In Contention

By Josh Spiegel

January 18, 2011

Are True Grit's chances at Academy Awards riding off into the sunset?

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There is just one week left until the Academy Award nominations are announced, but there’s not an air of suspense surrounding the announcement so much as an air of boredom. When the Golden Globe Awards — which were aired this past Sunday night—listed Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, Inception, and The Social Network as its five nominees for Best Picture – Drama, some critics wondered why the Hollywood Foreign Press Association had left off True Grit from the ballots. Indeed, True Grit, which has now become the third highest-grossing likely Oscar contender, behind Toy Story 3 and Inception, has a very good chance of getting plenty of Oscar nominations. But the Golden Globes’ top five dramas are very likely going to be the top five films at the Oscars. At the very least, if there were only five Best Picture nominations, those five films would be it.

You see, even if we were to ignore the Golden Globes (and some people would say you should, or that they shouldn’t be given any legitimacy within the industry), the industry guilds are announcing their yearly awards, and the pattern is clear: True Grit is being left in the dust. Don’t get me wrong: True Grit is going to get nominated for Best Picture at the Oscars (or, to put it correctly in this time of not officially knowing anything, it is likely to). But based on how the editing and directing guilds go, two very key guilds within this season, Joel and Ethan Coen’s latest film may not be as lucky as Paramount Pictures wants it to be. Both the American Cinema Editors and the Directors Guild of America announced their awards this past week and nominated Black Swan, The Fighter, The King’s Speech, Inception, and The Social Network.




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Of course, with the continued dominance of The Social Network at every single awards show in the history of the world (over the long weekend, it won top honors at both the Golden Globes and the Critics’ Choice Awards), you have to wonder if it really matters for True Grit to get nominated for Best Director and Best Editing (the latter of which is often a strong predictor of which film will or will not win a Best Picture award) at all. Is The Social Network just going to win every award it’s nominated for at the Oscars? When it won, as an example, the Golden Globe for Best Score, some prognosticators wondered if that meant curtains for the supposed frontrunner, Hans Zimmer’s work for Inception. There are some naysayers who point out, shrewdly, that The Social Network has only won with critics and journalists so far. When the guilds come in, then we’ll know for sure.

When those guilds — including the DGA, ACE, and others — announce their awards, we may be as unsurprised by the winners. What films even stand a chance of sneaking in front of a fictionalized version of Mark Zuckerberg? While I love Inception, and it’s got a realistic chance of being the film with the most Oscar nominations (thanks in no small part to the many below-the-line awards it’s likely to get nods for), it’s not a likely winner. When Christopher Nolan and The Dark Knight were snubbed in 2008, the Academy wanted to cater to the people who thought he and the film were robbed. Those people will have to be content with nominations…hopefully. It’s worth pointing out that Christopher Nolan has been nominated by the DGA twice before, for Memento and The Dark Knight. He’s never gotten an Oscar nomination as a director. Keep that disquieting fact in mind.


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