Make no mistake: Awards season is a cutthroat time, when even the most normally civilized and magnanimous of Hollywood's citizens transform into rapacious hyenas fighting for the best position from which to gnaw on Oscar's gilded carcass. Do you remember how charming those adorable French people from the silent movie seemed at the Golden Globes, even inviting their canine costar onstage to share in the glory reflected from a second-tier statuette?
By Mark Lisanti at
Paul Drinkwater/NBC/Getty Images
Before we begin, it should be stipulated that awards shows are boring. They have always been boring, and they will continue to be boring until the Earth hurtles into the sun, which will almost certainly occur during the 18th hour of 10,464th Annual Academy Awards Psychocast, finally freeing us of the curious need to complain about why we aren't more entertained by famous people trading gold statues and listing their business obligations.
Welcome to the first annual GRTFLies Awardsies. I couldn’t think of a good title, so I just added the syllable “eez” to the end of the nouns — that’s how all award shows do it, right? Anyway, since the inception of this enjoyable filter through which we view the deplorable programming known as Reality Television, there have been a slew of people, events, and sexual encounters that deserve special recognition. That last part’s actually not true. Let me rephrase: There have been a slew of people, events, and sexual encounters that would be fun to point and laugh at one more time before clicking and dragging them to the trash can on your mental desktop.
What a frenetically busy weekend it was in the handing out of shinies and sparklies and mantel-trinkets to chronically underappreciated movie people, who at other times of the year often have to survive for weeks without winning anything. Critics’ groups in Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco announced their honorees, as did online critics in New York; conclaves in Detroit and Houston revealed their lists; and the American Film Institute named its 10 best movies. That’s a lot of noise! All of these simultaneously live-tweeted prizelets are microtwitches in the Oscar race, and it’s true that come ballot time, no Oscar voter is going to find himself frozen in indecision, his pen hovering above his ballot as he frets, “But dare I go against Detroit?” However, it’s still possible to pull some larger trendlines from this surge of hyperbolic over-celebration of film achievement. And if it’s not, let’s pretend it is.
A couple of days ago I asked Oscarmetrics readers to tweet me the movies they wish were in the Best Picture discussion right now. I ruled out what I think is the current consensus top ten (The Artist, The Descendants, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, The Help, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, Moneyball, The Tree of Life and War Horse). Anything else was eligible. I got an earful: Impassioned and thoughtful (within a 140-character limit) arguments for 32 different movies. And, by a landslide, the one you’d like to nudge into the discussion is the one in which Ryan Gosling kicks ass and takes names while maintaining an expression of such frozen imperturbability that a climactic twist pivots on your inability to figure out whether he’s dead or just concentrating. In any event, as the song says, he’s a real hero and a real human being (give or take), so bravo!
In thinking about the race for Best Picture this week I found myself drifting unhappily back to the 1980s, specifically to a stretch during which the Oscars reacted to an uncertain (i.e., post-Raging Bull) period in high-end American moviemaking by retreating to a safer, more virtuous and conservative definition of "prestige" films. In a period of just seven years, Best Picture Oscars were won by Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Amadeus, Out of Africa, and The Last Emperor. Some of those movies were good, and all of them had their virtues. But collectively, all they told us about the world and times in which they were made is that apparently nobody in 1980s Hollywood wanted to think about 1980s America.
This year’s Best Picture contest is starting to feel afflicted by a similar sense of what I would call belligerent nostalgia. The two movies to win high-profile prizes so far, The Artist and Hugo, are both being hailed as odes to the early days of cinema. But really, they’re not. The Artist tells you everything it knows about the painful transition from silents to talkies in its first 10 minutes: It’s an undeniably charming but extremely slight comedy-drama that mimics the most basic elements of silents (They were black-and-white! The screen wasn’t wide!), but seems more engaged by their poignant quaintness than by the visual language, wit, beauty, complexity, or psychological richness of the movies it purports to honor. And as enchanting as it can be to enter the glittering, hermetically sealed but vividly three-dimensional toy chest/train station universe that Martin Scorsese has created in Hugo, there is something slightly self-adoring about the story it tells. Hugo is not a valentine to the dawn of movies — it’s a valentine to people who send those valentines, a halo placed lovingly atop the heads of cinephiles and film preservationists. (And, not incidentally, film critics and Oscar voters.)
The National Board of Review announced its annual movie awards today, and although this remains a deeply weird organization whose membership is opaque and whole method of selection is — to be generous about it — impenetrable, we should probably not hold it against any of the many, many movies or people that managed to win something today, so bravo to all of them. The big victors were two films that got blanked the other day by the New York Critics Circle: Hugo, which took awards for Best Picture and Best Director, and The Descendants, which won prizes for Best Actor, Best Supporting Actress (Shailene Woodley), and Best Adapted Screenplay.
Welcome to December, RazzieWatchers! We’re in the home stretch. We have to say, this is the most exciting Razzie season in years — every time we think a movie’s a shoo-in, something elsecomes along that’s even worse! Last week saw the bloody, violent birth of Razzie heavyweight Breaking Dawn, Part 1 — seemingly a lock with a 26% Tomatometer, but possibly hampered by a sort-of rave by mysterious New York Times soothsayer Manohla Dargis.
I’m going to begin this edition of Oscarmetrics with a cautionary tale about overreaction, backlash, and misbehavior. Appropriately, it comes from one Best Picture nominee, and it’s about another. In the 2005 film Capote, we watch our brilliant, narcissistic protagonist (Philip Seymour Hoffman) experience a friend’s success the only way he can — as a staggering personal humiliation. He attends the premiere of the movie version of his loyal pal Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird. Afterward, Lee finds him at the bar, magnificently self-absorbed, and, of course, choked with jealousy.
“How’d you like the movie, Truman?” she asks patiently. He can’t even rouse himself to look at her. She finally walks away — at which point he murmurs sourly, to himself, “I, frankly, don’t see what all the fuss is about.” And nobody cares.
As we enter a season that’s defined by a great deal of fuss, of hyperbolic praise, and of hyperbolic dissent, it bears remembering that at some point in the next few months, we’re all going to find ourselves on the losing side of at least one movie argument. And when a film that everybody seems to love leaves us cold, we all, to some extent, risk sounding like Truman Capote — pissy, superior, bitter, bored. This is the time of year when the ridiculous word “overrated” gets tossed around as if it were an actual qualitative property of a movie rather than a silly side argument about what other people thought of it. So my current resolution is to try to be arrogant about movies that I love, but humble about movies that work for everybody else but not for me.
Well, Razzie lovers, things just got interesting, didn’t they?
All year, we’ve been disappointed by the movies we thought might be Razzie contenders. Transformers: Dark of the Moon? Coulda been worse. Rise of the Planet of the Apes? Frustratingly good. J. Edgar? Despised by some, not all. It’s enough to make veteran Razzie gurus like ourselves throw their hands to the sky and cry, “Why? Why must we suffer so? For God’s sake, can’t someone in Hollywood make a shitty movie that everyone hates?”
In covering the Oscar race so far, I’ve tried to focus on movies that have already opened. But this week, I’m tossing that approach, because effective immediately, the attention of the Oscar-punditry universe swivels decisively forward. The last eight weekends of 2011 will bring more than two dozen movies with aspirations as modest as a single acting nomination and as grandiose as sweeping the slate from Best Picture to Best Makeup.
So from now until year’s end, the goal of every contender that opened before November 1 is simply survival. Think of the next two months as a tidal wave, and of early hopefuls like Midnight in Paris, The Help, and Moneyball as trees along the shore line. Some of those trees will topple — and a couple of months from now, those still standing may look that much taller. Same goes for the movies in the big wave; some will arrive with obliterating force while others will weaken the closer they get. (Please take the above tortured analogy as my tribute to Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter.) With that in mind, this Oscarmetrics installment is a cheat sheet — a map of the parallel tracks of reality and hype along which the race will now proceed.
We’ve all seen it happen in awards show after awards show. Some grizzled veteran or much-nominated actress finally wins an Oscar, a Grammy, a Tony, after years of disappointment — for work that’s maybe just a leeeeeetle bit subpar. It’s why Kate Winslet won an Oscar for The Reader, not Eternal Sunshine. It’s why Mary Louise Wilson won a Tony for Grey Gardens, not Cabaret. It’s why Susan Lucci won an Emmy for the 29th season of All My Children, not the previous 28.
There may be no Oscar category more maddening to try to handicap than writing. When it comes to editing or sound, at least we all know that we’re clueless — film editing, after all, is called “the invisible art” by the very people who do it, and if you’re aurally sophisticated enough to judge the difference between sound mixing and sound editing, you’re probably either a sound mixer or a sound editor. Good screenwriting, by contrast, is supposed to be self-evident. But everything that can make a screenplay praiseworthy — dialogue, character development, story structure, gracefulness of adaptation, or originality of concept — can play as shoddy or hackneyed when a filmmaker mishandles it. And if you think the blame is always fairly apportioned, consider how many reviews make the claim, “The talented cast and director do their best with a weak script,” and how few say, “A fine piece of writing has been undermined by haphazard directing and tepid performances.” Critics never go there, because they don’t have access to the material — the script itself — that would support that argument.
The truth is, it’s virtually impossible to separate your judgment of a screenplay from your judgment of a completed movie — even if you’re one of the screenwriters who does the nominating. During campaign season, many studios send voters printed copies or flash drives of screenplays they want considered. But those versions have been retrofitted to match the finished films; they don’t contain any scenes or constructions that you didn’t see on screen. Unless you’re a big fan of stage directions and character descriptions, they’re not exactly essential reading.
So let’s start from the premise that Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay should probably be called Movie That Suggests Most Strongly That It Was Based On A Really Good Piece Of Writing. What do we know about the predilections of the Academy’s writers’ branch?
This Friday, Universal will release a movie that bears all the hallmarks of a Razzie contender. It’s a sequel to a movie that no one particularly liked the first time around. Its trailer features multiple crotch shots, wan jokes, and scenes of characters being hit in the face. It even has its fair share of respected thespians (Gillian Anderson, Dominic West, Rosamund Pike) debasing themselves for, presumably, of a paycheck. Its Tomatometer currently stands at 37%.
Sounds perfect, right? Sadly, though, we can personally guarantee that this film will not be nominated for Worst Picture. Why? Because the movie is Johnny English Reborn, it’s from a foreign country (Britain), and Razzie voters still haven’t gotten over their bias against “snooty” foreign films.
Welcome to the last slow stretch of the Oscar season. Over the next few weeks, a couple of movies will open with the hope of landing acting or writing nominations, but mostly they just want your money (For Your Consideration: The Thing?). The year’s remaining big guns won’t start to arrive until mid-November, and here’s a hunch, based partly on what I’ve seen, partly on instinct, and partly on hope: We’re looking at a year without an early frontrunner. By which I mean that the more than two dozen critics’ groups that announce their year-end prizes in a furiously compressed frenzy of semi-futile self-assertion may not become one big hive mind the way they did in 2009 with The Hurt Locker or last year with The Social Network. It’s possible that The Descendants, the black-and-white silent sensation The Artist, or one of the still-unscreened contenders — War Horse? The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo? Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close? — could turn into The Monolith, but otherwise, December could bring a scattered and chaotic field. Here’s hoping.
So while we wait, perhaps it’s time to turn to the Academy itself. As Oscar-watchers, we all root for excellence to be rewarded. Sometimes that doesn’t happen because of collective bad taste, or sentimentality, or blind spots, or irrational exuberance, but it’s particularly galling when it doesn’t happen because the Academy’s own rules prevent it.
