What would be the film that would drag the Academy kicking and screaming into the modern era? Would it be a Jim Cameron 3-D sci-fi epic? Nope. Would it be Martin Scorsese brilliantly utilizing the up-to-the-minute technology of today to bring to life the origins of film itself? No. The Academy hews close to its own beginnings. Nuts and bolts filmmaking that relies mostly on acting, directing and writing. Visual effects? Not to much. Motion capture? Forget it. And 3D? You might as well be offering up rabbit as your Thanksgiving meal.
Here we are once again with Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, a film so unlike any other it cannot help but present itself as a viable Best Picture contender. It was that the moment it hit Venice. It remained that when it ran through Telluride. With a few films left to see, the Best Picture race still feels like it’s down to a small handful of films for the win. 12 Years a Slave still has the momentum and importance to go the distance. Gravity is close behind, and has already won the first Oscar of the year for Visual Effects. No contest necessary. Captain Phillips is a formidable challenger. Finally, the sleeper underdog Nebraska might be the film no one sees coming. We still wait for American Hustle, maybe Wolf of Wall Street, Saving Mr. Banks, and Her.
How does the year shape up the way it does? Is it the pundits’ fault for herding the select few into a pen? Or does it just magically happen that way? Some films stand the test of running a brutal gauntlet of bloggers, critics and ticket buyers to emerge as one movie most can agree on is best. That means, in 2013, the film with the least amount of baggage. In today’s world, baggage means one person whining about something that gets exploded into a “thing” and soon it becomes a “controversy” and soon, there is too much baggage attached. Voting FOR something is about self-identification more than it is anything else. What film makes them feel obligated to vote for something they don’t like (can’t win)? What film is too big ignore (might win)? What film makes a person feel good when they check that box (will win)?
You can’t win Best Picture now unless voters want to see you win. They want to see you win because they either really liked your movie a lot (The Artist) or they liked your movie better than the one that was supposed to win (The King’s Speech vs. The Social Network); Sometimes a Best Picture winner is really a vote against what ought to be named the Best Picture of the year (Brokeback Mountain vs. Crash).
We are dwelling in the best moment of the Oscar race, before things take a darker turn. And they will take a darker turn, my friends. They always do. You can feel the backlash towards Gravity in its beginning stages. No film wants to be a frontrunner, or THE frontrunner because it’s like having a bulls-eye on its back. Suddenly, those who loved Gravity figured out it has a woman in the lead and that is leading to all kinds of torment with the ruling sex, white men who are used to having the whole thing revolve around their internal struggle. Sure, it’s a fine struggle. We watch it go down every year. We patiently watch as men come of age, come of middle age and then come of old age. We watch Jennifer Lawrence nurse the crazy ones back to health, and we watch them rescue hostages on our behalf. We watch them free the slaves and we watch them live out their dreams in quiet desperation.
So some brave filmmaker decided to put a woman in the hot seat. What of her dreams? What of her will to live? What of her desire to fight? It’s all there in Gravity, and yet … here’s some guy on Vanity Fair calling it a chick flick in disguise because George Clooney pops in to give her an idea of what to do next in order to get back to Earth. But if you see the film it isn’t him at all. Perhaps, because she only trained for six months and has no real idea what she’s doing up there (not because she’s a woman but because she’s a newbie) she had to think like her superior. Sometimes problems get solved when we aren’t thinking about them. Sometimes they come to us in a dream, other times in a vision, and even sometimes in a hallucination. Yet, the writer at Vanity Fair doesn’t seem able to hold both of those ideas in his head at once and must do what he’s been trained to do: downgrade the whole thing because a woman stars in the film.
When Gravity starts winning things, and it will, the backlash will continue to grow. As Sandra Bullock edges closer to her second Best Actress win (a distinct possibility at this point) it will grow bigger. And all the while, the films that held the frontrunner spot early will breathe a sigh of relief that they aren’t out front. Once they’re put there, however, the cycle will repeat itself. The most common mantra: “It wasn’t THAT good.”
How you keep winning is to have people continue to see you as an underdog winner, a little movie that could. On the flipside of that is an unquivocal winner, like a Schindler’s List or a No Country for Old Men. Sometimes the best film of the year is obvious and no amount of backlash can touch it. But this year is going to be a competitive one. There are so many good films in the race already — and if those that have yet to present themselves are that good, we will have a heated race for Best Picture equal to last year’s.
A film could win on its own merit but every winner needs an “Oscar story” to push it through a heated season. What 12 Years a Slave has going for it is that it could make Oscar history with the first black filmmaker to win. Ever. That is a powerful motivator for voters. Add to that, nice guy Brad Pitt gets to win a producing Oscar, which only helps keep the train rolling on. But it has some stiff competition right now with Gravity and Captain Phillips, two very strong contenders that are vigorously directed and deeply moving. That none of these three directors is American is a sad lament. Alexander Payne, David O. Russell, Martin Scorsese, John Lee Hancock, George Clooney, Lee Daniels, Ryan Coogler, Ron Howard, Joel and Ethan Coen, JC Chandor, Woody Allen, and Richard Linklater are the American sons hovering on the fringes.
The Oscars aren’t just a domestic product anymore. To succeed now you have to succeed internationally. The internet has allowed for a global reach in all aspects. Only traditionalists wish the Oscars to remain distinctly American. It seems an out of date concept by now. Americans are handicapped by many things now, but none so much as consumerism. If your ultimate aim is just to make money, sooner or later quality will fall away. It is time for Americans to take a good long look at themselves, especially where art and culture, deemed irrelevant by our public school system, are not being fortified. For its faults (simply that other films were more ambitious) Argo was wildly entertaining, a story well told, in a distinctly American way.
The trick now is manage the buzz. If voting is a way of identifying oneself, perception becomes everything. Remember last year’s Zero Dark Thirty, how it kept winning everything until it got to the LA Film Critics awards and how they took a hard stance against awarding it?
The giving out of awards, in the tiny group that follows it, becomes its own circus. The first of these this year will be the New York Film Critics and the National Board of Review. How have those awards influenced or matched with Oscar for the past ten years? The National Board of Review used to be first but the New York Film Critics decided to shift their dates to be the first to ring in. Their power to influence the direction of the race must be acknowledged. Their voting system is bizarre. I won’t try to explain it because I don’t entirely understand it, but it has to do with a first vote, then a second vote, then a third vote, and on and on.
Once they ring in, the trajectory is set. The biggest and most influential film critics awards would be New York, National Board of Review, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago, the National Society of Film Critics and the Southeastern Film Critics. When I started blogging about the Oscars, people like me and people who voted on critics awards were a different group. But slowly, they have merged so that many people who cover the awards also vote on them. Funny, that.
The Critics Choice awards and the Golden Globes are their own animals. They hit just before the major guild awards, which really are the biggest deciders now of the consensus vote. The Producers Guild takes off just after the Golden Globes and these days, there is total unity between the PGA, the DGA and Oscar.
If there was more time between the voting of these awards and the Oscar votes, there might be time for the Academy to go its own way, but that hasn’t happened yet. The ship gets too big to turn around in time to avoid the iceberg. Inevitability sets in. Human nature defined and exposed. The 4,500 voting members of the PGA agree with the 14,000 or so voting members of the DGA and the 6,000 or so voting members of the Academy.
Last year, Zero Dark Thirty was winning everything until its baggage became too heavy. Lincoln and Life of Pi had their followers but the default choice if it wasn’t going to be Zero Dark Thirty became Argo. You can track the wins, track the buzz and this truth will reveal itself. Some will say that Argo was the bigger crowdpleaser and that when it came down to thousands voting, and not hundreds, that made all the difference. And that’s probably true too. You can look at it either way. We will never know the truth.
That’s why when 12 Years a Slave won the audience award at Toronto it became the strongest contender so far. What it needed was broad audience support, which it got.
But let’s look at the National Board of Review’s past winners:
2000 Quills, Philip Kaufman
2001 Moulin Rouge! Baz Luhrmann
2002 The Hours, Stephen Daldry
2003 Mystic River, Clint Eastwood
2004 Finding Neverland, Marc Forster
2005 Good Night, and Good Luck. George Clooney
2006 Letters from Iwo Jima, Clint Eastwood
2007 No Country for Old Men, Ethan & Joel Coen
2008 Slumdog Millionaire, Danny Boyle
2009 Up in the Air, Jason Reitman
2010 The Social Network, David Fincher
2011 Hugo, Martin Scorsese
2012 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow
Only Slumdog and No Country won the NBR and then Oscar because they were both juggernauts that couldn’t be derailed. In other years, the NBR set the tone for a strong nominee, just not the crowdpleasing winner. Vive la difference.
By contrast, here are the New York Film Critics winners for Best Film:
2000 Traffic, Steven Soderbergh
2001 Mulholland Drive, David Lynch
2002 Far from Heaven, Todd Haynes
2003 The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Peter Jackson
2004 Sideways, Alexander Payne
2005 Brokeback Mountain, Ang Lee
2006 United 93, Paul Greengrass
2007 No Country for Old Men, Ethan & Joel Coen
2008 Milk, Gus Van Sant
2009 The Hurt Locker, Kathryn Bigelow
2010 The Social Network, David Fincher
2011 The Artist, Michel Hazanavicius
2012 Zero Dark Thirty, Kathryn Bigelow
Their track record is slightly better. But bear in mind that they only recently altered their date to fall before the National Board of Review.
The Social Network proved that a film could win every critics’ award and still not woo the broader consensus vote. It was heartbreaking to watch the best film of the year not be named Best Picture by the Academy. But a lot has changed over the years in some ways. In other ways, nothing has changed. The Academy remains the fairly conservative-minded relatives who show up to the table and everyone has to make the conversation go vanilla. We adapt our thinking to the Academy’s if we’re in the Oscar-watching business. If we’re in it long enough our hearts get broken almost every year. Unless they don’t. But if they do, the trick is not minding.
Best Picture rankings:
1. 12 Years a Slave
2. Gravity
3. Captain Phillips
4. Nebraska
5. The Butler
6. Inside Llewyn Davis
7. All is Lost
8. Labor Day
9. Dallas Buyers Club
10.Rush
11. Blue Jasmine
12. The Fifth Estate
13. Blue is the Warmest Colour
14. Before Midnight
Still to come:
1. The Monuments Men
2. American Hustle
3. Saving Mr. Banks
4. Her