Once the weekend is over we’ll be headlong into the early critics awards. The cards pretty much fall from there. Over these next few weeks Academy members will face a daunting screener pile. There will be some they’ll be more eager to watch (Gone Girl) than others. The selection of films up for Oscar then go up before their whole family for discussion. That is how we all ended up in the mess we’re in. You have to figure – it’s not Best Picture of the Year but rather Best Picture any of us can stand, mostly, during the holidays. Uncle Harry really didn’t like Birdman because they were all talking so fast and what the heck was that ending about? Aunt Shirley really loved The Theory of Everything but Cousin Tyler was playing his DS the entire time and had no idea who the guy in the wheelchair was but he LOVED Fury and Birdman and Inherent Vice. He thought Big Hero 6 should win Best Picture. Granda Lowenstein was all about the Imitation Game but brother Patrick couldn’t stop talking about Interstellar. They had to wait until the kids went to bed before they put on Gone Girl and when it was over the newly married Johnsons sat awkwardly silent until finally someone broke the ice. “So, been married long?” Nobody could find anything bad to say about Boyhood except that the young Smith girl wondered why it wasn’t called Motherhood. “where’s the big Oscar movies,” they wondered. And that was when the cleaning lady from the kitchen came out and explained the concept of the Hollywood tent pole, and how it’s marginalized the Oscar movie so that studios don’t make them anymore. Or rarely. Those movies don’t make money, she explained, and they cost too much and the risks are too high. Cousin Tyler said Gone Girl made $160 million. Isn’t that the an Oscar movie? The cleaning lady dried off her hands and pulled up a chair. She finally sat down and let out a long sigh. Now, she said, it was time to explain why only certain movies get nominated and others don’t. At the end of the long monologue, she ended it succinctly: think Nazis.
The Gurus of Gold have put up their latest before Thanksgiving:
And Gold Derby’s:
Scott Feinberg’s Feinberg Forecast has gotten a redesign — looks pretty good. He’s finally dropped his CitizenFour for Best Picture prediction, has Birdman at #6 (!) and American Sniper at #8.