In Contention: Oscar Nominations

By Josh Spiegel

January 26, 2009

You were so much sexier before I found out you can't read.

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The dust has cleared, and it's now been a few days since the nominations for the 81st annual Academy Awards were announced. I'd prefer to call it Black Thursday, due to the disturbing lack of The Dark Knight on the Best Picture roll call, but this is a happy column, filled with happy things, yes? Well, I'll do my best to ignore that other nominee for Best Picture, but I'm not promising anything.

At the end of the day, the biggest winner of all has to be The Reader. This Nazi-themed film (I guess it won the lottery for which of the holiday Nazi movies would end up with the most Oscar nods) got only five nominations, but when Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress and Best Adapted Screenplay are among them, someone is doing something right. Though this film's inclusion as one of the Best Picture nominees was a major shock, it's worth pointing out that Stephen Daldry, the film's director, is one lucky son-of-a-gun: each feature film he's directed has gotten him a nomination for Best Director. How many pictures does he have of Academy members in compromising positions?

The other Best Picture nominees aren't nearly as surprising. They include The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, which garnered 13 nominations overall, the most of any film in 2008; Frost/Nixon, which also only got five nods; "Milk," with eight nods; and Slumdog Millionaire, with ten overall nominations. As of now, put your money on Slumdog Millionaire to pick up the Oscar for Best Picture. It's already won the Golden Globe and Producer's Guild Award for Best Picture, and having such major support is a big boost for the India-set love story.

Every year, of course, there are surprises in the Oscar nominations, and the exclusion of The Dark Knight from Best Picture and Best Director was the biggest of all, especially considering the rarity of the Oscars matching Best Picture nominees with their directors over the past 15 years. Still, there were more surprises with who or what was included as opposed to excluded. For example, Richard Jenkins and Melissa Leo were nominated for their lead performances in The Visitor and Frozen River, respectively. Though these films weren't seen by many audiences, the Academy deserves a bit of credit for honoring these character actors for their separate performances.




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Also pleasantly surprising was the inclusion of Martin McDonagh's screenplay for In Bruges in the Best Original Screenplay category, and the complete and utter exclusion of Clint Eastwood and Gran Torino. I don't usually like to show bias here, but seriously...it may make $100 million at the box office, but lots of money does not a good movie make. In this case, it makes an unintentionally funny movie, not a good one. The surprise here is that many believed the elder members of the Academy would honor Clint as Best Actor or Best Director, but Dirty Harry came up short. I guess next time some of them drop by his house, he'll tell them to get off his lawn. What do you think?

With the Oscars only a few weeks away, most late-year nominees are being re-released or being given a wider platform, as the studios hope having an abundance of Oscar nominations will help out small movies with big audiences and the final Academy votes. In years past, having the highest gross of any Best Picture nominee doesn't always help, though. Only three of the past 11 Best Picture winners, among them Titanic and Gladiator, have had the highest gross of any of that year's nominees. In fact, the first two Lord of the Rings films, The Sixth Sense, and Juno were left out of the celebration despite having commercial support.

This year's favored winner, Slumdog Millionaire, is unlikely to be the highest grossing nominee by February 22nd, as it trailed "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button," the highest-grossing film, by $60 million only a few days before the nominations. This past weekend, it got nearly $11 million more in its coffers, but Benjamin Button has still got just about twice as much money overall. Granted, Slumdog may not win Best Picture, but its future box office performance is not likely going to be the deciding factor here.

The films with some of the biggest post-nomination bumps were Frost/Nixon, which desperately needed to be opened wider for mass awareness let alone appeal, and The Wrestler, despite it being completely snubbed aside from its lead performances. How the Academy could leave Bruce Springsteen out of the Best Song nominations is beyond me. Does he always need to sing about Philadelphia to be honored?

Unfortunately, the film with the most to gain, The Reader, didn't do so well in its first post-Oscar weekend, with less than $2 million. However, it's likely to be opened wider in the coming weeks, and seen by many more, including those curious to find out what makes this film Oscar-worthy. That they will likely not find an answer to their question is the bitter pill they'll have to swallow after seeing the movie. Still, what matters most isn't how much money the movies make, but how many votes each has. Which of these films is the Best Picture Oscar winner? Is it the story of the backwards-aging man? The story of the poor boy who's trying to be a millionaire? Or possibly the story of the ex-Nazi being court-martialed for her crimes? Only the Academy knows and only they will decide. Once they do, of course, we can all disagree, but until then, the guessing continues.


     


 
 

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