I don’t give a crap about the Oscars this year. I don’t suspect I will ever deeply care again. I suppose there comes a time in every film fan’s life when they realize the Oscars are mostly crap. My disillusionment came over the course of the last couple years, and this tale begins in what was one of the Academy’s strongest years in recent memory: 2009. At this time I was but a college freshman. I hadn’t started this blog yet, meaning that all my film-related thoughts were forced to remain in the prison that is my head. I can’t imagine such a world. Anyway, it was a year when my young, impressionable mind was fooled into thinking all the Academy’s decisions were actually credible and important. For a year, I respected them and I was convinced that they were moving in the right direction. Then, over the course of the next two years, it all went downhill until I reached my current state of ambivalence.
As you likely recall, the 2009 Oscar race came down to two films, as it so often does: Avatar and The Hurt Locker. For a while, it seemed like Avatar would be the clear winner. It was well-received, a technological marvel, and—most importantly—made a gazillion dollars. The Hurt Locker was undoubtedly the underdog: it was a challenging and exhilarating character study that cost no money and made just as little. However, it was bold filmmaking about something that mattered. In other words: not your usual Academy fare. When I saw it that summer during its initial release, I loved it, but I didn’t think for a second it would be an Oscar nominee for Best Picture. Same goes for my favorite film of that year: Inglourious Basterds. While the Academy has showed they aren’t afraid of nominating Quentin Tarantino, I wasn’t convinced they’d recognize that one. I was wonderfully wrong on both counts, even if it means they went up against Avatar.
A couple years after Avatar’s release, everyone now seems to agree that while it was a revelatory film in the realm of technology and 3-D and all that, the story and the script left much to be desired. A lot of people (ahem, myself) even felt this way back when the movie came out, though the box office receipts were proof that the public at large were quite in love with it. In 2009, Avatar would have been the easy choice for Best Picture. I had more or less accepted this. I wouldn’t have been over-the-moon in love with the choice, but at the time I figured it is what it is. Then, to my infinite joy, the buzz for The Hurt Locker started to heat up. I still never believed it would win, but I was happy that it was simply in the conversation. Then it won, and I was over the moon with excitement. In my naïve little brain, I was convinced this marked a turning point for the Oscars. They had an opportunity to take the simple way out with Avatar, but instead they chose the better, slightly more dangerous choice. Perhaps we had finally reached an era when the Academy would actually choose the more important film! The dream was alive!
Then… well, we all know what happened the next year. Instead of marking the beginning of a new, more glorious era, the win for The Hurt Locker turned out to be the exception and not the rule. In 2010, the most acclaimed film to come out was The Social Network, and justifiably so. I have already killed millions of Internet trees writing about this movie, so I won’t blabber on about why it is great. It just is, and if you read this blog you probably agree with me. If you don’t agree, you are wrong and can suck it. This is a movie that showed up on everyone’s top 10 list last year, and yet when the Academy sat down to vote they gave Best Picture and Best Director to The King’s Speech. Now, I liked The King’s Speech a great deal. I thought it was a terrific historical drama, but it is hardly a piece of filmmaking on the level of The Social Network. It was just the safest choice, and for that reason I came away disappointed. A year after they took a leap forward, they took a few steps back.
Besides some unfortunate winners, last year wasn’t a terrible year as far as nominations go. Of my top 10 movies of the year, eight were nominated for Best Picture, and this was coming off one of the best years the Oscars ever had. While there was a lot of bad on the Academy’s part last year on the night of the ceremony itself, there was enough good leading up to it to hold me over. However, this was all just prelude for the lackluster crop of nominees they threw at us this year. Of my top 10 movies this year, but two are nominated for Best Picture. Many of them were shut out of the Oscars altogether. Instead, we got only the most unthreatening choices. I don’t want to pretend that I hate all of this year’s nominees—some are great, most I liked just fine—but just about all of them fit within the stereotypical parameters of “Oscar bait.” (Only The Tree of Life could be considered a bold choice.) All this seems to be leading up to the most uninteresting ceremony in years, which will almost certainly end with the award for Best Picture going to The Artist.
I’d like to clarify that a bad year for the Oscars does not equal a bad year for the movies. Likewise, a good year for the Oscars does not equal a good year for the movies. Take a look at 2010, which had a lot of good at the top but once you got past the obvious choices (The Social Network, Winter’s Bone, Black Swan, etc.) there wasn’t a whole lot there to latch onto. 2009 had slightly more depth, but not a whole lot that can be described as an all-time masterpiece. (Though I maintain that Inglourious Basterds is one of Tarantino’s best.) However, as I said above, I think 2009 and 2010 were both very good years for the Oscars. Now we’re up to this year, which had a great deal of depth and several movies I’ll be remembering for quite some time. The problem is: not many of them were given any Academy attention, and as a result it has—in my eyes—become a bad year for the Oscars. Got it? Good.
All of this could be forgiven if The Tree of Life wins Best Picture later this month, but I have very little faith it will go to anything that isn’t Michel Hazanavicius’ fun-but-gimmicky tribute to silent movies. His film is charming enough, but the Oscar for Best Picture is an award that should go to a film that exemplifies the best of modern filmmaking and is about something that resonates with society as a whole. Or something. I’m flexible, but I like to think I’ll know it when I see it. The Artist is not it. In fact, I’d argue Avatar—flaws and all—is an even more “important” film than The Artist, which I think will be forgotten by this time next year.
As much as this blog post likely comes off as a lot of whining, I want to reassure you that I’m not all that angry about it. Not anymore. When The Social Network lost last year, I was kind of angry. But much like the time I watched my Buffalo Bills lose to the Dallas Cowboys on Monday Night Football way back in high school—it was a last-second field goal, don’t remind me—this moment acted as a form of initiation. At that moment, I fully understood what it was like to be a Bills fan. (I mean, my dad was at the infamous “wide right” Super Bowl. How can I complain about watching one random game on television?) Likewise, when The King’s Speech won last year I came to terms with the fact that this is what the Oscars always were. Years like 2009 exist just to fool us. This year’s crop of nominations confirms this, and thus I have now become just another movie blogger with the opinion that the Oscars don’t matter, and they are mostly out of touch with all the great filmmaking going on. They prefer to just give the award to something that seems familiar. I’ll admit this is not a revelatory thought, but only recently has my brain come to fully accept this.
Make no mistake: I will still watch the Oscars. Even the movie bloggers and critics who are the loudest with their anger will watch the crap out of the ceremony. Even if we’re burying it, we still kind of love it. We sit waiting for the year they’ll get it right, and when they finally do (like in 2009) it’s a great feeling. When they don’t, well, whatever. At least it will all be over soon, and we can get back to just talking about movies without worrying about golden statuettes. Safe House isn’t going to watch itself, you know.
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