On November 6 of
2008, Los Angeles Times columnist Patrick Goldstein, writing on his new
blog —which some speculate was created by Goldstein at gunpoint—stated: “Anyone who doesn’t believe that the Oscars haven’t been
thoroughly hijacked by a gang of daffy, clown-suit-clad Oscar bloggers making
endlessly moronic best picture predictions just hasn’t been paying
attention.” Calling out Variety’s Anne Thompson and Entertainment Weekly’s Dave
Karger by name, Goldstein went on to lambaste these writers’ speculations that
recent turns in current events could influence nominations and eventually
secure victories.
Specifically,
Thompson saw some correspondences between the California electorate’s notorious
passing of gay-marriage-banning Proposition 8 and the campaign depicted in Gus
Van Sant’s Harvey Milk biopic Milk to
defeat the similarly gay-oppressing Proposition 6 in the ‘70s. This turn of
events, argued Thompson, “could energize the largely liberal Academy base” with
the realization that “we haven’t come far enough.” As for Karger, his claim
that The Dark Knight’s subtheme of “the
innate goodness of human nature” would resonate with Academy voters who have to
cast their ballots on the week that Barack Obama is inaugurated left Goldstein
not knowing whether to “laugh or weep.” (Truth to tell, Karger’s musing was
actually more than a bit goofy.)
One
of the main points of interest of Goldstein’s throwdown was that it was
directed at journalists who have at least a modicum of credibility in this
business we call show. Thompson’s storied career has seen her do productive
stints as L.A. Weekly, Entertainment Weekly, my alma mater Première, and The
Hollywood Reporter, and, as we see, she is now ensconced at the biz bible
Variety. Indeed, before pooh-poohing her, Goldstein calls her “a journalist I
respect.” He shows no such love for the telegenic Karger, whose lengthy tenure
at EW is supplemented by voluminous appearances, often as the go-to Oscar guy,
on various and sundry network and cable chat and news shows.
So where are the real clown-suit
wearers? Tom O’Neil thinks he knows—because Tom O’Neil thinks he’s one of them.
No
kidding. O’Neil, the proprieter of Gold Derby, a sub-blog on the L.A. Times’
awards website The Envelope, cited Goldstein’s “latest attack on me,” noting
that “[t]echnically, he didn’t call me out by name, but those words were linked
to my blog post full of new Oscar predix.” “In the past,” O’Neil burbles,
Goldstein’s “slammed me publicly by name…as ‘the poster boy for the
trivialization of Oscar coverage.’” (Of course, one of O’Neil’s signal
qualities is an eagerness to take offense, as witness the fireworks on Gold
Derby last fall, when he rather ill-advisedly made his poor opinion of Murnau’s
Sunrise known, and was thereupon
beset by a group he charmingly deemed “film Nazis.”) O’Neil then notes that
before the advent of bloggers, Goldstein’s L.A. Times, The Hollywood Reporter,
and Variety ruled the Oscar-prognosticating roost, and Goldstein’s just irked
that proper attention is no longer paid him.
O’Neil,
who himself is hardly above citing how-many-years-he’s‑been-doing-this and
how-many-books-he’s‑written-about-awards, wasn’t the only one ticked off by
Goldstein’s imagined choice of
Oscar blogger couture. David Poland had at “the naked
emperor-in-his-own-mind…making pronouncements from his broken-down soapbox.”
“He was never very insightful to begin with,” Poland sneered.
So
much anger. So much terribly inflamed…passion. You’d think these guys were
debating the war in Iraq or something. But no. Just about a bunch of statuettes forged from varied
semi-precious metals and alloys that every year wind up in a variety of hands,
said variety never quite fully satisfying the desires of those who had spent so
many months angrily and passionately debating just which hands they ought to
end up in. They call it the silly season, but if it’s so silly, why does it
drive so many people to such near-homicidal rage?
Well,
the easy answer is that those people themselves aren’t terribly serious to
begin with. But, as this piece as of now needs to be about 1800 words longer,
we’re not going with that, much as we’d like to. And even were we to accept
that answer, it wouldn’t erase the fact that these people are all out there,
doing what they do. So we’ll propose a theory instead. This: The tendency of media award
prognosticators—whose ranks have grown almost incrementally as the number of
newly minted and televised and touted awards ceremonies (SAG! Critics’ Choice!
Indie Spirit! Etc.) gets bigger—to viciously attack each other increases in
direct proportion to the predominance of uninspiring-to-mediocre films in any
given year’s awards race. For all their putative merits, there is something
fundamentally unexciting about The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Doubt, Revolutionary
Road, Milk, and even the most supposedly offbeat of contenders, Slumdog Millionaire. Each of these films peddle their brands of uplift or
non-uplift in relatively conventional fashion; even Slumdog’s tribute-to-Bollywood finale represents a sort of
genre-melding that’s fairly well-established (courtesy of, among others,
director Bax Luhrman, whose underwhelming Australia found him lagging in what used to be his signature
ability to tap an audience nobody else knew existed). Nothing 2008
offered was as galvanic as, say, No Country For Old Men’s what-the-hell? ending, or the seeming nihilism of There
Will Be Blood. Absent much cinematic red
meat to chew on, the divisions of the clown-suited turn on each other.
However
fierce the infighting gets, the fundamental narratives offered by the various
awards chatterers— each one a form of wishful thinking—don’t change. In the
narrative seemingly advocated by Goldstein and, to some extent, online movie
writers such as Jeffrey Wells and David Poland, the Academy Awards are the big
show, the Globes and varied indie awards merely zeitgeist barometers for the
main event, and the Oscars exist in order to valorize pictures sufficiently
thrifty, brave, clean and reverent that they register as “distinguished.”
Goldstein rather shows his hand at the end of his “clown-suit” broadside,
asking if anyone could possibly believe that Academy voters, after being “dazzled by Benjamin Button or enraptured by Slumdog Millionaire” will “react by saying—try to hear the robotic tone of
this voice in your head—‘I know that was a wonderful movie, but I must remember
there are more serious matters in the world than a wonderful cinematic
experience. I must vote my political conscience during this important Oscar
season.” Indeed, so devoted a defender of the putatively distinguished film is
Goldstein that he recently saw fit to upbraid the influential New York Times
critic, Manohla Dargis, for failing to give sufficient slack to the
excruciatingly tasteful and definitively muddleheaded German guilt tale The
Reader. While many might perceive that
Dargis gave the picture exactly the notice it deserved, Goldstein bemoaned that
the critic is actually capable of “pursuad[ing] high-brow moviegoers” to skip
the high-minded films she dismisses. Never mind Goldstein’s peculiar conception
of a high-brow moviegoer—for one thing, he seems to think he’s one—what’s
dangerous about Dargis is her “ seeming lack of empathy for the challenge ot
tackling difficult material.”
Dargis should grade on a curve, because, you know, The Reader is about “difficult” themes. Never mind that a whiff of
self-congratulation on “tackling” these themes runs through the film
itself. Don’t you get it
people—this picture was “the one true hope [for the Weinstein Company] to
contend in the Oscar race,” and now, because of the “faint praise” of Todd
McCarthy and David Ansen, the “mild disapproval” of Anthony Lane, and finally,
the scab-picking and knife sticking of Dargis, those hopes are dashed, I tell
you, dashed. This is all too terribly untidy for the likes of Goldstein. It’s just not how things are
supposed to happen in his ideal Oscar season. In this respect, O’Neil is rather
on the money when he declares that “Goldstein will always insist that he’s
really protecting Hollywood’s sacred prize from infidels who threaten to cheapen
it.”
Which
brings us to the narrative of the
O’Neil-ish Oscar prognosticator, wherein the most fabulously entertaining of big Hollywood efforts are the most
deserving. O’Neil’s eagerness in
this respect has led to some substantial errors in predictions, given that the
film he thought most fabulously entertaining in ’07 was Sweeney Todd, while his ’06 fave rave was Dreamgirls. (How often an Oscar prognosticator gets things wrong,
incidentally, rarely inhibits said Oscar prognosticator from gleefully pointing
out the errors made by a prognosticator pushing an opposing narrative. Hence,
O’Neil says of Goldstein, “usually…[he] has gotten things really wrong.”)
O’Neil’s
approach is not entirely not akin to the perspectives of Kris Tapley and Sasha
Stone, who oversee the In Contention and Awards Daily blogs, respectively. They take a largely populist approach,
but as they’re both younger and…what’s the word?…oh, to hell with it, I’ll go
with “hipper”…than O’Neil, they filter it through a Film-Buff-Lite lens. They
give props to both big entertainments and “distinguished” films but also hold
out hopes for more cultish items, e.g. Tapley’s enthusiasm for The Wrestler, Stone’s high regard fo Synecdoche, NY. (Incidentally, I don’t intend an insult [per se],
incidentally, when I cite my invented “Film-Buff-Lite” mode. Let me define my
term specifically: By Film-Buff-Lite, I mean any self-described film buff for
whom Bela Tarr, Jacques Rivette, Apichatpong Weerasethakul, those kinda
directors, effectively Do Not Exist.) But they never go too far. Priding
themselves on a sense of reality, they don’t see much for The Dark Knight this year beyond a Supporting Actor nom and
maybe-just-maybe win.
Reporting
and commenting from a seemingly above-the-fray perspective, New York Times
media columnist David Carr, in his persona as “The Carpetbegger” (as in red
carpet, get it?), attempts to give a look at how your Oscar sausage is made,
casting a gimlet eye on the process while admitting that the purview of his and
the Academy’s enterprise has little to do with the quality of the actual films
that happen to be involved in it. The more-than-slightly condescending positon
he takes on the very idea of film-as-an-even-potential-art-form vexes many, but
no doubt pleases a certain species of know-somethingish Times reader. For all
his skepticism about everything, though, Carr’s radar is not infallible; he was
recently taken in by a satirical faux-right-wing blogger advocating a form of
film assessment called “derriereism.”
Finally,
there’s the eternal Oscar outlier malcontent narrative, the “Why Do They Give
Awards To Stupid Movies Nobody Has
Ever Seen” in which the various and sundry disappointing box office returns of many Oscar contenders are reiterated ad
nauseuam. Last year it was a little tougher for these guys to get quite so much
traction, as No Country For Old Men
was very nearly a bonafide mainstream hit, and both that film and There Will
Be Blood both landed on the not-so-far
side of two favored genres among such outliers, the action suspenser and the
rough’n’tough historical epic.
And
this year, a whole new narrative emerged, one related to the “why do they give
awards to stupid movies nobody has seen narrative.” That would be the “The
Dark Knight TOTALLY RULES And It Should
Win Everything” narrative, proposed by
a number of film bloggers more, shall we say, adolescent in perspective
than some others. Still. One understands their pain. Genre films, whether they
by comedies or thrillers or horror pictures, rarely get Academy respect. And
yet, they argue, because of its relevance to today’s world, and also because of
the fact that it, like, you know, TOTALLY RULES, The Dark Knight transcends genre. And didn’t a flat-out thriller/horror
movie like Silence of the Lambs get a
boatload of awards, back in the day?
Such
arguments really aren’t all that terribly stupid. After all, Heath Ledger’s
Joker is no more, or less, deep a characterization than Anthony Hopkins’
Hannibal Lecter was. But, lest we forget, The Silence of the Lambs was adapted
from a best selling genre novel that, whether we like it or not, got a fair
amount of lit-critic respect. And Heath Ledger being a genius or not, the Joker is, in the mind of so many
awards voters, nothing more than a comic-book character. And comic book movies
do not get awards, except maybe some technical ones. It’s true, what Jimmy
Carter said: Life is unfair. A film adapted from a comic book may someday get a
Best Picture Oscar, but it probably won’t happen until Don Murphy is in his
early ‘80s, and it‘s likely it won’t be a comic book movie that he produced.
Because,
after all, “It doesn’t matter what people think. It matters what people who
have a ballot think.” So states 42 West publicist Amanda Lundberg in Dan Kois’ sharp Washington Post article
of December 21, all about the narratives publicists create to push their Oscar
hopefuls. And who has a ballot? Quite a few people, many of them not known to
even those who believe they’re up to date on all the Hollywood players. Well,
check out the Reel Geezers on You Tube—industry vets Marcia Nasatir and Lorenzo
Semple Jr. Semple’s 85, and
Nasatir’s birthday isn’t listed on the Internet Movie Database. So. Or go to
Pajamas Media TV, the venture of one-time screenwriter Roger L. Simon. Check
out his video feature Poliwood, in which he discusses the politics of
Tinseltown with fellow
not-visibly-working-all-that-much-in-the-medium-these-days oldster Lionel
Chetwynd. Consider the musings on movies these four offer. Don’t even consider
the politics of the latter two. Got that mental picture down yet? Good. Now
take those four, and multiply them by a thousand. There you have it: a good
two-thirds of the people who nominate and vote.
Exciting,
no?
Given
the seeming absence of any indies connecting with mass audiences—save, of
course, Slumdog Millionaire,
distributed by Fox Searchlight, whose past mastery of marketing their pictures
to mass audiences has no doubt engendered some resentment among those who have
a tougher slog with that— the entities that exist to award indies seemed to
feel little obligation in 2008 to connect with the mainstream. The Gotham Award
best feature, for instance, went to the not-quite $2.5 million grossing Frozen
River, while its ensemble cast award
went to the just-above $2.5 million-grossing Synecdoche, NY, which features a somewhat higher-profile cast and
writer/director. Their doc award went to Trouble The Water; Breakthrough award to director Lance Hammer for his
debut Ballast. River, Water, and Ballast
were all well received at Sundance,
garnering similar honors there, and with the Gotham awards comes a sense of
full-circledom for those pictures; despite early talk of Melissa Leo having a
strong shot at the Academy Award for Best Actress nomination, both Sally
Hawkins (for Mike Leigh’s Happy Go Lucky)
and, to a lesser extent, Anne Hathaway (for Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting
Married) have since left Leo in the dust
as far as “edgy,” “indie” types in contention.
What’s
left, then, for the most part, is a process of elimination among films that
seem to have been specifically conceived and produced as “Oscar bait.” And
given the by-the-book predictability of the Hollywood Foreign Press
Association’s nominations for the once universally scoffed at Golden Globe
Awards, the clown-suited have to look deeper and deeper into the
ever-multiplying tea leaves to find material. Well, looky here—Revolutionary
Road didn’t get an “Outstanding
Performance By A Cast In A Motion
Picture” nomination from the SAG Awards! Are its Oscar chances in trouble?
That’s
how it goes. And to think: not only is this some people’s idea of fun, it’s
actually some people’s idea of meaning.
Once you realize that the whole Oscar season is really only distantly related to the idea of quality film, it’s easier to enjoy Oscar-watching as the strange, oddball little sport that it is. But yeah, Goldstein is a douche.
What will happen when ‘The Dark Knight’ fails to win Best Picture? I fear society may collapse.
Hey Glenn,
This is really off-topic, but did you see that Nat Hentoff was laid off by the Voice?
@Nathan: Yes, I did see that. A seriously boneheaded move—New Times should have SYNDICATED him, rather than laid him off—but really, no more or less boneheaded than a lot of the moves they’ve made recently. (Although hiring Roy Edroso was a surprisingly SMART move.) Before the paper moved to near Cooper Union, Hentoff’s office was the most seriously messy that I’d ever seen—newspapers literally stacked to the ceiling. They shoulda preserved that room and shipped it to the Smithsonian.
It’s just all so…boring. I’m not going to pretend that I don’t watch the show, and that I don’t, to a degree, root for some movies and actors over others (although, unless I get on the ball, I will have seen next to none of the films in contention this year), but I do at least have perspective on it. It just makes me sleepy.
You know, everybody I know who writes about movies talks about how they don’t care about the awards, and then they go on to complain endlessly about and/or handicap them, while my eyes glaze over because I. Genuinely. Do. Not. Care. These days I even express my lack of caring by seeing most of the new movies on DVD, which means that all the Oscar bait have already won or lost their stupid awards by the time I might even begin to have an opinion. So there.
I’m a producer’s assistant in my early-late twenties who spent precious office time this week nominating people for BAFTA awards on behalf of my boss. I fully expect the same duties come Oscar ballot time. When will the publicists market to MEEEEE?
I don’t think all my ‘Flight of the Red Balloon’ nominations made a dent, though.
Maybe you should also write a piece on why so many blogs use awful colors that make the sites incredibly hard to read. Somewhere I think I’ve seen red letters on black ground, green on blue and your black on light grey n front of darker grey is also quite an eyesore. What happenend to the good old black on white?
Glenn, I appreciate your critical analysis of this topic, but …
did you ever actually expect this article to see print?
The Oscars were always a politically and ratings driven farce, just look at the history of the Best Picture winners against about 80% to 90% of other much finer films that could have won. Their poor record speaks for itself. The farce downgraded itself to a disgrace when they broke every precedent in their 77 year history to avoid giving Best Picture to Brokeback Mountain for fear of right-wing reprecussions (such conceit, as though 99% of people even remember or care what won the yeear before anyway). After that, I became one of the people who truly doesn’t watch, but I can’t help but care, because so many continue to take it seriously. They influence what people watch. I remember a friend saying, “gee, I had no desire to see Crash, it got such mixed and even bad reviews, but then it won, so I had to see it…how did that win, it really sucked, I should have watched Brokeback instead”. Its the latter part that peeves me. The friend is a working mother of three, she sees very few movies per year, most her selected by her kids, the others by the Academy. Bad thinking, since with that logic, she’d be missing the likes of City Lights, Citizen Kane, Notorious, Singin’ in the Rain, Night of the Hunter, The Searchers, Vertigo, Some Like It Hot, Dr. Strangelove, The Graduate, 2001, Network, Apocalpyse Now, Raging Bull, Blade Runner, Do the Right Thing, Goodfellas, Breaking the Waves, Fellowship of the Ring, The Pianist, Eternal Sunshine, and so many others, in favor of often far inferior films. And they don’t even seriously consider foreign-language films, save Crouching Tiger thanks solely to its huge box office, but of course that lost to Gladiator, another joke. To me, however, the joke ain’t funny, the Academy wields far too much influence. Of course its not worth getting upset about in the more serious in the scheme of things, but in the movie talk world, its gospel.
The Voice laid off Nat Hentoff?
Jesus. Is their business model the baptism scene from The Godfather? At any rate, I somehow doubt a Michael is waiting in the wings to take over from all the legends they’ve axed. Hoberman must see the writing on the wall.
Mr. Kenny, I admired your analysis/skewering of hysterical oscar blogs. one thing that has become surprisingly commonplace in awards season commentary is the participation of respected critics( Ebert, Corliss) in predicting nominations or lamenting the Academy’s omissions. Do you have any thoughts on the history of this merging of popular criticism and Oscar handicapping? Did the great crtics of decades past (Agee, Crowther) comment on the Oscar races of long ago?