Oscar 2013: Avenging the Marigold Kingdom Part II
By Tom Houseman and David Mumpower
June 20, 2012
BoxOfficeProphets.com
All right, Tommy Boy, let’s continue with the discussion. Previously, I mentioned a litany of summer releases that wound up being Academy Awards contenders. Your rebuttal attempted to dismiss them for being released in June/July, which confuses me in that it is mid-June so this seems like the perfect time to evaluate this year’s contenders. Had you said, “Oh, you mean Brave!”, I would have tipped my cap and moved on with the day.
Instead, you summarily dismissed The Avengers as being unworthy of conversation. The explanation utilized is what caught me off-guard. You indicate that “The Academy clearly found it easy to ignore The Dark Knight”. This is like arguing that Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom is a PG film. While technically correct, you ignore the backstory that led to fundamental change within the industry. In the case of Temple of Doom, its heart-ripping violence (in a literal sense) triggered the creation of an entirely new rating grade, PG-13.
With regards to The Dark Knight, its inexplicable oversight imbued potential viewers with such harsh feelings about The Academy’s voting process that they rebuilt the scoring system from the ground up. The movies considered for the 81st annual Academy Awards played under an entirely different set of rules and a finite limit of five for potential Best Picture nominations. We both realize that The Avengers and all the other 2012 releases under discussion possess more opportunity. There could be double the amount of nominees in the category. Had The Dark Knight been situated similarly, the Academy could have avoided the mistake of nominating The Reader and Milk over a vastly superior movie by simply choosing it as well.
Do I believe that 5% of the Academy, the requisite number now, will list The Avengers as their favorite film of the year? Probably not. Am I ready to dismiss this possibility altogether? Absolutely not. And, slap fighting aside, I did not expect you to do so at this stage. Every movie that has earned $1.4 billion worldwide has been nominated for Best Picture thus far. There is the straw man you were hoping to see, but there is truth as well.
Titanic and Avatar combined for 23 Academy Awards nominations with 14 victories. And just to give you something to think about, Avatar is 83% fresh at Rotten Tomatoes while Titanic is at 88%. The Avengers is at 93%, which leads me to believe that you must be confusing it with the Sean Connery in a Giant Teddy Bear suit film called The Avengers. Otherwise, you would take it more seriously as a mortal lock multi-category nominee. Anyone who summarily dismisses this as a comic book movie is wholly unaware of the movie industry zeitgeist.
Tom Houseman: David, I didn't know that the Dumbledores were from Tennessee. That would explain why Aberforth has such an affinity for goats.
I'm glad you're bringing up all of the relevant arguments for why one might consider The Avengers a potential Best Picture nominee, so that I can hopefully avoid having to talk about it again until at least December, at which point its exclusion from the awards of every major Guild will be all the proof I need to shut people up.
You compare the Academy's expanding of the category to ten nominees to the MPAA adding the PG-13 category, but I would say that it is more akin to when they changed the X rating to NC-17. It was an attempt to fix the symptom without having to deal with the underlying problem, which is that the members of the Academy - much like the MPAA - are out of touch with mainstream audiences. Yes, the voting system changed, but the voters are still the same old crotchets around whom I'm sure you'd feel very much at home. The fact is, for a mainstream blockbuster to get a Best Picture nomination it has to be more than just popular. If all it took was a boatload of money, Twilight would be riding a string of Best Picture nominees.
Let's look at the nominees from last year, because if the voting system remains the same (which is not a certainty) then that will give us an indication of what type of films we can expect to see. It is safe to say that the films that would have made a five-film list would be The Artist, Hugo, The Help, Midnight in Paris, and The Descendants. That means that the four films that got in thanks to the expanded list were Moneyball, The Tree of Life, War Horse, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. None of these were a big popular blockbuster, but rather films that Academy voters really enjoyed. Those are the kind of films that get in with a category that fits more than five films, no matter what the Board of Governors want the effect of the expanded field to be.
Titanic, The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Avatar, and Inception were all films that had an indelible impact on the cultural zeitgeist. Yes, The Avengers has made, as we've established more than once, all the money, but in the end, it's just a really popular superhero movie. It is in the same category as Star Trek, which was also talked about as a potential Best Picture nominee, but was overlooked. Also, those films I mentioned above were all made by highly respected directors, and while Joss Whedon has his cult following, he is not the sort of director behind which the Academy can rally, a necessity for these sorts of blockbusters.
Multiple nominations? Maybe. Visual Effects is extremely likely, and it has a shot at one or both of the sound categories. But what else? Acting? Writing? I have a better chance at having a threesome with Scarlet Johannson and the actual Black Widow (it would be a Purple Rose of Cairo situation, because yes, I have seen at least one movie made before 1995) than anybody in that cast has of getting nominated for their performance. Films like this are driven by the popularity of their director, and if The Avengers gets a DGA nomination, then we can talk. Until then, I can't imagine 5% of Academy members putting this one at the top of their list.
I do enjoy that you use the polar opposite reasoning for why The Avengers and Best Exotic Marigold Hotel are potential Best Picture nominees. Is the dementia finally kicking in, David, or are you just so strapped for legitimate arguments? Are they going to nominate The Avengers because they aren't that out of touch, or are they going to nominate Marigold Hotel because they are exactly that out of touch? The latter point certainly holds more water, which is why I think there is a rationale for Best Exotic being a Best Picture nominee, just a very, very weak one.
All of the movies you mentioned had a lot of things going for them that Exotic Marigold doesn't. Almost all of them (I can't speak for Prince of Tides, because I have a strict No Barbra Streisand policy) are set in the past. Many of them were about important, serious topics, or were biopics. The majority had strong lead performances around which voters could rally, and were directed by respected and beloved directors (Altman, Frears, Clooney and Eastwood). A decent number of them, most notably The Artist, had the power of Harvey Weinstein behind them. Best Marigold has none of these advantages.
Exotic Hotel is an enjoyable movie without a doubt, but it does not have the gravitas to survive Oscar season. It has an outside shot at a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination, and maybe Best Supporting Actress for one of the Dames if they hit their stride at the right moment. And yes, if there are ten nominees and it turns out to be a weak Oscar year then it is not inconceivable that the acting branch could push it into the Best Picture field the way they did The Blind Side (which also had a strong lead performance around which to rally), but there are so many variables in play that it seems extremely unlikely.
As for Moonrise Kingdom, well, it seems like you've conceded that quality aside, Moonrise Kingdom is unlikely to be the Academy's cup of tea. Unless it proves itself to be a major crossover hit (which seems unlikely) it will have a very tough road to getting any Oscar recognition. That is what my central argument boils down to for all three of those films: I genuinely enjoyed all three of them, more than I expected to, although none of them will be close to my number one movie of the year. But I can't imagine a significant portion of the Academy loving these movies, not the way they loved The Help or even Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Liking, yes. Enjoying, sure. But loving enough to put at the top of their ballots? Highly unlikely.
The Dark Knight Rises and Brave are the two that have the best chance of any summer release to be nominated for Best Picture, and even those are far from locks. First of all, the Academy has yet to establish how many films they will be nominating. If there are only five nominees, then Brave's chances fall to next to nil, since before the expansion Pixar was zero-for-forever in Best Picture nominees. If there are between six and ten, then yes, you can feel pretty confident in putting Brave on your list, but nothing should be written in stone for a while.
There's nothing that can be said about The Dark Knight Rises right now, not until we see the reviews and the box office and find out how big a field there is going to be. If there are five nominees, then I'd say it probably will not be nominated, but it is still definitely possible. If there are up to ten nominees then its chances more than double, because it won't need a Best Director nomination to get in. But I have said this before and I will say it again, even if there are ten guaranteed nominees, there will not be enough room for The Dark Knight Rises and The Avengers. Of course, that's fairly irrelevant, because as I've already established, The Avengers' chance of being nominated for Best Picture is lower than the IQ of the average resident of Tennessee (I needed to get one more in). I hope that can be the very end of this at least until the National Board of Review, but my hopes are not high.