Disagree that Winslet’s competition is Streep. I think it’s between Winslet and Hathaway. The Academy (insofar as a collection of individuals can be considered to have a singular motive) loves the chance to coronate an up-and-coming performer before they break through into superstardom, particularly if he or (especially) she is beautiful (Reese Witherspoon, Jennifer Hudson, Hilary Swank, Renee Zellweger, Marisa Tomei, Angelina Jolie, Gwyneth Paltrow, etc); this year, that’s Hathaway. They also love to honor the career of somebody whose work is much respected but who hasn’t gotten an award yet, especially if he or she is beautiful; this year, that’s Winslet. Streep is sort of an institution at this point (and besides, she should have been nominated for her stunningly luminous work in Mamma Mia), which means she’s being taken for granted to some extent; plus she’s won twice before; plus this movie, Doubt, isn’t the best role she’s ever had. I think she’s the second-runner-up here.
Here, though, I agree completely. As I said in the other thread, Frozen River, and Leo’s work in it, blew me out of my seat. This, to me, is the year’s little-movie-that-could, at least as the awards go, because it would have been so easy to overlook it completely. I sincerely hope this exposure means more people check it out. The other two movies were great, but Frozen River is really something special.
The way the song nominees are determined is as follows: The music branch holds a screening (and also creates a DVD) that shows every eligible song (40+ this year) as heard in the context of the movie. Then they evaluate each song on a point system, and after tallying the points, they select any song that passes a certain point threshold.
Closing credit songs are allowable (if it’s the first song in the credit roll), but do not usually make for much of a viewing experience. There are 3 different types of contexts:
(a) within the body of the story
(b) closing credits, with something visual still going on
(c) closing credits, with only a black screen and credits.
Note that WALL-E’s nominated song is (b), just like the Inconvenient Truth winner two years ago. Slumdog has an (a) and a (b) nominee. Bruce’s Wrestler song was a (c).
Since this procedure has been institutued, only 1 song from (c) has ever made the final cut (Dolly Parton’s Transamerica number from 2005). Since then, both Dreamgirls and Enchanted racked up 3 nominations each in this category. Each of those songs were (a), as were the recent winners from Once and Hustle & Flow.
So, clearly, the music branch has shifted its priorities so you can’t just tag on a song at the end of the film and expect a nomination, and it feels no obligation to recognize 5 songs if only 3 meet their threshold. Personally, I still think Bruce got shafted, but there is a process that explains how it all transpired.
You make some good points but are conflating too many variables into this coronation meme (which is actually much more true of the Golden Globes than the Oscars).
[ul][li]Witherspoon, like Julia Roberts before her, won primarily because she was, at the time, the biggest star in Hollywood.[/li][li]Swank (#1) & Theron won because they were truly transformative performances that came out of left field and genuinely blew everyone away. Note that these two also won a ton of precursors: The Globe and/or SAG, and a bushel of critics’ awards.[/li][li]Swank (#2), Paltrow, Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jennifer Connelly were piggyback winners of Best Picture winners, though Paltrow also is a Legacy Princess (mom/dad in the biz)[/li][li]Hudson, Zellweger, Jolie & Mira Sorvino were supporting scene-stealers, the most memorable things in so-so films, though Jolie & Sorvino are also Legacy Princesses (and Renee was on her 3rd nod by then). Plus in most of these cases, the competition was rather weak (an assortment of obscurities and previous winners).[/li][li]Tomei, at the time, was such an enormous fluke, conspiracy theories still abound.[/ul]Some of these performances were award-worthy and some weren’t, but there are more complicated reasons behind the wins than simply voting for Prom Queen (otherwise, Kate Hudson & Natalie Portman would’ve won their contests, too).[/li]
Now, the problem with Hathaway is…[ul][li]She’s not a B.O. powerhouse yet (she just got her ass kicked by Clint Eastwood this past weekend)[]The performance is good but not Undeniably Amazing, and she’s barely won any precursors, so she’s not the Critics’ Darling Who Cannot Be Denied[]She’s in a smaller pseudo-indie with no other nominations (so no piggyback effect possible)[]She’s a lead so in with the Big Fish (as opposed to a supporting scene-stealer)[]Like other recent young beautiful losers (Amy Adams, Penelope Cruz, Keira Knightley, Salma Hayek, Naomi Watts), people probably suspect she’s got more performances like this in the future, so what’s the rush? Winslet has been a perpetual victim of this groupthink.[/ul]So I don’t think Hathaway has any of the things going for her that all these other winners did. If her film had scored another acting nod, or even a Screenplay nod (for another Legacy Princess), it might be different. But on her own? Not enough.[/li][quote]
Streep is sort of an institution at this point…which means she’s being taken for granted to some extent; plus she’s won twice before;
[/quote]
The thing is, though, that everytime she’s nominated, everybody brings up how the last time she won was in 1982! That was the year Hathaway was born! So the talk isn’t about the two she’s won, but the 10 straight that she’s lost since then. Nicholson is a comparable male insitution, but even with fewer nods than Streep, he still has more Oscars.
This is Streep’s 12th lead nomination, tying her with Katherine Hepburn, who had won 4 by this benchmark. Does anyone think On Golden Pond was her best? :shudder: Plus Doubt is loved by the acting branch; 4 acting nods for a single film has happened only 1 other time in the last 25 years. And actors represent the largest voting block in the Academy (and they revere Streep).
Hathaway may be a remote spoiler, but she’s strictly the darkest of horses, and now that Winslet doesn’t have to worry about siphoning votes off to a supporting nomination, I’m not sure how she can lose–though if she were to, it would have to be to a heavyweight like Streep (who was also the biggest female b.o. champ this past year)
Gotta agree, though I realize I’m in the minority. I thought (aside from Ledger’s acting) it was a weak-ass film. I actually thought the first one was more enjoyable (though also not Oscar-worthy).
I largely agree with this as well. I thought The Dark Knight was an excellent film buried somewhere within a sprawling morass of plot implausibilities, contrivances, and a sagging narrative structure. (It would be easier, for example, to ignore the ridiculously meticulous and complicated plans that the Joker was able to set into motion all across the city at any given time if he weren’t so wonderfully emphatic and convincing in his characterization of himself as an agent of chaos down to the core.)
But I thought that Ledger hit it out of the damn park.
Yeah, I enjoyed the first one more than I thought I would and the second one a lot less.
I had to post something, though, because I find the adulation of this film utterly confounding. It’s the Matrix redux. The Academy did not make a mistake here. It saved its ass.
This is the first Academy Awards in a long time that I’m really meh towards. In previous years I’d seen at least one of the Best Picture nominees and was invested in some of the performances. This year, I haven’t seen any of the main movies and I’m not that interested in seeing them either (except for Doubt, but that’s just because I think Phillip Seymour Hoffman is awesome).
Kind of wish there had been an In Bruges nomination but I’ll just have to take Colin Farrell’s Golden Globe win.
I’m with you. I was fairly excited to see it, even though I’m not a superhero/action fan by any stretch, just because I was surprised by how not-shitty the first one was and everybody was raving about this one. I, too, find the accolades baffling - I assume a lot of it’s from the fanboy contingent.
Quite the opposite for me. This is the first Academy Awards in a long time in which I DO feel an investment: I really want “Slumdog Millionaire” to win.
About* The Reader*'s surprise nomination: I was listening to NPR today and they commented on the fact that it’s a Weinstein Brothers movie, and they are notorious for campaigning their way into Oscar nominations. I don’t know enough about this to know which movies they were alluding to that were unlikely noms that happened via campaigning; maybe someone else can comment?
Shakespeare in Love is the most notorious. The English Patient and * Good Will Hunting* are a couple of other Miramax films that probably got more Oscar love than they really deserved.
Yeah, Weinstein was notorious for over-the-top gladhanding to get as much love for Miramax films as possible. My Left Foot was an early calling card, followed in successive years by the Oscar successes of The Crying Game, The Piano, Pulp Fiction and Il Postino.
The English Patient was the first to score a Picture win (though honestly, that type of film was already right up the Academy’s alley). Still, 9 Oscars for that film was nothing to sneeze at, and Good Will Hunting the next year continued the trend. But the biggee was Shakespeare in Love upsetting Spielberg’s war epic, which got Harvey his own personal Golden Guy as well (and forced the Academy to change the rules so a laundry list of producers couldn’t take credit for a Best Picture win).
From there, it was downhill, though Cider House Rules still took home a couple and he was even able to score an inexplicable Best Picture nod for Chocolat. (!?!) After that, The Shipping News (first-class Oscar bait) tanked and Cold Mountain couldn’t manage a Picture nod despite his best efforts. A few other modest Academy successes (Finding Neverland) followed, but nothing that came close to the Big Enchilada. Not long after, Miramax and Harvey parted ways.
But now, it appears, the galeforce personality of Harvey is back in business. He practically busted a gut trying–and failing–to get Martin Scorsese an Oscar for Gangs of New York (that film went 0-for-10), so now he’s on a new mission: Get Kate Winslet her Oscar at last. The fact that the Weinstein Company is also distributing Vicky Christina Barcelona is what you’d call “synergy”; by bumping Winslet’s “supporting” performance in The Reader up to lead (leaving the tatters of Revolutionary Road in its wake), that also eliminates Penelope Cruz’s chief competition. 2 for 1! It will be interesting to see how much of a backlash the Academy has to this strategy, since he really alienated a lot of people with his excessive tactics the last time he was front-and-center in the Oscar race.
I haven’t been this underwhelmed by the Oscars since Crash won Best Picture. Before that, it was when Crash was nominated for Best Picture.
No Director/Picture for Dark Knight/Wall-E. No shocker there, and neither was strong enough to merit breaking tradition. It was a weak year, but it’s still the Oscars.
Torino Snub and Jolie Best Actress. Got this one bad wrong. Gran Torino was unspectacular, but Changeling was just bad. Jolie hurt an already bad movie.
Mr. Buttons cleaning up. 13 is a lot of nominations for a mediocre movie, but I think it’s mostly an achievement award for Fincher. And the technical nominations were done better in Synecdoche, NY. Wasn’t nominated for a thing.
Robert Downey Jr. Good surprise.
Overall, this year was a good reminder that the Academy doesn’t care what film actually deserves to win, because it uses a cryptic process that frequently coincides with critical opinion. Won’t be watching.
Well, not to be morbid, but I wouldn’t have made that bet either if Heath Ledger were still alive. His performance is fantastic, and absolutely deserving of winning this Oscar, but it was his untimely death that had me absolutely certain from the moment I saw the film that he would win.
I believe I said at the time that as long as he got the nomination he was a shoo-in. I still believe that, but I’d be really interested in the crowd’s reaction if he doesn’t win. Either way, it should be the most interesting part of this year’s ceremony.
Newsweek has released it’s annual Oscar roundtable. This year w/ Frank Langella, Brad Pitt, Robert Downey, Jr, Mickey Rourke, Anne Hathaway, and Sally Hawkins.
