One list:
The English Patient
How Green Was My Valley
American Beauty
Another list:
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Casino
The Shawshank Redemption
Do you spot the difference? The first list are movies were Oscar winners for best picture, the second list are freaking awesome. The Academy Awards were last week, and there’s a lot of either joy (“Karen Bigelow! Whoo!”) or hand-wringing (“Avatar should have won because *I* want to have sex with a blue person!”) about the awards. My personal favorite article is here, but you can google hundreds of them in the last ten days alone. The arguments are either descriptive (“Movie/actor/director won because the Academy likes drama”) or normative (“Movie/actor/director should have won because the Academy should favor drama”) at their base. You’ll talk to people who loved the Hurt Locker and people who think it is once again a case of the Academy snubbing a really important movie. I don’t actually watch the Academy Awards because I only like to see people cry if I caused it.
Between the arguments, it is important to remember the following things:
1) The Academy Awards voters are all really, really old. Older than dinosaurs. They’re trilobite-old. Thus, they enjoy the kinds of things that people of such advanced years do, such as: drama, distinguished performances, war movies, and cream of wheat. What they don’t like are any new-fangled special effects, so Star Wars, the Indiana Jones movies, Avatar, those are all right out. The only special effects they like are ones that bring them back in time, so Titanic and Forrest Gump get passes.
2) The Academy Awards are like flowers given to your girlfriend when you screw up. They do not reward present behavior; they reward people who got jobbed on awesome performances by the Academy before. Al Pacino won for the Godfather, not for Scent of a Woman. Martin Scorsese didn’t win for The Departed (although it was awesome), he won for every other awesome thing he did before that. Jennifer Connelly didn’t win for A Beautiful Mind; she won for Labyrinth. That’s true. I sincerely think that.
3) The Oscars don’t matter at all. Really. The dresses worn to the ceremony are more relevant than the awards themselves. All due respect to winners and the nominated, but butterflies flapping their wings have more to do with weather patterns than the awards do to the long term reception of the movie, or to their gross. I’m happy when the smaller release or foreign movies and actors get some love and sell a few more tickets because of the attention, but other than that, pffffft.
And, finally,
4) Screw Avatar. I won’t go into all the weird sexual/colonial/plagiarism issues; that’s been covered ad nauseum elsewhere. I actually enjoyed the movie, but wouldn’t call it my favorite. It was a beautiful movie (the cinematography Oscar was deserved, I think), but I’m I gonna re-watch it? Not without chemical stimulation. It was ok, and that’s about it. Hell, Captain Eo has had a greater emotional resonance with me than Avatar, if we really want to parse out 3D movies. It was a B minus movie that made oodles and oodles of money; it was the cinematic equivalent of Hootie and the Blowfish. Does anyone break out their old Hootie CD anymore? Only Academy Awards voters.
As part of my long standing desire to do something both detrimental to my emotional health and socially irrelevant, I had a long standing goal of watching 10 movies starring Sandra Bullock. I finished the twentieth this weekend; combined with the two movies mentioned above, I think the movies I watched have now gotten me out of about one thousand years of purgatory.
