Gurus o’ Gold: November 8, 2011

Rank	Last Chart	Best Picture	Breznican	Ellwood	Hammond	Harris	Howell	Olsen	Poland	Pond	Stone	Tapley	Thompson	VanAirsdale	Wloszczyna	Votes	Total
1	1	The Descendants	2	1	2	5	1	1	5	1	1	3	1	1	1	13	144
2	2	The Artist	4	2	6	2	3	2	1	2	2	2	3	3	2	13	135
3	3	War Horse	3	5	1	3	2	3	3	5	5	1	8	2	6	13	122
5	4	Midnight In Paris	6	6	3	7	4	6	4	3	6	6	4	5	9	13	100
4	5	The Help	8	9	5	1	5	4	6	7	8	5	5	4	4	13	98
6	7	Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close	11	4	4	6	10	7	8	4	10	4	7	7	5	13	82
8	6	Moneyball	10		7	8	6	5		8	3	9	2	6	7	11	72
7	9	The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo	1		12	9		2	2	9	4			8	3	9	67
9	8	Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy	7	3	10	11	9	12	7	12	7	8	10		10	12	50
10		The Tree Of Life	12	7		4	7			10	11	10	6		12	9	38
		J Edgar	9	10			8	11				12	9	9	8	8	28
	10	The Ides of March		8	9		11			6		7		10		6	27
		Hugo			8	10		8	12	11	9	11		11	11	9	26
		Young Adult	5					9	9							3	16
		The Iron Lady		10	11											2	5
		We Bought A Zoo						10	10							2	4
		My Week With Marilyn						10						12		2	4
		Drive		11							12					2	3
		Shame					12		11							2	3
One Vote Wonders
		Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Pt. 2		12												1	1
		Bridesmaids				12										1	1

Rank	Last Chart	Best Actor	Breznican	Ellwood	Hammond	Harris	Howell	Olsen	Poland	Pond	Stone	Tapley	Thompson	VanAirsdale	Wloszczyna	Votes	Total
1	1	George Clooney The Descendants	4	1	1	2	1	1	2	1	3	1	1	1	1	13	71
2	2	Jean Dujardin The Artist	2	3	2	1	4	2	1	2	2	3	4	2	2	13	61
3	4	Leonardo DiCaprio J. Edgar	6	2	3	5	3	6		4	1	2	2	6	3	12	41
4	3	Brad Pitt Moneyball	3		4	6	2	4		3	5	4	3	4	6	11	33
5		Michael Fassbender Shame	1	5	6		5	5	3	5		6	5	3	4	11	29
	5	Gary Oldman Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy		4	5		6	3	4	6	6	5		5	5	10	21
		Michael Shannon Take Shelter	5	6		3			6							4	8
		Woody Harrelson Rampart				4					4		6			3	7
One Vote Wonders
		Jeremy Irvine War Horse							5							1	2

Rank	Best Animated Feature	Breznican	Ellwood	Hammond	Harris	Olsen	Poland	Pond	Stone	Tapley	Thompson	VanAirsdale	Wloszczyna	Votes	Total
1	Rango	1	1	1	4	2	2	1	2	1	1	1	2	12	65
2	The Adventures of Tintin	2	4	2	2	1	1	4	1	5		2	1	11	52
3	Puss In Boots	4	3	4	1	5	4	2			2	3		9	35
4	Cars 2	3		5	3	4		3	3	6	4		4	9	28
5	Arthur Christmas		2	3			3	6		2	3			6	23
	Rio		5	6						4	5	5	3	6	14
	Happy Feet 2	6					5		4			4	6	5	10
	Kung Fu Panda 2					3			5	3				3	10
	Winnie The Pooh	5	6			6			6					4	5
	Chico & Rita				5							6		2	3
	Gnomeo & Juliet										6		5	2	3
One Vote Wonders
	A Cat In Paris							5						1	2
	Alois Nebel				6									1	1

Be Sociable, Share!

Posted in Awards Update, Awards Watch, Gurus o' Gold, MCN Originals, Movie City News | 12 Comments »

12 Responses to “Gurus o’ Gold: November 8, 2011”

movielocke says:

November 8, 2011 at 1:31 pm

the thing I loved about ten nominees is that there was room for films like Midnight in Paris and Tree of Life.

Although Midnight is in the top five now, we all know that not a single one of these gurus would include it in their top five if there were only five BP nominees.

With five nominees you have the boring, lifeless lock-in of the Harvey era of Best Picture nominees. Descendants/ELIAC style oscar bait and crowd-pleaser warhorse/help style oscar bait.

Sadly, it looks like we’ll probably trend more back towards boredom than lively and varied. Stupid academy. 10 BP nominees was the best move they’ve made in decades and they can’t even commit to it for a decade.

Would love to see a director chart from the gurus, and the supporting categories seem much more volatile and wide open this year than in recent memory.
K. Bowen says:

November 8, 2011 at 3:07 pm

It would be a joke if The Tree of Life misses, particularly behind some of these films. But at least it is no longer behind Ides of March.
Keil Shults says:

November 8, 2011 at 3:36 pm

@movielocke:

I personally can’t wait for The Descendants, and have never felt that any of Payne’s films were Oscar bait. Maybe it just happens to be a great movie, the studio realizes it, and so they’re trying to market it for a mass audience.
Keil Shults says:

November 8, 2011 at 3:41 pm

Also…

I’m a die-hard pre-2000s Woody Allen fan. I even wrote him a letter in high school and received an autographed postcard for my troubles. But Midnight in Paris, while indeed being a delight and one of his best of the past 15 years, is still little more than a good time at the movies. It pales in comparison to his greatest works, and if it weren’t for it’s comeback nature and relatively impressive box office, we wouldn’t be throwing the phrase Best Picture anywhere near it. Then again, I haven’t seen enough of this year’s films to say if it could slide into the Top 7 or 10 simply due to slim pickings.
movieman says:

November 8, 2011 at 4:00 pm

Go, go Leo!
movielocke says:

November 8, 2011 at 4:44 pm

Other than his first film, Payne hasn’t made a non-oscar-bait film.
KMS says:

November 8, 2011 at 6:46 pm

You’re an idiot.
movielocke says:

November 8, 2011 at 8:21 pm

Only if you think Oscar-Bait is a term that can only be used in a pejorative or derogatory sense. Payne’s films are made with an eye towards prestigious awards, as are many other films.

Oscar-bait comes in many forms, it is not limited to films you don’t like and you can’t create a blanket exception for films you like. Sideways was one of the biggest critical Darlings of the past decade. It is Oscar Bait. Just being beloved by critics does not mean a film is no longer Baity.

To think that Social Network is not Oscar Bait but King’s Speech is Oscar bait is nothing more than wishful thinking and willful blindness.

But if you just want to use the term pejoritively to tear down films you dislike you’re doing nothing more than pushing an agenda. Descendants is every bit as baity as War Horse, but to only turn the derogatory scorn of the appellation “Oscar Bait” on one of the baity films is absolutely ridiculous.
Glamourboy says:

November 9, 2011 at 8:11 am

Movielocke–there’s one fatal flaw in your theory–and that is, there is no way that you could possibly know their intentions. You weren’t in the room. You were never privy to one conversation. I’ve worked with some pretty talented people and not once have I ever heard anyone talk about making a project to get an Oscar–they all talk about wanting to make the best movie possible. Oscar bait is one of those terms that was invented by something like Movieline or Premiere magazine. It kind of makes you sound silly to suggest that directors sit around and decide one day that they are going to make Oscar bait.
movielocke says:

November 9, 2011 at 12:47 pm

Right because explicitly stating “we’re making an oscar bait movie!” is the only way an oscar bait movie gets made. Part of the game is to never admit it, even if it is why your movie gets financed. But that’s both snarky and irrelevant, no artist/filmmaker wants to believe this about themselves either, so it isn’t even a game, they try very hard to just tell a story (there is no intent to make something baity), and the studio tries very hard to just sell a product.

Neither Alexander Payne or Steven Spielberg ever had or will have that thought, “I’ll make some oscar bait,” But this year they both made oscar bait movies.

You’re mistaking the intent of the artists & filmmakers with the audience and environment into which a film is received. Films don’t happen in an a vacuum, reception of the film often defines what the film is as much as artistic intent: if people hate it, it’s a bad film; if people love it, it’s an instant classic. Obviously there is a lot of variations and films aren’t restricted to such a simplistic binary, but broadly we all know that reception matters–and an Oscar is a metric of reception as much as anything else (as are other awards, which measure peer, audience or critical receptions, respectively).

Certain films will always be labeled baity because of how they are released. If Shutter Island had been released in November rather than February it would have been labeled baity, it probably would have earned nods in editing and cinematography and it would have made a swing through the awards circuit, it would have scored higher on critical lists and awards and gotten some love from the guilds. It would be oscar bait.

I don’t think there’s an issue of intent at all in terms of making movies that are baity by the filmmakers. But I do think that a lot of people who do the labeling impugn ‘nefarious’ intent upon those films they decide to dislike. There is not a baitiness purity test. This is the real issue with the term, imo, people use Oscar Bait to impugn a filmmaker with some icky intent and create a binary that says some other filmmaker is somehow more pure and lacking in the above intent. I say that its the environment and reception that determines whether or not a film is baity. This is the only way to use the term that makes any sense, every single artist ever will always declaim that they never had any baity intent and most of the time they’re probably being truthful, but despite all the denials, oscar bait films continue to be made year in and year out. How are all these baity films being made if no artist ever intends to make one? I say it is because baitiness is an extrinsic quality, not an intrinsic quality.
Keil Shults says:

November 9, 2011 at 2:34 pm

I won’t bother reading all you’ve written, especially now that I’ve spotted the word “baity” in one of your paragraphs.

All I will say is that if you think “a movie with Paul Giamatti, that guy from Wings, and that forgotten actress from Candyman — about two guys who go to wine country to celebrate the impending groom’s last week of freedom before marriage” seems like Oscar bait, you obviously don’t understand the term.

The same can be said for Election, which was an MTV-produced satire starring Matthew Broderick and Reese Witherspoon (before that name meant anything), about a high school brat running for student office, her annoyed and sexually frustrated teacher, the dopey jock who gets in the mix, and his pissy, lesbian sister. Again, if you think that’s Oscar bait, you’re more misguided than I imagined.

I would argue that About Schmidt and The Descendants read more like Oscar bait, given the plot lines and actors involved.
Neil says:

November 13, 2011 at 8:00 am

I just don’t get how “Midnight In Paris” is always in the conversation. I am like Keil Shults in that I have always been open to any of Woody’s films and WAS almost religious in my devotion to his past works. I can accept “Midnight” being good but only because everyone else says so (maybe I am too old), but I draw the line at it being better than that. I ENJOYED “Vicky” much more.