It’s that time of year again. The 2010 Oscar nominations were released last week, and with the Academy Awards now less than a month away, film lovers are about to be inundated with an endless parade of columns filled with puffery and prognostication. This is mine, and I’d like to use it to vent some frustration.
For film columnists, this time is something of a gift, like the last week of school. There’s some work to be done, but for the most part it’s a matter of going through the motions. With the heavy lifting of actual film criticism done earlier in the season, it’s easy for critics simply to coast through February by rehashing bits and pieces of old reviews as they cycle through the list of nominees, boosting or bashing as they see fit. And now that the Academy has added five slots to the Best Picture category (raising the total number of nominees to 10 for the first time since the mid-1940s), the white noise is only going to get worse.
Consider the gimmicky ways these recaps are dressed up: which film had the “greenest” production? (Even the greenest is likely not very.) Who was snubbed? (There are dozens of great performances every year. If you don’t get an Oscar nomination, relax; you’ve still got a good shot at one of the hundreds of other awards given out every year.) The worst are those that predict a winner in each and every category—after the first few, it all starts to seem like a field trip to Off Track Betting, with hopeful reviewers clutching their ticket stubs.
That said, there are still some interesting aspects to this year’s expanded race. The big water cooler topic this time around has to be the Kathryn Bigelow vs. James Cameron story. It almost feels like an old Hollywood comedy: two nominated directors who also happen to be ex-spouses. Get Grant and Hepburn, maybe Preston Sturges to direct, and you’ve got a picture. Bigelow is nominated for her critically acclaimed Iraq war film The Hurt Locker, ex-husband Cameron for the headache-inducing cerulean juggernaut known as Avatar.
Lost in noise is the fact that Bigelow, who just won the Directors Guild of America’s top prize, has a good chance to make history as the first woman to win the Oscar for direction. I hope Bigelow comes away with it, and not only because I find her ex-husband’s films hopelessly shallow. A win for Bigelow would open doors for other female directors; even if it’s only a crack, it provides a place to drive in the wedge.
Very few people, meanwhile, are writing about the boringly still-together spousal team behind surprise Best Picture nominee District 9. Or maybe it’s because they’re Canadian. Either way, their film’s nomination points toward a more open-minded Academy view on what makes for good film—generally speaking, a sci-fi film about an alien race with a cat food diet would not have been considered in the past. But District 9 was a good film, and it’s heartening to see it at least given more exposure—a win is unlikely, with most online betting sites listing it as a hundred to one shot.
District 9‘s inclusion is a reminder that the 10 nominee system is supposed to make room for genres that are usually overlooked, especially comedies. Still, you can’t force the issue: this year saw The Hangover become the top-grossing R-rated comedy of all time, and it was noticeably absent when the nominees were announced. On the other hand, it was something of a nice surprise to see the animated film Up included, though I’m not yet convinced that allowing the same film to appear in both the Best Picture and Animated categories is a great idea.
So even if one takes the pessimistic view that the expanded Oscar slate is nothing more than a crass attempt to pull in more viewers from middle America—note the nomination of the Sandra Bullock tearjerker The Blind Side, which is a bit like nominating a Hallmark card for the National Book Award—the perhaps unintended result is that smaller films can get to taste a bit of the spotlight, and the people who create them can use that heat to help fuel their next film. In a time when most award slates are safer than Ralph Nader at a classic car convention, I can get behind an Oscar contest that has room for the Friskies set.
Whether or not it stays that way is an open question. The balloting this year was rocky, not so much because of the extra films, but because of how the Academy tabulates vote totals. (One simple way around this that the Academy has steadfastly refused to consider: create separate categories for drama and comedy, like the Golden Globes.) To borrow a phrase from a film that found no Oscar love: It’s Complicated. That doesn’t mean it’s not worthwhile.
Just don’t bother telling me whose production had the most carbon offsets. We all know it was that goody two-shoes Clooney.
Jack Brown can be reached at cinemadope@gmail.com.
