The 2012 Academy Awards will air this Sunday and it will involve rich and famous people congratulating each other for being rich, famous, and artistic in a very long-winded, unnecessary ceremony. Awards will be handed out and I will disagree with them, especially Best Picture. This happens every year. It probably sounds like I don't like awards season, but this is not at all true. I don't have the complaint that I hear every day: "They nominate movies nobody has ever seen or even heard of." I love awards season. It's my favorite time of the year aside from November and December when all of the supposed awards-worthy movies come to film festivals, gain hype, open in theaters, and gain more hype or make everyone question why they were hyped to begin with. I love it so much that I have made it a point to not only see all of the Best Picture nominees along with most of the acting, but to see them before the nominations are announced. Getting back to my original point, the Oscars are this week and they are about to name the wrong film Best Picture, the wrong actor best actor, and the right actor best supporting actor. Before I discuss the who will win, the who should win, and the who should have won but somehow wasn't nominated because the Academy is full of safe bets, Over the next few days I will discuss the 5 biggest Oscar mistakes in the past 20 years.
5. The 2009 Academy Awards were broken. So broken, in fact, that they amended the rules almost immediately after the ceremony to prevent the travesty that occurred. Five films were nominated for Best Picture and I can make a valid argument against each one of them and name five films that deserved to be in the race just as much, some even more.
I will start with The Reader. This film was made as Oscar bait and the Academy bit. Sure, Kate Winslet is great in it but it isn't her best performance nor film of the year. That distinction belongs to Revolutionary Road. There is a reason Hugh Jackman joked during his opening number singing "I did not see The Reader." It wasn't award worthy and we all knew it.
Frost/Nixon is a fine film with some phenomenal acting. but it isn't anything special. It won a nomination for being a Ron Howard film about a bad time in American history that made today's society look like we came further than we have, not because it was a risky, ground-breaking film that changed the way movies are made or even how we perceive ourselves. It was an above average movie with hype and a premise.
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is a film I love. It is by far my favorite of the nominees and I don't care how much you tell me it was just backwards Forrest Gump. That being said, it was backwards Forrest Gump. Something that could have been wildly original ended up being a slightly different movie that had won this award previously.
Milk may actually belong in this category. It had everything the Academy loves (the little guy, history being made for the better, great acting, a well-known director who had been nominated before) but there's something missing from this film I have never been able to fully explain.
The year's Best Picture winner was the Danny Boyle directed Slumdog Millionaire. When this film won, which was inevitable as soon as the nominations were introduced I had no problem with it. I enjoy the film and I like the way the story was told. Plus, I'm a sucker for two things: a tragedy and a good love story. This film had both aspects. The reason this film won was because Obama had just been elected president, America was turning downhill and he was our hope. This film was the epitome of hope. Keep in mind Hollywood is known for being a very liberal society. But as time passed the movie clearly doesn't have what it takes to be considered a classic, which is what the winner of this category is supposed to be.
So with those five films thrown out what should be put in? I mentioned one previously in Revolutionary Road. I know it isn't uplifting or hopeful. In fact it is one of the saddest films I have ever watched. This doesn't make it any less beautifully shot, acted, directed, and executed. When I walked out of the theater one of my friends said to me "If you ever are unsure about your current girlfriend, don't have her watch Revolutionary Road. You will break up before the credits roll."Any film that can evoke that much emotion deserves recognition.
Clint Eastwood kind of shot himself in the foot this year by directing two films that had award hopes, and likely split the vote between the two. Changeling and Gran Torino both have their classic Eastwood touches and are definitely stories meant to tug your heart strings. Both have great lead performances (Angelina Jolie in Changeling and Eastwood in Gran Torino) and both have their issues. Maybe Gran Torino should have cast actors instead of just finding children living in a Hmong village. Maybe Changeling should have focused less on dressing down Angelina Jolie and let her acting speak for itself. The fact is these issues didn't drag down either movie enough to make them less enjoyable. Gran Torino was loved by everyone I have spoken with and carried a message of even old dogs can learn new tricks that the Academy should have loved. Changeling is the one film I could throw out of the running in favor of Milk or Slumdog Millionaire, but it deserved more credit than it got.
In the 1992 Academy Awards a new precedent was set with Beauty and the Beast getting a Best Picture nomination. An animated picture didn't get a nomination again until 2010 when the field expanded to 10 nominees. The Academy was able to justify this by creating a Best Animated Picture category in 2001. The reason Up was able to claim that Best Picture nomination in 2010 is because of the public and critical outcry for Wall-e to get one the year before. Wall-e is one of the best films ever made. The main character says two words: Wall-e and (incorrectly) Eva. The first 30 minutes are practically silent and the animation is practically 3D before 3D came back in style. Sure the last half of the movie can't top the first, but it isn't enough to prevent Wall-e from being a great film.
The final nominee should have been a movie that was such a critical success that out of the 283 people that reviewed it for RottenTomatoes.com only 18 gave it a "rotten" rating. This is coupled with the fact that it is the third highest domestic grossing film of all time with $533.3 million. This film is of course The Dark Knight. Those of you who know me probably know I love Batman. I did before this film and I will after the series ends, but this doesn't make it any less worthy of the award. This is not bias, this is truth. It embodies everything that the Academy should love if it could get past the fact that the hero is in a mask. It has a clearly defined good and evil then muddies the waters with Harvey Dent/Two-Face. It has a hopeful, yet dark ending. It shows that there is such thing as too much power for one person, just ask Lucius Fox. It has a public that won't be corrupted. This movie just showed you the world is full of people ready to believe in good. As Batman has the Joker hanging upside down the camera starts to turn, slowly making the Joker no longer upside down, but instead turned us and our perceptions upside down. If the Academy really wanted to award a movie for giving us hope, this was the one.
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