re: t91st Academy Awards | 7 pm on ABC

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Sam Elliott was also robbed for Best Supporting Actor.

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Nah. Richard E Grant was the one that was really robbed.

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With its insistence on the pretense of loving our way into racial harmony

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Can I just say I thought Brie Larson looked very sickly last night with the weight loss for Captain Marvel.

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It's one of those things that someone inevitably says every year, but this year it happened to be true.

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2012
The Descendants
The Artist
Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close
Moneyball
Midnight in Paris
War Horse
Tree of Life
Hugo
The Help

That is the gold standard for lousy nominees. The only movie on that list that even approaches Oscar worthy is THE DESCENDANTS, and its the kind of movie that gets a courtesy nominee before losing to some other big-named film. I actively despise about half of those films, and most of the others are too mediocre to have any opinion on at all.

Damn, yeah that’s a bad year.


I did like Descendants and Moneyball a good bit, and my inner child that grew up with the love of the magic of cinema couldn’t help but really like Hugo.

Other than that, yikes.


Still not sure it’s worse than this year though.



I honestly think the Academy ruined their brand by expanding the Best Picture race.

I’d love to see what each year would look like with only the traditional five nominees.


I’d think this year it would be something like this:

Green Book
Blackkklansman
Roma
A Star Is Born
The Favourite


Still not a great year, but each of those would be decent nominees in lots of years, and one could argue that each fits the Oscar standard in some capacity. Also still very diverse and inclusive, imo, which was the supposed reason for the expansion.


For convenience, I’ll use Baloo’s other example as well and say in 2012 it would have been something like:

The Descendants
The Artist
Moneyball
War Horse
Hugo

Again, far from a great year, but a decent scope of styles and subject matter, all of which have a credibility that at least makes the category respectable and worthy of praise.

Compare that to what we see now where you’re left a crowd of movies and wondering what sets half of them apart from any other movie playing at the theater on any given week, and I just don’t see the benefit to the awards or to the film industry itself that the expansion created.



Onviously, part of the respect for the statue was its exclusivity. In most years you’d be arguing for movies that were left off, sort of indirectly highlighting how many good movies there were. I mean, there’s too many to choose from!

But by including 8-10 movies every year that can claim any Oscar credibility at all, it shifts the debate from “what other films may have been worthy” to “is this really all there was that was worthy??”


As usual, it was a very shortsighted reactionary move and I think it has put a huge chink in the statue, so to speak.

Yeah, I don't like the expanded category either. Five nominees was fine, we don't need courtesy nods. And it's not like they've gone to movies who could use the attention like, say, FIRST REFORMED or EIGHTH GRADE. They got their traditional courtesy noms in Screenplay.

I think this year's field was fine. It left out a lot of my favorites, which I think were still Oscar-y sort of movies like FIRST MAN and BLINDSPOTTING to say nothing of more risky choices like ANNIHILATION, HEREDITARY, SORRY TO BOTHER YOU, or DEATH OF STALIN.

But you had a personal film from one of the world's great directors (ROMA), a crowd-pleasing mainstream effort from one of the era's most overlooked by Oscar directors (BLACK KLANSMAN), a terrific period piece which is a subtle critique of period pieces (THE FAVOURITE), and a star making acting turn from one of the biggest pop stars on earth (STAR IS BORN). That's a pretty good field, objectively speaking, even if you don't like one or two of the individual movies.

But if, say, THE FAVOURITE won, it would be to a smattering of applause and it would eventually be forgotten over the years. People would treat it like, "Hey, remember that movie that won Best Pictur with the duck racing?" Or A STAR IS BORN would've led to a mediation on the validation of remakes. But neither would have much of a backlash (or a frontlash). It would've been like ARGO winning. Oh, that's nice. And then we move on.

I genuinely feel bad for GREEN BOOK. It's not a terrible movie, but it is destined to be treated like one by movie historians. It's got a role to play in the narrative of movies, and it's now, unfortunately for it, DRIVING MISS DAISY 2. Right down to screwing over Spike Lee. It also had the result of promoting BLACK KLANSMAN out of the field of fairly even contenders to the One Movie That Got Screwed. The story of the 2019 Oscars is now about those two movies, like it or not. For there to be a screw job, someone has to get screwed. And we like to identify one movie out of the field.