A-List: Best Picture Nominee Slates - Part 3
By J. Don Birnam
August 4, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
In 2001, the five nominees were A Beautiful Mind, Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Moulin Rouge!, Gosford Park, and In the Bedroom. So, we're looking at another superb lineup where the worst movie, by far, won.
A Beautiful Mind, also called The King’s Speech, also called The Imitation Game, also called The Theory of Everything, is fine as good as it goes, but Aaron Sorkin writes about troubled, misunderstood geniuses way better than Ron Howard could direct them. Worse, the movie pales in comparison to one of the best musicals of all time (Moulin Rouge!), Robert Altman’s last gift to movie lovers (the whodunit costume drama Gosford Park), the first of three fantasy masterpieces that culminated in a sweep of the Oscars (Lord of the Rings), and a touching, emotional melodrama (In the Bedroom).
It is somewhat embarrassing for the Academy that the blander A Beautiful Mind did as well as it did when SAG went for Gosford Park and the PGA for Moulin Rouge. Still, the DGA decided Howard was overdue after his Apollo 13 snub from a few years prior, and that was that. In any case, as we have seen, years such as this one, where the guilds are all over the place, show that the field is strong. The year also had Mulholland Drive and Training Day as possible nominees, as well as Pearl Harbor - just kidding. But Amelie, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums and Shrek could have all also made it and been respectable.
We are definitely in top five territory now, folks.
4. 2002: Chicago in Another Narrow Victory
And, the very next year is another one of my top five. Clearly, the presence of a Lord of the Rings nomination automatically raises the quality of the slate (except of course that the year Lord of the Rings itself was one of the weakest overall). In any case, I love all five nominees this year, which included The Two Towers, The Hours, The Pianist, Gangs of New York, and the eventual winner, Chicago. This is the last year that a movie that focuses on female characters, that is almost entirely comedic, and that is a true musical, won Best Picture. It is also another split year, with Roman Polanski taking the top Directing award from Rob Marshall for the Holocaust movie. Gangs of New York, meanwhile, became the first in a string of stunning defeats for Martin Scorsese that culminated with his 2006 win (below).
And the movies not nominated in some ways put these strong nominees to shame. Far From Heaven was snubbed, like this year’s Carol (so, not much has changed I suppose), and Talk To Her, Adaptation, Frida, Catch Me If you Can and My Big Fat Greek Wedding were all worthy contenders.
There’s not much more to say except I think the deserving winner won, although I know that choice is far from popular or accepted. But, if you’d allow me, when you consider that almost every winner since then has told the story of straight white guys (with the next entry on my list the only exception), the triumph for Chicago makes the Academy seem a lot more progressive than the current controversies over women and minority nominations would lead you to think…
3. 2008: Slumdog Millionaire And The Year That Changed History
Before you had an expansion, you had to have a reason for it. In 2008, The Dark Knight and WALL-E gave the Academy the reason to consider expanding their field. Both missed out on nominations, while The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Milk, Frost/Nixon, and The Reader lost to the unarguable Slumdog Millionaire. As for the field, it is hard to complain about it - Frost/Nixon is, to be sure, the typical Spotlight/Good Night, Good Luck procedural, but it is superbly well made. The Reader is perhaps not as deserving as The Dark Knight, but it’s still a pretty good movie that raises eternal, moral questions. Milk, meanwhile, was an important picture with superb performances, and Benjamin Button was another example of David Fincher’s technical mastery.
And consider what else missed: Doubt, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, The Wrestler, Frozen River, and Revolutionary Road, were, at the least, respectable contenders.
What to make of The Dark Knight and WALL-E controversies? Both should have made it in in my opinion, but it is hard to see what exactly you would knock out. It is therefore not surprising that such an impossibly difficult year led to the expansion - and impossibly tragic that the year that followed was so weak in comparison, as discussed above.
2. 2006: The Departed Narrowly Escapes Insanely Strong Field
Another year that was very disjointed like the Gladiator year was when The Departed won Best Picture and the DGA, Little Miss Sunshine won SAG and PGA, and Babel won at the Globes. Joining them in the slate of nominees was Clint Eastwood’s last great movie Letters From Iwo Jima, as well as Helen Mirren’s acting clinic, The Queen. We have entered into territory where basically you cannot fault a single one of the nominees, which explains the number two spot.
Certainly, you cannot discount Martin Scorsese finally triumphing at the Oscars, or the breakthrough of now Oscar-perennial Alejandro González Iñárritu with his poetic look at our different humanities through language. Nor can one forget the harrowing analysis of Japanese soldiers’ fortunes in Iwo Jima. When you add the analysis of the British monarch into the list, the year reveals itself to be both incredibly strong as well as remarkably diverse in terms of style.
But, if you start taking a look beyond the Best Picture lineup, the race becomes even more remarkable. Dreamgirls was famously snubbed after receiving a lot of precursor love, but Little Children, Notes on a Scandal, The Devil Wears Prada, Blood Diamond, Volver, and United 93 all earned nominations in top categories and would be fantastic Best Picture nominees today.
Oh, I’m not finished - the Mexican three amigos had their trifecta that year. On top of Babel, Pan’s Labyrinth and Children of Men also (re)introduced us to the technical mastery of Guillermo Del Toro and Alfonso Cuarón, and took the Oscars by storm. Better campaigns could have certainly meant a better result for those two movies, in a year of an expanded field would have certainly made the list.
What a year.
1. 2010: The King’s Speech and the Greatest Robbery in Oscars’ History
In order of brilliance, the 2010 nominees for Best Picture were The Social Network, Inception, Black Swan, Toy Story 3, Winter’s Bone, True Grit, The King’s Speech, The Kids are All Right, The Fighter, and 127 Hours.
David Fincher, Christopher Nolan, the Coen Brothers, David O. Russell, Darren Aronosfky. Those are the names of some of the directors of these superb movies. American masters, American masterpieces.
Then an unknown named Tom Hopper swooped in and his troubled genius biopic delivered an emphatic and resounding “no” to the overwhelming critical consensus pick that year, The Social Network. It is somewhat hard to fathom that the top year on this ranking could be a year in which I do not even agree with the winner - by a lot, actually, but The King’s Speech is itself a very good movie in a category that features a lineup for the ages.
Remember the years 1939, 1976, and 1981 as years we may explore later as epic in the history of the Best Picture Oscar. But 2010 will join those, or has joined those, even if the outcome is less than ideal. After all, we have theorized that in stronger years the weaker movie wins, so this year keeps with that outcome.
And being the top on the list, you’d expect the mastery to continue beyond the actually selected ten, and it does. Blue Valentine, Another Year, Animal Kingdom and The Town - not only would they have been good nominees, they arguably should have been nominated, somehow, with that improbable lineup.
Once more, too, the diversity of the selections in a great year is obvious. The movies again run the gamut from westerns to biopics to cartoons and everything in between. It is and was the movie industry at its best and the Academy did not fail to recognize that breadth in talent.
It did, of course, fall back on its own tendencies of rewarding the most crowd-pleasing movie of the bunch - a product of the preferential ballot, of their disaffected affectations, of their whimsical nature, or maybe of their lack of taste.
But that’s a topic for another - for every other - Oscars column.