I’m not generally a fan of train wrecks. I don’t take pleasure in other people’s misfortunes and derive no sense of enjoyment from watching celebrities like Lindsay Lohan self-destruct before my eyes. Things change slightly when corporations and faceless conglomerates enter the picture. Somehow it’s different when a pompous organization stumbles than when it’s an individual. Particularly when the organization is making a blatant attempt to grab an even larger portion of the pie than they already have. See also: New Coke. Make that business entity an arrogant, somewhat inflated, self-described ‘honorary membership organization’ designed to promote and champion the art of Hollywood and the entertainment value of the trainwreck increases exponentially. Welcome to the case of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and The Debacle of the 10 Best Picture Nominees.*
* The Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) is the group that you know as simply The Academy or, more likely, as the group of roughly 5,000 industry insiders that puts on and distributes the Oscars.
The Academy has been in control of the grand dame of film award ceremonies for years. The Oscars aren’t just another Hollywood award, they are the Hollywood award. It’s the reason that the words “starring the Academy Award winning actor _______” are prominently displayed on the theatrical posters of an Oscar winning actor’s subsequent films. Winning a Teen’s Choice Award is great for an actor’s bio sheet, but doesn’t do anything to help market a future project of there’s in any manner, shape or form. Winning an Academy Award does.
For as long as the Academy has been doling out awards, idealists and critics have been complaining that some movie(s) or some talent(s) got shafted in the voting. I actually use these complaints as a line of demarcation about who gets the industry and who doesn’t. Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture. Forrest Gump beat both Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption in the same category. I rear-ended a guy doing less than five miles an hour while my car was in neutral and he put in for and received a check from my insurance company for more than $10,000 in medical bills. Shit happens. It’s up to us to deal with it.
In other words, The Dark Knight being shut out of the biggest category in one given entertainment industry award ceremony is not especially high up the list of egregious offenses in a global sense.
Do I think it’s a shame that The Constant Gardner, Hoop Dreams and Children of Men didn’t even get nominated for Best Picture? To be sure. Did I write anything about it or complain to anyone about it? No. The Academy is what the Academy is and they do what they do; namely, they praise actors who put on weight and actresses who get ugly and play real life people in biopics that are themselves mostly fictional.
After years of receiving complaints about the unfairness of the fact that there were only five Best Picture nominees and laughing them off in much the same way as the NFL laughed off the suggestion that they expand the number of teams in the playoffs when an 11-5 team failed to advance to the post season, the AMPAS did an about face this last year. They decided that maybe they were wrong. They then decided to add a whopping five Best Picture nominees to the category. And just like that, the category doubled in size. What makes this so funny to watch as an outsider is that the number of quality movies being released in so way doubled. As a matter of fact, in 2009 it actually decreased substantially.
Criticism about the movies nominated for Best Picture is always part and parcel of having an award show. As I mentioned earlier, this criticism got noticeably louder during the Oscar ceremony held in 2009 when The Dark Knight got left off the list of five Best Picture nominees. Whether this was due to Heath Ledger’s untimely passing, the film’s enormous box office success or something else is anybody’s guess.** Whatever the case, the Hollywood community did everything they could to call attention to The Dark Knight’s snub. The most petulant and confusing of all these actions took place during the actual Oscar telecast when Hugh Jackman performed a routine that focused on the Best Picture nominees that actually included a segment on The Dark Knight which, of course, wasn’t nominated.
** Most interestingly, had The Dark Knight gotten nominated, I think it would have won. Very rarely does this situation happen anywhere else in life. Has anyone ever suggested that the sixth best candidate for a job would have gotten the open position if he’d been able to make it passed the first round of selections? Has Terry Bradshaw ever stated that some team would challenge for the Super Bowl had they been able to make the playoffs? The answer is no.
With The Dark Knight’s supposed snub fresh in everyone’s mind when the vote to expand the Best Picture nominees category from five to ten films earlier this year, it was as close to a slam dunk as these things comes. Not only was the AMPAS going to right the specific wrong of The Dark Knight not getting nominated, but they’dalso give five additional films a month to market themselves as a Best Picture nominee.
There was only one problem with this: 2009 has been a truly bad year for movies.
Normally, the studios tend to save up their Oscar-worthy films for (limited) release in November and December so that they will be fresh in the minds of the voters. 2009 is bucking this trend because almost none of the end of the year releases are generating any kind of positive buzz.
Besides Avatar, Precious*** and Up in the Air, there simply aren’t any fourth quarter releases that are being mentioned as true competitors. A quick look at the Golden Globe nominees shows this. Five of the ten Golden Globe Best Picture nominees were released during the summer months. 2008 featured only two such movies, 2007 had one film released during the summer and 2006 two.
*** And Precious’ Oscar buzz includes buzz for Mo’Nique. Yes, Mo’Nique. The same Mo’Nique whose last three films were Welcome Home, Roscoe Jenkins, Beerfest and Phat Girlz.
One of the nominees is The Hangover, a movie that would traditionally have as much in common with the words ‘best’ and ‘picture’ as I would with the words ‘married’, ‘to’ and ‘Monica Bellucci’. To fill out the ranks of the best dramas of the year, the members of the Hollywood Foreign Press had to include Jason Reitman’s Up in the Air, a movie that’s own web-site proudly trumpets the Wall Street Journal’s statement that it is “Up there with the fresh and sophisticated comedies of Hollywood’s Golden Age.”
No matter how you slice it, 2009 has been a truly bad year for movies. You really couldn’t have picked a worse year to double up the number of Best pictures nominees. And naturally, this is the year the Academy decided five nominations would leave out several deserving candidates. Where 2008 might have had The Dark Knight and Wall•E outside looking in, 2009’s award ceremony will feature roughly six movies doing the exact opposite: they will have been nominated for an Academy Award that no one will ever argue that deserve. It will be interesting to see the statements released by the individual studios and directors after the nominations are out.
OREN MOVERMAN: Uh, when I started working on The Messenger, I really believed in the project, I had no idea that it would be considered for a Best Picture Oscar. I’m not sure if anyone knows this, but it stars Woody Harrelson and is about the Iraq War. Never mind, I’m just happy to know that Paul Thomas Anderson and I have both directed the same amount of films nominated for Academy Awards. I’d like to thank The Dark Knight for this amazing accomplishment.
This is what we know: Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Precious and Up in the Air are locks for a Best Picture nod. District 9, Inglourious Basterds, Invictus, The Messenger, A Serious Man and Up are all certainly in the mix for the final six spots. However, if you listen closely, you’ll also hear talk of possible nominations for The Blind Side, The Hangover and Michael Jackson’s This Is It.
Pundits suggest that Weinstein Company’s latest musical Nine should be considered as a possibility—it has everything that Oscar voters normally like in a big-budget musical spectacle: Oscar winning leads in Daniel Day-Lewis, Nicole Kidman, Penelope Cruz, Marion Cotillard, Judi Dench and Sophia Loren with Rob Marshall behind the camera. Given Nine’s horrible critical reception (37% fresh on rottentomatoes.com) and enormous failure at the box office I wouldn’t put a lot of faith in this playing out as such.
All of these elements are leading to a situation—one hell of an entertaining situation—where the Academy may have to explain to the press why it appears that, for the first time ever, the Golden Globe Awards are more discerning than the Oscars. It’s hard to fill out a list of five movies worthy of a Best Picture nod, let alone ten.
For one, I cannot wait for the Oscar nominations to be released. Not only will I get on board Mo’Nique’s Oscar campaign like Oprah on Obama’s campaign trail, but I can’t wait to hear the back-peddling involved with explaining why the nomination of a film like The Messenger or, better yet, The Hangover isn’t a huge disservice to the Oscar brand.
Ah, the sweet sounds of a organizational trainwreck…
