I know, I haven’t been posting the last few weeks. I got lazy. What can I say? But this mornings Oscar nominations woke me up and have me back on target.
For the first time since 1943 there are a whopping 10 nominees for Best picture, a move made by the Academy to make room for “populist” films and attract a larger audience to the annual telecast. There was much talk in film circles when the announcement was made that it would be a failure both commercially (the top 10 films would still not be big box office successes) or make the awards a critical joke (films would be nominated purely for commercial success). I think the resulting nominees this morning are fairly solid with only a couple examples of films that made it to the list mostly for their commercial appeal.
The nominees for Best Picture are:
Inglorious Basterds, the Quentin Tarantino Nazi revenge fantasia.
Up in the Air, Ivan Reitman’s Corporate hatchet man flick starring George Clooney.
Up, the latest Pixar animated adventure about a grumpy old man and a flying house.
A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers latest about a Jewish man at the end of his ropes in 60′s Minnesota.
Precious, Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire the story of a troubled inner city teen
An Education a British 60′s-set coming of age story
District 9 the science fiction apartheid allegory
The Hurt Locker the Iraq war bomb diffuser drama
The Blindside the Sandra Bullock football weepy
Avatar an obscure art film about corporate greed and colonialism, er um, the James Cameron Sci-fi juggernaut.
The exciting news about the expanded field is that it has made room for an animated film in Pixars Up (though sadly a year too late for the sublime Wall-e) and for 2 Sci-fi films with District 9 and Avatar. Animation has been shut out by a separate category for nearly 2 decades and genre fare like sci-fi rarely makes the cut.
The bad news is that the expanded field made room for Avatar and the Blindside, two films whose best attributes are not their overall excellence as well made films but their broad popular commercial appeal. Avatar is undoubtedly a game changing technical marvel and the the movie event of the year , if not the decade, and the most commercially successful film of all time, worthy of every technical award it can gather, but it is narratively weak and naive. Blindside is little more than a Lifetime movie for television with a big star and is in my opinion a cliched emotionally manipulative melodrama. I personally would have been thrilled to see Star Trek or Moon in the Avatar slot and A Single Man or the Fantastic Mr Fox in place of Blindside.
The acting nominations turned out pretty much as anyone paying aqny attention over the last few weeks would have predicted. Best Actor noms: George Clooney (Up in the Air), Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart), Colin Firth (A Single Man), Jeremy Renner (the Hurt Locker) and Morgan Freeman (Invictus). Best Actress: Meryl Streep (Julie & Julia), Sandra Bullock (Blindside), Carey Mulligan (An Education), Helen Mirren (the Last Station), and Gabourey Sidibe (Precious). Best Supporting Actor: Christoph Waltz (Inglorious Basterds), Woody Harrelson (the Messenger), Matt Damon (Invictus), Christopher Plummer (The Last Station), and Stanley (The Lovely Bones). Best Supporting Actress Mo’Nique (Precious), Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick (Up in the Air), Penelope Cruz (Nine) and the one surprise: Maggie Gyllenhaal (Crazy Heart).
The Best Director nominees feature a battle between exes James Cameron (Avatar) and Katherine Bigelow (the Hurt Locker). Joining them are Jason Reitman (Up in the Air), Quentin Tarantino (Inglourious Basterds), and Lee Daniels (Precious).
I can’t say that there will be much suspense as to the possible winners, unless theres a major change in the air in regards to Hollywood politics and popularity in the next month, but I’m still looking forward to the Oscars on March 7. It’s my Superbowl, only with evening gowns and hot men whose faces I can actually see.
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FOF #1534 – Oscarcast 2012 – 02.27.12
2 Comments
Comments
I think Avatar is going to win most of the awards its nominated for, just on the basis of its huge popularity and success, and not by the fact that it actually deserves those awards..really I think the only awards it actually deserves are the technical ones, like best visuals..I mean the movie was pretty much 99% CGI!!! the visuals were all it had going for it..yet that seems to mask everything else that made the film mediocre, especially when you compare it to the other films….really, I will be satisfied if any film besides Avatar wins best picture and best Director..cos Avatar dosen’t deserve either dammit!
I haven’t seen some of the other popular films like Precious, Up in the Air, or The Hurt Locker..I will at least try to see The Hurt Locker before the Oscars….
Having 10 nominees in every catagory is making the Oscars more like the Grammys, where it’s not always about excellence or peer opinion, but about ticket sales and public opinion. Is this a good thing or a bad thing?
THere were regularly as many as 12 nominees for Best Picture in the first 14 years of the awards. The decision to expand the number of nominees, by all accounts seems to have been a purely commercial decision based on the declining ratings of the telecast over the last several years. When the Dark Knight didn’t squeak into the list of nominees it was widely viewed as a not only an arguable critical error as the film was very well received by critics, but a mistake as a reflection of the public’s taste and interest in the awards. The thinking is that if the public doesn’t have a stake in the winner, they won’t bother watching. The nominees over the last few years were mostly critical successes, but not popular box office hits.
I think the results are largely positive. Yes the Avatar and Blindside noms reflect purely commercial popularity in my mind. Avatar at least made many top 10 lists, and is a film with historic implications for the future of the art and business of film making. If they can continue to find a balance of strong contenders that mix the purely critical successes with a few popular films that have some strong redeeming qualities, I have no problem with the expanded field.