It’s coming up on the time of year when celebrities are hoping to parade around with a firm, golden guy and show him off to the paparazzi. No, I’m not talking about the annual spring divorce filings, I’m talking about Oscar ™ season.
Every year there are usually a bunch of good nominations and a few that make you go, “Huh?” It’s almost as if the Academy is passing out the box of assorted chocolates and throws in a Crunchy Frog just to see who will take it.
The best example that comes to mind is Marisa Tomei winning for My Cousin Vinny. Afterwards people were wondering if Marisa had pictures of Academy members in compromising positions with goats. I mean, look who she was up against:
• Judy Davis in Husbands and Wives
• Joan Plowright in Enchanted April
• Vanessa Redgrave in Howards End
• Miranda Richardson in Damage
I felt it should have gone to Vanessa and that Marisa should was much better in In the Bedroom.
So what other examples can you provide of Oscar™ winners, whether for the film or acting, that made you question the sanity (or blackmailability) of the Academy?
It has to do with the various characteristics of voting systems. The Academy uses a simple plurality. When there are more than one candidate, it can lead to skewed results. After all, if the other candidates split evenly at 19%, Tomei only needed 24% of the vote to win.
If you had polled voters and had them rank the candidates, you’d probably find that only a quarter of them thought Tomei was the best. But there is no perfectly satisfactory way of voting on an award.
Also, voters tend not to vote for nominees in films they haven’t seen. My Cousin Vinnie grossed $52 million; the other four films only grossed $55 million combined. It’s certain that more Academy voters saw Tomei than any of the other candidates, so when they had to choose one, they voted for the one person they saw instead of the four they didn’t.
They must have realized he could only be a caricature from then on out, so gave it to him for his previous body of work. Here’s a database search for anyone who wants to refresh their memory.
What the… a thread about undeserved Oscars and no one has (unfairly) bashed Titanic yet? Who are you people, and what have you done to the real dopers?
Because the OP specifically talked about the acting and directing, not “Best Picture.”
To add my candidate – “A Beautiful Mind.” Why it got best direction over LOTR is beyond me. LOTR was far more complex in shooting, logistics, editing, and so on, than ABM. (I can probably generalize this to any technically complex movie that loses out to a less technically complex one.)
(bolding mine). So please do slam a movie where you already knew what was going to happen to the ship. That sentimental piece of tripe should have been sunk to the bottom of the North Atlantic (of course the special effects were damn good) with Celine Dion strapped to the film canisters. “My heart will go on…” Yeah, and my gorge will rise. Ugh.
There are plenty of fair criticisms of Titanic. This is certainly not one of them, unless you also want to lambaste every historical movie ever made, not to mention every movie based on a well known previously-written book. For that matter, look at a movie like American Beauty. It tells you in the opening seconds that Kevin Spacey is going to die. Does that make it a bad movie?
The story of Titanic is not “is the ship going to sink or not?”, it’s two main things:
(1) The story of Rose, and how she is redeemed and changed by Jack (I think the love aspect of it is less important than the go-out-and-live-a-full-life aspect, with the key moment being her photos, which at the beginning of the movie seem like stereotypical old-dotty-woman props, but at the end tell you of her ultimate triumph)
(2) The fascinating details of how and why the ship sank, how various people acted, recreated in incredibly lush and well produced detail. If you can see the mom telling her children stories and the old couple hugging in bed, all knowing they’re about to die, as Nearer My God To Thee plays, and not shed a tear…
The reasoning has been explained to me many times, but I’m still fuming that Judy Holliday won best actress for her role in Born Yesterday over both Bette Davis in All About Eve and Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard. Both of the latter womens’ roles are just about the best actresses’ performances ever (in my opinion), yet they lost.
I’m not really griping about the movie because the sinking was a known factor. I see movies based on books even though I know how the story goes. I watched Good Night and Good Luck even though I had read many items and seen documentaries about Murrow and McCarthy.
My gripe with Titanic was that it would have been a great film if it told the story of the sinking and skipped the romance. Give more about the crew, the passengers and less to the hokey love story. Or the grave-robber attitude of the submersible crew searching for that damn necklace.
Maybe I’m an egotistical male, but I was ticked off that the true love of Rose’s life was some drifter that she banged in the back of a car. At the end when she heads up the central staircase to find Jack, all I can think is, “Where the hell is her husband? The man she spent her life with! She marries a man, has children with him, enjoys a long life but the person she can’t wait to see again after she dies is her one night stand!!! ‘Oh, please sketch me nude, Jack!’ Bullshit!”
Most women I talked with said they liked the idea of meeting their true love in heaven (or on the central concourse of a sunken cruise ship, whichever they prefer). When I gave my opinion I got a lot of responses ranging from, “Wow, I never thought of that,” to, “You cold, heartless man! He was her true love!”
At least her husband could have been there as well so she could have had eternal three-ways!
I don’t think the point of the scene at the very end is “now Rose is in heaven, and who does she spend eternity with? Jack!”. It’s not heaven, it’s just symbolism of the part of Rose’s life that related to the Titanic reaching closure, as she returns the Heart of the Ocean to where it belongs, and as she has revisited the story of Titanic and passed it on to her granddaughter. Rose has achieved closure wrt Jack. Presumably she achieved closure on her husband (who we have no reason to assume she didn’t love) earlier, like, when he died a non-tragic non-iceberg-oriented death of his own.
Taking the question in the title quite literally: the reason that Kramer and Terms and Titanic won is because they were far more emotional experiences than Apocalypse or Stuff or L.A. Confidential. Now whether you want to argue that they were more crass or sappy or maudlin or manipulative, there’s no denying that those films worked overtime for a genuine dramatic catharsis that the other films didn’t. I’m not saying that being a more emotional film makes you a better one, but it does often make it a more accessible and memorable one, and one more likely to rake in the votes.
So that’s how they won. You can disagree all you want, but don’t try to pretend it’s some inscrutable mystery. The answer is usually as simple as that.
It acually crossed my mind since I was pulling for something else that year, but I begrudgingly thought that technically it probably was an impressive movie.
Of course I’ve sufficiently blocked it out to the extent that I don’t even remember this “walking up a staircase” bit. I wonder if I just didn’t make it all the way to the end…?
