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

6 Weeks To Go:
Almost There

This is the shortest award season EVER!

It is also one of the most predictable years ever.

It is also the season in which coverage of the awards, from start to finish, jumped the shark into an Ouroboros parade. 

It is also one of the weakest years, in terms of movies, in a long time. 

The truth is, the field always narrows, there are always expected award players that turn out to be misses, and there are always a few big surprises… but on that last one, not this year.   

I think the lack of surprise is a combination of certain surprise tricks no longer being surprising and the films that hoped to film that place just not being compelling enough to overcome the more expected films. 

Really, the fact that The Dark Knight is looking like a locked in nominee – and has for a month now – is indicative of a weak field.  It’s not a reflection of the film itself, but of the simple fact that a film like that just isn’t what the Academy tends to lean towards.  People’s Choice Award?  Absolutely.  Oscar?  Are you kidding?

Gran Torino is an example of a film that lives in a slot that was once a surprise and no longer is.  “The Second Eastwood Movie” thing is in its second showing.  Thing is, the only movie of the four that really did deserve a Best Picture nomination was Letters from Iwo Jima. 

T2EM’s life and death was organic, starting with Mystic River making no splash at all at Cannes before becoming a strong Oscar player with an October release in 2003.  Could Eastwood really have a 2004 Oscar movie too?  Sure!  Million Dollar Baby zoomed into a December slot after Eastwood made the “go” call in late October and not only was it nominated, it beat that year’s Scorsese shot at Oscar.  How to top that?  Two movies!  Well… they were opposite sides of the Iwo Jima story, so there was some crossover.  But the big, English-language one turned out to be well made, but uninteresting.  And the little, late Japanese one that virtually no one who wasn’t a critic or a voter saw… your nominee.

Cut to two years later and it is like Clint’s Greatest Hits.  Changeling goes to Cannes, gets the buzz that is now expected.  And dies when landing on the Mystic River slot in October.  Then the second film, no longer a “late entry,” but long scheduled to follow Changeling by two months or so, stars Clint, like M$B, involves Asians, like LFIJ, and has a karate kid, though this one is a young boy with no acting experience instead of the Next Karate Kid, Hillary Swank. 

What is also true for the first time since Unforgiven is that Clint brings his iconography to the table and plays hard against it.  How ironic – and a little horrifying – is it that Eastwood, who lost the Oscar he should have won for Unforgiven to what was pretty much a career-achievement award for Al Pacino, is now being pushed hard to be nominated and win for work that is undeserving by his own iconic standards.  But even more so, that making this comparison would be unfair to Pacino, who is often mocked for his work in Scent of A Woman, but only because he created something so powerful that it was immediately the subject of everyone’s imitations.  People love Clint growling, “Get off my lawn.”  But they love it much the way they loved “Go ahead, make my day,” not because it was such a fine creation, but because it was so brutally direct. 

There is some talk this season about Holocaust fatigue. 

Nah.

But the standards are not quite as simple as “Dead Jews Win,” which is a horrible, yet often repeated line about the awards season.  But Ed Zwick making serious, popular, and awards-lite movies is not new news.  And The Reader, which caught fire as a possible contender primarily because of a fight between Harvey Weinstein and Scott Rudin that made it feel, for a moment, like Harvey was back in business.  He’s not. 

Then there were the front runners…. ah, the front runners.

I wrote about the danger of frontrunning six weeks ago and, indeed, Australia and Revolutionary Road died a BP death before they could open.  And The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has done the job of getting a nomination.  But try finding someone left who thinks it can win Best Picture. 

We also have the great animated movie reaching for a Best Picture nomination that has only happened once… and never with an animation category available for voting.  Wall-E is one of the very best films of the year, as was Finding Nemo… but no.  The last run like this was with the documentary, Fahrenheit 9/11, which lost its tiny, tiny window when Bush won reelection in spite of Michael Moore not wanting him to do so. 

You want a familiar, but silly stat that hasn’t come up yet and will in a couple of weeks?  Ron Howard has never been nominated for Best Director and had the film nominated for Best Picture and lost.  Why silly?  Because the sample is just one film.  A Beautiful Mind.  His other nominee was Apollo 13, for which he was not nominated.  (He won, however, the DGA Award that year.)

Even the leading nominees lack a certain sense of discovery.  Danny Boyle is the only nominee never to be nominated for anything by the DGA or the Academy.  David Fincher’s only nod from either group was a DGA win for commercials in 2004.  Gus van Sant was nominated by both DGA and the Academy for Good Will Hunting.  Christopher Nolan grabbed a DGA nod for Memento.  And Ron Howard has been thrice DGA nominated, wining twice and Oscar nominated once, winning that time.

Will any lead actor be in any way surprising aside from Richard Jenkins, who has been a well known character actor forever?  Same with Michael Shannon in Supporting? 

Streep, Blanchett, Winslet, Scott Thomas… really?  Does Anne Hathaway even seem like a surprise at this point?  Viola Davis may well be the only unknown… virtually the only non-former-nominee in that group!

Look… I am really happy to see a lot of these people again.  In the last couple of days, I have done four video interviews… with four people who I have sat down with either for past Oscar nominated work or earlier for their films this year under other circumstances.  It was a great pleasure, but it’s not so much about new discoveries anymore. 

I don’t know… it’s like the whole thing wants to regress back to an earlier form, perhaps not quite as owned by the studios as it was back in the day, perhaps still televised, perhaps in a bigger room.  But it is supposed to be about the work.  And it is all too easy to forget that.

One of my interviewees got very emotional today, talking about being in this special place at this special time.  And afterwards, I talked to her about Mickey Rourke and how, even though you do get the feeling that he is a bit of a performance artist in interviews, I truly believe all the emotion he has been offering.  After all, he gives this deeply emotional, pained performance and then, what?  He is supposed to bottle it up?  That is what we want from him?  That is what we hope for?  Whatever happened to an artist being an artist?  Shouldn’t writers get that?

And that… that is the feeling we all want.  We want to feel.  We go to the movies to feel.  To feel good.  To feel bad.  To feel excitement or fear. 

In this too familiar year of awards, what is all this ennui about?  We aren’t feeling it.  And there is only one real solution.

Watch a great movie.

And maybe… maybe… leave Bill Condon and Larry Mark alone to do their work and to deliver an Oscar telecast that has a chance to surprise us.  One can hope.

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