MADness—the Blog

Every Oscar year offers a few oddities.  This is one of them.

Ryan Bingham is the name of the co-writer, with T Bone Burnett, of the Oscar-nominated song “The Weary Kind (Theme from ‘Crazy Heart’).”

Ryan Bingham is the name of the character played by George Clooney for his Best Actor-nominated performance in Up in the Air.

When’s the last time an Oscar-nominated role shared a name with an Oscar nominee of the same year?  I’d guess that would be 2002, when Nic Cage was nominated for playing Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman in Adaptation, a movie scripted by the Oscar-nominated team of Charlie Kaufman and Donald Kaufman.

(There was no Donald Kaufman, really.  It was the first time the Academy nominated someone who wasn’t real.)

The Oscar nominations were announced this morning.  One thing is certain.  Television rules, which is why they make certain people in Hollywood wake in the middle of the night to bring the news to you.

Best Picture nominees number ten this year (another concession to television).  Here are the movies that made the cut:

Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air

Sci-fi historically does not do well in the non-technical categories, but this year may have been an exception with a certain phenomenon that’s setting records at the box office.  With District 9 in the mix, though, sci-fi fans have an alternative.  That should be good news for The Hurt Locker and director Kathryn Bigelow.  That’s good.

Here are all the nominees.  I’d say Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Christoph Waltz, and Mo’Nique are favorites for the acting categories (the men are virtual locks). 

Sandra Bullock has the rare opportunity to be the best—and worst—actress of the year.  She’s been nominated for a Razzie too.

Hollywood studios don’t make movies anymore.  They distribute them.  That is, they sell movies, they market movies, they release movies—and there are few things that matter as much to the studios as when a movie is released.  Take Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen.  (Please!)  DreamWorks, Paramount, Universal, and others, teamed up for the worldwide distribution, and you can bet they had countless meetings before agreeing on a schedule.  The U.S. release date was June 24.  That makes sense.  The beginning of summer, kids are out of school—it’s a good time for popcorn.

A June date for any movie usually means that Academy Award considerations were not part of the calculation.  Everybody knows that Oscar-worthy films are released late in the year.  But what’s interesting this year is that one of the films getting lots of Oscar buzz was released the same week as the Transformers sequel—The Hurt Locker. 

The Hurt Locker was released by Summit Entertainment, a relative newcomer to the distribution business.  Did the company not think the movie had Oscar potential?  Or did it think that the famously short memories of Academy voters was a Hollywood legend not to be taken seriously?

Ten films will get Best Picture nominations this year.  In nine days we’ll know what they are.  Of the films likely to be among the chosen, all but a handful were released after Labor Day.

Up—May 29
The Hurt Locker—Jun. 26
Julie & Julia—Aug. 7
Inglourious Basterds—Aug. 21
A Serious Man—Oct. 2
An Education—Oct. 16
Where the Wild Things Are—Oct. 16
Precious—Nov. 6
Fantastic Mr. Fox—Nov. 13
The Blind Side—Nov. 20
A Single Man—Dec. 11
Invictus—Dec. 11
Crazy Heart—Dec. 16
Avatar—Dec. 18
Nine—Dec. 18
Up in the Air—Dec. 23

Do Oscar voters really have short memories?  It’s hard to tell, since studios usually hold their best stuff till late in the fall.  It’s become a self-fulfilling prophecy.  In any case, over the past couple of decades, only four films released during the first half of the year won the big prize.

1990  Dances with Wolves—Nov. 9
1991  The Silence of the Lambs—Feb. 14
1992  Unforgiven—Aug. 7
1993  Schindler’s List—Dec. 15
1994  Forrest Gump—Jul. 6
1995  Braveheart—May 24
1996  The English Patient—Nov. 15
1997  Titanic—Dec. 19
1998  Shakespeare in Love—Dec. 11
1999  American Beauty—Oct. 1
2000  Gladiator—May 5
2001  A Beautiful Mind—Dec. 21
2002  Chicago—Dec. 27
2003  The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King—Dec. 17
2004  Million Dollar Baby—Dec. 15
2005  Crash—May 6
2006  The Departed—Oct. 6
2007  No Country for Old Men—Nov. 9
2008  Slumdog Millionaire—Nov. 12

This post’s title is the title of an article in The Envelope at the L.A. Times on Wednesday.  I read the article in the paper at breakfast, but inexplicably it’s not to be found online.  Perhaps there was an oversight, or perhaps the editors had second thoughts and wished they had killed the dead-tree version too.

Writer Glenn Whipp starts with speculation about the change this year in Oscar rules that will allow ten Best Picture nominations.  Which films will benefit from the extra slots?  Sci-fi films?  Comedies?  Animated films?  So far, he’s on solid (though well-trod) ground.  Then he goes on to write one of the more spectacularly silly sentences you’ll read all Oscar season:

The more intriguing question is whether it will mean more inclusion for Oscar’s most overlooked genre:  movies that appeal to conservatives.

I admit that I never had thought of “movies that appeal to conservatives” as a genre before.  I guess I missed that page at Netflix.  Some of those other “genres” such as foreign films and documentaries must be thankful for all the Best Picture attention they’ve been getting.  It would be an awful feeling to be the “most overlooked.”

Whipp goes on to name a few Oscar contenders that “could be seen as a patriot act” (which is hardly good grammar, but worse, it’s a tip-off to some insidious assumptions he’s making).  He also names some past Best Picture nominees that “could“ (his italics) be considered Red State films (which would then refute his assertion that they are the “most overlooked genre,” but logic is a lot to ask, I suppose).

What bugs me most, however, are those typical, tired assumptions that Whipp makes about what’s conservative—and the implicit assumptions that means for what’s liberal.  It’s bad enough when we have to endure this kind of stupidity on the op-ed page, but why is it now in the movie section too?

Some examples:

Juno.  Why he thinks it’s conservative:  “Teen girl has sex (!), gets pregnant…decides to have baby.  (Yay!)”  What he implies about liberals:  They don’t like babies—they like abortions!  (Baby killers!)

Braveheart.  Why he thinks it’s conservative:  “Freeeeeeeeeeedom!  It’s worth dying for.”  What he implies about liberals:  Wimps!  They deserve to be in chains.

Forrest Gump.  Why he thinks it’s conservative:  “Simple but big-hearted doofus rejects the ’60s, embraces God, country and free enterprise.”  What he implies about liberals:  Those losers just don’t have the “Gump”-tion.

The Lives of Others.  Why he thinks it’s conservative:  “Its indictment of Soviet-era communism.”  What he implies about liberals:  Pinkos who support the Stasi and totalitarian police states.

You get the idea.  Wrong in so many ways.  One thing I can agree with, though:  the title.  The whole article had me in a red state of mind.