The State of the Race — Rage Against the Machine

Reviews, like the Oscars, like your own impressions, are moments in time captured.  Some of that enthusiasm or hatred will last a long time.  You might be surprised to find, for instance, that Chicago got more scores of 100 on Metacritic than American Beauty, The English Patient, Unforgiven, and the Silence of the Lambs.  You might also find that no film ever won Best Picture since 1990 without having at least one score of 100.  The lowest was Gladiator with 2.  The highest was Return of the King with 26.  Yes, there are more critics now, but even when you average it out, the top get is still Return of the King, which makes it the best reviewed film in twenty years.  Gladiator is the worst. In the time that the awards season has exploded, post-Gladiator, the overall score and critical acclaim for Best Pictures has risen.  The number of critics Metacritic counts as valid has also risen.   The top ten of best scores of 100 per the amount of critics giving reviews have mostly occurred since 2000, with two exceptions: Schindler’s List and Shakespeare in Love.  The two films that didn’t hit very high and hover low on the list of high scores: A Beautiful Mind, Gladiator and Crash.

But it seems safe to say that Best Picture winners, even last year included, have been very well reviewed films.  There seems to be a wider and wider disconnect, though, between the public and the critics.  And since many of the members of the public are now coming of age and becoming critics themselves things feel a little strange “out there.”  There are always a few movies that hit with “the internet” but not so much with critics or with the public.  One of those movies this year is Drive.  The internet likes Harry Potter, Melancholia, Martha Marcy May Marlene, and is okay with The Artist.  But if you want to see how the straight-up  majority of internet users (who are young people — coming of age online, reared on the kind of mediocre entertainment mainstream Hollywood has been dishing out to them for years) you’ll see a list something like MSN’s users top ten:

MSN Movies Users’ Top 10 Poll

1. Harry Potter
2. Twilight
3. The Help
4. Bridesmaids
5. Rise of the Planet of the Apes
6. Captain America
7. X-Men: First Class
8. Fast Five
9. The Descendants
10. Moneyball

It’s sort of a miracle that three Oscar contenders — four if you count Bridesmaids — are among their ten.  Specifically, though, and most notably, Tate Taylor’s The Help which would have absolutely NO PROBLEM winning Best Picture if it had a well known director at the helm.  The Help is the most popular film “out there” besides The Artist.  Almost everyone I know who is not keyed into critics or the Oscars loves The Help.  But it is missing something that makes it feel totally like the underdog in this race.  To win, it has to appeal to the snobs.  Pre-Crash, it was a lot easier to sell a popular entertainment film like The Help without the major awards or reviews behind it.

But even then, The Help‘s score of 62 would make it even lower than Crash and Gladiator (though not by much).  The three films with the highest scores right now that can win Best Picture would be The Artist – 87 on Metacritic with 7 scores of 100.  Moneyball also with 87 and 9 scores of 100 — with almost double the number of reviews than for The Artist (which means we could see The Artist’s overall score rise as more critics put their reviews in).  And Harry Potter with 87 and 9 scores of 100.

The Ebert Factor: almost all of the films in the past twenty years that won Best Picture also earned a score of 100 from Ebert.  I think Gladiator is the only one that did not.  Ebert didn’t give Harry Potter a good enough review, and he hasn’t yet reviewed The Artist.  Moneyball DOES have the requisite 100 Ebert score.

So now we’re getting down to it.

The Descendants — 84 Metacritic score, with a whopping 16 scores of 100, including Ebert.  Hugo has 83, with 11 scores of 100, including Ebert.  All of these films are very much in play with critics awards, Globe nominations and SAG — all except Hugo, which does not have the SAG nod anywhere, and if it wins it will be the first film since Braveheart to win without any SAG noms — but that doesn’t make it impossible; there has never been a movie like Hugo in the Best Picture race at all.

Still, many of the films we’re talking about aren’t even open to the public so the list will definitely shift around as those movies are released, specifically a crowd-pleaser like War Horse, or even a crowd-pleaser for people who don’t have such a sweet tooth when it comes to movies, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.  But both The Descendants and Moneyball are in play.  Both are diminished a wee bit by having too much in common — sexiest men alive evolving into dads, suffering a loss, getting their priorities straight.  Both films are among the best offerings of the year.  The Artist still has a comfortable lead as the film to beat.  It has a gimmick attached (silent movie, black and white) – it is charming and audience-friendly.  It was made with a low budget and will profit greatly.  To me, the biggest stumbling block for The Artist is that it is a French production. And after going outside the American studio system last year, are the Oscars really going to bite the hand that feeds them once again?  I don’t know. If they like that movie the most it will win.  They don’t overthink these things.  They don’t sit there with their ballot and say, “America, fuck yeah.” They look at the movies and they respond with their hearts.  For me it would be a tough call if I asked my heart what it wanted between Moneyball, The Descendants, The Artist and Hugo — It would be damned near impossible.  I don’t know what the deciding factor would be for me.  It is so hard to say.

What the Golden Globes will do is put George Clooney front and center where he was supposed to be when the awards race started.  Clooney is a master when it comes to crowds, and television audiences.  Both Pitt and Clooney are going to be such blindingly beautiful awards contenders that it’s going to be hard to choose between them and their movies.  That again gives The Artist or Hugo the edge.

So you’ll say, why are we even talking about this – we all know The Artist is going to Slumdog Millionaire it all the way home.  And that might happen.  But my job is still to talk about the Oscars.  And to me, there is always room to talk about them.  Needless to say, a masterpiece like Hugo just might float by unnoticed, only to be dredged up years from now and marveled at.  At this point, I’m happy to concede — if those big industry clubs want to award the kinds of films they like to award?  So be it.  I will still look for greatness in what the filmmakers bring this year.  For me that’s David Fincher’s exceptional standout, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo — a genre movie made into one of the most exciting two hours at the theater this year.  The Rise of the Planet of the Apes a genre B-movie but again, one of the year’s absolute best films.  Moneyball, the beauty of baseball, the beauty of life; The Descendants — a film about our collective future. And Hugo – the one Scorsese movie that made me cry.  Scorsese made probably the best film of 2011.  And yet, and yet — the Oscars are about temporary but all-consuming flings.  And this year, those French beauties are going to be hard to resist.

The Charts

By Year:

By MC Score:

By number of critics

By 100s

Average of 100 scores by how many critics in total: