In Contention
By Josh Spiegel
March 1, 2011
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Not to toot my own horn, but while I didn’t end up with the most overall correct picks in our yearly Oscar predictions, if you had an Oscar pool, it was likely comprised of the major categories. In the top 10 categories — Picture, Director, Actor, Actress, Supporting Actor, Supporting Actress, Animated Feature, Documentary, Original Screenplay, and Adapted Screenplay—I was all aces, folks (and was the only person on our site to get those all correct). Some of my colleagues — and likely many viewers — were surprised that Tom Hooper won for Best Director, but there are times when all you have to do is look at who’s won the precursors. Whatever bile I shall spew against the Oscars this year, the awards themselves were unsurprising and expected.
Maybe that was the first problem. As I’ve said in past columns, how do the Oscars remain relevant in an increasingly speedy culture? The awards season begins in December and runs for nearly three full months. Most people don’t follow the ups and downs of the season, but this year, we’ve just been flatlining for a month. The preliminary ratings for the show were down from last year, proving that having “young and hip” hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway was a wash. If they’d been funny or engaging or charming, I would be fine with the experiment, but at no point during the show were they any of those things. Hathaway has enough ebullience for everyone in that theater, but by the end of the show, her chipmunk-like enthusiasm was driving me up the wall.
From beginning to end, the Oscars were just another example of why Hollywood — or some surprisingly powerful factions within it — is so out of touch with the younger audiences that give it the money it needs to survive. As long as comedy writer Bruce Vilanch is the grand poobah of the Oscar jokesters, then we are stuck with pain for a long time. Who do you think came up with the Six Degrees of Kevin Bacon joke? James Franco looked like he was being punched in the stomach for having to recite it. Anne Hathaway can clearly sell anything, at least to the point where it doesn’t seem like she hates herself for hosting. But there was no fun onstage except in the unexpected moments, which were rare. Kirk Douglas’s presentation of the Best Supporting Actress Oscar was a love-it-or-hate-it moment, but Justin Timberlake’s “You know…” reference minutes later, was hilarious.
Honestly, when that is the highlight of the show — and for me, that whole thing is the highlight — the Oscars are doing something catastrophically wrong. Nothing about the show was that interesting, in even so-bad-it’s-good ways, with the exception of the pointless and ridiculous auto-tune montage. Yes, Oscar writers, I did want to see what scenes in Harry Potter and Twilight looked like as a remix! You have made my dreams come true! Franco, as the show continued its long trek into oblivion, seemed more and more aware that, of the many weird and performance-art-type experiments he’s gotten himself into, this one was blowing up in his face. So he basically let Anne Hathaway, in her best pageant mode, do all the work. While there were fewer montages, the climactic clip was one of the rudest Best Picture nominee montages I’ve seen.
The package was simple: show clips of all ten nominees over Colin Firth, as King George, delivering the titular monologue from The King’s Speech. While, as a montage, it worked well, it completely fails as part of the Oscars. Why? All we are left to assume is that the winner of the award — at the moment of the montage airing, the presumed winner — is lording it over the losers. I know that’s not the intention, or I hope it’s not, but the interpretation is obvious enough that it’s been made elsewhere online since the show aired. And for those who think I’m just continue to hate on The King’s Speech, I’ll paraphrase what TV critic Alan Sepinwall said on Twitter: I’d really like The King’s Speech a lot more if it wasn’t for all the awards hype surrounding it.
The King’s Speech was a perfectly nice movie, and it was a great example of what the Academy likes: safety. The Oscars telecast was safe, and the awards were safe. Safety is boring, unfortunately. Safety is expected. Safety is nothing worth writing home about. Why does the show get high ratings (even this year, they were over 30 million) if it’s so safe? We could ask the same about American Idol, but that’s the most popular show on television. People like safety, most of the time. The reason why most people online aren’t fans of last night’s show is pretty clear: if you’re not going to try to mask that you’re putting on the same old show year after year, you’re going to fail.
So, with a prolonged whimper, we say goodnight to the 2010 Oscar season. There were some great discoveries in the world of film, but few surprises among who won anything. Good for Wally Pfister for being honored for his work in Inception. Honestly, good for Inception for winning four Oscars, as many as The King’s Speech did. But there were a lot of good to great movies this year, and only a few of them got honored at the Oscars. The King’s Speech, Inception, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, The Fighter, The Social Network, and Alice in Wonderland are among the only movies to win anything at the show. Were they your favorite films of the year? I doubt it. We’ll see you back here next year, but don’t expect things to be any more rose-colored. The Oscars are in a pit after this show. Let’s hope they get out of it.