Oscar 2012: Sweep Year
It's Not the Size of The Artist's Broom, It's How They Use It
By Tom Houseman
February 7, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
However, if you are really pinning your hopes on The Artist not winning Best Picture, I'll indulge you for a moment. Winning three SAG Awards offers all the proof we need that The Help is the most beloved film by the acting branch of the Academy, and since that is by far the largest branch, The Help is the basket in which to place your eggs if you're looking for an upset. Can it pull a Driving Miss Daisy, winning Best Picture without a Best Director nomination? Looking at how much broad support Miss Daisy had, almost certainly not. Miss Daisy was nominated for nine Oscars, including Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Costumes, and Film Editing, all categories in which The Help is notably absent. Miss Daisy won four Oscars, which is pretty much the minimum a Best Picture winner should get (not including Grand Hotel, which is famous for winning Best Picture without being nominated for any other award). The most The Help can win is three, but that's not realistic. Sorry, kids.
So let's not talk about the movies that barely scraped by with Best Picture wins. Movies like The King's Speech, No Country for Old Men, and The Departed only won four Oscars apiece, proving that support was divided that year. What we're looking at today are the movies that finished with a bundle of Oscars, and how they pulled it off. Because if the love for The Artist is as rampant as it seems, we could have a sweep on our hands. The only question is, how big a broom will The Artist bring on Oscar night?
The last decade has not been much for Oscar sweeps. Only two movies managed to win more than six Oscars: Slumdog Millionaire with eight, and Return of the King with 11. The Hurt Locker and Chicago each managed to pull in six. The '90s were a different story, however. Over three consecutive years The English Patient, Titanic, and Shakespeare in Love combined for 27 Oscars, with earlier Best Picture winners Schindler's List and Dances with Wolves each throwing in an additional seven. What is most remarkable is that of those nine films, six of them went home without an acting award, with the Slumdog and Return of the King not even being nominated for any.
So let's look at the categories that The Artist is counting on to pull off a sweep. Best Director is not as sure a thing as one might expect. The last time that a film won the DGA but lost Best Director at the Oscars was Chicago, which lost to Roman Polanski for The Pianist. There are some uncomfortable similarities here: a light, musically-oriented throwback film from an unknown director, clearly the fan favorite, losing Best Director to a respected auteur. Hazanavicius has to be seen as the favorite in this category because of his DGA win, but either Martin Scorsese or Terrence Malick could pull off an upset here.
The Artist is on even less solid footing in the Best Original Screenplay category, where Midnight in Paris is the heavy favorite. A WGA win for The Artist could turn the tide here, and Best Picture winners tend to do well in the Screenplay categories, but there is so much love for Woody and his latest film that a win for The Artist seems unlikely. Of the last seven films to win at least seven Oscars, all except for Titanic won for their screenplays. The Artist isn't even nominated for a category that has been a Best Picture gimme of late, but there's a pretty good reason for that, as it's hard for a silent film to compete in Best Sound Mixing. Still, not being nominated for an award that Hurt Locker, Slumdog, Return of the King and Chicago all won will make it even harder for The Artist to sweep.
It is in the other technical categories that The Artist is looking to make its mark. Cinematography and Film Editing is a surprisingly elusive duo, with most recent Best Picture winners grabbing one but not both awards. The Artist is looking to pull of the same feat that Slumdog Millionaire, Titanic and The English Patient did, but it faces stiff competition, particularly in Cinematography. Hugo, War Horse, and The Tree of Life make this the most crowded category of the year, and one that I'll have a lot more to say on in a different column. The Artist should feel safer with Best Film Editing, where only Hugo stands in its way.
Those two films butting heads is a trend this year, as Best Art Direction and Best Costumes will likely be a race between those two. They are the flashiest and most popular period pieces nominated in both categories, although the dresses of Jane Eyre could steal Best Costumes away from both. Will the popularity of The Artist be enough to take Best Art Direction from the flashier sets of Hugo? One category where The Artist should feel very comfortable is Best Original Score. Despite the controversy brewed up by Kim Novak (who apparently has a very different definition of the word “rape” than most people I know do), the film is so dominated by its music that it seems highly unlikely that fans of the film won't vote for it there.
The only two categories left to discuss for The Artist are the acting categories. The longest shot for a win that the film has is Best Supporting Actress. Octavia Spencer has so dominated the precursor season that Berenice Bejo is essentially an afterthought. If there is an upset in that category it will likely be Melissa McCarthy, not Bejo. Best Actor, though, is a different matter. Generally winning both the Globe and the SAG is a guarantee of an Oscar, but Dujardin does not have this category locked up, not with George Clooney's dreamy smile standing in the way. Had Clooney not won an Oscar for Syriana I would say that he was the favorite, but Dujardin seems likely to steal the award from him this year.
So it is safe to assume that The Artist will win Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Film Editing, and Best Original Score. While it could lose any of those, really, I feel confident in predicting it to win all five. There are three categories that will determine whether it is elevated from standard Best Picture winner to full-blown sweep, and those are Best Art Direction, Best Cinematography, and Best Costumes. If it can fend off Hugo, The Tree of Life, War Horse, and Jane Eyre, it could bring its total up to eight, which would make it only the second film since Return of the King to hit that number. If the support for The Artist is even greater than most people think it is, it could steal Best Original Screenplay from Midnight in Paris, but that seems like a stretch.
I am putting the floor for The Artist at four Oscars (if it loses Best Actor or Best Film Editing), and the cap at nine (sorry Berenice). Hugo will likely win the second most Oscars, as it is the favorite for Sound Mixing in addition to Best Art Direction and possibly Best Original Screenplay, and could steal Sound Editing too. Overall, however, this will be a year for spreading the love; Hugo is the only film besides The Artist that is a threat to win more than two Oscars, and I suspect a lot of films will walk away with a single Oscar, from Beginners to Midnight in Paris to Jane Eyre to Transformers 3 to Rise of the Planet of the Apes to The Muppets. This is the year that Hollywood embraces Hollywood, as not only will they award a film celebrating the early days of filmmaking, but a number of other films that show what movies do best, from big explosions to intimate moments. That's the Oscars at its best, when it manages to both lift up one film while managing to point out the best aspects of all the others.