Being on the Oscar beat for ten years and you learn a thing or two. The one thing that keeps coming back to me as the season begins is how quickly bloggers and critics are eager to give a success or failure judgment to potential “Oscar movies.” It slowly but efficiently breaks my heart every...
You Are Browsing ‘State of the Race’ Category
Our culture has been soaked in alternate realities lately. ABC’s Lost and Fox’s 24, are a few recent influences that play with time. We are dangling, it sometimes feels, between the solid ground of our world pre-2001, and the more precarious one we continue to find ourselves in. There is a bottoming out of institutions, the potential for Global Warming...
The chatter on the web about how there aren’t enough Oscar hopefuls to fill ten slots this year, let alone five, is heating up. I’ve already read several of them, including the most recent piece by Dave Karger. While I usually tend to agree with this line of thinking, this year I’m inclined to debunk it. The main reason for this is that the Academy...
As we close out our 2009 Oscar season, I just want to say it’s been a hell of a season. We have proved that what we love at the movies becomes some piece of who we are. ¬†And somehow, in all of that, we mix up our love of films with their need to also get approval by 5,000 or so regular people who work in the film industry. ¬†We pride ourselves on being unique...
A reader asked why there is so much predictions wall-paper that reflect exactly the same choices in exactly the same categories, except for one or two risky picks here or there. They wanted to know how predictors came to these decisions. I can’t really tell you why people all tend to think alike except that, perhaps, it is in our nature to want to be like-minded...
I don’t think I’ve ever seen a more cut-throat Oscar season, nor a more demeaning one all the way around. I don’t know if the ten Best Picture slots opened it up to more wild campaigning, or if the sheer amount of Oscar blogs and websites contributed to the mess by providing outlets for the campaigning like never before, or whether it was a deer taking...
In many ways, 2010 may mark the year when the Oscars became relevant again. They wouldn’t have made themselves relevant because they nominated The Blind Side over A Single Man, The Road, Where the Wild Things Are, Invictus, or 500 Days of Summer. Becoming relevant doesn’t require that one appeal to the masses. The same way fashion week dictates how we dress...
It feels like the weeks before ballots are due are stretching farther than they ever have before. Believe it or not there is still a full two weeks before final ballots are due. That means there is time for reflection if Academy members are having a hard time making up their minds. In order to make their vote strategic, they will have to do an anti-vote for a certain...
The last time in recent Oscar history that as much as three war films were in the Best Pic race was 1998, when Saving Private Ryan, The Thin Red Line and Life is Beautiful, all lost to the non-war film, Shakespeare in Love.  World War II is as comfortable a fit with the AMPAS as tea and lemon. That was an easy war, a winnable war. We got to lope in, kill the Nazis,...