The State of the Race: Turn on Your Heart Light

The Oscar race for Best Picture looks a little like the shelves at Kmart after a Black Monday sale. The reason for that is because so many of the year-end hopefuls did not turn out to be the Big Oscar Movies everyone had come to expect after years like 2012 and 2013. This one looks a little more like 2011, where there was only one movie that could win – it had no challengers.

This year, it doesn’t feel like anything can touch Richard Linklater’s consummate coming of age film, Boyhood.

The only film I think that has the stuff to potentially beat Boyhood in an 11th hour shocker would be Ava DuVernay’s Selma. That movie is on fire right now — where it will end remains a mystery. But it’s the only film I’ve seen that gives Boyhood some serious heat.

Pundits dutifully jotted down those they thought once upon a time COULD beat Boyhood, like Interstellar, like Unbroken, like Birdman. Those films have proven to be more divisive than anyone ever imagined, and there is no way you can win a consensus with a divisive film.

The Hurt Locker ( negative on RT=6/224)

The King’s Speech (negative on RT=14/240)

The Artist (negative on RT=4/229)

Argo (negative on RT=11/266)

12 Years a Slave (negative on RT=9/265)

Of the movies that can win this year:
Boyhood (negative on RT=3/215)
Selma (negative on RT so far=0/37)
Birdman (negative on RT=12/173)
Imitation Game (negative on RT=17/153)
Gone Girl (negative on RT=30/249)
Theory of Everything (negative on RT=30/154)

Best picture when you’re dealing 9 or 10 nominees means it’s the film you can’t hate, and the film that has built up a slow and steady consensus by year’s end, starting either back in the first part of the year (The Artist in Cannes) or hitting the race some time in August or September. This consensus is the Mary Bailey of the contenders – the reliable, trustworthy, lovable girl next door who’s been there the whole time. Violet Bick is usually the movie that comes along all flashy and exciting for a bit but sooner or later you realize she isn’t the girl for you.

There is safety in what you know and what you know is usually that one movie has withstood the long and heated months of Oscar punditry, critical consensus, costly publicity. This is why it’s always hard to get your foot in the door as a late breaking movie. There isn’t time to build consensus because no one really knows what it is yet. No one knows if they like the movie or not. Remember Life of Pi and the Academy’s supposed reaction to it, according to Scott Feinberg. We all discounted it. I remember writing think pieces about how the Academy would never go for it. But time happened to it. Time and money. The movie started picking up word of mouth once the initial negative buzz wore off. People started talking about the movie as the movie and not as an Oscar contender. Ultimately the movie would take home a boatload of Oscars, including Best Director. It needed time to settle in the consensus to become the sure bet that it ended up being.

Because our Oscar race isn’t yet written, we still can’t really define our consensus beyond what we think we know about how “they” will vote. What will determine it better will be the upcoming guild votes, the Producers Guild, which is currently the only voting body that mirrors the Academy’s preferential system. But unlike the Academy, they have ten slots for nominations, and not five. Still, they are pretty close. The Directors Guild almost always gets a movie in for Best Picture. Almost always. The only time they haven’t since the Best Picture count expanded was once, in 2011, with David Fincher and the Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. That decision is the primary reason pundits like Kris Tapley, Scott Feinberg and Dave Karger have omitted Fincher and Gone Girl this year. They are assuming that it’s another popular movie that the Academy will reject. I would not be that surprised either, truth be told. I still believe Dragon Tattoo was easily one of the best films of 2011 — here is how it went down guild/Academy-wise:

So why did Bridesmaids and Dragon Tattoo get supplanted at the Academy with Tree of Life and Extremely Loud, Incredibly Close? I can tell you that with the latter the largest branch of the Academy otherwise known as the actors jammed it through. You can always tell when the actors have their say because the film will have a Best Picture nomination and only one acting nomination. The same thing happened with The Blind Side the previous year.

Either Bridesmaids or Dragon Tattoo should have, by rights, taken Extremely Loud’s spot. I would also argue that War Horse was not up to the standards of either Spielberg’s body of work or the Academy’s choices. This year, these two slots could be taken up by Unbroken and American Sniper because inside the insular world of Academy voters, with only five slots for nominating, and not the freedom of ten, they tend to “vote with their heart.” Remember the King’s Speech’s brilliant campaign strategy, “Some movies make you feel”?

Neither War Horse nor Extremely Loud earned anywhere near as much as Bridesmaids did, which is currently one of the highest grossing R-rated films ever made. I don’t know if I can argue for an Academy that would have picked Bridesmaids, but I can say that their ultimate choices illustrates just how insular and out of touch with the American public they are. They are managed and handled by publicists so carefully that it’s as though they have no idea what’s really going on anymore. Oscar Island is shrinking by the year.

It really comes down to this in the 11th hour:

And this image, circulated recently by the Academy:

Now, let’s look at the following year to see if our ‘Heart Light’ metaphor holds true:

Amour was the exception, and it definitely leans towards “heart light” vote, as opposed to analytic, meaning its position as a number one film outweighed its popularity with the consensus overall. Moonrise Kingdom and Skyfall, one popular with audiences and one not, were zotzed. It’s hard to imagine your average Academy member walking around saying Moonrise Kingdom was his favorite film of the year – sure, there would be some, but not enough apparently. Now that the buzz has mostly died down from 2012, it’s hard to imagine Moonrise not taking Amour’s spot. Love Amour though I do, it seems like an odd choice for such a large consensus.

We’re still looking at Dragon Tattoo being the one exception that got a PGA, DGA and an Eddie nod but did not get a Best Picture nod.

The two that were eliminated this time around were Saving Mr. Banks (hurt by a scandal involving the lead character), and August: Osage County which the actors failed to jam through. Philomena was the “Amour” pick, the one that came from out of nowhere and landed in the Best Picture race, though pundits kept saying “watch out for…”

So that brings us to this year. It’s still too early to start stacking up the guilds but in a few weeks we will do just that. The reason that I started with 2011 was because that’s when the Academy instituted the “anywhere from 5 to 9” rule, but gave voters just five slots for nominations. With ten slots, predicting them would be far easier and I suspect, in such an instance, Bridesmaids, Dragon Tattoo and Skyfall would have made the list, thus satisfying the desire by the Academy to widen their scope from their insular little world of emoticon travel to acknowledge what was happening “out there” in the world, too. But alas, the new system merely echoes their narrow choices without expanding them in any significant way.

Your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to find the Amour/Tree of Life/Philomena in the crowd. The only thing I could find that unites these three films in that they tend towards emotion. Only one had a Golden Globe nomination, only one made AFI’s list, and one won the Foreign Language Globe. Beyond that, though, there is not any kind of precursor support that would lend itself to consensus building.

The only thing I can come up with is the screener pile. Once home for the holidays, families of Academy members gather round the hearth fire. They begin to contemplate the big things. Each of these three films is about growing old in some fashion and looking at one’s past. Two of them confront mortality. Sitting around with your family there or not there, alone or with loved ones, Christmas and Hannukah does kind of ping the bigger issues, perhaps.

Academy members are a lot older, by and large, than people think. Attend an Academy screening some time and you’ll see what I mean. That generation, the elders, really made the difference with the surprise picks going back to 2011.

So what movie is going to turn on the heart light of the senior set, infuse their holiday experience with profound thoughts of mortality, love, a journey into the past but is also a film that will likely be overlooked by the major guilds, and one that hasn’t yet found its consensus.

For the most part, there are one or two on the Gurus of Gold charts that were keyed into these potential surprises. Amour was chosen by many leading up to Christmas. Philomena
was predicted by many. It wasn’t a complete shock but more of a shock were the ones left off, like Inside Llewyn Davis last year, Best Exotic Marigold the year before.

The guild consensus does not necessarily indicate how the insular Academy, an older, more sentimental voting body will go 100% of the time. We can gauge maybe the top six of seven, but it’s hard to predict all of them under the new system.

In the years I’ve been watching the Oscar race I have never seen such a stark disconnect between Academy voters and the rest of the ticket buying public out there. I’m not really sure what they’re supposed to represent anymore since it seems to reflect such a specific taste of a certain type of person. I don’t think we can say with confidence that they reflect the industry’s taste overall, and I don’t think they, in any way, reflect the taste of audiences. They merely play the Oscar game.

My current predictions:

Best Picture
1. Boyhood
2. Birdman
3. The Theory of Everything
4. The Imitation Game
5. The Grand Budapest Hotel
6. Selma
7. Gone Girl

Heart light movies:
Unbroken
Interstellar
Wild
Love is Strange

Clint Eastwood wild card:
American Sniper

Movies that could struggle under the current system:
Nightcrawler
Whiplash
Foxcatcher
Into the Woods
A Most Violent Year
Mr. Turner
The Homesman

The reason that I have Gone Girl chosen, even making a pretty good case that they have to have something against David Fincher to have not voted in Dragon Tattoo, is that I don’t think Gone Girl IS like Dragon Tattoo. Sure, it’s in the range of movies the Academy punishes for being too commercial, too successful and above all: ABOUT WOMEN (note how under the new system, films about women are more rare than ever) but I have to think they will pick the film because it is going to be one of the more entertaining films in the screener pile, given that it’s lasted this long. But don’t you be like me. Follow the safe pundits like Tapley, Feinberg and Karger on this one.