“Let’s have a moment of silence for the suffering Oscar bloggers as they enter the most trying and mortifying weeks of their labors.” Such was Glenn Kenny’s tweeted lament earlier this week — one eerily anticipating today’s latest, sanity-thrashing edition of Oscar Index. And that’s just its effect on readers! You really don’t want to see the catatonic pall saturating Movieline’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics. On the other hand, we’re gonna make a fortune recycling this mounting pile of wine bottles. To the Index!
The Final 9:
1. The Artist
2. The Help
3. The Descendants
4. Hugo
5. Moneyball
6. The Tree of Life
7. Midnight in Paris
8. The Daldry
9. War Horse
Some shuffling in the ranks reflected little more than two things: 1) The profile boosts that certain films’ respective individual nominees received in the acting and directing categories, and 2) our arrival at the harsh depot known as Smug City — an awards-season juncture to which we return seemingly every year now, described this time around by EW’s Owen Gleiberman:
The audience — remember them? — is no longer a very big part of the equation. I had assumed, mistakenly, that because The Help was an astonishingly big hit, and because its success sprung from the way that it clearly touched a racial-cultural nerve in people, that the movie’s organic popularity — as opposed to the heavily marketed freeze-dried quasi-popularity of The Artist — would be decisive at the Academy Awards. But all I was demonstrating was a mode of analysis about how the Oscars work that is now, more or less, completely outmoded.
Seriously, you’ve heard this all before: Gleiberman goes on to contrast the populist glories…
Full Story »There’s good news and bad news to begin this post-nomination, next-to-next-to-next-to-next-to-last installment of Oscar Index. The good news? It’s kind of almost over! The bad news? Oy. Please don’t make me repeat it.
The laurel-sniffing wonks at Movieline’s Institute for the Advanced Study of Kudos Forensics went 27 for 34 predicting its regular, top six categories, which means that the Academy basically tossed in a “surprise” every fifth nomination or so — though specialists at the MIASKF technically refuse to classify anything that was on last week’s charts as a “surprise.” So basically, if it’s not all two nominations for The Daldry, then you probably should have seen it coming.
Which you did. As such, we resume the Sisyphean torment of our Oscar-addled eternities, pushing boulders that look and feel suspiciously like crystal balls up hills that look and feel vaguely like the bones of 84 years’ worth of snubs. What does it all mean? To the Index!
The Final 9:
1. The Artist
2. The Descendants
3. The Help
4. Midnight in Paris
5. Hugo
6. Moneyball
7. War Horse
8. The Daldry
9. The Tree of Life
My favorite parts of nomination morning — apart from the Lucasfilm plant who yelped, “Red Tails! Gotta be Red Tails” as Al Roker informally polled Today Show tourists about their Best Picture predictions — were the peals of ecstasy that greeted The Daldry’s announcement among the year’s nine Picture nominees. It sounded like a dog clamping down on a chew toy made of publicists. Other nominations elicited vaguely similar reactions, but that was The Reaction, as if to underscore just how desperately all the parties of all the films involved had chased this singular recognition, and how favorably…
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Happy Monday! Also in today’s edition of The Broadsheet: The ripoff artistry of the L.A. Times… Vanity Fair has a surprising new film critic… Atlas Shrugged has a blurb problem… The “Chocolate Rain” guy explains the economy… and more.
· In the same interview where he opened up about his icky first orgasm, George Clooney apparently elaborated as well about the suicidal thoughts he experienced following the spinal injury he suffered on the set Syriana: “I was at a point where I thought, ‘I can’t exist like this. I can’t actually live.’ […] You start to think in terms of, you don’t want to leave a mess, so go in the garage, go in the car, start the engine. It seems like the nicest way to do it, but I never thought I’d get there. See, I was in a place where I was trying to figure out how to survive.” Yikes. In any case, I’d say it all worked out? [Rolling Stone via EW]
· It was bad enough when the L.A. Times ripped off Movieline’s interactive map of Drive locations. Now they’ve got something called The Gold Standard — basically a copied, pasted, and slighty reconstituted version of our Oscar Index without any legitimate analysis or insight. Go over and check it out, and then leave a comment telling them how much more you prefer their features when they appear on this site weeks earlier. [LAT]
· Hey, this is fun: Writer-director Paul Mazursky is now the film critic in residence at Vanity Fair. First up: Melancholia. Seriously. [VF.com]
· Even more fun: The…
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