By MODERN criteria, it would be a critical darling and an auteur film and would be nominated for sure.
But by YOUR criteria it isn’t deserving of a nomination, let alone a win?
I’m sorry but I don’t understand. When did I say Best Picture nominees should only be box office hits?
Ah, I see you weren’t backing up @Noelq’s opinion. But you were sanctioning (paraphrasing) “All of the films nominate now are dreadful. I haven’t seen any, but they must not be unenjoyable and only watched and nominated for pretentious reasons like ART and Social Messaging” as on topic for an OP that asked for a discussion of this year’s nominees.
On reflection, your posts at least bring some rational discussion related to recent year’s nominees, so the preceding posts at least generated some rational posts. But were those preceding drive-bys in the spirit of discussion? I don’t think so.
I would argue that move back to 10 Best Picture nominees was an overreaction to a few years in the mid 2000s were you didn’t have any or only 1 box office success. Most of the 1990s nominees even had 2 or more hits a year.
Though I don’t mind the 10 BP nominees because focusing on more well made films is a good thing, IMO. In a 5 BP system, I don’t think Promising Young Woman gets nominated last year (or JoJo Rabbit in 2019), but it’s a film I think is well worth people watching and if BP nom helps that, I’m good with it.
It was the 2008 slate that seemed to be the last straw; there were some decent successes there, like “Benjamin Button” and “Slumdog Millionaire” but no one saw “The Reader” and there was a lot of widespread concern “The Dark Knight” and arguably “WALL-E” weren’t up for awards.
Best Picture popularity affects TV ratings; the best ratings they’ve ever gotten were the year “Titanic” was up.
It was mostly Dark Knight that outraged people IIRC, but I do think it was a bit silly as since the expansion to 10 only 1 Superhero film has been nominated. Maybe if they had it to 10 in 2009, TDK would have been nominated for Best Picture, but only because that year wasn’t that great for films. And it wasn’t like Slumdog was an obscure film.
Amusingly, while ratings increased the year of the change (2010), it actually was lower in 2011 than it was in the 2009 awards that prompted the change. That 2011 Best Picture slate had Toy Story 3 and Inception - the #2 and #6 pictures of 2010.
Kind of a local minimum if you ask me.
It’s fascinating to look at the drop off in viewers… There’s a baseline of 45M up until 2000, and then it drops to call it 38M for a decade, and then off the cliff it goes. Obviously there’s Covid in the last couple of data points, but still, just before that the drop was already precipitous.
If it hadn’t lingered for so long between 2000 and the cliff, I’d have blamed it on the internet. Easy to just google the awards next day, or even same night, dontcha know?
you have to add in political bias I don’t know how many years I’ve seen “I’m not watching Hollyweird cause unamerican libruls just make PC propaganda crap what happened to the real 'murican actors?” ie john Wayne and such to every award thread …
Which seems to indicate that increasing the BP nominees to 10, which presumably would add more “popular” films didn’t seem to help.
I still think that’s part of the issue. Look at all the 3 major awards slowly declining after the early 2010s. Though I was curious about that big blip in 2012 for the Grammys - turns out that was the Grammys that happened one day after Whitney Houston’s death and there was a tribute done for her at the awards.
I’m surprised House of Gucci seems to have been almost completely ignored (it got a single nomination for Best Makeup and Hairstyling). I haven’t seen it but it seemed like the kind of movie that usually gets some nominations.
If House of Gucci was a meal it would be basically made entirely of ham and cheese. It has some very fine actors (Jared Leto is practically unrecognizable) essaying a diverse set of Simpsons-level Italian accents while plotting against one another and telegraphing said plots with wild gesticulation.
On second thought, it is one of the year’s funniest movies, so maybe it’s Oscar’s well known bias against comedies that is holding it back.
Anyway, I’ve been receiving a nonstop stream of issues of The Envelope, and one of the recent ones reminded me I hadn’t posted thoughts on a couple of additional categories - short subjects.
I attended screenings for two of the three categories:
BEST ANIMATED SHORT
Affairs of the Art
Bestia
Boxballet
Robin Robin
The Windshield Wiper
BEST LIVE-ACTION SHORT
Ala Kachuu — Take and Run
The Dress
The Long Goodbye
On My Mind
Please Hold
The Animated shorts were packed full of “life’s a bitch, then you die” themes, plus a warning mid-screening of adult content (and not the good kind). Boxballet is from Russia, so it’s dead in the water. Affairs of the Art is apparently the favorite, but I thought it was just messy and pointless. The only standout is Aardman Studio’s Robin, Robin, which was an old fashioned tale of talking animals (remember those?). Will win: Affairs of the Art. Should Win: Robin, Robin.
The less said about Live Action shorts, the better. All of them are downbeat, from grimly humorous to violently polemic. Of these crowd pleasers, I thought The Dress, from Poland, was the most coherent and well made. Ala Kachuu — Take and Run also has some merits, but if not Russian, it is Russia adjacent. Will Win: The Long Goodbye. Should Win: The Dress.
One of my goals every year is to see all of the Best Picture nominees before the awards are announced. I accomplished this for a string of 15 years or so, pre-COVID. It’s not going to happen this year, either.
I have seen all except West Side Story, Licorice Pizza, Dune, and Drive My Car.
I have CODA at the top of my list, followed closely by Belfast, then King RIchard.
Regarding Don’t Look Up…I not only don’t think I should have been nominated, I actively dislike it. I consider it the worst BP nominee in a very long time.
mmm
West Side Story is now available to stream on Disney+ to all subscribers. I enjoyed it. Possibly even more than the original, and the original is one of my favorite films of all-time.
And Dune is back on HBO Max.
I’m surprised at the hatred for this movie. I quite liked it. I wouldn’t give it an Oscar, but it was very funny and had a wonderful cast.
I wonder what the worst BP nominee of all time is? According to Rotten Tomatoes the lowest rated BP nominee ever is a movie called Anthony Adverse from 1936, which I honestly have never heard of but am inclined to give a break to because, shit, it was 1936. In modern history they dump on Doctor Doolitte, which I am amazed to learn was nominated for Best Picture in 1968. Other poorly rated nominees in more modern cinema include Anne of a Thousand Days, The Greatest Show On EArth (which actually won), Hello Dolly!, Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close, The Alamo (the 1960 John Wayne film) and Out Of Africa, which also won.
Adam McKay, who directed Don’t Look Up, also directed Vice, which made also made RT’s list of the 40 worst BP nominees.
One of my absolutely favorite books about film is this one, which talks about the paths to production and nomination for all five of the 1968 best picture nominees.
Harris talks about how the studio head for Dolittle, Arthur Jacobs, browbeat and bribed anybody connected with the studio to ensure they voted for it to be nominated.
The book is actually about a lot more, given the social unrest of that era. I highly recommend it.
Dune is dominating the early part of the awards ceremony.
And we have a queer woman of color, Ariana DeBose, winning Best Supporting Actress, and a deaf man, Troy Kotsur, winning Best Supporting Actor. (And the presenter signed his name when he won!)
REPRESENTATION MATTERS!
Damn it, I wish they hadn’t changed the words to “We Don’t Talk About Bruno”.