Oscar Looks Around—And Up
For all his influence, Oscar can be pretty dull.
Every year, he dresses the same way for his big night: Top-to-toe gold plating, accented by a dense and dark base. His posture—steel-beam straight, formal, rigid—doesn't suggest he's the sort of guy to engage in a lighthearted frolic on the beach. There's nothing in his expression to suggest that he's ever laughed, ever smiled, ever so much as smirked. Which may explain why he traditionally goes home with folks who make such deadly serious films.
From The Godfather in 1973 to The Silence of the Lambs in 1992 to Million Dollar Baby in 2005, Oscar gold has often stood for Oscar grim. But it hasn't always been that way. And this year's picks make us think that Oscar's vacant visage may once again be softening. At the very least he's looking in more directions than just straight ahead.
A Case of Blind Optimism
Look at this year's Best Picture race: Such blockbusters as The Blind Side and Up are knocking elbows with indie film faves An Education and A Serious Man. District 9, a small-budget sci-fi thriller, shares billing with the message movie Precious. The two favorites for Best Picture seem to be Avatar, a film that's made more than $2 billion worldwide so far, and The Hurt Locker, which has earned less than $20 million. Let me stress that disparity another way: Avatar pocketed twice as much its first day as Locker has made in six months.
It is, in a sense, a populist resurgence in the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' hallowed halls. The idea that The Blind Side, District 9 or even Up would've been nominated in past years is improbable at best. "They are precisely the kinds of movies hardly ever nominated for a best-picture Oscar," writes John Horn of the Los Angeles Times. The fact they have little chance at winning is almost beside the point.
"In a Facebook nation, this is exactly what makes sense," Rich Ross, chairman of Walt Disney Studios (which, with its acquisition of Pixar, is now responsible for Up), told the Times.
Art for Art's Sake
Oscar has been honoring excellence in film since 1929 when the very first statuettes were handed over to filmmakers. And for many of the years since, populism has played at least a supporting role in the selection process. Film historians now bemoan how Citizen Kane—considered by some to be the greatest American film of all time—lost to How Green Was My Valley in 1942. But maybe Academy voters were swayed by the fact that Valley was making big bucks at the box office (it ended up with an estimated $6 million) while Kane barely cleared its production budget.
With the rise of the independent film industry in the 1990s and 2000s, though, that populist bedrock began to shift. Suddenly, small arts houses were producing riveting works that might never reach the local multiplex—unless, of course, they got some notice from Oscar. Boutique studios like Miramax started picking up small movies and pairing them with massive promotional budgets, with most of the money spent to get Academy members' attention. And when these smaller entities started hitting pay dirt—Miramax pushed both The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love to Best Picture honors—the big studios got jealous and started buying up boutiques and/or creating indie offshoots of their own.
The result was perhaps a win for cinematic excellence—many of these films were undeniably well made—but a loss for the moviegoing public. The Academy was honoring ever darker, ever bleaker and ever less popular fare, getting further and further out of kilter with the tastes, values and morals of the masses.
Makers of movies meant to be watched, meanwhile, reacted by scrapping any pretensions of being art and instead catered solely to the bottom line. Which translated directly into … bigger bangs, beefier cars and faster women.
Never was the divide so obvious, perhaps, as it was in 2008. No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood and Atonement were the talk of the Academy, even though they were commercial disappointments. Spider-Man 3, Shrek the Third and Transformers dominated the box office, collectively earning $1 billion domestically, and all three were given an emphatic "meh" from Oscar.
Then, a year later in 2009, when two more hugely successful—and this time critically acclaimed films (The Dark Knight and WALL-E) were snubbed for Best Picture nods, beaten out by films that did such miserable business that one wonders if anyone outside the filmmakers' immediate family saw them (Frost/Nixon, The Reader, Milk). And without a real draw among the nominees, the ratings for the Academy Awards telecast dropped like a stone.
Power to the People
Now, we know that Hollywood execs don't care that much about what critics think—as long, of course, as our opinions don't affect their bottom line. But when the ratings for one of the biggest nights on television go down, well, that is someone's bottom line.
So in an effort to give regular ol' moviegoers more of a rooting interest on Oscar night, this year the Academy doubled the number of Best Picture nominees from five to 10. The idea was to give more films—and presumably more popular films—a better chance to get in the derby, and give movie fans like you and me a little bit of confirmation that, hey, we know a good movie when we see it, too. It's not the first time there's been 10 noms, by the way. In fact, that number used to be standard for awards night until it was cut in half in 1945, right after Casablanca took top honors.
What does it mean when five turns into 10 and the power is handed back to the people, as it were? Well, as we mentioned already, part of the picture is that there's something here for almost everyone—even for curmudgeonly Plugged In film critics. Because as far as we're concerned, no movie on the list more richly deserves the nomination than Up—an incredibly sweet, poignant and savvy bit of filmmaking. Second on our list, predictably perhaps, is The Blind Side, which features an evangelical family offering up some much-needed Christian charity to a future professional football player.
This is not to say that all is well on the West Coast just because Up and The Blind Side get a rare wink from a stoic statue. Six of these 10 films are rated R, and with good reason. Inglourious Basterds? Really? Is this Oscar material? (Solely on principal there should be a disqualifying rule for any movie with a name that couldn't have been uttered in a 1970s sitcom.) There are also some serious content concerns with even most of the list's lower-rated flicks. So take our annual Oscar slogan seriously this year: "These are the 10 films Hollywood picked to love and watch this year. Should you?"
The Academy Awards have often felt like someone else's party. Now that its doors have been opened a bit wider and more of us can come in, we have a bit more responsibility to think about what's being served for dinner.
On Oscar night, Sunday, March 7, 2010, Plugged In's Paul Asay and Steven Isaac kept a running blog going through all the highlights and lowlights. You can still read their entries for a full recap. You can also add your post-awards comments.