A-List: Best Picture Nominee Slates - Part 3

By J. Don Birnam

August 4, 2016

Robbed.

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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.




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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.


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