Oscar 2012: Nominations Discussion
What’s a Demián Bichir?
By David Mumpower
January 24, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
Over the past five awards seasons, the only feature films to earn more nominations than Hugo are The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which was lauded in 13 categories, and The King’s Speech, which garnered 12. In fact, if we include the entire decade of results, there is only one more title added to the list, Chicago, which also had 13. Hugo ties The Aviator and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with 11. In evaluating the big picture result here, the Academy believes that in terms of overall quality, Hugo is among the six most triumphant projects of the past decade.
Before you grab your torches and pitchforks and head to the outskirts of my village to burn my home to the ground for stating such heresy, consider two things. 1) I’ve already had that happen in the past year and 2) I am not judging the overall quality of Hugo nor the awards season itself. I am simply stating that awards trackers oftentimes (lazily) define movies by the amount of Academy Awards nominations they gain. Through this finite lens, what Hugo accomplished today is amazing.
Now let’s rain on the parade a bit (and thereby douse your fiery torches). Here is a list of other titles over the past decade that earned at least ten nominations: True Grit, Gangs of New York and - if you didn’t know this already, it will blow your damn mind - Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World. That’s right. All of those awards contenders that received so much media attention gained far fewer nominations. Martin Scorsese’s The Departed received five nominations, Crash earned six nominations, No Country for Old Men attained eight nominations and The Hurt Locker and Avatar managed nine each. Hugo smokes all of them with 11. If you had made that prediction with a straight face three months ago, you would have been laughed out of Vegas yet this is exactly what has come to pass.
Still, I want to emphasize that I believe The Artist is still the overall winner today. The fact that its primary competitor heading into the day, The Descendants, managed only half as many nominations designates it the clear favorite out of the established contenders. Yes, Hugo was slightly more popular overall with one more nomination, but eight out of its 11 selections were in technical categories and the one I consider a mid-major, Cinematography. Its “only” major nominations are in Adapted Screenplay, Director and Picture. And barring something unforeseen, Hugo will not win Adapted Screenplay or Picture, meaning that its only major category win would come in Best Director if that happens. I consider that unlikely.
Conversely, half of The Artist’s nominations are in major categories. Those are Picture, Director, Actor, Supporting Actress and Original Screenplay. Only one other Best Picture nominee totals more than three nominations in the major categories of Acting, Directing, Screenplay and Picture, Moneyball with four. And I think we all agree Moneyball is unlikely to win Best Picture sans a Best Director nomination. In my estimation, this means that The Artist has separated itself from the pack and every other title selected for Best Picture is playing catch up.
Keeping all of the above in mind, here is my opinion about today’s various announcements. What I find strange about today’s nominations is their inconsistency. In the past, it was almost unimaginable for a title to garner a Best Picture nomination without either a Best Director or Best Screenplay nomination. In 2012, a full third of the Best Picture selections struck out in those two categories.
I would argue that War Horse is not a surprise in this regard as the most memorable aspect of the movie is a fallen barbed wire fence. The fact that it even attained a Best Picture nomination is a surprise I will address in a moment and if that is true of War Horse, it is double for Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, a film that only 48% of critics at Rotten Tomatoes enjoy. Yes, less than half of the critics who saw the film liked it. It is the third film that surprised me, though. The Help is a winner in every aspect possible and it seemed all but certain to gain at least a Best Adapted Screenplay nod as awards season ramped up. Instead, its candidacy has been reduced to the Actress categories as Hollywood yet again finds a new and improved way to dismiss female movie fans.
With regards to the Best Picture mess, in June of 2011, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced a new wrinkle in the previously altered rules for Best Picture nominations. At the time, the statement sounded relatively innocuous. From that point forward (at least until the rules are changed again), the only titles eligible for nomination for Best Picture are the ones that garner at least 5% of the total first place ballots compiled. BOP’s Tom Houseman has evaluated the chaos this has created (unintentionally?) in chronicling the potential nominees over the past three months Any title that is considered very good by most rather than The Absolute Best by a few has their candidacy damaged by this rule. Conversely, a movie that isn’t beloved by all can still sneak a nomination if there is enough diehard support.
What I take from the above is this. Had there been ten nominations this year along with composite voting, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 would have received its much deserved Best Picture nod. Would many people argue it is the Best Picture of the year? Obviously not. Would there be a composite selection based upon the triumphant nature of the franchise? I say yes. The fact that this did not happen today reflects the above. The changes in the scoring system have led to its snubbing.
In place of the climactic Harry Potter movie are three films with little overall support but a frenzied ardor from their zealous fans. Tree of Life is frankly too strange for the body of AMPAS voters, but there are absolutely enough of them to sit through its unbearably pretentious, surreal sequences to laud the film. Similarly, War Horse is a feel good film about the nature of pet ownership that has the one thing We Bought a Zoo is missing: Steven Spielberg’s name. That alone seems to be enough to attain a nomination, as was the case with Letters from Iwo Jima. Tom Houseman mentioned this in his Nominations Predictions column. Some members of the Academy give Spielberg a body of work vote that causes unlikely Best Picture nominations.
And then there is Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. When the list of Best Picture selections was announced two years ago, there was a ridiculous amount of outrage directed at The Blind Side. I rolled my eyes at the lot of it since the movie was in my top five for the year and actually made me cry at one point (Real men cry. Deal with it.). Compared to something such as A Serious Man, it was far superior and more than worthy in my evaluation, but this is how many awards trackers behave regarding nominations. We are protective of their exclusivity for whatever reason. Best Picture nominations are for whatever reason sacrosanct. Ceding spots to less qualified entrants is upsetting to some of us. This is why today’s nominations have launched a million tweets about the absurdity of Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the inferior Scott Rudin production of the year.
Why then was Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close nominated while The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo was snubbed? Most voters in AMPAS live in New York City and Los Angeles or at least travel to those places on a frequent basis. This is the simple fact of the matter. A 9/11 based drama is statistically more probable to impact these voters than a movie set in a small Swedish village. And while this was not the first mainstream 9/11 film, it was the first major one with enough distance from events to be worthy of consideration. Let’s also consider that two of the first high profile stories on the subject matter starred Nic Cage and Edward Cullen.
So, while I completely agree that it is an abomination that the vastly superior 2006 film, United 93, received no Academy Awards notice while Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close has flat out stolen an undeserved nod in 2012, I cannot say I am surprised nor am I outraged. Numbers matter here. No title released in 2011 was more likely to gain 5% of the vote than this one if we strip quality out of the conversation (which is hard to do, I know). It is the right subject matter targeting the right audience at the right time. Also, since it will not win, it is a future trivia question more than anything else anyway.
The real stories in my estimation exist outside the Best Picture contenders. I started the column with the joke about Bichir, who you are now pretending to know when you talk to your friends. You are saying things like “I was blown away by his performance” and “I have been telling people for months that he should be nominated.” FYI: Everyone knows you are lying. Stop lying. I read an Oscars column last week that listed the top 25 (!) candidates in the category and he wasn’t listed. Yes, his name has been mentioned in some circles but Best Actor is tough sledding every year.
This is exactly why Gary Oldman did not have a single nomination prior to now. In fact, think about it like this. Bichir and Oldman had the same amount of Oscars love yesterday and they still have the same amount of Oscars love today. According to the Academy, Gary Oldman and Demián Bichir have the exact level of credibility as actors. Also, I’m going to pronounce his name “Bitcher” until I hear otherwise. In fact, I say the two of them should fight crime together as The Bitcher and The Old Man.
Of course, Demián Bichir is not the acting nomination receiving the most grief. That honor is reserved for one Jonah Hill, which irritates me to no end. I believe that his understated performance in Moneyball is a jaw-dropping turn from an actor who is ordinarily as subtle as a meteor shower. In order for Brad Pitt to create an epic “character” out of Billy Beane, he needed a straight man and Hill’s last role as an overweight nerd reflects tremendous growth in his craft. I will no longer ask him about his wiener from this point forward.
The numbers game this year was also interesting to me. Ignoring the oddity of nine Best Picture nominees, I’m captivated by a system that could lead to a pair of nominees in the Best Song category. As a child of the 80s who remembers a time when movie soundtracks were anxiously anticipated, I scratch my head at the thought that a virtual coin flip will decide whether The Muppets or those birds from Rio will win. Okay, it’s going to be the Muppets in one of the biggest blowouts in Academy history but the point stands. Two nominees? Does the Academy not know how to download Spotify or Pandora apps?
With regards to the Best Animated Feature category, the results occurred as I expected and yet not at all as I had anticipated. In one of the recaps for last year’s Oscars, I mentioned that with Cars 2 on the docket for 2011, the door was opened for somebody else to win. Cars 2 was also a project based in commerce, not art, which Pixar has frankly earned the right to do from time to time. When the rest of last year’s animated films disappointed, a trend we selected as one of the Top Film Industry Stories of 2011, I figured the choice would come down to Kung Fu Panda 2 versus Rango with the latter a heavy favorite.
I am record as stating that Kung Fu Panda 2 is a wonderful achievement in storytelling, but its lack of popularity in North America makes it a difficult film to laud. Rango is a masterpiece worthy of winning the award but the Academy messed up me and a lot of other animation films by nominating A Cat in Paris, something I am vaguely aware of and want to watch, and Chico and Rita, something I believe may be a YouTube hoax. My wife subscribes to Animation Magazine and I still have never heard of it. As an aside, between Midnight in Paris and A Cat in Paris, this was a good year in cinema for the City of Lights.
With regards to the failed candidacy of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, this is the latest example of AMPAS failing to give David Fincher full credit for his work. An inferior film and an inferior directing effort won last year when The King’s Speech and Tom Hooper bested The Social Network and Fincher. He follows that up with arguably a more impressive achievement by making a Swedish film better than the Swedes did and all he has to show for it are five nominations, only one of them in a major category. I simply do not understand why the Academy continues to underrate his accomplishments. Who made the determination that Chris Nolan and David Fincher are infidels?
The one nomination for which I would laud the Academy is in Best Original Screenplay. An argument could be made that Margin Call is a straight to video release in that it was day and date with theaters and digital download. Obviously, the rules for the Academy Awards allow the selection, but the nomination of J.C. Chandor is a rare instance of forward thinking by voters.
Margin Call is a timely story with a tremendous cast and deserves to be celebrated for its triumphs. I had not given the film any chance for a nomination and I was pleasantly surprised to be proven wrong on this one. Of course, it has the same advantage as Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close in that it is a Manhattan film targeting Manhattan voters. To a larger point, however, out of all of the major awards selections, this is the one that I think best reflects the coming challenges AMPAS will face as the line between theatrical and digital release grows blurrier.
By the way, if you want a blueprint example of the madness of judging film quality based upon Academy Awards nominations, 2012 provides an all-time example. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which is 100% fresh among top critics at Rotten Tomatoes, earned three nominations. Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which is 25% fresh among top critics at Rotten Tomatoes, also earned three nominations. Epic conclusions in triumphant franchises are no different than cinematic abominations in the eyes of the tech awards crew.
Finally, this was a fantastic weekend for the Mara family, owners of the New York Giants. First, the team that family patriarch Wellington Mara built into a legacy made the Super Bowl once again. Then, the now deceased Mara’s widow, Ann, because a viral video legend when she accosted a deeply confused Terry Bradshaw on live television in front of 50 million viewers. And now Rooney Mara has been nominated for Best Actress for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That’s a year worth of Happy in 48 hours.