Oscar Flashback: When the Gatekeepers are Wrong

We Oscarwatchers put a lot of faith in the gatekeepers — those bloggers and critics who see movies first, review them, assess their merits, and assign them into meaningful categories. The public at large have, for the most part, discarded critical consensus when it comes to seeing movies they want to see. All they need is some heavy marketing, a movie star, a promised thrill ride, and the fruits of many years spent branding these consumers from birth can be harvested as they go like lemmings to the multiplex and throw down, all in the name of fun, all in the name of perpetuating what we still call the movie business.

But the Oscar race is different. It stands alone as this island onto itself, the last vestige of what most of us still think of as the movie business. In this world, dramas still reign. In this world a movie like Argo will seem like, in the cloistered heat of the season, the best film of the year. No one actually thinks it is, just like no one thought The King’s Speech was, but it is the most agreed upon, most tolerable of the nominee pool — itself a collection of 5-10 titles that repeatedly excludes many of the best films in movie history.

We count on the gatekeepers to keep us on track, to help us suss out the “good” from the “bad.” We dutifully count the Metacritic scores, even stacking them up to previous years — for instance, Argo had only 10 negative reviews on Rotten Tomatoes last year, compared to Les Miserables, which had over 60. In the end, Argo might have won Best Picture but Les Miserables still won four Oscars to Argo’s 3.

The Gatekeepers are partly responsible for nudging which direction the early awards will tilt. It doesn’t really matter who the individuals in these groups may be, or what their qualifications are, winning an early critics award starts the buzz. Either the buzz will carry on through to the end or it won’t. Usually that depends on the film itself, whether it’s as likable to regular folks as it is to critics. And even that doesn’t matter much past a certain point because human nature dictates that we like to be on the winning side, hate to be on the losing side, so a winner is a winner is a winner is a winner.

Every once in a while, though, a movie pops through that was dumped on by the gatekeepers and ignored by the Oscar race that was entirely undeserving of this exile. For all of my complaining about the lack of good, leading female roles, I came to realize that those roles DID exist. They came, they disappeared. The gatekeepers did not deem them worthy so the bloggers never caught them. The buzz never took root.

Probably the worst crime perpetrated on actresses last year was the total omission of Barbra Streisand in The Guilt Trip. The critics did not get it. The critics did not get it. Maybe not enough of them think it’s their job to fish out the rare opportunity for a woman in her ’70s to give a fully realized performance. Their job is simply to write up the film. And it seems to me that many times they measure comedies and genre films against an impossible standard. There were other problems with The Guilt Trip, namely the title. The film might seem like it’s making fun of a typical Jewish mother who nags her childman son as they drive across the country. Not only that, but the marketing backed this up. In their defense, how on earth do you sell a Seth Rogan movie that’s really about a woman in her 70s, to today’s generation? Where are the greased up twenty-somethings in bikinis? (Well, there is one scene). Where is the pot? Where are the dick jokes and fart jokes? How come they don’t make fun of her throughout? Isn’t she a hateful, awful OLD WOMAN?

How do you sell it? How do you tell people to give this movie a chance because its success could mean that it wasn’t the end of everything? You can’t, really. Every movie billboard lining the walls at the multiplex starred only men. 100% of them were male – the stories, the stars, the filmmakers.

It isn’t that The Guilt Trip was as good as, say, Beasts of the Southern Wild, but Streisand’s performance was worthy of attention. The narrow pathway to what can and can’t make it into the race is limiting diversity as much as the movie going public gets blamed. As we make our lists at the end of the year, we tend to rely on those that have the buzz already and that is usually fueled by the gatekeepers — critics and a few tastemakers — but in so doing we paint ourselves into a corner.

The Guilt Trip, with its terrible title and bad marketing, made just $37 million domestically and $41 million internationally. It was, of course, directed by a woman, Anne Fletcher — which explains its authenticity when it comes to telling the story from Streisand’s point of view. The kind of shit that passes for entertainment now makes upwards of $200 million. There is no incentive to make a movie like The Guilt Trip ever again. Who will get the blame for the film’s failure? That it starred a woman, even the former queen of the box office Barbra Streisand? Streisand has only starred in 19 movies throughout her career. She has been acting since 1968. 44 years. Not even Golden Globe buzz? What did she get instead? A Razzie nomination. What an insult. What a tragedy.

As a mother, The Guilt Trip resonated with me. As my own daughter goes through teenagerhood and begins that painful detachment to go live her own life. It has to happen but you are never prepared for it, never prepared for how you will irritate them, how stupid they seem to think you are. After years of being their favorite person in the world suddenly you are a major drag. The Guilt Trip is the only movie I’ve seen that deals with this in an honest way.

My big lament is that I passed on seeing The Guilt Trip last year. I passed because I trusted the gatekeepers. I trusted them that they knew what they were talking about when the film earned a 50% on Metacritic. I get that it isn’t the job of critics to right the wrongs of the film industry to allow the inclusion of roles about women. I get that their job isn’t to help shape the Oscar race to be more inclusive, more diverse and just better overall. Their job is to analyze movies according to their own tastes. In this case, they will all come at this film with their own personal biases, whether they admit them or not.

As I write this I know that many commenters will say “That was a bad movie.” You know, it might be. But that’s really beside the point. Bad movies get Oscar nominations every year. What’s more, bad movies can contain some fantastic aspects worth admiring. It was an acting showcase for Streisand, a rarity of the industry overall, and one of the few films to ever offer up such a rich portrait of a mother/son relationship. They took the risk of making it be a buddy comedy of all things. And while I personally would have cut the steak-eating scene, and definitely would have changed the title, I wish more people had not listened to the gatekeepers on this one. I wish they’d just taken a chance as I did on a flight home from the Cannes Film Fest to watch a movie I really didn’t want to see.