17 Days To Oscar: Just Keep Swimming

We’re just treading water now.

Warner Bros is still shoveling money upon Inception… which could well end up being the winner of the most Oscars this year… and which has virtually no chance at taking home any of the high glamor awards. (Really, the likely take for the film is Oscars for Sound Editing and Visual Effects. Sound Mixing, Cinematography, and Art Direction are likely to go with the Best Picture winner, for better or worse.)

Some are still pressing the case for Annette Bening… the same case that’s been made since the summer, when she was handed the win on the basis of a solid performance (hardly a career best) and popularity inside The Academy. Whether this led her to think she could win Best Actress without making any public effort or if this was her idea, she is suddenly turning up everywhere in this last couple of weeks. Well, not everywhere. When the season ends, her appearance count will still be under 20. She could win. Black Swan remains as divisive as ever and The Portman Express has been slowed by her pregnancy and her disinclination to play on the pregnancy to her benefit. But probably not.

The air has gone out of the The Social Network balloon, though anything could happen. Reports of The Fighter being a hard charger are wildly overblown… as they have been from the start. Good movie. Not a Best Picture winner. Take your two Oscars and be very pleased. The real question right now is whether The King’s Speech will win four Oscars or nine.

And here is my Social Network statement. Not winning Best Picture is not a tragedy. Obviously, everyone connected to the film would love to win. But in what I believe are honest conversations, I feel that the team involved with the film never saw this as the epic movie of the year, as much of the media has painted it as such. They wanted to make a strong movie, based on a strong script, with a strong director, and great acting. And that, they did.

The reason I have been saying forever that The Social Network was not going to win – and could still be proven wrong – is not the vagaries of the Oscar season, but that the appeal of the film is to a very specific group of people… who happen not to be the majority of people who vote in The Academy. Circumstances often lead the awards season in unexpected “couldn’t happen” directions. But The Social Network, Inception, The Fighter, Black Swan, and 127 Hours were never likely to win. Toy Story 3 always had a nearly impossible road because of Academy vagaries (the animated feature category). The Kids Are All Right had to become a cause… and even if it had, cause movies that are not December releases are prone to “cause exhaustion” and that is a lot to overcome.

If there was going to be a Hurt Locker this year, it would have been Winter’s Bone… but there is no Avatar to play against. Last year’s win – for a movie that deserved to win – is one of the greatest flukes in Oscar history and will, I believe, be seen in that perspective even more as time passes. Oscar just doesn’t choose their winner from the bottom 40% of the nominees. There are two exceptions in the last 30 years, from 1982 (Gandhi) and 1987 (The Last Emperor). Both were the #4 grossers of the 5. Both – 23 and 28 years ago, mind you – significantly outgrossed Hurt Locker. Both were period epics loaded with British accents.

Hmmm… a period piece with Brits… hmmm…

Moreover, in that same 30 years, only three more titles, making 5 total not from the top 2 slots, won Best Picture from the #3 box office slot. In other words, in more than 83% of the races, until we expanded to 10 nominees last year, one of the Top Two grossers won.

Obviously, 10 nominees changes the dynamic. This year, #1 and #2 are Toy Story 3 and Inception. I would argue that those two films are beneficiaries of the expanded field and were unlikely to be nominated in a 5-film race.

And that leaves us… in terms of eliminating other titles and considering the Academy’s preference for commercial success… your #3 grosser, True Grit, and your likely winner and #4 grosser, The King’s Speech, both of which play quite well with “the Academy demographic.”

And why isn’t True Grit your likely winner? Because, in my view, the pressure from producer Scott Rudin, who also produced The Social Network, was not laying heavily on Paramount. The studio, by almost everyone who covers the race, leaned towards The Fighter early and often. It also makes it harder when your writer/director/editor is not widely available for press, your third lead – the one real box office star in the film – is shooting another film and is mostly unavailable, and your male lead is carrying around last year’s Oscar and is also opening a big action film in the same period and has too many media demands on him. That leaves an awful lot of pressure on a 14-year-old girl to carry a movie to a Best Picture win.

And there is this… Harvey Weinstein pushes hard and the top of his team from The King’s Speech have worked their asses off. Colin Firth has been on display for five months. Tom Hooper, once he started spending a lot of time in LA in November, has been a constant and gracious ambassador for the film. And the not-front-running Geoffrey Rush has flown to the US for a few days here and there and then run back to Australia, where he has been in a stage show for the last few months. Helena Bonham Carter, who could win an Oscar on personality if she wanted to, has held back a bit, not anxious, I imagine, to be disappointed again.

Jesse, Andrew, and Sorkin have put it out there for Social Network. Justin Timberlake made a real effort. And Fincher, who really doesn’t want to sell, has been shooting another movie through most of the awards season. And he’s still done a fair amount of stuff. So has his team. Even Scott Rudin has been more available for media than usual. They have made the effort. But it just doesn’t seem that they have The Movie for the “academy demographic,” even if the movie is utterly respected by every Academy member to whom I have spoken.

And in the end, after all the shouting, it is about The Movie and The Academy Demographic. It is forever tempting to see The Academy as a monolith. It’s not. 5800 people is a lot of people. But the basic principles of movie marketing apply. Flukes happen, but there are movies that appeal to certain demographics and not to others. And The Academy, big as it is, has certain kinds of taste. They also nominated District 9 last year. So one can’t be too rigid about making assumptions.

One more thing… it’s been a pretty principled race. There have been a few brickbats flying about. But basically, the King’s Speech Nazi thing was not a factor and was not forced into being a factor. An even sillier discussion of misogyny in The Social Network never took off and was not pushed forward. I expected Speech to be attacked for not being weighty enough… but that claim never took air. No one felt a need to target Inception or Toy Story 3. The Fighter was not overanalyzed.

The biggest complaint was that Sony wanted it too much. Yawn.

Moreover, it was one of the nicest years for nominees that I can remember. There are always a few people who seem to have the wrong attitude. Not this year. It’s a young, smart, rising group of people in many categories. And that makes for a gentle journey. Hooray.

And once the ship has sailed at this late date, it’s usually gone. And if some of these races are legitimately within 100 votes between the winner and second place, there is still a tiny sliver of room to maneuver.

One of the nice things about The Academy is that idiots like me can theorize all day and the only empirical data that The Academy offers is the winners. “Just keep swimming. Just keep swimming, swimming swimming. What do we do? We swim, swim, swim.

Be Sociable, Share!

• 
•