Oscar Nominations

[Green Lantern]

My favorite day of the year! (Okay, not really.) They announced the Oscar nominations this morning and there are some good films getting recognitions. I thought it was pretty cool that with the expanded Best Picture category, (they upped it from 5 to 10 films this year) both DISTRICT 9 and A SERIOUS MAN got nominations.

Of the 7 Best Picture nominees that I've seen (Damn it, I was hoping to have seen all 10 before they were announced) my pick is THE HURT LOCKER for Best Picture. Here's a complete list of the nominees: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/35196979...ainment-movies Thoughts?

[MarkGrace]

The only best picture nom. that I'm dying to see is The Hurt Locker. Saw Up, The Blind Side, Up In The Air, Inglorious Basterds, A Serious Man...and I think that's all. I've been trying to see Previous for a while, but haven't pulled it off. Of those I've seen, I'd probably take Up In the Air. We'll see if The Hurt Locker can displace that selection once I see it.

The expansion to 10 films is nice as it allows more films to receive recognition, but if it's going to water things down to the point that The Blind Side gets a nomination, let's do away with it already. But that just may be the fault of the academy as there are a bunch of films out there that were more worthy of the 10 spot.

[MarkGrace]

Just read this:

by Linda Holmes

There weren't a lot of enormous surprises in this morning's Oscar nominations, in which the leaders are Avatar and The Hurt Locker, with nine each. (Get the full report here.) Nevertheless, the expanded field of 10 Best Picture nominees really did have at least some of the intended effect -- which was to include more well-received commercial successes alongside the smaller films that have been making up the field in recent years.

One rough way to estimate the effects of the expanded field is to cross-reference the 10 Best Picture nominees with the five Best Director nominees, and guess that in a normal year their films are the ones that probably would have gotten the Best Picture nods. That would make the nominees Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Precious, Inglourious Basterds, and Up In The Air.

So the five other nominees on the list are The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, A Serious Man, and Up. Of those, An Education and A Serious Man are relatively traditional nominees, but in a normal year, The Blind Side is exactly the kind of movie that might earn an acting nomination for Sandra Bullock -- which it did -- while getting passed over for Best Picture. District 9, meanwhile, wasn't a Transformers-size smash hit or anything, but it did make $115 million.

And then, of course, there's Up, which got the Best Picture nomination many believed WALL-E should have gotten last year and didn't.

What this means for the box-office performance of the field, after the jump ...

Combined with the fact that Inglourious Basterds and Avatar both made plenty of money, you wind up with a situation where five nominees have already made at least $100 million. Now look at last year: Only The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button had made $100 million by the time it was nominated for Best Picture. (Slumdog Millionaire far surpassed that mark later, but not by the time of its nomination.)

Bottom line: If the idea was to give viewers more of a rooting interest by nominating more movies they'd actually seen, it just may work.

Of course things weren't guaranteed to go that way. Some observers thought the nominations would just dig deeper into the same pool of art-house movies that get nominated every year. If the nominations that went to District 9, Up, and The Blind Side had gone to A Single Man, The Messenger and Crazy Heart, you'd have an entirely different situation -- and the experiment, as an audience-goosing technique, would probably be viewed as a failure.

The biggest slice of controversy will undoubtedly arise over the Best Picture nomination for The Blind Side, a tear-jerking, feel-good story made no more palatable to many by the fact that it's based on an absolutely true tear-jerking, feel-good set of facts. (It's not helped in this regard by the fact that what nuance it contains was mercilessly sucked out by whoever cut the trailer, which makes it look far more humorless and pedantic than it actually is.)

So while Sandra Bullock's Best Actress nomination was widely expected, the movie's nomination was not. (Note that it was one of only two Best Picture nominees -- the other being Avatar -- to see its screenplay not nominated.)

The acting nominations contained few surprises, with maybe Matt Damon's nomination for Invictus (a movie that had lots of early awards buzz that largely evaporated as soon as people saw it) being the closest thing there was to one.

But away from the most highly publicized battles, there are some puzzlers in the animation categories. No animated feature nomination for Hayao Miyazaki's widely praised Ponyo, with an unexpected nomination for the little-seen The Secret Of Kells. Moreover, there was no animated short film nomination for Partly Cloudy, the beautiful little film (with the storks and the clouds) that ran alongside Up.

On the whole, not a surprising batch of nominations -- but one that probably will accomplish the goal of making the awards a little more meaningful to people who primarily see movies at multiplexes. Which, after all, is where the great majority of American filmgoing actually takes place.

http://www.npr.org/blogs/monkeysee/2010/02/an_expanded_oscar_field_lets_i.html

Pulling big commercial successes into the field of ten to draw wider interest seems to make sense given the sagging interest in the Oscars.

[Babs]

The only best picture nom. that I'm dying to see is The Hurt Locker. Saw Up, The Blind Side, Up In The Air, Inglorious Basterds, A Serious Man...and I think that's all. I've been trying to see Previous for a while, but haven't pulled it off. Of those I've seen, I'd probably take Up In the Air. We'll see if The Hurt Locker can displace that selection once I see it.

The expansion to 10 films is nice as it allows more films to receive recognition, but if it's going to water things down to the point that The Blind Side gets a nomination, let's do away with it already.

Not to mention drag the presentations out. Can they get any longer??

[TripletDaddy]

Expanding the field is weak.

A blatant attempt to try to restore some relevancy to the Oscars, particularly in the youth demographic (i think it will have the opposite effect because it will make the ceremony even longer than it is now).

Also, a convenient way for movie studios to cross promote even more of their movies. 10 movies being nominated for Best Picture? what for? The public doesn't vote on these things anyway, so what is the point of expanding the field?

[MarkGrace]

Not to mention drag the presentations out. Can they get any longer??

Yeah, that's not going to help things. I only watch about a half hour of it anyway (trying to catch the big awards).

[Babs]

Yeah, that's not going to help things. I only watch about a half hour of it anyway (trying to catch the big awards).

You're ahead of me. I just watch the red carpet and turn it off when the awards start. The awards update live online, anyway.

[Green Lantern]

Expanding the field is weak.

A blatant attempt to try to restore some relevancy to the Oscars, particularly in the youth demographic (i think it will have the opposite effect because it will make the ceremony even longer than it is now).

Also, a convenient way for movie studios to cross promote even more of their movies. 10 movies being nominated for Best Picture? what for? The public doesn't vote on these things anyway, so what is the point of expanding the field?

Yeah, studios love slapping on those "Best Picture Nominee" stickers on their DVDs. Here's the thing though, the Oscars have always just been, at heart, a big sloppy self-interested love fest carrying a modicum of respectability. Who cares though? They're fun to watch, and if they can get a lot of people watching the ceremony, and then some of those people go rent HURT LOCKER or A SERIOUS MAN, that's a net positive in my book.

And it's hard for me to be down about the whole enterprise in a year when the Dude himself is probably going to win Best Actor.

[Donuthole]

Yeah, studios love slapping on those "Best Picture Nominee" stickers on their DVDs. Here's the thing though, the Oscars have always just been, at heart, a big sloppy self-interested love fest carrying a modicum of respectability. Who cares though? They're fun to watch, and if they can get a lot of people watching the ceremony, and then some of those people go rent HURT LOCKER or A SERIOUS MAN, that's a net positive in my book.

And it's hard for me to be down about the whole enterprise in a year when the Dude himself is probably going to win Best Actor.

Is it really that much easier to hit Caps Lock than to hit the " " keys? Every time I read your movie posts I feel like you are screaming the titles at me in an attempt to convince me of something. I know that's not the case, but I'm not having much success training myself to think "movie title, not shouting" upon first glance.

[creekster]

Is it really that much easier to hit Caps Lock than to hit the " " keys? Every time I read your movie posts I feel like you are screaming the titles at me in an attempt to convince me of something. I know that's not the case, but I'm not having much success training myself to think "movie title, not shouting" upon first glance.

If you always think it is shouting then you are letting the shouters win.

[MarkGrace]

Is it really that much easier to hit Caps Lock than to hit the " " keys? Every time I read your movie posts I feel like you are screaming the titles at me in an attempt to convince me of something. I know that's not the case, but I'm not having much success training myself to think "movie title, not shouting" upon first glance.

Ha. Every time I read a Green Lantern post I think "why does he have to put the title in all caps?" I kind of get the same shouting effect.

But I've never been inclined to say anything.

[Green Lantern]

Is it really that much easier to hit Caps Lock than to hit the " " keys? Every time I read your movie posts I feel like you are screaming the titles at me in an attempt to convince me of something. I know that's not the case, but I'm not having much success training myself to think "movie title, not shouting" upon first glance.

LOL. Sorry man. It's not that it's any faster. It's just a stylistic holdover from this site I used to write reviews for. The house style was all-caps for movie titles and now it's just habit. But if it also achieves some kind of exclamatory emphasis that makes you pay attention, that's just gravy.

[Green Lantern]

Ha. Every time I read a Green Lantern post I think "why does he have to put the title in all caps?" I kind of get the same shouting effect.

But I've never been inclined to say anything.

Great, now I'm all self-conscious.

[MarkGrace]

Great, now I'm all self-conscious.

Oh, it not like it really bothered me. Like you said:

But if it also achieves some kind of exclamatory emphasis that makes you pay attention, that's just gravy.

[LiveCoug]

Just so everyone is aware, Funk hates Avatar. There, it's out there. Whew.