So in a very quick presentation at 8:30 AM this morning, the Academy Award nominees were announced to what is known in the Foley world as a resounding dud. Obvious choices buttressed by dismaying picks, sprinkled generously with bizarre omissions, the grand announcement made the interwebs slightly a-twitter over the selections. But before we get to the nominees themselves…a plea for some sanity.
Yes, awards for art is whack. It is kind of creepy in declaring definitively that one particular work of art prevails all others, and sealing the deal with a treasure, a gift, or in this particular case, a little hairless naked golden man with a giant sword. What happens when people get together and decide in groupthink what film is the best of the year? You end up with years like 1998 when Shakespeare in Love, a thoroughly forgettable film, is crowned cream of the crop over the likes of movies such as Saving Private Ryan and The Thin Red Line. You would think it was a tough choice in 2005 to pick between Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck and Munich for best picture, and apparently it was such an incredibly tough choice that it they just gave up and declared the wretched and pandering Crash the year’s Academy Award of Merit. Are you going to sit there and tell me that Dances with Wolves is better than Goodfellas? Cause the Academy said so. And if the Academy were here now, in physical form, sitting in front of me, I’d slap him in the face and make him watch Raging Bull ten times in a row, yelling at him that no one on this planet cares one iota about Ordinary People, and Raging Bull is a bonafide, 100% USDA A-grade beef American classic, and declaring in 1980 that Ordinary People was a better film was blindingly stupid and deafingly insulting! Handing out awards for different forms of art and insisting that other forms of the same art are not good enough to be considered for such frivolous trinkets is a bizarre and often wretched practice.
Unless of course I win some sort of award, in which case…f*ck it.
Here’s a bit of a rundown of the nominees for the 2012 Academy Awards:
The most noticeable thing about this year’s crop is the lack of a stand out film. Nothing really caught on with everyone this year, and really none of the films really reached those levels of greatness that one would expect from award winners (see, there you go, that’s the exact kind of crap I was talking about). There are nine best picture nominees this year – War Horse, The Artist, Hugo, The Descendants, The Tree of Life, The Help, Moneyball, Midnight in Paris and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. For starters, it’s all likely going to come down to The Artist and Hugo, with The Artist being the likely choice. But that doesn’t dismiss the fact that the maudlin piece of award bait known as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close managed to get in there, despite it being not generally well liked by anyone. And nominating Midnight in Paris is purely a financial choice – it’s Woody Allen’s most profitable film since 1986 and it’s rather accessible and well liked. But best picture material? I don’t know. But by nominating this rather successful film sure won't hurt the ratings for the Oscars telecast, that's for sure.
Woody Allen leads to the second most noticeable thing about this year’s noms – Spielberg is getting dicked over despite making two of the best films of the year. Though War Horse was nominated for best picture, he didn’t get a best directing nomination for the work he did – you can presume that available slot went to Woody Allen, as the directors of The Artist, The Descendants, Hugo and The Tree of Life are all pretty obvious choices. It’s not like he’s going to win it or anything – that will probably be recent Golden Globe winner Martin Scorsese – but it’s still a head-scratcher of a choice. And then Spielberg’s The Adventures of Tintin, an extremely enjoyable and very well made movie and itself this year’s Golden Globe winner for best animated movie, didn’t even get nominated for an Oscar for best animated feature film. Instead they got both 2011 Dreamworks sequels Kung Fu Panda 2 and Puss in Boots in there, and though I quite liked both of those movies, neither of them gave me that charge I got from Tintin. And though it is nice to see Rango, since I do love that movie, the award of merit will likely be bestowed upon one of the two foreign animated movies that no one aside from Academy members have had a chance to see. Brilliant. Spielberg wuz robbed yo!
As for the actors, we all know Meryl Streep will win for her portrayal of Margaret Thatcher, and she will act shocked to win and we will all die a little inside. As for the lead actors, that’s a little tougher, there is no one knock out choice, though it is kind of easy to see Jean Dujardin getting up there for The Artist. And Demián Bichir did great work in A Better Life, but was it better than Michael Shannon in Take Shelter? Cause Shannon didn’t even get noticed, and that was one helluva performance he gave, probably the best of the year in my humble non-award doling out opinion.
No Albert Brooks for supporting actor for Drive? Come ooooooon.
I do like the few nods for Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, including Gary Oldman who fantastic in that film, so at least there's that.
I’ve seen a bunch of foreign films and documentaries, yet I haven’t seen any of the ten movies nominated for these categories, and I’ve only heard of four of them. No Into the Abyss or Cave of Forgotten Dreams or Tabloid or Beats, Rhymes and Life or The Guard or Trollhunter? Ridiculous. Simply ridiculous.
It’s all a wash anyway – awards are awards, whack as hell, unless I get one, and completely meaningless if the work of art itself isn’t enduring (Spike Lee likes to make a point of the fact that 1989 best picture winner Driving Miss Daisy is completely forgotten, while his own 1989 film Do The Right Thing is being used as educational material in schools). There are a ton of categories, ranging from the writers to the costume designers to the composers and so forth and sopwith, so why not just head on over to the official Academy Award website to see all the nominees and decide for yourself what they already got wrong.
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