I haven’t updated for a while (over a week, Jesus) but it’s taken me that long to get over the shock of the Oscar nominations.
Well, not really, because like I said in my last post, this has been a particularly boring year. Even though there is no consensus on who the actual winners might be, the nominees have been set in stone for a while. However, there were some surprises, but we’ll get to them in a minute.
The strange phenomenon this year regarding the Oscar nominations has been for the media to try and scrutinize how they reflect the society in which we now live in. In what ways will the collection of films that the faceless “Academy” have deemed as the best of the year provide a representation of the zeitgeist for historians in the future. In the post-Obama era, will the pick of Slumdog Millionaire as Best Picture winner-apparent show how the world was feeling particularly international and globally-minded, or will the record-tying nominations haul of The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button show that America had closed its borders and turned even more insular and picked a home-grown big-budget Hollywood epic in this time of economic despair? To be honest, both analyses would be wrong.
Like I said last week, “nobody knows anything”, and last Thursday morning proved that. As always, when the dust cleared and all the predictions and declarations that “this film is a lock” or “that movie has no chance” (even, admittedly, from me) passed, the Academy did as they always did and just chose what they liked. Simple as that.
Now, here are my five nominees for “most surprising moments of the Oscar nominations” (catchy title, don’t you think?):
1. They loved The Reader
As Sally Field would say, they really loved it. They even loved it enough to ignore the potential category fraud of Kate Winslet as Best Supporting Actress and put her in her rightful place as
Best Actress (which surely makes her the favorite to win now, which she wouldn’t necessarily have been had she been nominated for Revolutionary Road). Not only that, but they love Stephen Daldry. Only three films to his name, but a Best Director nomination for each of them. Watch now as pundits have seen the pattern emerge and his next movie becomes pre-ordained as a sure-fire Oscar nominee but ends up being ignored. The Academy have a habit of doing that, you know. They don’t like to be told what to think, they just like what they like. Although I’m sure the deaths this year of both beloved producers of the movie (and Oscar-winners) Sidney Pollack and Anthony Minghella didn’t hurt.
2. Harvey Is Back
Anyone who watched the Oscars in the 1990’s will know that Harvey Weinstein dominated for the entire decade. By taking films with mainstream, audience-friendly sensibilities such as Pulp Fiction or The English Patient and giving them art-house friendly credentials by
distributing them under the Miramax banner, he created an Oscar formula that couldn’t fail, and a Miramax movie was nominated for Best Picture at least once every year all the way from 1992 to 2004, with Harvey himself leading the campaign trail. Since the Weinstein brothers were kicked out of Miramax and founded The Weinstein Company, things have been quiet on the Harvey front, but when The Reader’s name was called out on nominations morning, it meant one thing – Weinstein is back in the race! And anyone who thought he may have changed his tact and become a bit more passive and relaxed nowadays were reintroduced to the old Harvey that very afternoon, as he sent out a press release positioning his movie as the underdog in the race, and promising that it would win Best Picture. Welcome back, Harvey. The Oscars haven’t been as fun without you.
3. omg they hated the dark knight!!!
Well, they didn’t hate it. Despite what you may have read in the papers or websites, The Dark Knight wasn’t “snubbed” or “ignored”, it just wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. Eight nominations is a hell of an achievement for a genre-film that was released in the summer, and it judging from its run of guild nominations and critics awards, it must have come pretty close to the finish line. It may not have made it to the final five, but just the simple fact that a film like it got as close as it did will certainly have repercussions on Hollywood over the next couple of years at least, and it has opened a lot of doors for genre films – be they comic-book, horror or sci-fi – to be taken seriously by both the critics and awards bodies, like The Lord Of The Rings before it. (For what it’s worth, I think that the LOTR trilogy’s Oscar success paved the way for The Dark Knight’s campaign).
4. The Music Branch went full retard
Anyone who may have taken the time to have even the briefest look at the Best Song nominees over the past couple of years (well, even since it’s inception) will know that it is a category with very little value, apart from every once in a while when it will actually see the light and
give it to a deserving winner like Once last year. But the small way they went a year ago to building some respect by awarding that great film was totally destroyed this year when they DIDN’T NOMINATE BRUCE SPRINGSTEEN! Anyone who has seen The Wrestler or even just heard the song (called, incidentally, “The Wrestler”) will know that it is clearly the best song written for a film this year (though admittedly, that’s usually not the highest praise you can bestow) but because of category rule changes that are both too boring and too complex to explain, the Boss was ignored. I’m sure it’s probably the last thing on Springsteen’s mind, but along with The Dark Knight and WALL•E not being nominated for Best Picture, it has gone some way to further damaging the Academy’s already fractured reputation.
5. They weren’t Happy with Sally
Sally Hawkins wasn’t nominated for Happy-Go-Lucky, which was not only a surprise (because Mike Leigh’s female muses always do well
with the Academy, be it Brenda Blethyn in Secrets & Lies or Imelda Staunton in Vera Drake) but also unprecedented, because in the 34 years that the National Society Of Film Critics, the LA Film Critics, the New York Film Critics and the Golden Globes have all existed, only SEVEN women have won all four – Sally Field for Norma Rae, Meryl Streep for Sophie’s Choice, Michelle Pfeiffer for The Fabulous Baker Boys, Emma Thompson for Howard’s End, Holly Hunter for The Piano, Helen Mirren for The Queen and, this year, Sally Hawkins for Happy-Go-Lucky. All of the other six women were nominated for Oscars, and all but one of them won (Michelle Pfeiffer being the unlucky one). I don’t really know how to explain it, because I thought she was a sure-thing. I guess it’s just that “nobody knows anything”.
