The State of the Race: Best Picture Part 2 – Predicting the Unpredictable

The run up to the Best Picture race is always interesting from an awards perspective. We tend to lift some movies up before we see them, based on our best hopes, then adjust our lists accordingly if things don’t pan out.  I can think of two recent examples where things went a different way than how people were predicting them. One was the reception of Life of Pi at the New York Film Festival. One of the few to have faith in Ang Lee was Anne Thompson who stubbornly predicted the film and Lee until at such time others did as well. Thompson did the same thing with The Grand Budapest Hotel and she did the same thing again with Mad Max: Fury Road. She hung on when others had let go. She either knew something other people didn’t or she just had a hunch, and it turned out to be the right hunch.

In all three of those cases, the Best Picture nomination went hand in hand with a Best Director nomination. In Lee’s case, he actually won. George Miller should have won for Mad Max but didn’t. Doesn’t it seem like he almost did?

The film in question that has split pundits this year is Arrival. Denis Villeneuve’s sci-fi masterpiece starring Amy Adams.  It’s a film that either really connects with a viewer or it doesn’t. For me, it connected more than any film I saw this year. It was for me one of those transformative cinematic experiences that don’t come around very often. For me, it’s up there with La La Land and Moonlight as the three best films of the year. But I’m not the Academy demographic.

I went over most of the race in a post yesterday, but then I started to think about Arrival, and how it has 46 positive reviews at Rotten Tomatoes for a perfect score of 100. That number is bound to drop but it’s a pretty startling stat for a film that so many grumbled about in Telluride. Of course, that 100% doesn’t tell the whole story, as Arrival has a somewhat more mixed reaction if you read the reviews themselves.

People like Jeff Wells, Kris Tapley and Scott Feinberg are three who have the film either so far down their lists that it doesn’t even matter, or out of the running completely. Their theory is that it’s “too confusing” for Oscar voters to get. Yet, this dismissal of Arrival by my fellow pundits has me intrigued. They would say to me, “Well, you went ass over elbow for Gone Girl and we turned out to be right about that.” Perhaps that’s true. But there’s a significant difference between Gone Girl and Arrival. True, both starred women (thank Jebus, finally) but Arrival is emotionally powerful, albeit perhaps more for women than for men. Gone Girl was too dark and pulpy for the Academy but because I loved the movie I pushed for it anyway. Probably in the end men felt like someone was scissoring off their nutsacks while watching it and therefore a male-dominated voting body did not go for it. It is already an iconic movie and will only become more so as the years wear on.  But if you were just predicting the Oscar race you would have been right to predict how voters would respond and to drop it off your list.

Thompson is on board and she has Arrival at number five. So does Susan Wloszczyna. Make of that what  you will.  While I know Arrival might be a long shot for Academy voters, it’s hard for me to imagine that group out and out ignoring such a grand vision, a masterpiece with a woman at the center. Granted, she’s a woman who actually speaks rather than tumbles in outer space looking for a way to get home, but a woman nonetheless.

Arrival also benefits from being seen early.  Only two films (once three) from the later part of the year have made it onto the Best Picture list since they expanded the ballot past 5 BP nominees. Let’s go through them:

2009
The Hurt Locker – Toronto previous year
Avatar – late breaker
The Blind Side – bypassed critics entirely, released in November
District 9 – early
An Education – early
Inglourious Basterds – early
Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire – early
A Serious Man – released in October
Up – early
Up in the Air – Telluride

2010
The King’s Speech – Telluride
127 Hours – Telluride
Black Swan – Venice
The Fighter – late breaker
Inception – July
The Kids Are All Right – Sundance
The Social Network – September
Toy Story 3 – June
True Grit – late breaker
Winter’s Bone – Sundance

2011
The Artist – Cannes
The Descendants – Telluride
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close – late breaker
The Help – August
Hugo – October
Midnight in Paris – May
Moneyball – September
The Tree of Life – Cannes
War Horse – late breaker

2012
Argo – Telluride
Amour – Cannes
Beasts of the Southern Wild – Cannes
Django Unchained – late breaker
Les Misérables – late breaker
Life of Pi – New York
Lincoln – New York
Silver Linings Playbook – Toronto
Zero Dark Thirty – late breaker

2013
12 Years a Slave – Telluride
American Hustle – late breaker
Captain Phillips – October
Dallas Buyers Club – September
Gravity – Venice/Telluride
Her – NYFF
Nebraska – Cannes
Philomena – August
The Wolf of Wall Street- late breaker

2014
Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) – Venice/Telluride
American Sniper – late breaker, AFI
Boyhood – Sundance
The Grand Budapest Hotel – February
The Imitation Game – Telluride
Selma – late breaker, AFI
The Theory of Everything
Whiplash – Sundance

2015
Spotlight – Telluride
The Big Short – late breaker, AFI
Bridge of Spies – October
Brooklyn – Sundance
Mad Max: Fury Road – Cannes
The Martian – Toronto
The Revenant – late breaker
Room – Telluride

The only year that they went for three late-breaking films was 2012, when Django Unchained, Les Miserables and Zero Dark Thirty were all nominated, all three with very well-known directors. In other words, not a tough sell to get people to see these movies, to notice them, to praise them and then to tear them down. Django and Les Mis benefited from breaking late, but Zero Dark Thirty suffered greatly when it was attacked beyond repair for the torture scenes and had no time to do damage control.

So if we go by what we’ve seen already, the films “in the conversation” are these:

La La Land
Manchester by the Sea
Arrival
Jackie
Moonlight
Loving
20th Century Women
Sully
Lion
Hell or High Water
Hacksaw Ridge
Florence Foster Jenkins
Denial
Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk

And in all honesty, the only sure bet on that list right now is La La Land. Manchester by the Sea is an incredible film top to bottom and easily one of the best of the year, but it has the kind of ending that is challenging to people. The critics love it, however, and it will do very well by year’s end. It’s hard for me to imagine anyone not liking it but I did hear grumblings in Telluride. I also heard some grumblings about Moonlight, another movie I loved. I’ve heard grumblings about Sully and Lion too.

The films, so far, that I’ve not heard a single negative thing about: Hell or High Water and Jackie, oddly enough. No matter what these movies are about, no one has anything negative to say about them.

Remember this if you remember nothing else:  Passionate love gets you nominated, but broadly liked gets you the win. That is Oscarwatching rule number 1. 

Now let’s look at what we haven’t seen:

Silence
Fences
Passengers
Hidden Figures
Gold

Of those, I would pick Silence and Fences, as I’ve said before.

The Argument for Arrival:

There are a significant number of Oscar voters who are into effects-driven films. That’s been true since 2009 when Avatar really changed the game. Big effects movies with emotional twists find their way into the Oscar race quite often, actually. This year that movie was meant to be Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk but after a muted reception in New York it’s probably out. That means the only big budget effects movie delivered to voters will be Arrival.

Big splashy Hollywood movies can matter to weary voters who are tired of all of the little character dramas. The films with the big stars are the first to be watched on the DVD pile. The next to be watched will always be the big spectacle films and there isn’t a bigger spectacle film this year than Arrival.

We are in the midst of a changing Hollywood. The Academy knows it has to address the way film is evolving and much of the time they resist. Except when they are given a chance to see one of those films that also touches them emotionally. That is my best argument for why I would have Arrival in my predictions.

The Argument Against Arrival

It may well be confusing to some. But probably more than that, it dares to tell the story from a woman’s point of view rather than either both perspectives or primarily a male POV. These movies will get traction on occasion, like Brooklyn or Black Swan but it is rare, especially for sci-fi, which is usually a male-oriented genre, even when it stars women.  But Arrival really is about her ideas, her thoughts, her dreams, her solutions, her choices. In addition to being somewhat confused by the story, I suspect that some men might take it personally. “Why did she choose to [insert plot point here]? Didn’t she care about the man?”

If that’s so, well, I can’t really argue with that. If the Academy is a boys club and only films boys approve of can be allowed in, then movies that would benefit from la greater number of women voting won’t ever break through. I don’t know if this is true of Arrival — certainly most of its biggest advocates have been men, frankly. Just that it’s usually expected that men will appreciate the sci-fi genre and many will be dazzled by where Villeneuve takes this movie.

Prominent Hollywood heavyweights are standing behind Arrival in hopes of gently delivering a challenging work of art to said steak-eaters.  But if you’re me, you’re not counting it out. If you’re me, you’ve never seen anything like it. If you’re me, you’ll fight hard against an awards ceremony that supposedly measures greatness but really measures the tastes of 7,000 people who work in the film industry.

Today, my predictions would look like:

La La Land
Manchester by the Sea
Silence
Arrival
Jackie
Fences
Moonlight
Loving
Lion or Hell or High Water or Hacksaw Ridge