..Gary Dretzka
..Noah Forrest
..Leonard Klady
..David Poland
..Douglas Pratt
..Ray Pride
..Kim Voynar
..Michael Wilmington

4 Days To Go:
That Obscure Sense Of Surprise

And so, we are at the end.

For a year of predictable outcomes, it is actually fairly remarkable how many major awards seem to be up for grabs at this late date.

I don’t think many people expect Slumdog Millionaire to get anything less than 6 Oscars, including Picture, Director, and Screenplay.  But in the Top 8 categories, Rourke vs Penn, Winslet vs Streep vs Hathaway vs Leo, Cruz vs Davis, and Stanton vs Black are all still uncertain in many minds.  Add Slumdog’s four and Heath Ledger as locks and you have half the top awards in play.

It’s the rarest kind of Oscar stat these days… one that doesn’t seem to have been written about endlessly… that in five of the last ten years and in the last four years in a row, the Best Picture winner has been nominated in one or no acting categories.  (Slumdog, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash. Lord of The Rings) 

So much for the mythology of the Actor’s Branch controlling the Academy.

It’s not just the Best Picture winner.  This year, four of the five nominees have just one acting nominee or less.  Only Milk managed two.  The most actor-nominated film was Doubt, with four, count ‘em, four nominees… and no Best Picture nod.  In fact, the only other nomination for the film was for John Patrick Shanley’s Adapted Screenplay from his own play… which was – by his reckoning- more a work of adapting as a director than as a writer.

Last year, three of the five nominees scored just one acting mod each… and just two for There Will Be Blood and the big get, three, for Michael Clayton.  The big “actors’ movies” that didn’t get BP nods, besides Clayton, were Into The Wild, Gone Baby Gone, American Gangster, and The Savages… each of which managed only one acting nod.

Go back one more year and again, 3/5 of the nominees had one acting nod or less… and just two each for the other 2… all fours nods in Supporting. 

It’s been nine years since a Lead Actor win for the Best Picture.  And while Million Dollar Baby was just five Oscars ago, it was the only example of the Lead Actress winning in the last eleven years. 

Go back a little further and the lead actors winning for best pictures is not so rare; Crowe for Gladiator, Spacey for American Beauty, Paltrow for Shakespeare in Love, Hanks in Forrest Gump, Foster in Silence of the Lambs, Tandy in Driving Miss Daisy, Hoffman in Rain Man… that’s seven times in thirteen years.  The only lead male in the Best Picture to even be nominated in the last seven years was Eastwood for Million Dollar Baby.

And while Slumdog may be written off as an anomaly with its 17-year-old lead, along with the Crash ensemble and the Rings ensemble, others overlooked are nothing close to unknown: Tommy Lee Jones, Leonardo DiCaprio, Matt Damon, and Richard Gere. 

But really… look at it… the last four years… all ensemble movies.  Big stars in a couple… not so much in the other two… but ensembles have won.  Is that good news or bad news for Nine?  Who knows?  Really, neither.  It’s not really news.  It’s just a curious statistic.  And those change all the time.

But back to this year…

Even after you crack the Top 8, there is still a lot to ponder.  Will things sway more to Batman or Ben Button… or with they come out dead even… or will they get rocked by underdogs. 

Even in Foreign and Doc, there seem to be clear frontrunners in Waltz with Bashir and Man on Wire, but with a much smaller group of voters qualifying to vote for these in the finals (likely under 500 for each), you never know.  Sony Classics is putting up the strongest fight against their own film with The Class, a film that’s grown in profile as we’ve come closer to a vote.  And while Man on Wire was the top grosser of the five nominees and the only one to crack the MCN Top Ten List Chart’s Top 30 (at #9), the small voting group could lead to anything… and there are big emotional connections around some of the other films while Wire is a beautiful piece of filmmaking and a great story, but not a heart-tugger.

And then there is the show itself…

Which neither I nor this website is going to work to spoil for anyone.

It would be a mistake to expect too much.

And it would be a mistake to not pay close attention.

It would be a little silly of anyone to argue too intensely that the Oscars were ever a pure, innocent celebration of the best work of the preceding year.  The stakes were, indeed, much, much lower.  It was less of a marketing machine.  But every major wanted its piece of the action and by 1936 (Year 6), there were a dozen Best Picture nominees (and the film won Best Actor and Actress).  In 1945, they went to the five Best Picture format. In 1953, the show was first televised.  That was two years before this year’s producer, Bill Condon was born.

And I think that is a real point to make.

Condon grew up in some realm of the modern Oscars.  His memories, however rose-colored, have led to a passion for the event.  He, like his entire generation, grew up on what was in the theaters and what ended up on network television and much later in its life, on local stations.  I don’t know what films he watched over and over and over again on the television set.  (Who knows?  Maybe he didn’t watch much TV.)  For me, it was The Little Rascals, the Blondie series, Penny Serenade, and, starting in my pre-teens, the Saturday night line-up on CBS, which was replaced by the ABC line-up, which was replaced by the NBC line-up, and so on…

But every year, it was the Oscars.  For me, I think the first one where a Best Picture that I had seen in first run, before the show, was The Sting in 1974.  I was 9.  That was also the year of The Streaker.  I think I missed the 1975 Oscars.  The only “Best Picture” I would have seen before the show was The Towering Inferno.  The other four films (Godfather 2, Chinatown, The Conversation, Lenny) would be the baseline for my film education for decades to come.  I didn’t see Barry Lyndon in first run, but I did see One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest twice before it was nominated.  That would become the norm.  By the next year, I was deeply invested in Network winning… which it did not.  The 1978 Oscars were the first group of films I remember watching over and over and over again on HBO. 

There are not a lot of other things that I have done every year for 33 years. 

Condon was 18 for the Oscars show I first remember watching.  He probably remembers the years with no host (1969 – 1971).  He surely remembers the six years after that with no fewer than 4 hosts each year.  Charlton Heston and Rock Hudson in ’73, John Huston in ’74, The Rat Pack in ’75, Gene Kelly in ’76, Beatty and Pryor in ‘77.  Then Carson… then Crystal.  There were others in between and since, but it’s always been some form of flailing with various levels of success. 

But there was something that really did feel special in those years.  The hosts were real life icons.  They were not just members of the industry, they WERE the industry. 

Who IS the industry right now?  That is one of the prime questions that Mr. Condon & Mr. Mark will try to answer on Sunday night.  Is it this month’s hottest star… the senior circuit… the stars of Condon’s youth, of my youth, of a 30seomthing’s youth, of Watchmen… the stars of tomorrow? 

If their answer is close enough to right, the show will be the party we all wanted to be at and got to watch on TV.  If not, then it will be another show with some memorable reactions when people win, some great sets, so big moments and some disappointing moments.  Respect will be paid.  The thrill of the winners will be the most important drama of the night. 

We all keep watching and waiting for that tingle in the spine because it matters so much and it matters not at all… but you can’t fake that tingle when it happens.

Here’s to the tingle!

 

This Week's Charts
PictureX
Actor/Supporting Actor | Actress/Supporting Actress
Screenplay/Adapted Screenplay | Director

Recent Columns
February 5, 2009
January 29, 2009
January 8, 2009
December 31, 2008
December 18, 2008
December 11, 2008
December 8, 2008
December 4, 2008
December 1, 2008
November 20, 2008
November 14, 2008
November 6, 2008
October 23, 2008
October 16, 2008
September 25, 2008
July 31, 2008

2008 Oscars | 2007 Oscars | 2006 Oscars | 2005 Oscars

- Email David Poland