Ah, February. The month of blustery winter days, chocolate and heartbreak (at least on the fourteenth), and, until recently, the culmination of the annual cinema award season in the form of the glitzy Academy Awards. On Groundhog Day, the Academy will reveal the nominations for 24 different categories, making around 120 people extremely happy and prone to fits of crying and squealing. Sadly, these expressions of emotion will be probably covered by all of Hollywood’s “magazines” (they’re the trash of the literary world, right next to the Twilight books) and published, complete with intrusive cover pictures, by day’s end.
I must admit, the awards have always been a guilty pleasure of mine. If you gave me a prominent actor from the past two decades or so, I could most likely list every single Academy Award he has been nominated for, what movie, what year, and if he won (or was nominated for) a Golden Globe for the same performance. For me, it’s just being able to have an idea of what movies to watch out for, since the ones that win the most Academy Awards are obviously the best ones of the year. Since this is a literary endeavor, I can’t convey sarcasm through the tone of my voice, and instead will point at that the latter half of the previous sentence was completely sardonic.
Let’s see… where could Oscar possibly have gone wrong? Well, since Oscar has been a very naughty and presumptuous boy, I’ll just focus on last year’s faults. For those of you who do not keep up with the awards season, last year’s five Best Picture nominees were Slumdog Millionaire, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, The Reader, and Frost/Nixon. For those of you who do not read movie reviews and keep up with the public reception of movies, here’s what they should have been: Slumdog, Benjamin Button, Milk, Wall-E, and The Dark Knight. The Reader and Frost/Nixon were so-so movies, they had great performances which were rightfully nominated, but they did not deserve the honor of Best Picture. They received horrible reviews at the box office in comparison to the complex tale of Batman and the love story of the little robot that could, yet they still got cinema’s greatest honor. Why is this so? Because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a tendency to go for more “refined” or historically relevant movies. If a film has to do with any major global event (i.e. World War II and the Holocaust), it’s in. If it is a biopic, it’s in (or at least the lead actor or actress gets an award). Academy members are also suckers for movies that tie everyone together in mysterious ways (aka Babel, Magnolia, and Crash). If it’s rated R or explores a foreign country (not France, Britain, or the U.S.), it has a pretty good chance. Are these random musings of an award junky? Au contraire, mes amis!
Let’s take a quick peek at the past decade’s best picture nominees:
- Slumdog Millionaire (rated R)
- Frost/Nixon (R, semi-biopic)
- Milk (R, biopic)
- The Reader (R, World War II)
- Atonement (World War II)
- No Country for Old Men (R)
- The Queen (biopic)
- Letters from Iwo Jima (foreign-based, World War II, R)
- Babel (R, foreign-based, everyone’s connected)
- The Departed (should be rated X, but it’s R)
- Capote (biopic)
- Crash (R, everyone’s connected)
Wow, that’s pretty good so far, and that’s only out of the last four years!
But, I digress. The Academy always has its own prejudices towards movies, rarely giving animated or comedic films big awards. Its compromise for 2010? There will be ten nominees for Best Picture instead of five. This move on the part of the Academy will lessen the honor of being a nominee, but will exalt the award’s winner, and bring more movies into the spotlight. Some front-runners include The Hurt Locker, Avatar (sci-fi has it’s day), and Up in the Air, but I can only hope that the Academy will get off its high horses and choose other successful movies. They snubbed Wall-E, Pixar’s best-received film to date, but they can make up for it by nominating Up. It would even be nice to see The Fantastic Mr. Fox on the list, since it is also on most periodicals’ top ten list for the year’s movies.
…I’ll just keep my fingers crossed on Tuesday. Feel free to do the same.
Expressive Youth 