Oscar 2012: Final Thoughts
Artists Celebrating Artists For Making Movies About Artists
By Tom Houseman
February 27, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com

Did I swear in French? I did, and snootily!

Shouldn't I be celebrating right now? Shouldn't I be jumping for joy? The Artist, the film that I consider to be the best of the year, won Best Picture at the Oscars. The last time that happened was 2002, when the Academy shared my love of Chicago. Isn't that the point of watching the Oscars? You root for your favorite film, cheering when it wins and hurling obscenities and pillows at the television if it loses.

I used to feel that way about the Oscars. When Michael Caine beat Haley Joel Osment for Best Supporting Actor I was furious. When Gladiator won Best Picture over Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon I was outraged. When Helen Mirren lost Best Supporting Actress to Jennifer Connolly I took it as a personal insult. I accepted Return of the King's domination as an inevitability, but still grumbled to anyone who would listen (not very many people would) about how wildly overrated it was. And when Hillary Swank stole Kate Winslet's Oscar? Walls were punched and kicked in anger.

And then Crash happened, and it broke me. It wasn't just that I didn't see it coming. It wasn't just that I was so sure that Brokeback Mountain would win Best Picture. It was that I couldn't fathom the idea that a movie I hated so much could be awarded by the Academy. Four of the nominees that year were on my top fifteen list of the year, Brokeback Mountain was number one, and Crash was easily the worst movie of 2005. How could the Academy declare such an offensively terrible film to be the best movie of the year?

It took a couple of years to recover, but I finally did, and with it came an important realization. The Oscars don't matter. The Oscars are as relevant in a discussion of a movie's quality as its box-office or its IMDB score. What's more, the Academy is not trying to declare the best film of the year. Looking at the history of the Oscars, you will see films from Citizen Kane to Taxi Driver to Do the Right Thing to, yes, Brokeback Mountain, receiving some accolades by the Academy but being overlooked by vastly inferior fare. That's the way the Oscars work.

The Academy only takes one thing into account when they give a film Best Picture: how much they love it. Take The Artist. It won Best Picture without winning for its screenplay, its art direction, its cinematography, or its film editing. Hugo won five technical awards, but came up short in all the important categories. Voters were enamored of Hugo's technical achievements, its sets, its cinematography, and its sounds, but they didn't love it. They didn't love The Social Network either, or Avatar, or Brokeback Mountain. They respected those movies, they were impressed by them, but they didn't love them.

So it doesn't really matter to me whether or not the Academy, a bunch of old white guys, loved The Artist. And I couldn't get invested in whether or not it won Best Picture. Because if I got emotionally invested every time a film I loved was nominated for Best Picture, it would mean I would get hurt every time it lost. If I got excited by The Artist winning Best Picture, I would have to be crushed when The Social Network lost, or when Milk lost, or when Little Miss Sunshine lost. And frankly, it's exhausting to care that much about something as inconsequential as the Oscars, and it doesn't matter in the long run. Will anybody ever be able to convince me that The King's Speech was better than The Social Network, or Black Swan, or Inception, or True Grit, or 127 Hours, just because it beat all of them at the Oscars? Of course not.

I was happy that The Artist won Best Picture and Best Director because it meant that I was right. The game of Oscar isn't being happy with the winners, it's being happy because you predicted the winners. The Artist came through for me in four of the six categories I predicted it to win. Hugo came through in three of the four I predicted it for, including Best Cinematography, one of my gutsier calls that came through. I got both Screenplay categories right, a rarity for me, and two of the three short film categories, which is the best I've done in half a decade. Overall I got seventeen categories correct out of a total of twenty-four, which is better than I usually do, but not as well as I did in 2005. I should have been ecstatic that year, when I got nineteen categories right, but I was too busy being furious about Crash beating Brokeback Mountain. I was playing the game wrong.

What were the big surprises this year? Meryl Streep won the Oscar despite losing the SAG award to Viola Davis. You could say that this gives more weight to the BAFTA than the SAG, but the fact is that, historically, when one nominee wins the SAG and the other wins the BAFTA, either of them can win the Oscar. Streep played a real person, with an accent, suffering from dementia and wearing prosthetics. That package, plus the sense that Streep was overdue, was too much for Davis to overcome. The flashier part almost always wins. We learned that when Marion Cotillard beat Julie Christie, and we relearned it this year.

Hugo's win for Best Visual Effects says a lot about how voters pick the winner in this category. Usually there is a Best Picture nominee with really incredible special effects, so it is easy to assume that the film won because of the visual effects, rather than because of love for the film. Hugo has proven that the film itself is what the Academy votes for. Never in the history of this category has a film nominated for Best Picture lost to one that hasn't. This is an upset we should have seen coming.

But there are some upsets you just don't see coming. I put The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo as my dark horse for Best Film Editing, but I never expected it to win. This makes the film only the fourth non-Best Picture Nominee to win this award since 1990, following The Matrix, Black Hawk Down, and The Bourne Ultimatum. I suppose the take away from this win is that films with action sequences have an advantage, and especially films with dark lighting and dark themes. I'm not sure why, but the last time a legitimately bright film won this Oscar was The Aviator. Mostly, this award is a reminder that The Academy will sometimes throw us a complete curveball and there's nothing we can do but look foolish when we swing and miss.

There are now only two reasons to predict different films to win Best Sound Mixing and Best Sound Editing. The first is when a musical is nominated for Best Sound Mixing (such as when Dreamgirls won Mixing but Letters from Iwo Jima won Editing). The second is when an animated film with lots of action sequences is nominated for Best Sound Editing (such as when The Incredibles won Editing but Ray won Mixing). The only recent year where there was a split in the categories for neither of those reasons was 2008, which was a particularly strange year, as Slumdog Millionaire won Mixing but The Dark Knight won Editing. But King Kong, The Bourne Ultimatum, The Hurt Locker, Inception, and now Hugo have proven that these categories will almost always go to the same film.

Two other categories gave us lessons to remember for the future. Some people were concerned that the controversy surrounding The Artist's score (which apparently raped Kim Novak) would cost it votes. We have learned again that the voters either don't pay attention to these controversies or just don't care. They vote for what they love, and they loved the score for The Artist. Also, Terry George's Oscar for Best Live Action Short confirmed my thoughts that films with famous people involved are much more likely to win that Oscar. Martin McDonough's Six Shooter won with Brendan Gleeson, and now George's The Shore won with Ciaran Hinds.

There's not much more to say about this year's Oscars. That's not true, there's a lot more to say, but that's all I care to say about it right now. It's possible that some of the lessons we learned this year will bite us in the butt next year, but hey, that's next year's problem. I hope everybody enjoyed the show and got at least one more category right than they did last year. I suppose I'll end the year by quoting the most memorable line from any Best Picture nominee this year. Will I obsess and analyze the Oscars this much next year, knowing how pointless and often fruitless it is? “With pleasure.”