Over at Hollywood-Elsewhere, Jeff Wells reports that both Milk and Frost/Nixon are pretty good, in his estimations. He gives them both about an 8.5 on a scale of one to ten but says he doesn’t understand what the early impressions of Frost/Nixon were about and the so-called bad buzz he heard about Milk was also unfounded. In the comments, Scott Feinberg, wrote:
Jeff, I was getting the same BS tips about “Milk” being a disappointment, and then I saw it today and happen to think it’s terrific, especially–but far from exclusively–Penn. The bad buzz actually only lowered expectations and made the movie all the more rewarding… but, still, you’ve gotta wonder where this stuff starts, and why it sometimes builds to the point that usually-credible people start circulating it to us.
I’ll take a stab at answering that, from a gal who’s been around the block shall we say: trust no one.
Any good Oscarwatcher worth his or her salt must start there. You can’t trust anyone anyway but remind yourself every year: Nobody knows anything. And that includes people who get to see early screenings. Screenings exist in a vacuum, mostly, which is why I prefer a good old audience out in the valley to a cushy screening room in the city proper. A screening can tell you that everyone wildly applauded, sobbed hysterically, or even walked out – none of these reports can be trusted completely – why? Oscar voters and bloggers/critics (sorry critics) are different audiences that expect and want different things. Think back to how many people gave middling reviews of No Country for Old Men who saw it at screenings. How we respond to it depends on the mood we’re in, whether or not we’re in love or heartbroken, embittered – it all impacts our reaction to films because it is a subjective medium. Good films will never survive a round of bloggers and critics who eye them with judgment first, especially when that judgment has anything to do with winning awards.
When people complain about sites like this one usually they are complaining about turning this beloved, subjective medium into a sport. The Oscar race is a competition and hundreds of thousands of dollars are spent on that competition; we didn’t invent the game but we’re playing it, for better or worse. It’s a sorry achievement, and not one that will necessarily garner respect at a cocktail party. We’re probably seen more like parasites than fans of films, the Oscars or the race itself. But who cares what we do in the privacy of our little blogging world, right? Well, wrong. Nowadays people do care. At best, a site like this one can highlight films or performers who might have been otherwise forgotten come Oscar time. We can sabotage a carefully plotted publicity campaign. At worst, I suppose, we can wring the enjoyment and value out of cinema in the first place.
This is the usual lament. It’s a dirty business, the Oscar race. It always has been. I suppose that’s why it annoys me when people complain about how Oscar blogs are ruining the film business. Depending on who’s doing the complaining – a publicist or a critic – the end result is the same. Critics complain about the pass/fail test. Publicists complain about personal vendettas and the ongoing hassle of having to cater to various egos of bloggers who will trash a movie if they don’t get into a screening early or the studio doesn’t choose to advertise with them.
A lot has changed in ten years.
Now, the bloggers who are in the business of Oscarwatching are too trigger-happy in their desire to be the “first” to call a movie a winner or a loser. I have never found any joy in calling out a loser and usually keep my big mouth shut even if I fear that a film is going to take a tumble. I do this because it isn’t just about my own opinion – it’s about careers, jobs, health insurance, pay raises. What little gratification I would get in being first and being right would be quickly consumed by waves of guilt that my stupid little need to get attention would have mucked things up for an underling or a publicist would be too much to sleep on. I rarely sleep as it is.
So Scott Feinberg wants to know why “usually credible” people float news his way. I guess it depends on who is doing the floating and why. You have to know your source – know their tastes and biases. If Roger Ebert wrote me an email (he only did that once during the Crash vs. Brokeback debacle) telling me a major Oscar contender was a turkey I would believe him. Why? He has nothing to gain or lose by telling me this unless he was telling it to me to somehow slant my coverage. If he was telling me as a friend (I should be so lucky) I would trust it coming from him. If someone whose opinion I didn’t trust as much as Ebert’s, someone whose taste is radically divergent from my own (not to mention that of AMPAS) I would take it from whence it came.
Incontention’s Kris Tapley responds to Scott Feinberg:
Come off the conspiracy theory shit, Scott. There are some people who genuinely have issues with “Milk” and their concerns aren’t totally unfounded. Just because they disagree doesn’t mean they’re somehow “wrong.” Don’t puff yourself and your “tips” into something they’re not.
You have to wonder, though, why someone would float negative buzz Feinberg’s way. He writes for his own Oscar site, And the Winner Is, and he also works for the LA Times’ The Envelope. Floating negative buzz his way IS a way to slant Oscar coverage, for better or worse. Why would someone do it? To knock out the competition. To get back at someone. To be “first.” It’s likely to be one of those.
I think this Oscar season is getting off to a very strange start. Usually by this time I have several movies on the contender list for Best Picture, one of which will go all the way. Maybe that movie is The Dark Knight, maybe Slumdog. The Wrestler is one that could make it as well. Rachel Getting Married could get in there. It’s almost November and many of the Big Oscar Movies haven’t been seen. The more they hold them off the hungrier the bloggers will get — they’ll want to be first and they’re want to be right.
It’s all making me very nervous about where this is going but also kind of excited. It reminds me of the early days of Oscarwatching, before everyone and their brother was on this sit.
In the next few weeks reviews and opinions will be coming fast and furiously. None of it will mean much until the critics’ awards start rolling out – only then will we know what the general consensus is, or at least what the critics’ are going to like best. There are several movies we know they’re going to like – Ballast is one. Frozen River is another. The Visitor is still another. These are “little” movies by Oscar standards but they might be hinting at the season to come, one where the Academy and the critics once again diverge.
The Chicago Film Critics will announce their nominees as early as December 8th, and their winners on the 11th. This gives us about a month to start seeing what’s what. Hopefully, though, we’ll all remember that these aren’t football teams stocked with best athletes to take the heat; these are artists who are trying to do something outside the realm of “winning” and “losing.” Yes, the Oscars a dirty game. The film industry is a dirty business, mostly. But filmmaking is not.
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As quoted by Sasha: “I’ll take a stab at answering that, from a gal who’s been around the block shall we say: trust no one.”
……… I completely agree.
I remember as recent as 3-4 years ago, I did not follow most blogs/review sites/papers. I went to a movie if it looked intriguing to me, and if my local paper gave it an interesting/positive write up. Most of the time, I’d be happy to see said film be nominated for some things later on in Feb/March at the Oscars.
NOW, there is internet overload (and though I am absolutely not complaining. I’m addicted to it!!! haha) I now have to reign my emotions in for every single great and bad review I read and realize that it won’t necessarily effect MY viewing of it.
I look back now at some of my all-time favorite movies from as recent as 3-4 years ago, going back 2 decades and am astonished to see not only how many multiple Oscar noms they got … but how POORLY they did on metacritic and/or Rotten Tomatoes!
I love reading the buzz and will continue to add to it, read it, salivate over it, but I need to get back to my own frame of thinking from some years ago. I am still going into films such as ‘Frost/Nixon’ and ‘Milk’ with great interest no matter what the negative or positive buzz is.
Prime example, I loved ‘The Duchess’. I was able to get my head around it’s 61% on RT. Sometimes it doesn’t happen for me that way. So I hope the trend continues. And similarly, I’ll find myself not liking something with 96%. It could be the acting, the execution, the story, the technicals, whatever. It happens both ways.
Anyone else have similar feelings?
Surely, John!
Occasionally, I make a conscious decision not to follow the progress of one certain film in particular, one which I intend to see. This is not because I am looking forward to it, necessarily, just that I want to enter into the theater not knowing what to expect. If I have already been able to avoid reviews about the film, then I sometimes take this track.
And what an exciting few months it’s going to be…
“It’s almost November and many of the Big Oscar Movies haven’t been seen.”
This seems to be the key reason for the vacancies in the sidebar contender list. This time last year, plenty of people had already seen No Country for Old Men. Michael Clayton opened Oct 13 (and Sasha was among the first to flag it as a major contender) Into the Wild and I’m Not There received lots of lavish early praise too, and though their fortunes faltered before nominations they were each far stronger films that The Visitor and Frozen River.
For one reason or another (mostly economics and strategy, I think) the studios are holding onto their supposed trump cards longer this year.
And it’s also possible that we have to face this reality: Maybe this year is just not as packed with great movies as the last 2 or 3 award seasons have been. That doesn’t mean we don’t still have a lot to look forward to. But it can lead to grasping at straws when the pickings are slim (yeah, I’m looking at you, W.)
I was lucky enough to see “Doubt” last night, and the audience they pulled from were a bunch of freaking morons. These people stated they NEVER went to the movies, and only decided to stay once they saw Meryl Streep’s name.
So…..don’t trust the test audiences. Most of the time, they are average Americans that don’t know anything about film.
Side Note – See the play of “Doubt” instead.
Brooke, does that mean (in your opinion) that the play is just much better? Or is the film itself not very good? You say not to trust test audiences. I’d like to think that I could somewhat trust someone who takes enough time to come onto this site and who has seen the play before.
Sasha, I agree with what you say about seeing films in a small screening as opposed to seeing a film with a large audience. That’s why I love seeing films at the Toronto Film Festival–the audiences there love films and you can feel their reactions to films as you’re watching each movie. Though I guess the enthusiasm of the audience afterwards can be misleading in figuring out the eventual box office /critical success of a film.
I don’t see how critics watch and evaluate comedies in a screening room–you really need to watch a comedy with a large audience to get a sense what works as humor with an audience.
[...] the most part, I really enjoyed Sasha Stone’s recent “State of the Race” column at Awards Daily. Stone’s been kicking around this beat for longer than she’d probably [...]
More proof of disregarding some early buzz and/or early reviews (sometimes) :
My friend saw ‘Changeling’ last night in Manhattan. He’s not the biggest Eastwood fan, but decided to check it out, anyway.
He thought it was INCREDIBLE. And he’s so confused at why it’s garnered such mixed, negative-tipped reviews of late (especially after raves from Cannes).
You just never know how a film will ‘hit’ you until you see it and decide for yourself.
As for the ‘negative buzz’ around F/N, I think it’s just an affirmation of reality in that it’s a mediocre play directed by Ron Howard, it’s hardly going to be an artistic tour de force that will achieve much beyond respectability.
Sad to hear that about Doubt, but again, even on paper it would have needed something extra special to really affirm it as a sublime cinematic experience.
If the academy do go all commercial with TDK, Wall-E, Australia (?), Ben Button, then I’m going to bet on Milk being the one that will squeeze past the other studio-indie pictures. Everything else just seems to be erring on the wrong side of depressing/boring/typical prestige picture. Or possibly Rachel Getting Married.
If Obama wins that’s the line up; if it’s McCain then: Doubt, Frost/Nixon, , Nothing but the truth, Revolutionary Road, The Reader, Changeling, Valkyrie . . . lol
I am aware this sounds like crazy talk with no basis in fact but . . that’s exactly what it is.
I know it sounds conceited, John….but I felt that I was one of the only ones in the audience with an informed opinion who take moviegoing seriously. These people freely admitted to not being regular moviegoers, and only seeing it because they recognized Meryl Streep’s name. Hell, one woman said “I loved Mamma Mia sooooo much, so I stuck this one out, but she was way too mean in this for me”. Uh, I hate to break it to you but in the annals of film history, Streep won’t be remembered for “Mamma Mia” only.
Only a few of us were invited. The rest got flyers on the street for a sneak preview. They didn’t even know what they were seeing. The woman in front of me said she hadn’t seen a film in the theatre since “American Beauty”. These were Joe Schmo, which the studios wants, but I find infuriating. The reps were shuffling us in and picking people very carefully based on age, and gender. They came up to each person, asked how old you were and then crossed off that demographic. When they had too many 30-38 year old females (like myself), they wouldn’t let anymore in etc.
“Doubt” is a wonderful play. Absolutely brilliant in its ambiguity. The movie took away the choice and really gave you no other option than to think Father Flynn is guilty. There is a snippet in a scene, that shows a little boy smiling when Flynn resigns, that you had seen before arguing and pulling away from his embrace that literally makes you say “Oh, Yeah…no doubt….Guilty”
Most of the audience when asked about his guilt said “Yes”. Shanley blew it in my opinion, and I left with a lesser opinion of the film.
I’m still wondering. Isn’t the election driving us all crazy too in our judgement of films? Especially those with Oscar-potential?
It does seem like a lackluster year, and some people are seeing the state of the business as moving toward corporate-friendly-only-ness. It’s hard to tell if we’ll look back on 2008 and say, hey, there’s when the Sundance-Miramax-indie days really died/dried up! Or maybe that’s just the same fatalism that environmentalists feel every time there’s a particularly hot summer – oh THIS proves global warming is real all right! I like this site because Sasha gives credence to both kinds of perspectives. Thanks again.
2007 was an exceptional year for movies, imo. It was inevitable 2008 would feel like a letdown.
“2007 was an exceptional year for movies, imo. It was inevitable 2008 would feel like a letdown.”
-Completely right.
It seems like a very odd year in which the reaction to the films have more to do with what’s happening to the real world than the actual films themsleves. The state of the race is going to look awfully different a week and a day from now depending on who wins the election. If Obama wins I think people might go out on a limb and respond to things that aren’t typical or conventional (Benjamin Button, Milk). If McCain wins I think people will go with the familiar or comfortable or typical (Australia). I’m not sure if I’ve formulated an opinion on what will happen to Frost/Nixon is either man wins. That doesn’t mean that unworthy films will make it through and the worthy will be left by the wayside, but I do think the election will alter people’s perception of not just movies, but life in general.
I also think, like Harry pointed out that we live in a post 2007 time. A year that exceptional is bound to make many other years that follow it look downright bad in comparison.
But, I think there’s something happening in the world at large that is larger than any election or any astounding year of solid film. The decade is winding down, and times are more uncertain than they have ever been. The decade began with 9/11 and may end with the collapse of the world’s economy. I will have lived most of my life (and this decade) with the world at war, times uncertain, and things getting increasingly harder rather than easier. I may be part of a generation that has things worse than their parents. I think the world is going through it’s collective “Oh shit what do we do?” phase and I think the films we watch and what we take from them have altered.
Thanks for the info Brooke. One does have to wonder if last year was so good that this year could never live up to it. I mean look at all the movies that have either not lived up to the hype or moved altogether (The Road for example——Let’s be honest, if that movie was even remotely good then Harvey Weinstein would be putting it out in 2 weeks). If one or two more films like Revolutionary Road, Austraila or Benjamin Button fail to live up to the hype then the question changes from will it get nominated to is The Dark Knight you lock for the Oscar for Best Picture? I really don’t think the election will have any affect on what gets nominated. That said, here’s my 5 movies I think get in:
The Dark Knight
Gran Torino
Happy Go Lucky
Milk
Revolutionary Road
Unconventional for sure but at this point these look as good as any lol.
Sasha,
I totally agree with you 100% as usual. Brilliant piece of writing! Right on the money….
Yes, this is gonna be a real suck-er-roonie of a year at the Awards end of things…
One of the main culprits is this is the flotsam and jetsam left over from the Writer’s Strike…
Which is why you have ANOTHER French film(and I love French films) in VERY serious contention for a Best Actress nomination, Kristen Scott Thomas, in “I’ve Loved You So Long.”
At the other end, there are the big studio films like Universal’s “Changeling”…
And Sasha knows, you can trust me on this, I do know Academy members and they do tell me things. And as long as I don’t mention their names, I feel I report to you what I’ve been hearing.
Angelina Jolie is GOING to be nominated. “Changeling” the picture is up in the air. I think just about ALL pictures are up in the air at this point.
Anne Hathaway is also going to be nominated. But again, I’m not sure the picture she’s in will, though, as far as I’m concerned it’s the best film I’ve seen this year. But it might. I’d say it was surer than “Changeling” for a BP nod only in that it has staunch supporters and the Academy loves Jonathan Demme’s back-from-the-dead comeback story.
The same applies to Mickey Roarke in “The Wrestler”. He’s in. Also possibly Marisa Tomei, but again I’m not getting a for sure bead in the film’s chances….I don’t think the Academy is on to Aronofsky. At least not yet.
“The Visitor” yes, is still on people’s radars as Sasah said, but I’m not hearing “Frozen River” at all.
Sally Hawkins nomination is also in serious doubt for “HGL”. With Kate Winslet’s two films “The Reader” and “Revolutionary Road” still to unspool, we can’t really count her out, but I’m hearing such mixed things about the both of them….
And now this news about “Doubt” from Brooke, who I totally believe is a credible reporting source here. She hit the nail right on the head in her posts above in this thread about what I had my doubt’s about.
A) Shanley’s directing his own play(which he didn’t do onstage)
b)The question and the theme of the nature of Doubt itself. If there is no ambiguity…well, that was the play’s greatness…I even BOUGHT a copy of the play which was seling like hotcakes since there were no “Doubt” souvenirs you could buy on Bway. Only the printed text of the play.
And you never knew WHAT was up with that priest! Played so brilliantly onstage by Brian F. O’Bryne…If Phillip Seymour plays it without that beautiful, suspenseful ambiguity…Or Shanley punctuates it with the kid smiling or smirking at the end of the film…As Brooke described…I despair for “Doubt” as a film…
Meryl will no DOUBT get nominated, but if the film tanks, the Academy isn’t going to give her an Oscar for a film that bombs…which it might…
Impossible to film…that was my take on “Doubt” and it saddens me to hear that I might be right about this…And Shanley’s heavy-handed self-destructive approach to his greatest work…Sad…
Also, in case people didn’t know this about the Academy, the actor’s branch takes their nominating process very seriously, but the rest of the academy doesn’t see all the films that they should. BY A MILE.
Also, depending how the election goes…”Rachel” out of all these films that we’ve seen SO FAR is the Obama movie.
With the multi-racial family who isn’t discussed in racial terms EVER, which I thought was great…This is the only film SO FAR that even encompasses a racial theme.
And everybody feels Jenny Lumet will win Best Original Screenplay. That comes up again and again. And of course, she would be the first African American woman to win in that category. AND GOOD FOR HER!
And Supporting Actress in “Rachel”. They Academy will nominated someone they know, Debra Winger, a previous nominee, before they nominate the unknown newcomer Rosemarie DeWitt…
But if “Doubt” goes as Brooke predicts above, then maybe there will be room…
“The Road for example——Let’s be honest, if that movie was even remotely good then Harvey Weinstein would be putting it out in 2 weeks”
I think that’s giving Weinstein way too much credit.
I do agree with the general thrust here that it’s too early to tell. Look at ATONEMENT from last year. The general buzz it got from early reviews in London and its performance at the Toronto Film Festival made it seem like it was going to be the film of the year, but by the time it opened, the ardor for the film had faded.
This might be notable for the Best Actor field, Adam Resurrected will be given an awards qualifying run.
Stephen Holt, thank you for your post. Very interesting information. And really, not all that surprising.
Chris wrote:
Thanks for the info Brooke. One does have to wonder if last year was so good that this year could never live up to it.
*******
I thought last year was a pretty lousy year for great films. Hardly anything that was nominated for Best Picture last year deserved to be nominated. There certainly were some good films last year but not great ones.
Thank you, John. I keep having this awful feeling that ALLLL the year-end-hidden-away films will all tank…But that couldn’t be true….Could it? But some of them will and some of them won’t….Soooo glad that “Milk” is causing raves…At least for Sean Penn’s performance…
It’s between him and Mickey Roarke is what I hear…
Hoping that “Milk” is not going to be a heart-breaking “Brokeback” situation again this year….with the Academy I mean….
And also, pointing once again to AD’s excellent Oscar poll….It had Sean out ahead…and Kate Winslet for “Revolutionary Road.”
Even the LA Times took note!
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