They’re awesome, and Fred is a tri-color basset with some great shading and lots of spots.
[Shrug] Well, you tell me! I call 'em as I see 'em. If I see an audience laugh when a big rig slams into a police car, I have every right to be disgusted with that audience. For all I know, they are rooting for “their side.” They are not technical critics!
That’s the best kind. 
But you didn’t see the audience laugh. As you said in an earlier thread, everything you know about the movie, you got from the poster.
Please… don’t discuss items of which you have no knowledge. It does nobody any good.
(BTW, you wouldn’t happen to be Rush Limbaugh, would you? He does the same thing (or did, back in the '90s), much to his embarrassment. My favorite Rush movie criticism was when he whined about Independence Day having a “support the homeless” message based on the scene where Jeff Goldblum, after decoding the Aliens Secret Countdown Timer™, goes back to “rescue the homeless guy he was playing chess with at the park.” I guess Rush missed all those times that Goldblum referred to the guy as “Pops” or “Dad”.)
Anyway, this conversation has the same overtones. You’re discussing a film which you either (a) didn’t see, or (b) didn’t understand.
Available on Amazon streaming, btw.
And kids will love it too. My 12yo was all “OMG, I don’t want to waste my time on Dad’s boring movie” then was “Oh, Fred!” all throughout the film. She saw it twice in our 24 hour rental period.
Asking me “Are you Rush Limbaugh?” is just as much an insult as asking, “Are you Adolf Hitler?” And the ad says in essence, “See this movie in which a big rig rams police cars.” I say, “Go hang yourself.” (If you saw the movie–to be fair about it–did you hear anyone laugh at that point?)
The movie in question is 37 years old and I was 10. Do you remember audience responses to individual movie scenes 37 years later?
As sparse as my visits to the movies were after we moved out of our old neighborhood in December 1959, I can say that I probably would. I remember things like William Castle, on screen, saying “Look through the red part of your viewer [in your darkened bedroom]–if you dare!” and someone in the audience hollering an obscenity at him, in 1960. And winning a bicycle in a raffle (with the only ticket I had), a year later; and a marquee with a broken fluorescent tube shorting out, in the rain, a few years later…audience reaction to something on screen that outraged me would not be a problem. I remembered, after all, the outrages I saw in Back to the Future in 1985…
Maybe a bit off topic, but the thread title immediately made me think of how awesome Chris Rock was as host, and Seth MacFarlane was a home run for me.
BttF is another film you criticized without having seen it.
Two of the three items you mentioned had nothing to do with the question. The third sounds like one of the highlights of the film. I don’t remember audience reaction to anything in SATB, but I do remember the gasp when the Star Destroyer flew over our heads in Star Wars… which, of course, was the point of the scene - to impress the audience.
None of this has to do with the topic of the thread, therefore I’m done.
Star Wars didn’t appeal to me at all. My brother, 13 years younger (age 14), had me drive him to see it time and time again. I refused to see it and still haven’t. Of course, I have no comments about THAT movie…
He drives over at least 10 bikes, with only $20,000 worth of damage? Even 37 years ago those bikes had to be worth a whole lot more than that!
Yeah, I have no idea how much those bikes cost in 1977… I assumed 10 bikes at $2k/each, but they could have easily been $5k or more.
Anyway, the fact remains: DON’T MESS WITH THE FRED
Wait a minute. I loved that movie, but didn’t it lose to Blood Diamonds???
Seems like a lot of “the Academy” go for what the hot political topic is. If it’s a decent movie about a subject that’s politically in the right spot, it’s got a leg up.
Blood Diamond wasn’t nominated for Best Picture. It was nominated for actor, supporting actor, editing, and the two sound categories, but it didn’t win anything.
Wow, my mind must be going. I can swear remembering being very pissed that BD won over TD, because I thought TD was such a better film.
:rolleyes:
What’s so hard to understand?
In Post #91 I said that I had refused to see the movie Star Wars. While this is true, I did not mean to say that I was singling that movie out. In 1971 I had seen a movie, The Love Bug, which infuriated me, strangely enough, and I decided I did not want to go to the movies again–not a hard promise to keep because our home situation had changed and we no longer had a car, and I had almost no money. I did not see any of the big movies of the 70s–The Sting, Rocky, Airport, King Kong, The Godfather, Jaws, Superman, Close Encounters, etc. Star Wars just happened to come out during this time; my younger brother enjoyed the movie and urged me to see it, but I always told him no. I didn’t go again until I saw Time Bandits in 1982.
Uh… OK.
Let’s see if I can get this one back on track. Half the country can’t get to work today, a quarter is acting like they can’t (though they perfectly can), and for those of us who can make it to work… it’s kind of slow. So I have time to spare.
A couple of things before I begin…
I am not aware of any true “global” film review board that started with the intention of being such (i.e., reviewing all Swedish, French, American, Mongolian, Chinese, British, Russian, Peruvian, etc films and selecting a yearly “Best of” in various categories ala the Oscars.) If there is, I’d like some ignorance fought, please. (Cannes is the most likely candidate.)
The Academy Awards (AA) is an industry trade show founded by people from the Los Angeles film industry, and it was founded in the beginnings of the time when one could say the American film industry was based in Los Angeles.* So it is not surprising that the awards have an American, “Hollywood” bias, and it obvious that the Academy w as not interested in being a “global” film review board as described above. At least they didn’t name the ceremony the “World Series of Film Awards” or something.
For Best Picture, here are the rules. You have to show your film for 7 days in Los Angeles County, CA, and you also have to fill out a form stating that your film is eligible. The Foreign Film category is treated differently: a country must submit a single film for consideration, the film must be subtitled, more here. While there is no rule that says a foreign film (defined as “non English-speaking”) can’t be nominated or win B. Picture, there’s an obvious bias against foreign films doing so: only 9 non-English films have been nominated for B. Picture, and no wins.
Lastly, and people like to yell at me when I say this but it’s true, Best Picture is not just an “artistic” award. On that night, Best Picture is the only Academy Award statuette that is given, not to creative talent, but to business executives. It’s an award given to the people who gather the artistic elements, but not to the artists themselves. To quote Wiki: “The individual(s) who shall be credited for Academy Award purposes must have screen credit of “producer” or “produced by.” Persons with screen credits of executive producer, co-producer, associate producer, line producer, produced in association with or any other credit shall not receive nominations or Academy statuettes. The nominees will be those three or fewer producers who have performed the major portion of the producing functions. ”
People will argue that producers have to be creative to recognize the elements that make a successful film, and that is very true – according to Wiki, the producer is responsible for both creative and accounting functions. But as I was telling my daughter: the difference between writing LOTR and producing it is that one could be done at night by a guy in his kitchen, the other requires you to run a quarter-billion dollar company hiring and contracting 10s of thousands of people as to make three films , with the company itself designed to wind down to a mere shell of itself after production and release. The talent to do the one (writing) has little similarities with the talent needed to do the other (running a company.) So when LOTR:ROTK wins B. Picture, it’s not the Academy telling Peter Jackson “That was the best fantasy film EVAH!”, it was the Academy telling Barrie M. Osborne, Fran Walsh, and Peter Jackson “You did a helluva job coordinating all those artistic elements and making them into a successful product.”
Given that the purpose of a film is to make money, it would be odd if the B. Picture winners and nominees weren’t financially successful (and it is unusual – there is only one time in my research where the BP winner earned less than the average movie that year, and I don’t know of any BP winner that actually lost money.**)
But none of the above has anything to do with the question “Is there a bias for or against popular films in the Best Picture nominations and winners?”
I put together a 3-tab Excel file of all B. Picture nominees since 1980, included their Box office grosses (Boxofficemojo.com), and made some comparisons, ending up with some charts and graphs. You can download or view the document via Google Docs. There is a LOT more information in the link than in this post (charts, tables, etc), if you’re interested. You can see most of what I’m saying merely by looking at the charts on the third tab.
Generally, the OP is correct – since 2004, and especially since the field expanded to 9-10 B. Picture nominees in 2009, the Academy has shown a shift away from more popular films in regards to Best Picture winners and nominees. The last #1 BO movie to win Best Picture was in 2003, a drought of 10 years, the longest such in Academy history (I’m including this year as well, unless Gravity gets taken up by the same people who made Avatar earn $2.whatever billion.) Since 1980, the Best Picture winner has been among the top-20 of that years grossing movies 28 times out of 33 winners – but only 3 times in 9 chances since 2004.
So there has been a shift away from more popular films.
However… historically, once the nominations are set, box office gross remains a good indicator (not predictor) of who may get the statuette. Interestingly, the data shows that within the category itself, Best Picture Winners show a definite bias being the first or second highest grossing nominated film, with the BPW coming from this group 25 of 33 years. Again, this hasn’t happened since 2009 when the number of nominees doubled, but two of the winners (both ranked #4 w/in the BP category) earned well over $130 million in the US and a quarter billion worldwide, so it’s not like The King’s Speech and Argo weren’t popular movies.
I have yet to find an example where the least-grossing film of the slate of nominees has won – it just doesn’t happen. So, each year you can safely take out the film that earned the least amount of money… and probably the 2nd-least earning film – that film has won twice in 33 years (Gandhi*** and The Last Emperor, respectively.) Even The Hurt Locker****, as poorly performing a film as it was, was the 8th highest-grossing B. Picture nominee for its year, meaning two other films earned less than its $17 million (An Education ($12m) and A Serious Man ($9m.))
And this is interesting, because the expansion was supposed to allow rooms for “popular” movies to get nominees because, for the first time ever, none of the 2005 nominees were among the top-20 films of that year (according to box office grosses.) Instead, what has happened is that the expansion has allowed lesser-known films to get nominations… and even wins.
So, to conclude: Yes, there is a bias towards more “popular” movies winning the Best Picture statuette. Yes, this bias has slipped within the past 9 years. However, five of those nine Best Picture winners grossed over $100 million in the US alone, so it’s not as if the bias has completely disappeared. Is this bias the predominating factor that determines whether a film wins or not? I don’t know, I didn’t look at other possible correlations. But I don’t think you can blithely ignore box office success either when you talk about what film is likely to win Best Picture.
Even if you limit yourself to the “most popular film of the year”, as the_diego did earlier, the bias (and its diminishment over time) is apparent: since 1934, when the Academy went to a strict calendar-year nominating system, 16 of 78 B. Picture wins went to the most popular film of that year – over 20%! For the last 33 years, however, the B. Picture winner only went to the #1 BO film 12% of the time. (1935-1951 BO rankings from [Box Office Champions.)
Why there is this bias, I cannot explain other than the obvious fact that most people will only vote for films that they’ve seen, and an Academy voter, like all of us, is more likely to see Ben Affleck planning to rescue a bunch of people from Iraq in a $100 million earning crowd-pleaser than will see that indie film set in Louisiana starring nobody that earned $8 million. And I think there’s a lot less “your film made an buttload of money, here’s an Oscar” than there used to be (though it’s important to note that the year Spielberg won B Picture/Director, it was also in the same year he made a lot of people rich with Jurassic Park.)
*For details of the founding of the American film industry, I strongly recommend “The Dream Factory”, Chapter 18 of Sir Peter Hall’s wonderful [url=Cities in Civilization: Hall, Peter: 9780394587325: Amazon.com: Books]Cities in Civilization]( Private Site). This is a book I recommend to everybody, both because I think it’s a great piece of non-fiction, secondly because it looks impressive to have on your bookshelf.
If you want to check it out, somebody apparently made copies of their notes written within CiC and put the Introduction in PDF form online here. The introduction to the chapters about LA (and Memphis, TN) are pages 13-15 of this 18 page document, and it concludes the LA portion with this:
** BTW, I trust the snake living behind our house more than I trust Hollywood cost accounting. Just saying.
*** Gandhi was still the 12th biggest movie of 1982, however!
**** The Hurt Locker was also the first Best Picture Winner in history to earn less than the average film for that year, and it & 2012’s The Artist are the only times in which the Best Picture Winner was not among the top 50 grossing films of their year. On a personal note, while THL is a fine film, I have no problem believing a few votes for it were cast with a “f-you, Cameron” mindset on the part of the voter.
Notes and disclaimers: All 1980-onward box office information is from Boxofficemojo.com. The chart was “Yearly Box Office Releases”, All releases. If you want to move the goalposts and say “Well, if you choose for calendar year, and sort by… “ I reserve the right to slap you in the face with a trout. I went only to 1980 because BOmojo only went to 1980. “# Movies per year”, “Average Gross” and “Median Gross” are defined by BOmojo (rankings done by yours truly.) Official information about the rules for each Academy Award category and the overall process can be found here. I am not a statistician. I am not your statistician. The math may be wrong. The very concept of math may be wrong. I accept all blame for the first, but not the second. If you want to argue without looking at the charts, please do, but damn I put some time into this.
TL;DR – There is a strong bias within the group of nominees that the B. Picture winner will be the 1st or 2nd highest grossing movie of the nominees (from 1980-2008, the #1 or #2 grossing nominees won 28 of 30 times, with the average B. Picture winner grossing 2.5 times as much as the average film for the year.) However, as noted in the OP, this bias has been slightly reduced with the expansion of the nominations from 2009. Since then, the BO rank of the winners within the category of BP was 8, 4, 7, and 4 respectively (and two of those movies made over $130m in the US). Also, I still contend that when 20% of the BP winners just happen to also be the most popular film of the year (out of 35-500 contenders), you cannot argue that the Academy Awards ignore box office receipts when doling out B. Picture awards. However, you can argue that since 2004, they are paying less attention to overall box office success than they have done.
TL;DR for the TL;DR: Yes, but not as much.