Noel: At the end of last year, I wrote a long blog post about how much I used to love the end-of-the-year list-making/list-reading process, and how I thought it had started to go sour. Well, now we're moving into another list season, and I'm determined to keep a more positive attitude about why we critics go on list benders at the end of the year. It isn't about consensus, it isn't about "being right," and no matter what some of our readers think, it's not about showing off how obscure our tastes can be. It's about taking a moment to reflect on the popular art that meant the most to us in the previous year, seeing how it all might be connected, then sharing those thoughts with readers and colleagues who enjoy ruminating about such things themselves.
But there's still a snake in our listing Eden, my friend, and I think you know what I mean. It's those "Oscar prognosticators," the officious know-it-alls who take our lists and input them into a databank that, when consulted properly, reveals the nominees and eventual winners of this year's Academy Awards. These guys and gals aren't interested in predicting the Golden Globes, the Independent Spirit Awards, or the tabulated ballots of the Southeastern Film Critics Association. They only care about other awards and best-of lists inasmuch as they have an impact on the Oscars, positively and negatively.
I used to think the OPs were a benign annoyance like hangnails, or the music of Jack Johnson. Now I think they may be a malignancy. I've got a couple of reasons for this change in perspective, but let's start with a biggie: Some OPs started the 2006 prediction season as soon as this year's Oscar ceremony was over. At first, I took this as good-natured, tongue-in-cheek self-ribbing, but as the year rolled on, and especially as we approached fall festival season, I realized that a lot of the OPs were measuring the movies they saw (or even just read about) against charts they made six months ago. Feigning objectivity, they turned every movie they liked into a front-runner—or vice-versa, I'm still not sure—and labeled every movie they disliked "dead." Never mind that the film might have some merit beyond its awards-gathering potential. If it isn't going to get a statue, who cares?
Before I get to my next complaint, let's hear from you, Scott. Do you read the OPs? Do you have hate for them in your heart?
Scott: I think I'm still at the hangnails/Jack Johnson stage, but I can see where you're coming from. Truth be told, I'm guilty of a little prognostication myself—it can be profitable on Oscar night, like when I scored a copy of the original Traffik DVD set via Tasha Robinson's Oscar-party contest last year. But I don't really see the point in doing it in any official capacity, much less months (or many months) away from the actual ceremony. The OPs at the Toronto Film Festival behaved like scouts in a rotisserie league: All The King's Men, Stranger Than Fiction, Bobby, A Good Year, Breaking And Entering—dead, dead, dead, dead, dead. In other cases, they were picking at the bodies like vultures, looking for those meaty individual performances that transcend a film's shortcomings (Forest Whitaker in Last King Of Scotland) or foreign-osity (Penélope Cruz in Volver).
Taste dictates these assessments to a certain degree, but when a film gets deemed "Oscar-worthy," it's the furthest thing from critical advocacy. All it means is that a particular film has qualities that Oscar voters traditionally find attractive—a middlebrow sense of grandeur, a message that seems risky without actually being provocative, name stars emoting like crazy, and the potential for at least modest success at the box office. If the OPs have any effect on the process, it's really to enforce (rather than challenge) the status quo: Instead of doing something good for humanity, like asking voters to consider some movie or performance that really moved them, they're filtering everything they see for the same "Oscar-worthy" qualities that have made the awards such a useless barometer for cinematic excellence throughout history.
And after awhile, being an OP really has to color your perspective: Good movies start to look bad because they fall outside the box, and vice versa. This year's 9/11 movies are a perfect example: With its pedigreed cast and director, the broad, shamelessly sentimental World Trade Center has been labeled an Oscar contender, while United 93, a rigorous vérité-style drama with no stars and an almost heroic aversion to "big moments" (can you imagine what Oliver Stone would have done with the "Let's roll" line?), has been deemed an outside shot at best. Yet have you met anyone who prefers the former to the latter? Me neither.
The big thing that's been sticking in my craw this year is that the OPs have already christened Dreamgirls as the Best Picture favorite, with supporting nods likely for Eddie Murphy and Jennifer Hudson, not to mention the scads of talent eligible in other categories. Here's the problem with this bit of speculation: Nobody has seen the film! There's a trailer out there that people seem to like, it has pedigree (writer-director Bill Condon adapted the screenplay for Chicago, another musical turned undeserved Best Picture winner), and it's been promoted with a certain amount of swagger. I'd probably concede that the OPs know this business on this one, even though I personally have been unimpressed by Condon's biopics Gods And Monsters and Kinsey, and can't imagine his middlebrow sensibility would bring much pop to a movie musical. But even if he did pull it off, wouldn't it be better to make that discovery outside of the context of it being the frontrunner in the Oscar horse-race?
An open question: Why bother writing about the Oscars months ahead of time? And also, why read such writings? (These are rhetorical questions, but they may be worth answering.)
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