The last time a film won the Best Picture Musical Comedy at the Golden Globes then went on to win the Oscar for Best Picture and Best Director was in 1968. The film was Oliver! Despite it being 1968, one of the most tumultuous periods of history for the US, the Academy went old school with Oliver, a Dickensian tale about an orphan, directed by Carol Reed. How are the ways that 2011 resembles 1968, other than the fact that Th Artist is poised to do what Olvier! did – win the Globe for Picture Musical/Comedy and then win Best Picture and Best Director at the Oscars.

The only reason it’s worth noting is that it’s rare for a musical/comedy film to win Best Picture at the Oscars. It’s even rarer for the director to also win. The Academy tends to prefer films with more gravitas. And in the years since 1968 when a lighter film won Best Picture, the director of a much more serious film won Best Director. And that director generally won the DGA as well. However, in 1968 the winner of the DGA was not the eventual Oscar winner. Anthony Harvey won the Directors Guild, but Carol Reed ended up winning the Oscar, along with Oliver! winning for Best Picture.

Neither Reed nor Harvey had won the Globe for Director that year. Instead, Paul Newman won for Rachel, Rachel. The Ace Eddie went to Bullitt. It was a split year in many ways. It was also a nostalgic year, a year that represented strong female characters in the oscar race, a year when Best Actress ended in a tie (Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand) and a year that was more interesting for the films that weren’t nominated than the films that were:

2001: A Space Odyssey
The Producers
Faces
Rosemary’s Baby
Once Upon a Time in the West
Performance
The Odd Couple

And then some ironic titles vis a vis this year:
Shame (Bergman)
Planet of the Apes

The Academy picked these five movies instead:

Oliver!
Lion in Winter
Funny Girl
Rachel, Rachel
Romeo and Juliet

It’s easier to see what the definition of the “Oscar movie” means when you look at that list. Clearly, not a one of those five outlasted Kubrick’s monumental 2001. But it’s doubly ironic that Terrence Malick’s Tree of Life was also nominated this year, since it’s always being compared to 2001. It is eery how similar this year is to 1968. If it comes full circle, THe Artist and Michel Hazanavicius will become the first film since 1968 to first win Globe for Musical and then win the Oscar for Picture and Director.

Since Oliver! only these films have gone on to win Best Picture after winning Picture in Musical/Comedy at the Globes but none of them won the Oscar for directing:

Driving Miss Daisy (Oliver Stone won director for Born on the Fourth of July)
Shakespeare in Love (Steven Spielberg won director for Saving Private Ryan)
Chicago (Roman Polanski won director for The Pianist)

Two of these are Weinstein joints, and the other didn’t even have a Director nomination.

Funnily enough, all of the above directors also won the Golden Globe for Directing, as Martin Scorsese has done this year. Though it’s almost impossible to predict a split, if I were ever going to predict one I would do so this year.

The best case scenario for The Artist is that it follows Oliver!’s path. It could also follow Chicago, where it won the Globe for Musical/Comedy and then won the DGA but lost Director at the Oscars. The other weird coincidence this year has with the Chicago year is that Martin Scorsese won that year also for Gangs of New York, which then went on to win no Oscars.

Chicago and The Artist are both about one star overtaking another and both end with a dance number. Both were loved and hit hard with critics of the race. And both are films most anyone can enjoy. The Artist, of course, feels like it was something different from everything else out there. Chicago had much more of a hard edge.

There isn’t a film like Born on the Fourth of July, Saving Private Ryan or The Pianist in the race. Therefore, Hazanavicius doesn’t have the same kind of competition. But Martin Scorsese is a force to be reckoned with and Hugo is a triumph, even if people like to talk about well, the money.

Tonight at the Santa Barbara Film Fest, Rooney Mara, Demián Bichir, Melissa McCarthy, Patton Oswalt, Andy Serkis and Shailene Woodley accept the Virtuoso awards.

David Poland on 25 Days to Oscar puts it in rhyme.

It’s not talk of craft and your decade of work that
Allow you to get through the worst.
It’s, “I do,” and, “You will,” and, “I shouldn’t say that,”
And, “Who are you voting in first?”

Over at the LA Times, Patrick Goldstein wonders if Oscar pundits know too much:

Because the academy has such predictable tastes, the Oscar pundits have a pretty easy time figuring out which films meet the minimal requirements of best picture awards heft. And until academy voters widen their artistic horizons, I suspect the pundits will continue to nail their predictions. If you’re making best picture picks, stick to a safe formula: Expect the expected.

He’s right that the Oscar race is predictable. But it has been for mostly the 13 years I’ve been watching them save for one or two exceptions. This year, the pundits mostly got Best Picture but few predicted Extremely Loud would get in there and most assumed that the Best Picture race is aligned somewhat with the guilds. We found out that it is not really. DGA, WGA kind of didn’t matter, which is odd. So minor surprises, not major ones. But the machine is large and lumbering. Voters are not willing to invest their time with all of the movies so they only watch the ones they have to watch. Moreover, getting a consensus opinion around any nominee, Picture or otherwise, has more to do with what any old person would think and not so much the Academy voters. Although this year we can be sure of two things: They went with their heart most of the time and they voted for their friends. Still, you could ask any old person at a festival what movies they liked best and you’d pretty much know how Oscar was going to go. Not making too much of a ripple this year: the critics, though I suspect they will wear that like a badge of honor. After all, who really wants to cultivate good taste only to find that one thinks like one’s parents. Or grandparents. Most don’t. Vive la difference.

Ask this guy what he thinks after the jump.

As recounted in People Mag:

“I was in the lobby with some friends of mine, and I look over, and I said, ‘Is that Meryl Streep?’ ” she recalls. “And as I said it, she turned around and started walking toward me.”That was the moment “everything got kind of foggy,” she says.

“She went, ‘Jessica,’ and she grabbed my hands and she was saying beautiful things about the play and my performance.”

Chastain’s self-proclaimed “embarrassing” reaction? “Because I was so shocked by it, all I did was I held her hands and went, ‘Thank you, thank you. It means so much to me that you came,’ ” she says. “And I walked away.”

It’s not the first time Chastain embraced her inner fan girl. At the Palm Springs International Film Festival earlier this month, the actress started crying when she met Gary Oldman.

Every so often during the awards race you stumble onto something that maybe makes you feel like you are rising above the usual game of campaigning, advocating, reporting on the campaigning, predicting how the awards will go.  No one on the Oscar beat mistakes these events, interviews, photo ops, junkets and travel perks for anything other than what they really are: a way to hopefully help promote an Oscar contender.

So it wasn’t with any illusions that a few of us attended the Martin Scorsese tribute at the Arlington as one of the centerpieces of the Santa Barbara Film Festival. I’d already missed Viola Davis and Christopher Plummer’s tributes, although I heard they were also very good.  There is something about the Festival’s director Roger Durling’s own love of cinema and unique perspective that  gives this fest its flavor.  I’m not sure what makes it different, exactly.  Surely Santa Barbara itself is part of it — heaving pastel mountains on one side, a cheerful expanse of sea on the other and in between an extended shopping mall up State Street where there are equal amounts of hipsters, senior citizens, homeless people, stoners, and cinephiles.  State Street is full of upscale shops like Sur La Table and also more practical chains like Marshall’s.  They all must wear the Spanish architecture mask to blend into the face of the place.

The Scorsese tribute was set to start at 8pm.  The press line began much earlier.  I parked behind the Arlington just as an ambulance was pulling up to rescue a woman who’d fallen flat on her nose.  The poor woman, but I couldn’t help noting the irony that of course there would be blood: Scorsese was in town.  I made my way up the press line and into the large, lovely Arlington — it’s one of those old movie houses worth preserving.  Next door was the bar which drew my interest after finding a spot as close to the stage as possible.  Martin Scorsese was going to be there — I’d do what I could to get as close as possible like the unrelenting fan that I am.

As many festivals as I’ve attended, the SBIFF has a kind of romance to it that the others don’t. You see swirling lights on the ceiling of the Arlington and it really does feel like you’re transported into a different era, a less cynical, less cellphone friendly time even if everyone has their little lighthouses poised and ready for emailing, for picture taking, for messaging.  Soon Scorsese would come out and all of the cell phones would whir to life to capture an image of one of the directors who can still be called a legend.

The q&a, mercifully, would be hosted by Leonard Maltin, an old-school film critic with a head full of trivia and a vast knowledge of film history and of Scorsese’s career.  You can’t just get anyone to talk to Scorsese and expect not to be outmatched in every way.  You have to have a film nerd. Maltin is a film nerd of the highest order, and the kind of person you want to still be around writing film reviews.  There are, in truth, too few like him as I would come to find while listening to this conversation between the legend and the critic.

The fest had carefully pieced together a reel of Scorsese’s films highlighting familiar and not so familiar moments in a vast and exceptional career beginning early on with Mean Streets and zooming forward, all the way to present day, with the 3-D masterpiece, Hugo. Where you’d think a director might stubbornly hold to the past and refuse to evolve into the new technology — which he acknowledges is a work in progress, “someday they might not even have the glasses,” he said.   But Scorsese has been around long enough, and knows the evolution of film itself long enough, to know that you have to adapt or die.  There is no sense in holding onto what worked before.  This, it’s worth mentioning, is the message behind The Artist, which sums that notion up nicely.  The Artist is about that; Hugo IS that.

Maltin introduced Scorsese who happened to be sitting about six seats away from me — and amid applause the director stood up and took the stage.  As they do with all of their tributes, the screen projected Scorsese’s face, larger than life, so alluring it became almost impossible to watch the smaller, real life Scorsese seated opposite Maltin.

They talked about Scorsese’s early work, of course, how he came to make movies, how he met and became acquainted with Robert De Niro, whom he called his deepest and most trusting relationship throughout his career — he’s the only one, Scorsese said, still around who remembers where they came from.  He talked about all of his children, not just the littlest one who was the inspiration behind Hugo.  Scorsese had chosen the clips from his films he wanted to have presented.

He talked about the various mediums he’s worked in — documentary, film preservation, and filmmaking. He’s a professor, a fan, a visual wunderkind and one of the few with the right amount of appreciation and obsessiveness to have done Bob Dylan right, not once but twice. First with The Last Waltz, where Dylan appears at the end like a deity from on high, and then later with No Direction Home, which examined the trappings of Dylan’s own making when he refused to be “that protest singer guy.” His fans never wanted him to move forward – they only wanted the old Dylan, the folk singer misfit.  They didn’t appreciate his going electric and singing randomly, about nothing.  But Dylan, of course, was and is a man of many faces, like Scorsese.

Maltin pointed out the similarities between Dylan going electric and Scorsese going “kids movie” on his fans and how they all seem to still be wanting another Goodfellas.  But as I listened to Scorsese talk about film, his own career, and the future of film I realized that there is no single kind of film Scorsese ever made.  He might be most known for his mob movies — or his more violent-themed films, but within the directors work is a willingness, always, to try new things with or without violence.  The Age of Innocence, King of Comedy, New York New York, Life Lessons, The Last Waltz, Italian American, Kundun – he’s always working outside his own comfort zone – and it’s a sad lament that his fans want him to always be that “mob movie violence guy.”

It was really at that point that the conversation felt like it was going much deeper than the usual way these discussions often skim the surface.  Part of it was Maltin’s willingness and intelligence about Scorsese’s work and film in general, but most of it was Scorsese himself — his own desire to be forthcoming.  It isn’t easy to measure this except to say that at some point it dawned on me how rare of an opportunity this was.  You are always waiting, really, for that moment where a great artist reveals him/herself in a way that might make you finally understand them better.  As much as I know Scorsese through his films, hearing him speak about himself reveals someone almost the polar opposite of the nervous, hyper, obtuse young man he was when he made Taxi Driver.  Now, he is generous, open, warm, easily moved, funny, and someone who seems to be genuinely loving the “right now” as much as he is welcoming whatever is coming next.

Scorsese chose all of the clips, including the famous “Are you Talkin’ to Me” scene from Taxi Driver, saying that they had only about an hour to do that scene and that De Niro improvised almost all of it.  The intensity in De Niro’s face during that scene is one of the minor miracles Scorsese captured with his camera over the years.  He also talked about his mom and dad in that screen from Italian American and how they were in many of his other films.  The presentation went well over two hours and though a few complained about the length, with such an in-depth and insightful conversation happening between Maltin and Scorsese I could have listened to two more hours.  By the end of it, when Scorsese accepted his award, tearing up when Ben Kingsley gave a speech about him, he continued to refer back to Maltin about movies.  They couldn’t help themselves.

And so, funnily enough, though he’s nearing the end of his career, in many ways, with Hugo, it feels almost like he’s at the beginning of it.  Not only is Hugo different in terms of structure and tempo, but it is the most emotionally exposed film he has ever made.  Who knew that under all of that fast talking mania was a tender, beating heart.  And that might be the thing about Hugo that is most surprising of all, not just to those who come to it for the first time, but to those who are familiar enough with Scorsese’s work to know how rare of a thing that is.

Brad Pitt talking with Jon Stewart about Moneyball on The Daily Show — wondering why Oscar campaigns never go negative the way political campaigns do.

It takes a lot to shake the tree of discontent where the Oscars are concerned.  Most film critics and media writers feel it’s borderline irresponsible to even care about such a silly contest, let alone write about it.  The Oscars are then left to the hardcore fans of the Oscars, and there are a few of those still left.  The Oscars are still an annual event, even if they have been eclipsed, mostly, by bigger events like American Idol.  The Superbowl isn’t going anywhere because, though some might be able to see the art in a great football game, mostly it’s simply about winning and losing with no nagging questions about whether or not it should be looked upon as a game.  It’s a game, all right — designed to be and enjoyed as such.

The Oscars, though, isn’t supposed to be a game.  As the Academy themselves proclaim, it is supposed to be about honoring the highest achievements of the year.  Those of us who dwell inside the belly of the beast know that it is also a reward for studios and publicists and the talent involved, how hard they “campaign” for the award.  When you are talking about a majority vote upwards of 5,000 people, you can’t rationally parse the particulars.   A majority vote is something that can be manipulated because the Oscars are, for the most part, about Ms. Right Now, not about Ms. Right, as Scott Tobias points out beautifully and succinctly in his latest piece about The Artist.  

As Tobias points out,

What’s important is perspective: Accept that the Oscars have a casual relationship with excellence, cheer for the times when consensus and greatness intersect, boo the egregiously unworthy, and above all, find some other context to think about what’s great and what’s terrible without awards talk poisoning your conscience. In the end, film history has a way of sorting things out anyway: Driving Miss Daisy won Best Picture the same year Do The Right Thing wasn’t nominated, but the “dead” film is the one with the statuette. Now it’s just the answer to a trivia question.”

Winning means a statue on the shelf, a moment of pride for the recipient, a way to position oneself in a crowded room, a way to position oneself within the bookends of history, “Academy Winner so and so and died.”

That those words always precede an obit is really what we’re all doing here.  Martin Scorsese, arguably the greatest director America has produced, or certainly one of them, must measure his great career against how many Oscars he’s won — when he took to the stage at the Santa Barbara Film Festival to receive the prestigious Riviera award, the subject of the Oscars danced lightly, and sometimes heavily, around the proceedings.  I know that if Hugo was the frontrunner, it would be savaged bloody by now by bloggers and fans and critics.  I also know that if Hugo won Best Picture, it would be The Artist that shimmered more brightly in history.  And I also know that if The Artist wins, Hugo will always be the film everyone remembers as being the better of the two. Funny, that.  Winning the Oscar of course is a definitive measure of success. But it is often also a curse in disguise.

Today is the day final Oscar ballots go out.  The race has come down to a few easy decisions, probably, and a few hard ones.  This is sort of like the moment the millions of sperm leave the shaft in hopes of implanting an egg.  The egg has already gone out, its genetic materials determined long ago and so it sits there, waiting for implantation. If everyone did their job right, if everything goes as expected that egg will be fertilized and a human being will form.  If it doesn’t, all of those hopeful sperm just speed past their target, destination unknown, and the egg passes, along with all of what might have been.

It might seem like an offbeat award analogy but fertility, like the Oscar race, is about careful timing and expectations.  It’s about foreplay and lubricant.  It’s about erections and heat. It’s about excitement, attraction, euphoria.   But it isn’t much of an intellectual impulse.  Or it doesn’t seem to be. Passion is the name of the game. The ballots are mailed and the members look carefully at them.  One name will pop up immediately, or they’ll look at all of the names and think, “I have no idea what film is my favorite.” Or they’ll hand them off to the people who work in their office and ask them what they think should be voted as best.  Or their kids or grandkids will get that job.  There must be an intoxicating sense of power holding one of those in your hands.

There is probably little doubt that most members, if they’ve actually seen The Artist, will vote for that film for Best Picture.  And because they usually match BP hand in hand with Director, Hazanavicius will likely be checked.  They will move down the ballot but will be unable to vote for Documentary, Foreign Language or the shorts unless they have seen all of the movies.  This same obligation won’t apply to the rest of the categories.  Maybe they will share The Precious among several movies, maybe they will follow the one they love and check it off all the way down the line, ducklings in a row.  As Leonard Maltin pointed out at the tribute to Scorsese, all of the branches nominated Hugo.  But we know the one branch that didn’t. The actors.  The actors are a pesky bunch.  They ordinarily like movies that feature familiar Hollywood aristocracy — whether reigning royalty or heirs apparent — though not always; they loved Slumdog Millionaire, which was populated by unknowns.

The actors will love The Descendants, which is a brilliant ensemble filled with actorly performances as well as naturalist performances by locals.  There is a marvelous organic quality to both The Descendants and Moneyball that the other films don’t have.  They soak up their environment, they work with people who know those worlds.  These two films, like The Artist, The Help and Extremely Loud are about actors and acting.  These are usually the types of films that do very well with the Academy because the actors amount to around 1200 voting members, almost triple the size of any other branch.

This isn’t a year that feels like it’s up in the air.  The surprises seem to be centered in the Actor and Actress races.  Supporting Actor will come down to Christopher Plummer who has never yet won an Oscar and who is not only way overdue but actually gave a performance worthy of an award versus Max Von Sydow, who does star in a Best Picture nominee, who also has never won an Oscar and who is also a beloved vet who has paid his dues.  Both actors seem like they will split the house.  In which direction will it inevitably lean?

Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay feel like they’re wide open too.  Though people who really like The Artist will probably check it all the way down the line — Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, possibly Actor, Costumes, Score — and then it gets iffy.  Hugo will give it some heat for sure, mostly in the Director category (or maybe I’m just dreaming), Art Direction, Cinematography, Editing, Sound — I prefer Hugo’s score to the Artistbut since The Artist’s score functions as beats and zingers in a screenplay it’s hard to imagine that film not winning.

When all is said and done, those of us who write about this will list the number of Oscars won.  Many fear that Hugo will be like Gangs of New York, which lost to Chicago (which in turn lost Screenplay and Director to The Pianist), and go home empty handed.  That would be really hard for me to believe for any of those members who took the time to watch Scorsese’s masterpiece in 3-D. If they relied on the 2-D screener they are simply going to miss too much of what is so great about Hugo.  And if they watched the movie a second time, as with all great films, the first layer can be peeled off and a whole other movie emerges.  But voters, you know how they are, slip it in, watch it, form an opinion, move on.  They don’t study films because they have to watch too many of them.  They also probably follow public opinion and the buzz might be with Scorsese but it isn’t with Hugo.  Not yet anyway.

We will stack them up something like this:

The Artist: Picture, Director, Actor, Costumes, Score
Hugo: Art Direction, Cinematography,  Editing, Sound, Visual Effects
The Descendants: Maybe Screenplay
Midnight in Paris: Screenplay
Moneyball: Maybe sound, maybe screenplay
The Help: Actress, Supporting Actress
War Horse: Maybe Sound
Tree of Life: Maybe Cinematography
Extremely Loud: Maybe Supporting Actor

But right now it feels like a two picture race.  Those who support the Artist will make up the majority, probably.  Those not inclined to vote for The Artist will split themselves up a bit.  But they can’t really group themselves around a single winner that can challenge the frontrunner, not with the DGA under its belt.

For better or worse it has been a predictable race in all of the worst ways. As Tobias points out, and as we’ve pointed out, it probably isn’t fair that The Artist has the curse of the frontrunner and will always be loathed somewhat because of that, despite what a lovely gem it is.  Having written about the race a long time it is easier for me to see what’s coming next because unlike voters I DO study the films. I see them multiple times.  Though many will walk away from this year thinking only Tree of Life was the best film, for me, linear storytelling is harder than abstract storytelling and therefore Tree of Life only fascinates me in so much as it illuminates Malick’s inner world.  But for me, it doesn’t hold much resonance beyond that.  The films I think will last of our Best Picture list will be The Artist — because people will surprise themselves that they can so readily relate to a silent film; I also think we’ve already been conditioned as a culture to read people via text messaging — we are already one cool remove from having to communicate the old fashioned way, which is how The Artist plugs in to modern day.  When we see a line of text, or a smiley, or an LOL, we have to then fill the rest out for ourselves.  The Artist is an easy puzzle after all of that.  In many ways we are more open to varying methods of storytelling than we ever have been. Ten years ago The Artist might have landed with a thud.

The greatness of Hugo’s legacy may come later. Once people stop judging it within the ridiculous, dumbed-down confines of the Oscar race, they’ll be able to see past the instapoll comparisons to the essence of the achievement it represents — each brilliantly intricate shot and every exquisite detail.  It is a moving castle, a Winchester House, a Grand Canyon, a wonderment.  But it doesn’t follow “the formula” and it is too easily dismissed because audiences who are used to categorizing things must see it as a house that makes sense, a vista that is without complications, a castle that doesn’t move.  And thus Scorsese, once again, may be a man out of time.  But those who have gotten to the core Hugo know why it is the one that will last beyond all of this silliness.  I hope that our culture does not choose to measure this film, or any of the very good films that were nominated, like Moneyball and The Descendants and Midnight in Paris, by how many little gold men it did or didn’t win.

A couple of weeks ago, based on the fact that The Artist, as it began to open across the country, didn’t exactly seem to be setting the box office aflame (I don’t mean when compared to Thor — I mean on the traditional indie-crossover circuit), I made an Academy Awards prediction. It had much in common with a lot of the Academy Awards predictions that people have been making recently, in that it was fearlessly wrong. I said that I thought The Artist had peaked, and that The Help would win Best Picture. That could still happen, of course, but at this point I wouldn’t bet the farm on it, or even a nice steak dinner. Despite its less-than-Richter-scale-rattling performance thus far, The Artist, as it racks up wins (the Golden Globes, the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild), is looking more and more like a classic Oscar juggernaut, a runaway awards train fueled by the metaphysics of the entertainment-media echo chamber, in which the relentless chatter about the “inevitability” of one movie winning becomes a big part of the reason that it inevitably wins. (It’s Access Hollywood meets the doctrine of predestination. Or maybe just the doctrine of Harvey.)

I bring up my mistake not so much to come clean (the great thing about Academy Awards predictions is that so many people get so many of them wrong that you don’t have to), but because I think the reason I was wrong illustrates a quiet sea change that has taken place in the Oscars: The audience — remember them? — is no longer a very big part of the equation. I had assumed, mistakenly, that because The Help was an astonishingly big hit, and because its success sprung from the way that it clearly touched a racial-cultural nerve in people, that the movie’s organic popularity — as opposed to the heavily marketed freeze-dried quasi-popularity of The Artist — would be decisive at the Academy Awards. But all I was demonstrating was a mode of analysis about how the Oscars work that is now, more or less, completely outmoded.

The change has only really occurred within the last couple of years. As a kid, I loved the Oscars, but I always remember the first time I watched them as a film buff. It was 1977, my freshman year in college, and the year that Rocky won. You could say that Rocky was an inspired choice, but when you look at the movies it was up against — All the President’s Men, Taxi Driver, Network, and Bound for Glory — the triumph of Rocky looks a lot more like what it was: Hollywood honoring the movie that year that had struck the greatest populist chord. Of the five nominees, it was hardly the most indelible work of art, and no one pretended that it was. It didn’t have to be. It was a classic crowd-pleaser, and the reason it won is that, make no mistake, that was the business that Hollywood was in, and always had been in. Pleasing crowds.

For decades, ever since the dawn of the New Hollywood (and probably before), to be a movie freak and to watch the Academy Awards was to partake in a unique ritual of fused celebration and cynicism. The glamour and star power were the real thing, and a lot of the movies and performances that won were timeless. Yet the cynicism came from one’s awareness that the voters, no matter what their personal taste, always had one eye on “the mass audience.” At the Academy Awards, box-office success legitimized a movie, gave it cachet, and, in so doing, altered its meaning. And there was an unabashed hint of pop corruption in that. It was the “tasteful” middlebrow version of the blockbuster mentality. Yes, a movie that was a work of art could win the Oscar for Best Picture, and often did — provided, of course, that it was a major hit (On the Waterfront, Lawrence of Arabia, Midnight Cowboy, The Godfather, Annie Hall, The Silence of the Lambs, Schindler’s List). But just as often, the movie that won wasn’t a work of art, yet it was a work of entertainment that meant a lot to a lot of people (Marty, The Sound of Music, In the Heat of the Night, The Sting, Braveheart, Dances With Wolves, Chicago).

For a long time, it was all too easy to be a snob about the Oscars. Now, though, you could almost say that the snobs have taken over the Academy asylum. The Oscars now covet something much more than popularity: They covet cred. It all shifted two years ago, when The Hurt Locker won Best Picture. The movie had grossed around $15 million, and no Best Picture winner in history had been seen in theaters by that tiny or select an audience. That simply wasn’t the way that the Oscars worked. But now, suddenly, The Hurt Locker’s triumph among critics’ groups and its big win at the Academy Awards became part of a continuous, aesthetically dictated sweep. In the old days, or even just a few years before, Avatar — the main movie that The Hurt Locker was up against — would likely have taken the award for Best Picture. Now, though, it wasn’t just critics, or “small” or “elite” groups of viewers, who had become art-conscious at the expense of even thinking about popularity. The entire Academy, reversing course on 80 years, had tossed out popularity as a priority.

At this point, we’ll ask you to click on over to Entertainment Weekly to read the middle of Owen Gleiberman’s essay.

I guess I’m saying that there was something, in its wisdom-of-the-mob way, that made the Oscars sort of soulful in the era when the judgments of the Academy had to be validated by the raw power of the audience. Back then, you could only take the Oscars halfway seriously (if that), but at least Academy Awards night, in its combination of glitz, pandering, and middlebrow taste, represented the unity of Hollywood movies and everyone around the world who adores them. On the surface, at least, the new Academy Awards appears to be far more tasteful and pure. The movies, by and large, are smaller, the judgments more refined, and the popcorn movies — remember them? — that the vast majority of the audience prefers are nowhere to be seen. (In effect, they’re shunned.) But since the folks in Hollywood spend most of their time making those movies, you have to wonder if leaving the audience behind on Oscar night is a sign that the Academy Awards have evolved to a new artistic seriousness, or if they’ve turned art into another high concept, and if the voters are just pandering in a new way: not to the masses but to themselves.

So do you agree with me that the Academy Awards, more and more, seem to be cutting the audience out of the picture? Or do you think that the Oscars are simply evolving in a better direction?

Normally the VF Oscar edition is our cue to make wry sighs observing the immaculate snowy frost of Vanity Fair’s annual White Party — but a few angry voices have taken some of the fun out of that this year… Click to see the super-sized full-length trifold spread. (thanks to Mel)

Watch this speech again. Listen to it. Parse and analyze Viola Davis’s warm wonderful words any way you wish. If anybody wants to argue with me that there’s any race angle being dealt here, I’m here waiting to take on that debate. Anybody who thinks this speech plays up the black factor is seriously mistaken. That’s a warped misconception. Anyone who thinks I’m wrong to be angry about a sneering attitude toward this speech, Come at me, bro. Come at me.

On a happier note — watch Octavia Spencer’s great speech, after the cut.

Michael Barrick
Andrea Santucci
Nazrin Nasir
Gentle Benj
Massimo C.
Anne RR
Nestor Araiza
Thomas lawrence

And the TV winners plus total high scorers after the cut.

Highest scorers for TV with 7 out of 8 possible:
Victor Lopez
Richard of Bohemia
Graziano Ferrari
rocky langsy
Bogdan Kozar
Mike Meyers
Alex Z

The two highest scorers in both categories with 11 total:

Mike Meyers
Alex Z

I like that Mark Harris is trying to inject a little intrigue into a dead and flopping around on the shore race.  Here he makes a case for other movies to perhaps upset The Artist (I think the only possible upset is with Martin Scorsese, who really should win for Hugo even if the Artist takes best Picture).

His money shot after the cut, but you should read his whole article.

Here he is on Hugo:

The case for Hugo

If the movie industry is hellbent on disappearing up its own ass this Oscar season, The Artist is not the only option. We’ve got a big, fat, homegrown movie about movies right here, folks! Hugo has eleven nominations, more than any other film, which suggests broad support from the membership. It’s got just about as much love from critics as The Artist. And it’s a kind of ideal Academy combination—a high-budget studio films that is nonetheless made according to the uncompromising vision of one of the most revered directors in the world, who’s telling a story that welds state-of-the-art technology to a deep respect for the past and a sentimentality that isn’t just about actors, but about the art of film itself. Whether you like it or not, Hugo is a swing for the fences. Next to it, The Artistis a bunt.

The problem: There’s plenty of precedent for a movie without any acting nominations winning Best Picture—in the last decade, The Return of the King and Slumdog Millionairehave gotten there—but it’s not easy, and not likely, since people who are looking for something as different from The Artist as possible are unlikely to pick Hugo.

Whoa, where did the movie industry go? Wow, it disappeared up its own ass! Mark Harris, for the win.  And can we ever stop worrying about the no acting nominations rule? Well, no because the actors branch nearly triples the numbers of every other branch.  And they only like movies with actors they like in them.

My only bone of contention with Harris, of course, has to do with his saying Dragon Tattoo losing a Best Picture nomination isn’t a snub. I wouldn’t call it a snub either but I can certainly voice my horror that a film that was nominated by the AFI, the PGA, the WGA, the ACE and the DGA gets in where films that had NO guild support but a lot of chummy chums in the Academy did? I call foul on that.  And frankly, they have to live with the embarrassment – both in having not chosen several great films this year, Dragon Tattoo being only one of them. Their lineup is 6 and the rest are not worthy.   Their experiment failed worse than any of their other experiments have. Go back to five or go back to ten – but this….

I do agree that the Glenn Close loss was a SNUB.  100% with him there.

Anyway, more Harris after the cut.

The case against The Artist

The argument, which I’ve heard tossed around a lot, including by some Academy members, goes like this: I don’t know what’s going to win, but it can’t be The Artist because nobody wants it to win. It hasn’t resonated with the public, it’s been wildly overhyped, Harvey is not and never will be One Of Us, and it doesn’t hold up on second viewing. Giving it Best Picture would be tantamount to admitting that 2011 was a lousy year for movies, which we don’t want to do. Moneyball is a much better movie. The Tree of Life is a monumental work by an uncompromising film artist. War Horse made me cry. Or, if not those, what about…

The problem: Cases against movies never work, because Oscar votes are affirmations, not denials. Frontrunners can’t be taken down abstractly; votes need to coalesce around a single opposition candidate, and even if there had been a chance of that happening this year, the unexpectedly wide field of nine nominees probably would have demolished it. Remember, The Artist doesn’t need to be a consensus choice to win Best Picture—depending on the way the ballots fall, it could technically win by receiving just 12% of the votes, and very credibly win with 3 out of 4 Academy members voting against it.

I happened to be in the Oscar auditorium the year Crash won Best Picture, and I can report that what sounded on TV like a gasp of surprise resonated in the theater as something closer to horror. Very few people I ran into that night had voted for Crash. But it didn’t matter, because the vast majority of Oscar voters weren’t anywhere near that theater. They were at home watching TV. And a lot of them loved Crash. And a lot of them love The Artist. It’s got ten Oscar nominations, wins from the Producers Guild of America and the DGA, and now, the SAG award. There’s no reason to assume it isn’t going all the way.

The Popes of Blackness rarely agree on anything. One thing is certain — Davis takes on a difficult role and breathes life into a hero who is inspiring, enraging, familiar and extraordinary. It is odious that the nominating committee gravitates to black people playing into conventional stereotypes. Nevertheless, that is not Viola Davis’ fault. Given the state of the union, I think most any actor would be lucky to get work as a tree, forget about the layered role of a conflicted domestic in America’s civil rights-era South. It is an incredible part, and Davis nails it. Not everyone is happy about that.

You may recall that back when the film was released in theaters, the aforementioned Popes espoused their disgust for a black woman acting as a domestic, which naturally made white audiences curious, turning both the movie and the novel it was based on into something of a sensation. I’m not sure why white folks loved “The Help” so much — maybe because many of them grew up with an Aibileen of their own.

I love how he ends the piece:

Some may be discouraged to see a black woman get an Oscar nod for playing a house cleaner — never mind that women in their 40s of every stripe are having a hard time everywhere in Hollywood. Viola Davis is a gifted actor — smokin’ hot! — but not buxom, biracial or conventionally beautiful. She already has a truckload of Tony and other theater awards, just got a SAG award, and works steadily. Her nomination pushes an opening door even further, soliciting an appreciation for the beauty of dark skin, full eyes and lips, and a new beauty aesthetic for Hollywood to consider.

“The Help” is decried for being a work of white liberal guilt porn, schmaltzy and sentimental — which it is. But so what? There are flaws in the film, but Viola Davis is not one of them.

Actually, Davis IS quite buxom.  But he is comparing her, of course, to Halle Berry who is still the only black actress (she’s biracial but we all know how that is defined – just look at our President.)