HE points us to this interesting, well-written piece on Oscars 2008. It’s a must-read:
Pity the film scholar who tries to discern something about our times from surveying this list of best picture nominees 10, or 30, or 50 years from now. The substance of popular movies is almost never coincident with the events on the front page, and it would be a huge mistake to try to sew these films together into an argument that they somehow represent an Obama-era paradigm shift. For one thing, the presence of the fifth (and most surprising) best picture nominee, The Reader, proves only that the appeal of Holocaust-themed dramas to a large bloc of Academy voters transcends time, space, politics and fashion. For another, it’s not in the nature of movies to reflect the times so quickly: it took 15 years of development and rewriting as well as the invention of new technologies to make Benjamin Button possible, and although Milk came together with remarkable speed and focus under its producers Bruce Cohen and Dan Jinks, the idea of making a biopic about Harvey Milk, who was killed in 1978, has been around for so long that at one point, Dustin Hoffman, now 71, was touted to play the role that eventually went to Sean Penn (who is 48).
I disagree with him about one thing, though. While I agree that you can’t see these films as necessarily reflecting the Obama shift, you certainly can put the love of Slumdog squarely on the now. And the reason is that I have never seen this kind of enthusiasm for a politician and for potential change. I have never seen mass dancing in the streets when someone was elected. I have never seen so many smiles. While it is true that “they” didn’t seem to consider the economy at all when they made their choices (how many of them were really hit THAT hard?), it is clear that these things do not exist in a vaccuum. The only way, in fact, to explain the Oscars is to look at them as time capsules. You have to, otherwise you are faced with the grim reality that they mostly have bad taste but for a few eruptions here or there when they really aligned with greatness.
I see the choice of Slumdog in keeping with the post-Obama euphoria and I don’t know how you watch Milk and not think of Prop 8. I agree with him that a movie like, for instance, Million Dollar Baby could come out any year and be as popular. I think Slumdog could come out any year and be popular, just not THIS popular. This is what I think today. I might change my mind.
And as for painting “The Academy” with one brush, I also agree with that and I think it’s a trap we all fall into. And the only thing that stops me from utterly abandoning that illogical line of reasoning is when Dave Karger turns around and makes a great prediction based on the “they” hypothesis. When he said last year, “they’ll want to give Michael Clayton something so Tilda Swinton will get the Supporting Actress Oscar.” I thought, at the time, no way anyone can say “they” will do this or “they” will do that. But he was right.
9 Responses for "Everything Old is New Again"
I think it’s important not to factor the “mood” of the country too highly in analyzing Oscar picks. Look at the year Chicago won, it was a dark year, people did not have the optimism they have now, and yet many people said Chicago won over The Hours, The Pianist, Gangs of New York because they were looking for escapism.
Now Slumdog looks to be the likely winner, but the mood of the country is much more optimistic than the Chicago year. Yet both Slumdog and Chicago are (to overgeneralize) “feel-good” movies. So while I think the country’s mood plays some role in the race, I think that ultimately it’s important to realize that any facet of the state of the country can be used to “explain” a particular movie’s popularity, sometimes unfairly so.
Why not just face the grim reality that the voters–collectively–have bad taste? Why not admit that the Oscars favor certain types of pictures and therefore will prefer middle-weight films that “feel” like Oscar films over better-made films that don’t fit the model. The same with performances.
I really do think the nominations are hobbled by the fact that voters will only nominate films they’ve had time to see, and this has created a whole industry around “Oscar films,” in which certain films are greenlit with Oscar in mind, then carefully marketed and released for the most Oscar impact. This alone should make us deeply suspicious of just how “free” the voters are to see enough films to make truly good choices. Thank goodness for the preferential voting system they have, that every year allows a few films and actors with limited exposure to get in.
On top of this, many of these prestige pics have great actors doing good work. So it becomes easy to think that they acting noms are pretty good and to ignore the fact that the performances are just as influenced by the Oscar-industry as the films themselves. I complained after the nominations about how white they are — the only two non-Caucasians in the bunch are both supporting characters in films about white folks. People slammed me for it, but I have to assume that if the Academy is really voting for the best performances, there would be a lot more racial diversity in the acting categories–and I assume it would not necessarily reflect the ethnic distribution of American culture. There are too many great stories to be told about blacks, latinos, asian-americans, indians, arabs, etc. Why aren’t these stories being recognized by the Academy?
I assume it has to be that these stories aren’t getting made, or they aren’t getting enough visibility when they are, or they aren’t seen as “Oscar” films. But lately I’ve been wondering why so few foreign language performances get in to the acting categories. If the Academy is really about the best in cinema — not just USA cinema, but cinema everywhere — why are so few foreign language films nominated in the major categories?
Is it because these don’t smell like “Oscar” films? Or that voters don’t like sitting through subtitles? I could see voters feeling unsure how to measure a performance in a language they can’t understand, but surely editing, direction, cinematography, and even production can be recognized outside the language barrier? Do we really want to say that English-language films are simply better on the whole, year in, year out, than the entire output of European and Asian films?
After years of Oscar watching, I’ve come to face that grim reality that, yes, the voters have bad taste. Well, not bad taste per se, but only decent taste combined with a very mediocre menu. Much of what they vote for is what everyone expects them to vote for, because it’s what the studios make available to them. The younger voters are busy and can’t catch all the smaller films that don’t have studio support; many of the older voters are less active and therefore have more time on their hands, but they also have more traditional tastes–and I assume the Oscar industry plays this fact up: “We know they’ll vote for this type of film, so we’ll market it as such and roll it out to them as a FYC film.”
That’s my perspective based on years of following this crazy race and reading the articles that come out every year. I’m not anywhere near Hwood, so I could be wrong — I rely on what the journalists and bloggers closer to the action have to say. But everything I read suggests to me the above scenario: a collectively bland voter palate coupled with a mediocre menu leads to predictable (white english-speaking) nominations every year.
So, why not face the grim reality and recognize that the entire process is fundamentally flawed?
Comparing Oscar nominees in a given year to the events surrounding the ceremony is a lot more valuable than he acknowledges. Sure, there are always exceptions, but I feel more often than not that Hollywood likes to use the Oscars to define itself based on a) their activities and b) the times they live in. In another year, Slumdog Millionaire would likely still be a little-picture-that-could but in no way would it be the Oscar frontrunner. Can you imagine it stealing No Country’s glory? I sure as hell can’t. Not to mention the fact that it’s the only film in the five that wasn’t greenlit for the purpose of winning Oscars. It really did come out of nowhere. Only Danny Boyle fans like myself even knew he had a new film out so soon after Sunshine. But as with everything in entertainment, it’s all about the timing.
No Country was a perfect film for the Bush years. Slumdog is a perfect film for the Obama years.
And how in the world did Sunshine not get any noms?
I agree. I had Boyle on my personal Best Director list, and surely for the budget it had, the visual effects were stunning. Sadly nobody saw it. It was completely buried by Fox Searchlight (ironically) and only lately has found an audience on DVD. A flawed film but one of his smartest and most interesting. And as much as I love Slumdog, the scene where Cillian Murphy launches himself towards the sun is more moving than the whole of the aforementioned picture.
Noah,
How sad — I saw it opening weekend, having heard about it for months and wondering why it opened in Britain so much earlier than it opened in the States. And I’m not a sci-fi fan or even a Boyle fan — I simply had seen the trailer, thought it looked cool, read some good reviews and watched for it to come out.
Surely if *I* could learn about it months ahead of time, it didn’t need Fox Searchlight’s help?
A lot of factors go into what films are lauded at any particular time. Mood of the times is one of them. Why else, for example, would Mrs. Miniver have scored?
We can castigate the Academy all we want, but the fact of the matter is that AMPAS has its own collective set of priorities. The sooner we accept that, the happier we’ll be.
But Chicago is not really a typical “feel-good movie”. It’s a dark and cynical musical about ambition, greed, selfishness, and manipulating the courts and the media that was ahead of its time when it opened on Broadway in 1975. It was a perfect film for the times in 2002.
Chicago isn’t a typical feel-good movie, but it sure is a fun story that gets the viewers rooting for the manipulators. It certainly isn’t a downer film, even if it is dark and cynical.
“It was a murder but not a crime!!!!”
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