And Then There Were...Ten?

A few months ago, I thought the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences had finally gotten its head out of the sand. Now, I’m not so sure. The Academy’s president made a rather surprising announcement today: for the first time in more than 60 years, next year’s Academy Awards will have 10 nominees for Best Picture instead of five. Here’s a bit of what he had to say:

The final outcome, of course, will be the same – one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009... Having 10 Best Picture nominees is going allow Academy voters to recognise and include some of the fantastic movies that often show up in the other Oscar categories, but have been squeezed out of the race for the top prize.

Personally, I don’t think this makes a bit of sense. Even with five nominees, there always seems to be at least one that isn’t in the same league as the others. And with ten nominees, I don’t even want to think about how much garbage is going to be included. People will argue that there are “deserving” movies that don’t get nominated each year, but if you think about it, that’s kind of the point. If every good movie was nominated, it wouldn’t mean nearly as much to be a nominee.

Of course, I’m prepared to eat my words if this ends up working out for the best, and the Academy has proven me wrong before. But for now, I have my doubts – and if I see any Transformers posters with the words “For Your Consideration” on them come this fall, I swear there will be hell to pay.

Thoughts on the 81st Annual Academy Awards

I’ve been pretty down on the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for quite a while now. I’ve even made several posts to that effect on this blog. But I have to admit, I was surprised by how well the Oscars turned out this year. The nomination/award system may not be perfect, but watching the ceremony on Sunday night made me realize that it’s not nearly as broken as I thought it was either. In fact, I’m feeling pretty good right now about the way the awards went as well as the state of the Academy Awards in general.

The show itself was definitely better than it has been in the past several years, and Hugh Jackman did a great job as host. His opening number was one of the funniest things I’ve seen in a while, and set the tone for what ended up being a really good night. I could have done with one or two less song and dance performances, but putting the band on the stage and having the nominees introduced by a panel of former award winners were both excellent touches and more than made up for any of the show’s other shortcomings.

That’s not to say I wouldn’t have liked a handful of things to work out differently, though. While I can get behind Slumdog Millionaire’s win for Best Picture, I was a bit disappointed that two of my favorite movies from 2008 didn’t at least get nominated. The exclusion most obvious to a lot of people was The Dark Knight. Even if they didn’t feel it was the best movie of the year, there are a lot of people who would certainly consider it as being one of the top five.

In fact, when I originally saw the list of nominees a few months ago, I’ll admit that I was a bit annoyed. I had hoped the last two Best Picture wins, for The Departed and No Country for Old Men – two films that are a far cry from the more “traditional” movies the Academy typically likes to give the award – wouldn’t just be anomalies in the larger scheme of Oscar history, and were indicative of a more progressive mentality on the Academy’s part. With The Dark Knight not even being nominated, we can see a clear shift away from the kind of darker, edgier movies the Academy has celebrated for the last few years.

As I’ve come to realize, though, that’s not necessarily a bad thing, especially considering that the Best Picture award still went to a pretty nontraditional movie. If it had gone to The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – a movie I really enjoyed, but one that by its very nature plays much better to a conservative audience than Slumdog – it would have marked a step backward for the Academy. The more I think about it, the clearer it becomes to me that the Oscars aren’t necessarily meant to give the Best Picture award to the most objectively good movie each year. Rather, the movie that wins is the one that best encapsulates the spirit of our society at a certain point in time. In an era of increasing hope and the real possibility of change, Slumdog Millionaire is that movie much more so than The Dark Knight.

So while TDK’s exclusion is understandable on some level, there is one film that I think really should have been included: WALL-E. I had hoped, perhaps naively, that this would be the year the Academy finally recognized that well-done animated movies aren’t just good children’s movies – they’re good movies that happen to be suitable for children to watch.

What bothers me most about its omission from the ballot is that if there were any year that an animated movie actually had a solid chance of being nominated for Best Picture, it was this year. Many people (myself included) thought Ratatouille should have been nominated last year, and with WALL-E being just as well-received by critics this year, it would have been the perfect opportunity for the Academy to change its outlook.

To its credit, Disney tried to play ball with the other studios and mounted a fairly large Best Picture campaign for WALL-E. Still, this basically underscores my main problem with the way the Academy Awards work. Over the past few years, nominee lists have been for the most part determined by which studios are able to run the most effective advertising campaigns. Film companies spend millions of dollars on “For Your Consideration” advertisements in magazines like Variety, sometimes managing to muscle their way into getting nominations for movies that aren’t really deserving of the recognition (such as Robert Downey Jr.’s nomination for Best Supporting Actor in Tropic Thunder).

Perhaps this is a minor quibble on my part, though, since all of the films that ended up being nominated for Best Picture (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, The Reader, and Slumdog Millionaire) are good movies in their own right. Whereas in each of the last few years it’s always seemed as though one or two movies nominated for Best Picture weren’t really very good, I think all of this year’s nominees were deserving of recognition. The fact that we’re even able to debate what other movies should have been nominated is a good sign, because it means there were more than just five truly great movies to come out in 2008. That’s something I don’t think we’ve been able to say for a number of years now, and it makes me think that the film world is on more of an upswing than I would have thought just a few months ago.

Overall, I think this year’s Academy Awards are as good an indication as any that we’re entering into a more exciting and adventurous time for movies. Slumdog’s win is significant in that it’s a movie belonging neither to the “old school” of filmmaking the Academy has traditionally honored, nor to the “new school” of dark, gritty films along the lines of The Departed or The Dark Knight. The Academy’s choice of something so unique as its Best Picture means that we’ll likely see more risk-taking on the part of the major studios in the coming years.

In other words, executives will be more likely to give their directors a level of creative control that hasn’t been seen in quite a while, in the hopes that the final product will turn out that much better for it (and thus make more money). The result could be an era of filmmaking as fresh and creative as the 1970s, when independents like Scorsese and Coppola were given the freedom to put just about whatever they wanted on the big screen.

Of course, this is all just speculation on my part. What did you think of the Oscars? Were the awards given to the movies that were most deserving, or do you think your favorites got snubbed? Check out the list of winners HERE, and post your thoughts in the comment section!

The Academy Changed Its Mind

About a month ago, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences disqualified The Dark Knight's score from eligibility for its Best Original Score award. However, it seems they have now decided to reverse that decision. Here's what Yahoo News has to say:

The executive committee of the academy's music branch initially ruled November 10 that there were too many composers involved in the score; the Academy generally considers only scores that are the work of one or at most two composers.

But after reviewing the submission, it concluded that Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard were the main composers and deemed the duo's work for Warner Bros.' Batman blockbuster as eligible.

Gee, do you think? As I said in a previous post on this topic, Zimmer and Howard had already been acknowledged by their collaborators as the score's primary composers well before any of this controversy ever took place.

I'd like to say this move has restored my faith in the Academy, but it's going to take a lot more than their correcting of one mistake for that to happen. Besides, my guess is that Warner Bros. basically strongarmed the Academy into this decision, so it's hard to give the Academy all the credit.

That said, though, this does make me hopeful that the Academy could finally be turning things around this year. There's no reason why we shouldn't be able to have movie awards that actually mean something again, and this is a step in the right direction.

Dark Knight Score Disqualified From the Academy Awards

According to Variety, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has disqualified the score of The Dark Knight from consideration in the Academy Awards. Here's why:

Sources inside the committee said that the big issue was the fact that five names were listed as composers on the music cue sheet, the official studio document that specifies every piece of music (along with its duration and copyright owner) in the film.

This is absolutely infuriating. It was bad enough when they disqualified the score of There Will Be Blood last year for using eight minutes of preexisting material (thirty-five minutes were original). But this isn't even a matter of whether or not the music is original – The Dark Knight's score is being disqualified because the Academy thinks too many people are credited for it.

Hans Zimmer and James Newton Howard, who collaborated on the score, gave credit to the three other people as "a way of financially rewarding parts of the music team who helped make the overall work successful" (as Zimmer stated in a recent interview). These people were the music editor, ambient music designer and ambient music composer. All three of them signed an affidavit saying that Howard and Zimmer were the primary composers.

I don't see what the Academy's problem is here. Thinking back to The Dark Knight, it's almost impossible to imagine how completely different the movie would have been without the work of those three individuals. There is no way to argue that their contributions weren't integral to the effectiveness of the score, and the fact that the Academy refuses to acknowledge credit where credit is due is absurd.

The Academy has been hanging from my high opinion by a loose thread for the last few years, and this certainly doesn't help its case. It's about time for the Academy to get off its high horse and start addressing some of the ridiculous hypocrisies and double standards that have been bringing it down for so long.

The Oscars Are Up For Grabs

I’ve tried to think of a nicer way of saying this, but there really isn’t one: 2008 hasn’t been the best year for movies. The end of the year is traditionally the time when the movies that get nominated for Oscars are released, but it’s becoming increasingly clear that the movies of late 2008 are not living up to expectations. Films like Body of Lies, Changeling, The Duchess, and Synecdoche, New York in particular were billed as major Oscar contenders, but they all opened to mixed reviews.

To be honest, I can’t say that upcoming movies like Milk, Australia, or Frost/Nixon look like they’re going to curb the trend either. And it is a trend – there’s an almost indescribable blandness that seems to permeate the marketing campaigns for all of these films. They all seem to be mining the same “surefire Oscar” well, and the effect is that they all run together and become lost in the crowd.

On top of that, some of the movies that were assumed to be the biggest Oscar contenders this year, including The Soloist and The Road, were pushed back to 2009. What we’re left with for the remainder of the year are a very small handful of potentially great films. But if these movies continue to fall short of our expectations, we’ll be left without any end-of-the-year movies that are truly Oscar-worthy.

So what does this mean? It means that, for better or for worse, we could be looking at a potential Dark Knight Oscar sweep – best picture, director, the whole works. After all, the last time a movie made as much money as The Dark Knight did (Titanic in 1997) it swept the Oscars quite handily. But while there’s no question that The Dark Knight was a great movie, I can’t help but feel that there’s something a little off about the whole situation. Had TDK come out last year, it would have had no business winning more than one or two awards aside from the “craft” awards – editing, sound, sound editing, and visual effects. You could have made a case for the movie being nominated for best picture (over the highly overrated Atonement), perhaps best cinematography, and maybe a handful of other awards, but it wouldn’t have deserved to win any of them.

My point here is that one of the most satisfying things about seeing a movie you love win an award is the sense of competition that justifies having awards in the first place. Without any real competitors, though, I think I would find a TDK best picture win to be pretty hollow.

On the other hand, if the Academy isn’t enthusiastic about handing The Dark Knight every award it’s eligible for, the current cinematic vacuum could give way to a free-for-all the likes of which haven’t been seen in four or five years. I think this is a more likely scenario than the TDK sweep – the Academy has shown over the last few years that, much like the Golden Globes, they’ve become overly fond of distributing the awards to as many films as possible. It’s also the best scenario, because while TDK was a good movie, it wasn’t so good that it put every other movie this year to shame.

If the Oscars go this route, the winners will be next to impossible to predict. The Academy will put all its focus into the nominations, making sure all of the movies that were hyped up before they came out get their recognition, deserved or not. Brad Pitt will get an acting nomination for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. Nicole Kidman will get a best actress nomination for Australia. Charlie Kaufman will get a screenplay nomination for Synecdoche, New York. You don’t even have to have seen any of the movies in question to know who will get nominated. When there aren’t a plethora of truly outstanding movies to choose from, the Academy will “spread the wealth” to the same people it’s recognized countless times before.

Even the studios have recognized the cinematic void of 2008’s fourth quarter, and they’re doing all they can to push for Oscars in places that wouldn’t get a second glance in any other year. Paramount is currently promoting Robert Downey Jr. as best supporting actor for his role in Tropic Thunder. Marvel Enterprises is considering an Oscar push for Iron Man, which could lead to a best actor nomination for Downey as well. The extent to which the Oscars are beginning to mirror the MTV Awards is frightening. The only studio effort that I can really get behind is Disney’s push for WALL-E to get a nomination for best picture. As the best-reviewed movie of 2007, Ratatouille was absolutely robbed of a nomination last year and it’s high time for the Academy to recognize animated films as being worthy of more than just their own award subcategory.

Unfortunately, the real casualties in this whole situation are the good movies. The Dark Knight, as I mentioned before, could be robbed of a real victory by the fact that it has so little competition. Clint Eastwood will almost surely win an Oscar for his acting in Gran Torino, which looks fantastic, but the Academy won’t choose him for the reasons they should. They’ll do it because Eastwood has yet to receive an Oscar for his acting and the Academy has been trying to give him one for years. Is an award even still meaningful when it’s given away like that? Since it’s never entirely possible to explain exactly why people in a group vote one way or another, I guess it’s up for debate.

I’ve taken the long road in getting to this point, but here it is: the Oscars are completely up for grabs at this point. You might as well start making your predictions now, because I doubt it will get any easier in the next few months.