Okay, so it's been a while since I've posted anything on this subject because...frankly, the awards this past week have just been confusing as heck. In fact, this won't be an analysis, this is going to be a rant.
First off, no one should ever ever ever ever ever ever ever ever EVER ask Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel to host ANY award show ever again! That had to have been the worst award show I have ever seen. Not only did it kick off with an incredibly lame joke about motion capture, they actually brought Michael Bay in to play along with the joke. Let me let that sink in again, the Broadcast FILM CRITICS award show featured a clip with MICHAEL BAY in a POSITIVE light!!! This is a group that has gone out of their way to ignore every movie he's ever made, even in the technical categories. The fact that they would want to even feature him makes the credibility of the awards rank up there with the Nickelodeon Kids Choice Awards or the MTV Movie Awards. They could have found any other director that's great with visual effects, Nolan, Abrams, Jackson, Cameron, I could go on forever...that was clue one that the show was going down hill and it just got worse from there. I'm not referring to the winners, just the show itself. Again, no one should ever ask Paul Scheer and Rob Huebel back to host any award show ever.
Now for the awards themselves. Well, it looks like Harvey Weinstein bought another Best Picture award. He did it first with Shakespeare in Love winning over Saving Private Ryan, last year he bought out the award for last year's The King's Speech to win over The Social Network, this year, he's bought the award for The Artist over...I don't know. Honestly, this whole year had no real front runner and one movie that makes older movie lovers nostalgic for the silent film era by being a silent film itself. Now, The Artist is a very cute movie and a very good one. It'll probably make my ten best films of the year list (once I see enough good movies to make a top ten list), but here's my problem with it winning: it will be the death nail between the Oscars and any mainstream movie goer giving a rats ass about Oscars.
The Academy has been trying to appeal to mainstream audiences over the past couple of years and falling on their sword while doing it. They had the opportunity to nominate two of the highest grossing movies of 2008 that also got some of the best reviews of the year (The Dark Knight and Wall-E) and instead decided to go for more traditional and dismissible movies like The Reader and The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. They finally expanded their list of nominees to ten to include more mainstream movies...and kept nominating a bunch of studio promoted prestige pictures. Now, their final attempt to make things interesting is that they're going to have an undetermined amount of nominees to make things interesting. I said it before, the only people that are going to notice are the people who enjoy predicting the awards like me and even we find it annoying as hell.
So, how does The Artist factor into this? Well, consider this: 2009's The Hurt Locker was the lowest grossing Best Picture winner of all time and it made $17 million. Still, the subject matter and style was enough to make people interested in seeing it. Currently, The Artist has grossed $9 million and honestly, I can't see it doubling that amount over the next month. So this year's winner is going to probably take the mantle for the lowest grossing Best Picture winner...that nobody is going to care about! Seriously, is anyone going to say:
"Hey, honey, I just finished wiring up our three thousand dollar surround sound system. What do you want to try it out on?"
"Ooo, let's watch The Artist!"
(Movie's music plays in only the TV speaker. All other channels are silent.)
"Well...gee...that was...cute."
This movie is not going to find an audience, I can just say that now. It's not going to catch on with the mainstream and for the Academy to say that they want to appeal to mainstream audiences, they are picking the WRONG movie to get behind. Now, I don't expect them to give the award to my best film of this year (Hugo) because it was such a box office disaster (seriously, families, you'll take your kids to see Chipwrecked but not Hugo, then complain that they're not paying enough attention in school? It has to start somewhere, people!), but a movie like Moneyball, which was a pretty big hit and could generate a really good rental base could really be a great alternative.
But The Artist is just not going to catch on and I think, it will actually repel audiences not just from the movie, but from the Oscars also. Now, like I said, it's a really good movie, but at some point, we have to stop letting the oldest generation choose what is or isn't the best in movies. Last year was a clear-cut example of old versus new with the old being represented by The King's Speech, a real life costume drama about a person who overcomes a personal handicap, and the new being represented by The Social Network, a movie about the dangers of a generation becoming dehumanized. Look what won. While I mainly blame Harvey Weinstein and his lobbyist-esque tactics of buying awards, it clearly showed that in the Academy, the old outweighs the new.
If they ever want to appeal to a mainstream audience, they're going to have to do more than just half-ass a "youth targeted show", they're going to need movies that have a large fanbase behind them. They started out well with Avatar and Inception, but they decided to ignore Harry Potter this year. If they want the ratings, nominate something like Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, which, while it wasn't a classic, has been a consistently entertaining series of movies (something I can't say for the Transformer franchise). Also, you have the sleeper hit Bridesmaids, which has been getting a lot of good precursor buzz and some really good reviews. Heck, it might be time to recognize a new genre: women's comedies that prove women can be just as funny and raunchy as the men.
So, long story short, if the Academy wants to have their cake and eat it too with this year, their best picture line-up should look like this:
The Artist
Bridesmaids
The Descendants
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallow Part 2
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
See, aren't you interested in those nominees? Nine movies that are a perfect blend of mainstream and prestige, something the Academy USED to know how to do in their heyday. But, no, I think it's going to look like this:
The Artist
The Descendents
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
The Help
Hugo
Midnight in Paris
Moneyball
War Horse
Seen any of them? Okay, maybe a couple of you saw The Help (the few of you that are reading these posts), but for the most part, they don't have any audience appeal to them whatsoever. The Academy is going to keep trying to shove their choices down everyone's throats and they'll either be gems or pretentious art house crap that audiences are going to reject. If the Academy should take anything from The Artist, they should reach the conclusion that the main character did and adapt with the times, not move backwards!
Oh, well, like Sidney Poitier said in Guess Who's Coming to Dinner, "Not until your whole generation has lain down and died will the dead weight of you be off our backs!" It won't be until the old generation of Hollywood dies off that we'll see a recognition of more mainstream films, if studios can ever make those again. Which will bring me to my next post...
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