1/2/12

So far, I haven't written anything about the awards season.  Part of that's because I've been a bit busy, but it's also because this is one of those years when the dance of dozens of award granting bodies pretending there's an empiracle way to determine the best of the best bore me.  No dobut, there's some good stuff in play:  Hugo, which placed third on my Ten Best List, was selected as Best Picture by the National Board of Review and seems likely to get an Oscar nomination in the same category.  Take Shelter, 2nd on my list, has a shot at a Best Actor nomination for Michael Shannon, and when Jessica Chastain is nominated for The Help, I'll know that the nomination is at least 10% for Shelter as well.  Charlize Theron and Patton Oswalt might be nominated for their amazing performances in Young Adult, ditto George Clooney for The Descendants.  And there IS a lot of drama to this year's races:  can you remember the last time when not a single major category felt truly locked in?  And no doubt that will make for excitement when I watch the Academy Awards and fast-forward through the Screen Actors Guild and Golden Globe Awards (not watching the Globes in real time again as long as the point of the exercise is inciting conflict between the host and the audience, thank you).  But after last year, when so many popular hits that I really liked were in the running in every major category, this year feels like an awards season for other folks with whom I have less common ground.  Many contenders have yet to be released in my area, and perhaps I'll finally see something that excites me between now and those envelopes opening.  Time will tell.

But one thing that has interested me is the lack of attention to the fairly obvious elephant in the room.  For many people, all this is just about trying to predict The Oscars, particularly at a time when not so many of the Critics Circle winners are of interest.  And as hard as it is to puzzle out the possible winners in every other category from among the many folks who've already won something or other (especially when you can win as much hardware as Albert Brooks for Drive and still not seem like a lock to even be nominated by the Academy), there seems to me to be one clear winner that hasn't won anything yet:  The Help is going to win Best Picture.  I say this not as an admirer (I didn't see it and frankly had no interest:  it strikes me as The Blind Side 2 with no Sandra Bullock, not an exciting notion), but as someone who's been watching these awards seasons play out and trying to psychoanalyze the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for years.  No, no, you say, many worthy Best Picture contenders have already received prizes from the various Critics Circles, and one of them will surely win.  OK, let me set those tin cans up on a wall and shoot them down, as someone who (like many of the voting Academy members) hasn't seen most of them.

-The Descendants:  Let's start with one I have seen.  Alexander Payne (who shared Best Adapted Screenplay 7 years ago for Sideways and as such won't be deemed in any way overdue) is a master of the writer/actor Sundance movie, the kind that dominates the screenplay and acting categories but has never won Best Picture.  Oh, you'll hear a vocal Academy minority trying to create buzz for flicks like Little Miss Sunshine or Sideways itself in the weeks leading up to the ceremony so Leonard Maltin can go on Reelz and tell you the race is swinging their way, but it never quite swings far enough.  Besides, if it did get any steam going, Harvey Weinstein would just start a stink about how it's a movie set in Hawaii with no native Hawaiians in major roles.  NEXT!

-Hugo:  The Artist is about silent movies but not kids, and Scorsese has already won.  Plus, it's in 3D.  We're many, MANY years away from the first 3D Best Picture.  NEXT!

-The Tree of Life:  Terrence Malick makes movies for film scholars, film critics and the kind of people who wouldn't go to see anything playing on 1,000 screens nationally on a dare.  What people often get confused about is that those kind of people do not make up The Academy.  As near as I can tell from their choices, the Academy is made up of those people who only go to the movies in December and January, don't seem to know where the lines for tickets or popcorn form, and sit right next to you in the theater even though the entire row is empty, but when the movie is over, mutter to the person on the other side of them "I didn't think it would be so depressing."  Is The Tree of Life the movie for that crowd?  Let's ask Stamford, Connecticut's Avon Theater, which posted 2011's most celebrated sign:

And that's the sign hanging at a self-described "true art house cinema" (and later copied at others all over the country).  NEXT!

-The Artist:  Sight unseen, this is The Great Lightning Rod Movie of the Oscar season.  As we learned the last time the AFI 100 Years, 100 Movies list was updated, there's a whole lot of people out there who feel that the silent movie art form doesn't get its due, and what better way to get them to geek out than by creating a new silent film.  Plus, it's about the most resonant melodramatic icon to come out of the silent era, the Silent Star Who Couldn't Make the Transition to Talkies, a durable metaphor for every older person's feeling that the world is passing them by.  So, yes, I do believe that The Artist, the most honored film among critics circles to date, will be a powerful Best Picture contender, and maybe if they gave the awards today it could even win.  The press is salavating over the notion of a silent movie being a hit, the perfect antidote to 3D Transformers sequels.  And maybe if the Weinstein Company could find a way to keep the movie on 167 screens (where it's grossed 5.4 million in 6 weeks of release), there wouldn't be a backlash.  But that's the problem with The Artist, backlash is the elephant in its room, and it won't be the kind of backlash that took people 15 viewings of Titanic to develop or the "this looked awesome but it sucks" backlash that greeted quasi-genre flicks like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon or No Country for Old Men after they were finally seen by the masses.  The Artist is a friggin' SILENT MOVIE, and I'm telling you that if 2012 were ready for a silent movie, it would be a raucous comedy or a large-scale swashbuckler flick, certainly not a silent melodrama.  The Artist could have hung onto the sense that it's a great movie if it could have been kept away from a large audience, but the inevitable Oscar nominations will make that impossible.  And when it reaches 500, 600 screens, the headlines won't be "Audiences Cheerfully Accept Silent Movie as Alternative to 3D Crap", they'll be "Out of Touch Academy Fossils Try to Give Best Picture to Silent Movie".  NEXT!

-War Horse:  Another movie that hasn't won anything yet, but could be an Oscar player.  It's an epic, it's sentimental, it's about a war.  But the Academy tends to prefer World War 2 (in fact, a movie's chances of Oscar gold doulbe if it's about WWII, while other wars haven't really moved the needle since everyone felt Vietnam has been sufficiently apologized for about 20 years ago).  Spielberg's won before on more than one occassion and couldn't even bring what's widely perceived as the Best Movie Ever About WWII across the finish line.  War Horse has been getting that "This really well made, I feel like I'm supposed to like it" buzz that tends to get a movie into the nominations, but it hasn't inspired the passion that gets them to the winner's circle.  NEXT!

-The Help:  Yeah, I know, nobody's been calling it the best movie of 2011, but the movie's acting ensemble has been picking up a lot of hardware, showing that it is in people's minds.  And it's a movie designed for your Grandmother, based on a popular bestseller.  Plus, it's about the Academy's second-favorite topic, the civil rights struggles of the 50's and 60's.  It was a popular hit among the audiences the Academy membership actually resembles.  And this is a group of people gearing up to try and re-elect Barrack Obama (hey, I'm a liberal myself, but there's no use denying the obvious).  

I'm not saying the Academy's going to put The Help on its shoulders and march it across the finish line (and don't get your hopes up, director Tate Taylor, Bruce Beresford and Paul Haggis can tell you how much mileage you get out of being a white guy directing a Best Picture about civil rights issues).  But I do believe that once the votes are counted, it'll prevail in a field that contains no conventional Best Picture.  It may not look great, but it sure does look conventional.  Wake me up when they start handing these things out, and maybe I'll rent it.