OSCAR SYMPOSIUM
with your host Nathaniel and five very special guests
February 2009
continued from intro / day one pg 1 / pg 2 / pg 3 / day two pg 4
NATHANIEL: So they continually have to try and "fix" the ceremony with surprises since they can't pick interesting nominees. And here's the thing. I'm not sure the ceremony itself needs all that many fixes (other than SOMEONE in charge to just say no to the 6th, 7th and 8th "montage reel" for once. Right there your overtime problem would be greatly ameliorated)
I can't believe I'm agreeing that Gran Torino would have been a more exciting "surprise" than The Reader but I guess I am. I didn't like it at all and I hesitate to even call it a film it felt so much like a TV movie to me (same problem with Crash actually)... but you're right. Aside from who directed and starred in it, it isn't really an in-the-zone type of Oscar picture. This is the same reason why I really would have been happy for a nomination for The Dark Knight even though I think its merits have been wildly overpraised for eight months. See, I don't need Oscar to agree with me. But I do need to feel like they're noticing what's happening out in the larger world of film. I'm not talking about the weird reductive media obsession with them nominating only box office hits but about the need for them to recognize when a mammoth populist hit is also a mammoth critical hit. Those fusions are rare and for Oscar to say "not for us" is semi-disheartening. A nomination for a WALL•E or The Dark Knight would have been acknowledgement that they are paying attention.
I think the nomination for Robert Downey Jr speaks to this in a small way whether or not you think, like Karina, that it's for the wrong film. (I don't... I thought he was truly inspired in Tropic Thunder). Add to that that it's in the category that no one speaks of (You're so right, Karina) and it's pleasures -- they stretched for a comedic performance! They were paying attention! -- feel diluted. But for Best Picture, hell no. No stretching. No paying attention. Just ordering off the prestige prix fixe menu. I know it's unfair to peg them as a monolithic entity -- they're thousands of people with different agendas and tastes -- but sometimes it seems like if you mush them all together they're agoraphics who hide in a tiny "prestige" wing of a much larger film mansion. Occassionally something different feeling, populist, weird or progressive can sneak in while they're holed up there but it basically has to find its way to them. They can't go looking for it (the nobody sees the interesting movies problem we've already discussed). It's scary out there!
Which brings me to David Fincher who has been making strong films for years. He had to dull his very Fincherness to be invited in. I always dreamt of him being nominated but now that it's happened I just don't care at all. And the year after Zodiac, too!
ED GONZALEZ: Nathaniel. It felt lonely last year standing on the sidelines while everyone was jumping on the Zodiac bandwagon. David Fincher's music videos for Madonna are without equal, but I think his work in that medium has had an undue effect on his movies, which are all showboatishly visual and emotionally unfeeling, though I think The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, for all its glaring and sometimes risible flaws, is a fascinating piece of work, and definitely his most interesting since Fight Club. I hate to say I'm rooting for the guy, because it's hard to feel remotely passionate about any of the films nominated for Best Picture this year, but his is the film I most enjoyed watching, even if experiencing the thing made me a little sick to my stomach.
TIMOTHY: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button felt to me like a personal betrayal. I was never particularly impressed with Fincher's films before 2007, but Zodiac was a "road to Damascus" moment for me, the revelation of a great artist I'd never really noticed before, and I wanted his follow-up to be something equally special. Instead, this Benjamin Button thing, if not the worst film he's ever made, certainly the most boring.
For whatever reason, I've had more conversations about this film than any of the other nominees (which means, I guess, that I agree with Ed's assessment that it's the most interesting - even though I just called it boring), and one of the words that keeps popping up is "shameless". It so obviously and palpably wants to be an Oscar nominee, more than any of the others this year, and after a while (and there's a lot of while to be had in Benjamin Button), that feels like the only thing the movie has going for it. It's not emotionally resonant, it's not all that entertaining, it's only an Oscar Movie. The only conversation it really provokes - other than what went wrong with it - is which awards it deserves.
I know that great directors making baity films just because they want a Best Director award is an old tradition - Frank Capra later admitted that he made The Bitter Tea of General Yen in 1933 just because he wanted an Oscar, although he gets a pass because it's one of his greatest films - but hadn't this decade made it seem like we were past that? From David Lynch in 2001 to the Coens and Anderson last year, auteurs have been recognised for being auteurs. But now Fincher, and to a much lesser degree Gus Van Sant, are nominated basically for obscuring their talents (I kind of hate to sully Milk's good name by comparing it to Benjamin Button, but I'm surely not the only one who'd rather have seen Paranoid Park get this kind of attention?). And the hell of it is that I feel like both of them did it deliberately, knowing that they had no other shot.
We've all taken a stab at this question without coming up with an answer, but I still just can't understand what made the Academy so conservative this year. Like Nathaniel suggested, The Dark Knight was a gift-wrapped present to the voters: "It's popular! It's acclaimed! You'll get street cred! There's no downside!" What disappoints me isn't so much that it would have made this year's nominees more intersting, or that it would have proven that the voters pay attention to the world outside December; it's that if The Dark Knight couldn't get a Best Picture nomination, I cannot imagine any action film, any genre film period, doing so in the next several years. Its failure dooms us to year after year of The Reader, I'm afraid.
It really does feel like Academy voters never watch any movies at all, doesn't it? They just vote right off of the FYC ads.
ERIK: It’s not emotionally resonant” is exactly right, Tim. Button is a long, somber film about a miracle, yet nothing in it tells us anything about the human condition. It gives us almost all of the 20th century — from WWI to Katrina — to what end? What do we feel? What do we learn? That a life can be lived backwards as ordinarily as a life forwards? That exceptional birth does not make exceptional life? I’m not sure. I’m grasping here.
And why the bit in the middle on the happenstance of accidents? Why the bit in the beginning about the backwards clock – and how does that relate, really relate, to Button’s birth? The film's not only not emotionally resonsant; it’s not intellectually resonant. The one thing I’ll say in its favor is that Paramount marketed it right. They pushed it into theaters in a big way in December and movieogers responded and it made over $100 million — by far the highest grosser among the picture nominees. Compare this with the disastrous way Universal handled Frost/Nixon, which had buzz in December, but which they kept it limited (to 200 theaters) until the Oscar noms on Jan. 22. By then the focus and interest (and audience) was elsewhere. I mean, c'mon. The day you can't sell a Ron Howard film should be the day you hang things up.By the way, as you can probably tell, I don’t see anything weird or reductive about wondering why best picture nominees are no longer box-office hits. I wonder it all the time. Usually in print. Or whatever the hell this is.
Here’s the money stat for me (apologies if this bores everyone). Since 1944, when the Academy finally settled on five best picture nominees, there have only been seven years when the nominees didn’t include a top 10 box-office hit: 1947, 1984... and the last five years in a row. The divide between box office and best picture may have begun with the advent of the modern blockbuster in the late 1970s, but something sure as hell sped it up this decade.
TIMOTHY: Those are some incredible figures you've dug up, Erik, and an extremely good question. Why has box-office success become suddenly toxic for the Oscars? It's especially valid this year, with all the award buzz surrounding The Dark Knight or WALL-E; whether or not either of them counted among the five best of the year, I expect we'll all agree that at least one of them would have made a better BP nominee than some of the ones we got.
Looking at the seven years you've mentioned, some of them still nominated populist crowd-pleasers, whether they hit the top 10 at the box office or not: Miracle on 34th Street in '47, Amadeus in '84. I suppose Slumdog Millionaire would be that film this year, simply because everyone I know who saw Benjamin Button came out wanting to complain about it. But really, whither the cultural phenoms? As recently as 2003, we saw the Lord of the Rings threepeat, and if someone pointed out that those films were just too big to ignore, what makes them so much bigger than The Dark Knight?
At any rate, I agree that it's a reasonable line of inquiry (I think Nathaniel's "weird reductive" line was about faux-pundits who can't imagine why Transformers and Pirates of the Caribbean: End Already weren't nominated while that unpleasant picture about the oil man was), and the only answer I can come up with off the top of my head is that the Academy is trying prove that it's smarter and more in tune with Real Art than the groundlings. Which is funny, given how often people like me (I won't tar the rest of you with my Brush of Self-Identified Pretentiousness) rail on the Oscars for being so damnably middlebrow. I for one don't think that the recent box office hits are any more brainless than they have been for years now, and in each the last five years I can pick out at least one top 10 hit that would have been a more deserving nominee than Gladiator.
Maybe the Oscar voters just finally caught up with Godard's quote about a movie's increasing popularity being a sure sign of its increasing lack of quality. I don't have any other explanation. But they certainly have done a perfect job this year of picking films that the average moviegoer doesn't care about. For that matter, I don't know who outside of award-granting bodies does care about them, and this is where snobbery can bite you on the ass. The most mirthless & intellectual cinephiles I know would rather watch Iron Man again than see some of those nominees even once. A great cheeseburger is better than a terrible steak, and all that.
The Oscars get accused quite often of being "elitest" or "highbrow" --at least by certain voices who'd like there to be more blockbusters nominated. And it's true that the box office numbers required to make a dent in the Academy consciousness have shrunk. The ratings for the show along with them. But isn't the problem twofold:
1. The mainstream audience doesn't like adult dramas (which is what the Academy likes best even if they're none too discerning about which ones they like)
2. The Academy doesn't like genre pictures (which is what the mainstream audience likes best even if they're none too discerning about which ones they like)Erik's statistics are true but it's not really about the box office so much as different preferred milieu. If you go back over the decades and peruse top ten lists you'll see A LOT more academy friendly genres in the public's favorite pictures. No longer. There are years now where there's no box office hit that's not a sequel, genre film or a cartoon in the top ten and the Academy has rarely if ever gone for any of these categories of filmmaking. At least that's my take on it. In order to combat this problem you'd have to change both the Academy's way of thinking and the publics. And that seems too tall an order.
