I have a few traditions around this time of year:
-I publish a 10 Best/10 Worst list from the movies I saw that were released in the previous year; thus closing the book on them so I can exclusively review releases from this year.
-I publish my predictions of who will win this year’s Academy Awards.
-I have seen all the Best Picture nominees.
None of those traditions hold this year. The reasons are many and interrelated. You may have noticed that I am months behind on the movie reviews I publish, and I still have about 10 I intend to write. Organizing my writing time and goals is an ongoing struggle, with the way my life is structured right now.
I could give myself the excuse that, with 10 Best Picture nominees for the first time in my life, it’s understandable that I missed one (An Education) in the run-up. I know I will catch it soon, but I always had a certain OCD pride in seeing all the nominees in advance, so I could feel extra opinionated.
But now I will see that habits can be broken and the world does not come to an end. And I’ll get to do the important thing, which is to enjoy the ceremony with friends, and appreciate the passing of another excellent year of cinema.
And by the way? This isn’t a full round of predictions, but all that talk of this being the year of Avatar versus The Hurt Locker? In the last two weeks, I have come around to thinking there is a different possibility for one of the two top prizes – Inglourious Basterds.
My reasons why?:
-Harvey Weinstein distributed Inglourious Basterds; and no one knows how to run a better single-minded, no-bullet-un-fired campaign of ratfuckery for Oscars than Harvey. The well-timed news articles complaining about Hurt Locker‘s originality and accuracy in the final hours before the ballot deadline, the leak of that producer’s e-mail breaking Academy rules by bad-mouthing Avatar; someone has done a very good job provoking a hot war between those two pictures. With the new vote-counting procedure for Best Picture, the movie with the most first-place votes won’t necessarily win, if everyone outside its camp ranks it much lower. In religion, business, and politics, always ask: “Who benefits?”
-James Cameron got his big sweep with Titanic, and Oscar has a resistance to repeating history this exactly. Titanic may have been criticized as hokey, but it was providing romantic sweep and melodrama that gave a patina of classicism to its scope. Avatar doesn’t score as high for its all-ages dramatic appeal, and is probably a little too weirdly-spectacular for the older voters (and boy are there a LOT of them).
–The Hurt Locker‘s box office was small. REALLY small. Look at the most recent Best Picture winners – Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby. The lowest grossing of them, No Country, had over five times Hurt Locker‘s box office when it won. Locker finished its run in theatres many months ago, and while it ran an amazing awards campaign, it doesn’t change the fact that just not a lot of people have seen it. And being on DVD doesn’t provide the same cultural currency payoff. That said, because of the strength of its campaign, and the historic possibilities for director Kathryn Bigelow, I still think it is well-positioned to win Best Picture or Best Director, or possibly both. But I now think that, if it splits, the movie it splits with will be Inglourious.
-The Academy’s favorite prize to give is the make-up prize. Quentin Tarantino had to be satisfied with the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction, one of the greatest and most influential films of its generation. He’s a slow-burning savant who doesn’t put out movies as often as other filmmakers, and eccentric enough that he doesn’t always put out movies that can attract the approval of the respectables. Inglourious is roundly admired, financially successful, and shows him working at the peak of his craft. The Academy has a chance to give him one of its top prizes, and can’t be assured it will have another any time soon.
-Did I mention Harvey Weinstein?