Oscars Countdown 2012: The People’s Choice

Well, just a quick note to wish anyone staying up to watch the Oscars tonight good luck; I have a horrible feeling you’re going to need it, as I said last night. But let’s not forget that the Academy Awards are just that: a bunch of awards picked by people who make the films, or who at least used to, and consequently who should know better. But if the general public had their say, and by that I mean those committed enough to log their votes on The Internet Movie Database, then this is how the top nine films of the year would look:

9. Drive

Those sitting up tonight will be cheering Drive to the big prize. Forget Picture, Director (Nicolas Winding Refn), Actor (Ryan Gosling), Actress (Carey Mulligan) or Supporting Actor (Albert Brooks) – Drive could walk away with Best Achievement in Sound Editing (Lon Bender / Victor Ray Ennis). Surely some consolation?

8. The Help

Four nominations for this one: as well as Best Piccy, Viola Davis, Octavia Spenser and Jessica Chastain are all up for acting statues and it wouldn’t be a huge surprise if at least one, if not two, of them, picked up those statues before the night’s out.

7. Hugo

Eleven nominations, but chances are that Scorcese has the best outside shot of a win, being the most likely person to upset Michael Hava Havinac that French bloke. Sadly I’ve still not seen it, thanks to sold out showings in December.

6. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo

Five nods for the American remake of the Swedish film that still felt the need to put on Swedish accents. Rooney Mara is the biggest name to get a shout, but both Fincher and the film itself missed out on the big prize. It’s not as good as the original – there, I’ve said it.

5. Harry Potter And The Deathly Hallows, Part 2

No Lord Of The Rings-style love-in for the end of Potter, which rattled off with eleven awards. Sadly Potter will have to be content with making Warner Brothers and J.K. Rowling filthy stinking rich.

4. Once Upon A Time In Anatolia

Hitting UK screens in March, this Turkish effort was one of over five dozen films submitted on the one per country basis for Best Foreign Language Oscar. Sadly the committee didn’t even put it on their nine film longlist – I look forward to see what Oscar overlooked.

3. Warrior

Nolte got a nod, but will likely lose out to Christopher Plummer in the career sympathy award. Sadly Tom Hardy, Joel Edgerton and the film, a totally unexpected crowd-pleaser with dramatic weight, didn’t charm the Academy.

2. The Artist

Lots of awards, cute dog, French winner, black and white, blah, blah, blah. Next!

(Yes, it’s extremely good and the most deserving nominated film. But…)

1. A Separation

If the American Academy could overcome its foreign bias (only eight foreign language films have ever been nominated for Best Picture, and the last of those was directed by Clint Eastwood), then A Separation should be celebrating success. Hopefully it can pick up some glory in the condescending foreign appeasement category.

There you have it – all that’s left is to wish everyone concerned the best of American luck. I’m off to bed, to sleep, perchance to dream of Drive or Shame winning Best Picture…

Oscars Countdown 2012: Another Fine Mess

If the Oscars are good for one thing, it's at least the chance to roll out last year's dodgy Photoshopping one more time.

In a little over 24 hours, the eyes of the world will be on the Kodak Theater in Los Angeles for the handing out of this year’s two dozen tiny shiny bald gold men. Once upon a time, I would take the day off work the Monday after the Oscars so that I could be up all night, often in those days being glued to a tiny stream off the internet with a picture four inches wide, which was all my primitive internet connection could deal with, and watching with expectation and fascination while the awards were handed out. Then about four years ago I actually began watching enough films to have seen the majority of nominees, and quickly came to realise that a group of donkeys with pins tied to their hooves could do a better job of picking the best films and performances of the year than the Academy.

This article clearly breaks down the Academy Of Motion Picture Arts And Sciences (AMPAS) membership: the overall vote for Best Picture is voted for by the whole Academy, which if you’ve not clicked on the link is made up of a membership that’s 94% white, 77% male and 54% over 60 (and a crippling 98% over 40). I’m white, male and much too close to being over 40 for my liking, but my typical movie choices couldn’t be further from the conservative choices typically favoured by Academy voters. Consequently, looking back at the twenty years since I left school and went to university and started to get bitten by the film bug, I’ve been disappointed more often than not by the Academy’s picks. Take Best Picture for example.

Three columns. The first is the film which won Best Picture that year; the second column is, of the five or ten nominated films, the one I’d call my favourite, and the last column is my actual favourite film of that year, regardless of whether it’s in the nominated films or not. As you can see, there are only eight years of the last 20 when my favourite film has even made the nomination list, and only five when the film I enjoyed most of the nominees picked up the top award. Only in one year, 2007, did my top film of the year actually pick up the top prize of the year. One year in twenty, and that year There Will Be Blood lost out, so as many people will have disagreed with me as will have agreed.

Now, I’m not saying that I should be replacing Oscar as the definitive authority on what’s good and who’s worthy, although I probably couldn’t do any worse. No, the issue here is that there are three possible sources of enjoyment from watching the Oscar ceremony itself: to enjoy the ceremony itself, to marvel in the frippery of red carpets, fashion choices and Ryan Seacrests and to see what’s won. The last of these is undoubtedly the main purpose, the awards themselves being the Christmas cake to the icing of the ceremony and the strange marzipan that no-one ever eats on anything other than a Christmas cake that’s the red carpet. So if you’re not feeling the love for what actually wins the awards, is there any point in watching the Oscars, or at the very least sitting up all night to watch them?

Consequently Oscar night is more than likely to be a crushing disappointment for me, and this year is no exception. No Drive, Shame, Tinker Tailor or Take Shelter in Best Picture, no Michael Fassbender, Ryan Gosling or Tom Hardy in Best Actor or Olivia Coleman, Tilda Swinton or Kirsten Dunst in Best Actress, and the four big acting awards – which should go to the big names of George Clooney and Meryl Streep, and the talents of Jessica Chastain and Nick Nolte if justice is to be done – could well end up in the hands of Jean Dujardin and Viola Davis, Christopher Plummer and Octavia Spencer. Don’t get me wrong, I loved all four of those latter performances – even if the film I saw two of them in occasionally made me want to throw things at the screen – but for me they’re not the right choices, and the odds of all four prizes going to the names I’d like are about as high as Jack Nicholson turning feral and chasing the rest of the front row out of the auditorium.  When all the awards ceremony itself can offer up is rehashing Billy Crystal and excluding the performances of Best Original Song (“I’m a maaaan, I’m a MUPPEEEEEETTTTT!”), I’ll be heading for my bed at a normal time and picking out the bones from the latest fine mess in the morning. If you are staying up, best of luck, but I just hope you’re not in it for the winners; trust me, you’re going to be disappointed somewhere.

Oscar Meh Nominations Blah

Oscar nominations were announced today. Most of the film industry has gone absolutely mad over them. I’m left wondering if the people who voted have actually seen half of these films. So here’s a little exercise. Listed below are the nine films nominated for Best Picture this year. I’ve seen the first five, and have ranked them in order, the other four are somewhat random.

1. The Artist
2. Midnight In Paris
3. Moneyball
4. The Help
5. The Tree Of Life
6. The Descendents
7. Hugo
8. War Horse
9. Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close

Now here’s a list of eighteen films which weren’t nominated for Best Picture. Your task is to count how many films on the bottom list should have been on the top list, and consequently vice versa. If you can’t find at least four films to swap over, you’re doing it wrong.

1. Shame
2. Drive
3. Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy
4. Take Shelter
5. Super 8
6. We Need To Talk About Kevin
7. A Separation
8. Tyrannosaur
9. Warrior
10. Submarine
11. Melancholia
12. Senna
13. Rise Of The Planet Of The Apes
14. The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo
15. The Ides Of March
16. 50/50
17. Bridesmaids
18. Beginners

Excellent. If you’re not weeping into your cocoa at the sheer injustice of it all by now, then you have my pity.

Oscars Countdown: A Guide To What’s Actually The Best Picture

Well, it’s almost upon us. The 2011 Academy Awards take place around six o’clock on Sunday evening, local time, or stupid o’clock on Monday morning for those watching on these shores, and two dozen of the frankly odd looking (well, they are) gold statues will be handed out to those deemed the most worthy recipients. There will be few people in attendance, though, that have seen every nominated film and can give a genuine view on the respective worthiness of each of the nominees; to be honest, for most people with busy lives seeing all of the nominations for Best Picture is enough of a challenge.

And for all my love of movies, rather shockingly only three times in my life have I managed to see all of the nominated films before tiny gold men were handed out. It gets easier every year, thanks partly to those people who don’t fork out the cash to watch films in the cinema, as piracy has reduced DVD and international release windows, so most of the films in question arrive on these shores either at the same time, or very close to, their debut in America.

Oscars Countdown: The World Championships Of America

There are two events that booked February in the worldwide calendar, and there is a striking similarity between both. At the beginning of February each year, over 150 million viewers tune in to watch one of the most viewed events in the sporting calendar, the Super Bowl, in which two teams fight for the title of world champion. Except all of the teams involved come from America, of course, so it’s not much of a “world” championship. But it would be hard to argue that there’s a team better at the sport anywhere else in the world, although it would also be hard to argue that there’s much interest elsewhere in the world, when that audience is composed over 100 million people in America watching, and barely half that across the rest of the planet.

At the end of February, there’s an event that’s a different story. Typically getting a US audience in only the 30-40 million range (still enough to beat top rated shows like American Idol), but getting a worldwide audience higher than the shoulder-pad wearing ball-throwers, the Academy Awards have a much bigger reach, with audiences genuinely around the world tuning in. But sadly, there’s not much more chance of something non-American winning than there is at the Super Bowl.

Oscars Countdown: Does Size Matter?

Just two weeks to go until the annual climax to the Awards season, and we’re up to the BAFTAs this weekend. It’s easy to think of the Oscars as quite literally a marathon; thousands of runners, many of which are there to look stupid or make up the numbers, which are narrowed down as they can’t keep the pace, until there’s either a front-runner out on their own, slogging through the awards season like Paula Radcliffe, or there’s a couple which are competing in a nail biting finish right up to the line. At this point this year we have what has pretty much become a two horse race – it would seem that it’s either going to be The King’s Speech or The Social Network, unless something sneaks in and springs a Crash level of surprise at the last minute, like a charity runner in a comedy outfit beating out the professional athletes. There is one thing that stands out about both of these films, and indeed all but one of the Best Picture nominations this year – they’re all really, really short.

Well, not short in terms of the average film you see these days, but they are a lot shorter than the average Oscar winner of years gone by. Allow me to prove this with the use of a well placed graph.

The blue line indicates how long each Best Picture winner has been since the awards began in 1927. There’s a few where the lengths have varied over the years due to Director’s Cuts, studio interference and the like, but to be honest it doesn’t matter how many versions of Gone With The Wind they make, there’ll never be one short enough to remove the need to wear surgical stockings to avoid getting a DVT while watching it. The black line is the underlying trend, which as you can see got longer in the Fifties and then longer again through the Seventies and Eighties, but has been getting shorter since.

They key point in there has been the two hour mark (120 minutes if your mental arithmetic isn’t as sharp as you’d like). Only three winners of the biggest of the little gold men in the last two decades have been under that mark; they were The Silence Of The Lambs, Chicago and Crash, and on that basis not a suggestion that shorter films are a trend we should welcome. The midpoint average in those two decades is actually over two hours and ten minutes. But this year, we only have one film out of the ten which is over two hours:

To illustrate how short this year’s field are in comparison, looking at the bottom end, there have only ever been two winners shorter than 127 Hours (and they’re Annie Hall and Marty, in case you were wondering). Right, that’s the science bit out of the way, but what does it all mean? (Other than I spend more time coming up with pretty but pointless graphs than I really should, but of course you knew that already.) The key question is, of course, are these films getting shorter, and is it a trend we can expect to continue?

There was a view that Inception this year proved that audiences can cope with more demanding fare and that films don’t need to be dumbed down, but at the end of the year it’s proven to be the exception rather than the rule. What’s missing from many of this films that has characterised winners in the past is the level of sub-plots and secondary characterisation. Often sweeping historical epics will concern themselves with great expanses of the passage of time; although The King’s Speech nominally spans two decades, most of the drama is over two fairly short periods. That’s not to say this year’s films are poorer by any means, but they are somewhat leaner affairs than most winners from the past.

As to what’s driving that, then look no further than the box office. The Hurt Locker, last year’s winner, was the lowest in terms of box office performance for many years; films have largely been shunted into this two month “corridor” around December and January in order to be fresh in voters’ minds, but that means that there’s stern competition for screens, and for the studios to get the return that they perceive award nominations and the shiny statues themselves will bring in terms of extra cash to line their pockets. A film like Inception could play only three or four times a day at the box office due to its length, but the films at the other end of that spectrum above could get five or even six showings a day in, and films like The King’s Speech have been packing out most of their showings. That driver of box office is likely to keep lengths down; while we might get the occasional longer film, three hour epics in awards season will be very much the exception rather than the rule for as long as cinemas are in business.

As to what will win this year? The Social Network is two minutes longer than The King’s Speech, so if historical precedent means anything, it might just give it the edge, but that’s not even enough time to go out and buy extra popcorn, so it probably doesn’t mean very much in terms of choosing a winner from those two. But ultimately, this year’s nominees have proved one thing – it’s not how long it is, it’s what you do with it that counts.

Oscars Countdown: Do We Really Need Ten Best Picture Nominations?

The Movie Evangelist - home of low quality Photoshopping.

Yesterday the countdown began to the biggest night in movie self-aggrandisement of the year, the 83rd Academy Awards. The cycle of the modern era is thus: everyone from top print critics to plebs such as myself produces end of year lists, then spends the next couple of months being repeatedly and increasingly disappointed when their favourites are overlooked. I’ve become increasingly disenchanted with the Oscars for just that reason, but old age and boredom have led me to realise that while I may not enjoy them as much as I once did, I still have an opinion on them. In that respect they’re like the weather or The X Factor – you may not really enjoy them, but it’s good to have an opinion on them.

So between now and the big night in a little over a month, I will, whenever I get bored of talking about other things, give my view on some of the big issues surrounding the Oscars. The biggest talking point after the nominations is couldn’t they have found anyone more interesting than Mo’Nique and that old guy to announce them why your own personal favourite didn’t make the cut, of course. As much as I was pleasantly surprised that Dogtooth made it into Best Foreign Language or that The Illusionist made the final cut for Best Animated, my disappointment at such exclusions as Christopher Nolan for Best Director, Andrew Garfield for Best Supporting Actor, Tron: Legacy for Best Soundtrack and especially Lesley Manville for anything at all just increases my frustration with the whole process.