Poll: Oscar show format, acting awards

[twickster]

Current tally:

Yes: 16
No: 13

[DMark]

Another YES.

This is, after all, an award given by your peers.
It doesn’t get much better than to have Oscar winning peers taking a minute to give your nomination some weight.

Oscar winners are actually a pretty small club in the grand scheme of things; and many actors would kill just to be nominated. It really does make a difference when negotiating contracts to say you were nominated, and it most certainly helps if you ever win.

Granted, some fade off into obscurity after their win, but nobody can ever say your career was for naught after winning an Oscar. That is like saying, “Gee, poor guy only won one gold medal at the Olympics…”

[RickJay]

@DMark

Another YES.

This is, after all, an award given by your peers.
It doesn’t get much better than to have Oscar winning peers taking a minute to give your nomination some weight.

Oscar winners are actually a pretty small club in the grand scheme of things; and many actors would kill just to be nominated.

As I pointed out in another thread, Gary Oldman, universally regarded as a truly great actor, has never even been nominated.

You’d think there’s be acting Oscars all over the place, seeing as how they hand out at least four every year, but you forget how many good actors there are. Harrison Ford doesn’t have an Oscar, just one nomination. Gary Oldman, no nominations. Glenn Close never won one, though she was up four or five times. Edward Norton has no Oscars. Tom Cruise is 0-for-3, or is it 4? Leo DiCaprio can certainly act but his mantle’s empty. Julianne Moore has no Oscars, and neither does Annette Bening, who’s lost three times. Ralph Fiennes has no Oscars. I mean, these are good, some even great, actors.

Some people just get unlucky - Annette Bening had her two really big shots in years when Hilary Swank put on performances of staggering genius; if they’d made American Beauty a year earlier, Bening would likely have an Oscar. Most actors get just a few shots, just a few sweet roles, and if they hit the jackpot they’re in the club and if not, they’re forever the guy who lost to Philip Seymour Hoffman.

It really does make a difference when negotiating contracts to say you were nominated, and it most certainly helps if you ever win.

Granted, some fade off into obscurity after their win, but nobody can ever say your career was for naught after winning an Oscar. That is like saying, “Gee, poor guy only won one gold medal at the Olympics…”
[/QUOTE]

[SaharaTea]

No. I missed the clips, it felt too long and nothing of substance was really said.

[The_Superhero]

@WhyNot

Well, that’s good, 'cause so do I. In other words, nice straw man. Throw in a few “exclusives” and "JUST"s and you can make anyone’s argument look absurd.

Though I was quoting and responding to you, I was thinking of this previous post, too:

@Equipoise

The awards are NOT for the audience. They’re industry awards, given by people in the industry to peers in the industry. That the hoi palloi get to peek in to view the proceedings is a perk for those of us who like the movies, or who just like the fashions, or who just like to see movie people.

I didn’t mean to imply that you were making a claim that you hadn’t. Apologies as necessary. Equipoise does appear to be saying that the show is (or should be) staged without the home viewing audience in mind at all, which I think is bullshit.

@WhyNot

Let me be more clear: the awards show contains elements that are intended to appeal to the people being awarded, to the people watching the ceremony live in the theater and to the people sitting on their couches at home.

Fair enough. I just don’t understand why it was necessary for either audience. The nomination itself is already a stamp of approval from the nominees’ peers, after all. Were I nominated for an Academy Award, I would be far more moved if Robert DeNiro came up to me at the Governor’s Ball afterwards and said, “Hey, The Superhero, I thought your performance was great. You really deserved that nomination!” Having it be a staged event during the show would just make me think, “Hey, the producers recruited Robert DeNiro to say something nice about me. That’s kinda neat.”

[MovieMogul]

@Cervaise

A qualified yes.

It was a nice idea, handled clumsily. For every highly-personal tribute (MacLaine to Hathaway, Hopkins to Pitt) was a less-personal cue-card speech that was either goofy (Gooding to Downey) or stilted and weird (Brody to Jenkins). It would have been better if they’d managed to find some individualized connection for every actor being honored. On the other hand, I really appreciated that they dug back into their legacy and invited stars of the past, like Eva Marie Saint, instead of just familiar faces from the last few years. Hollywood is terrible about discarding its faded beauties; my favorite thing about this format is that it was a nod not just to the current nominee but to the stars of previous decades.

That said, as noted above, it was clumsily executed, and the implicit placement of the other categories on a lower tier, recognition-wise, stung a bit. I mean, the “Pineapple Express” sketch definitely demonstrated why you ask the actors to do the talking, and you don’t let the cinematographers do the presentation; I presume the technical specialists would have been even less polished. On the other hand, directors and writers are frequently well-spoken people, and even a few editors, like Walter Murch, can hold the camera effortlessly. Meh.

Re the clips, I personally don’t need them; I’ve seen almost all the movies and know what the work was like. (Watching Rachel Getting Married, I leaned over to my girlfriend at one point and whispered, “There’s the Oscar clip.”) On the other hand, I know I’m in the minority for having seen most of the nominees, and it serves a useful purpose for the wider audience to get a taste of the less-well-known movies. Nobody needs to see Heath Ledger again, but it’d be great if we could pick out forty to sixty seconds of Melissa Leo’s brilliant performance, in the hope that more people would be intrigued enough to check out that phenomenal film.

Net judgment: I liked it, but it had problems, and I don’t know that it should be repeated.

Can’t really add on to this. A qualified Yes.

It is a good point, though, that this would be hard format to repeat, partly because you’d run out of previous winners pretty fast (eventually, you might have Meryl Streep tributing herself) and the novelty would very quickly get old. But it certainly makes sense why the Presenters were kept a secret–since it added to the surprise effect. Maybe once-in-a-blue-moon would this be worth doing again, but not too often.

[twickster]

@ArchiveGuy

Maybe once-in-a-blue-moon would this be worth doing again, but not too often.

Yeah, agree that they shouldn’t make this the new expected format.

[Yookeroo]

@garygnu

A ten-second clip of somebody being emotional or whatever doesn’t do anything for me. A description of why the entire performance was worthy of a nomination tells me more.

Yes. And I’m all for giving all the nominees as much credit as possible. But this was such a horrible way to do it. Way too forced. I’d much rather have some folm scholar or critic giving me the context o the performance than having one of the presenters basically admit he had to google the actor he was presenting to us. It was hackneyed in the extreme. Lame.

[twickster]

Yes: 18
No: 14

[Wheelz]

No.

I actually liked the traditional format of the previous year’s winner presenting for the opposite gender. They could continue this while still giving props to each nominee.

I wonder if any of last year’s winners felt slighted?

[MovieMogul]

@Wheelz

I wonder if any of last year’s winners felt slighted?

Two of last year’s winners were presenters, one (Bardem) was busy, apparently, and Day-Lewis has a reputation for preferring not be involved in anything public any more than necessary, so I’m sure he was just fine…

[Spoke]

No.

Adrien Brody’s remarks were just embarrassingly bad. Made-fun-of-on-The-Daily-Show bad. Richard Jenkins deserved a helluva lot better tribute than Uh, I looked you up on Google, dude, and here’s what I found….

Actors aren’t writers, and shouldn’t be trusted to come up with their own material on these shows.