Oscar-ology

Handicapping Academy Award winners is usually easier if you study how Hollywood thinks

Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Justin Timberlake in Columbia Pictures' "The Social Network."
Jesse Eisenberg, left, and Justin Timberlake in Columbia Pictures' "The Social Network."

— It is good to remember that the Academy Awards are an election, and subject to all the little corruptions of the heart and intellect to which all such contests are subject.

Why do you vote for onecandidate over another? Maybe because you perceive qualities which make him more fit for office than the other choices, or you feel he better represents yourinterests. More likely, because something about him evokes an emotional response. You just feel better about one than the others.

The members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are no different fromyou or me. If they can use their ballot to benefit themselves or their friends they probably will. They are susceptible to campaign advertising, as well as the probably unmeasurable but very real human desire to align themselves with winners. They can be lazy, and rely less on what they’ve seen than what they’ve heard. They may not have strong opinions. They may be spiteful.

Such is the way of our society; all elections are simple tests of popularity. The “best picture” never wins Best Picture, just as the “best man” is never so insecure as to stand for public office. There arecertain kinds of movies that win Oscars, and other kinds of movies that don’t. Quality enters into it, but quality is not determinative. “Bad” movies can win Oscars - if they are the sort of movies that win Oscars.

Still, the 10 movies up for the Best Picture Award at tonight’s 83rd annual ceremonies (starting at 7 p.m. on ABC) aren’t bad - though they are all subject to criticism.

Front-runners The King’s Speech and The Social Network both use the names of real people and revolve around actual events (World War II and the founding of Facebook, respectively), but neither should be taken as a reliable history.

Inception, hailed by some of its fans as “mind-blowing” and groundbreaking, feels these months later, cerebral and cool-centered. It reminds me of an architecturally exotic house that’s fine to look at on a mountainside but hell to dwell in. And I like the movie.

As for the rest, no matter how good they may in fact be (and really, it’s a decent list of “good” films), none is of the sort that wins Oscars - at least not the Best Picture Oscar. Black Swan is best received as high camp; 127 Hours has a gruesome scene, and besides, it’s more about filmmaking than story. True Grit is a remake, and fine in all ways but perhaps too much a pure entertainment to represent the best Hollywood had to offer in 2010.

The Kids Are All Right and Winter’s Bone are terrific movies, but the first is an adult ensemble comedy with lesbians while the second is about a white-trash girl in the Ozarks. Toy Story 3 is a cartoon. The Fighter is ultimately too standard a sports movie, though Christian Bale’s subplot should win him Best Supporting Actor.

That’s not how I want it, just how I see it. And I hope I’m wrong simply because I’d love to see the experts from whom I’ve cribbed my theory that only The Social Network or The King’s Speech can win the Best Picture Oscar be wrong.

Philip Martin is blogging daily with reviews of movies, TV, music and more at Blood, Dirt & Angels.

But they seldom are these days. They read the trades and watch the result of the various guild awards and they can tell you who will win and why - and if they miss their guess, they can tell you why they missed it.

The King’s Speech may have overtaken The Social Network as the odds-on favorite in recent weeks because of the electioneering skills of Harvey Weinstein (the Lee Atwater/James Carville of Oscar campaigns).

The sort of fine-tuned and fusty film of quality with which Hollywood is always happy to associate itself, The King’s Speech has grand performances from Colin Firth as tongue-tied King George VI and Geoffrey Rush as the coach who alleviates his stuttering.

Firth and Rush also received nominations. Firth will likely win Best Actor, in part because he was so good but didn’t get the nod in last year’s A Single Man, while Rush is probably the second favorite to Bale in the Best Supporting Actor race. (And don’t forget, Helena Bonham Carter received a Best Supporting Actress nomination for her role as the queen consort, although she probably has no chance of winning.)

Personally I liked The Social Network better, and I still think it will win Best Picture (and its director, David Fincher, will win in his category too). There were movies I liked better - Winter’s Bone, The Kids Are All Right. But I wonder if I had a vote that counted would I spendit (and, if we believe the increasingly correct experts, waste it) by voting for one of these underdogs? Or would I back The Social Network, simply because I preferred it to the other favorite?

I don’t know, though I know that in elections in which I do have a vote I sometimes vote strategically, for the lesser of perceived evils rather than for valiant windmill-tilters. But those kinds of elections are important to me in ways that the Oscars are not - I barely remember who and what won last year. (Yes, The Hurt Locker beat the people’s cherce, Avatar, and Kathryn Bigelow prevailed over her ex-husband James Cameron for Best Director. And Jeff Bridges and Sandra Bullock won, too.)

But for some of the members of the academy, these awards do mean a lot; they validate, they legitimize, they affect livelihoods. Winning anOscar doesn’t make you a better actor or filmmaker, but it allows you to put “Academy Award winner” before your name. It allows you to direct your critics’ attention to the scoreboard.

Most of us probably watch the Oscars for the same reasons we watch sports - not so much to see who wins, but for the pageantry, and the way people respond to the thrill of victory and the agony of defeat. (Losers clap with tight smiles.)

Few of us imagine that there is anything revelatory in the Academy’s verdicts. Though there will no doubt be some mild surprises, most of us who bother to pick the winners will - unless we listen to our silly hearts - hit more than we will miss. And so the Oscars flatter us as well. We know good movies and great performances whenwe see them. Or at least we have been trained to know what Oscar winners look like.

They look serious and expensive - light and sound baffled and cured into weightless representations of a reality prettier and less confusing than our own. They look like dreams made straight, they sound like pleasant homilies. They soothe us, by satisfying our superstitious conviction that we are not so different from the heroes who live so vividly, love so well and die so meaningfully in that patch of silver in the dark.

E-mail:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

Style, Pages 45 on 02/27/2011

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