Feb 19 2009
Why The Oscars Don’t Matter.
Oh, boy, its Academy Award time! Its time for an elaborate and overdone ceremony where Hollywood pats themselves on the back. The Oscars are awarded to the best movies of the year based on specific or all the elements of filmmaking. At least, that’s what everybody thinks.
But wait, where is The Dark Knight? Sure, it’s getting nominated for the technical awards it deserves as well one supporting role, but why no Best Picture nomination? Simple: the Academy doesn’t want it. For the technical awards (cinemtography, visual effects), the movies that are great get what they deserve in that category, but when it comes to everthing else, the awards are biased. Perfect example was the 2006 Oscars for Best Animated Film and Best Documentary. The nominations for Best Animated Film that year were Cars, Monster House, and Happy Feet. Now, I was studying animation at the time and I was sure it was between Cars and Monster House. Both of those movies did something new and interesting with animation technically and story-wise. But the award went to Happy Feet. Why? Well, in the third act of Happy Feet, the movie broke down into an environmental message OUT OF NOWHERE! It was that forced message that won it the Oscar. Don’t believe me? Not much later after that movie recieved the award, Al Gore and Leo DiCaprio walk out on stage and talk about going green. Keep in mind this was BEFORE the award for Best Documentary was given to Al Gore for An Inconvenient Truth. I’m not trying to hate on Al Gore, but when you’re judging a movie based more on its message than it being a well-made and entertaining movie, that ain’t right.
I was recently talking with some people about the nominations this year for Best Animated Picture which are Kung-Fu Panda, Bolt, and Wall-E. My friends in the animation industry believe that Kung-Fu Panda will win because of its unique art style. However, Wall-E comes with the environmental message thus guranteeing it the Oscar. If the Oscars are truly judged on perfection and uniquness in the craft of filmmaking, Kung-Fu Panda will win. But, as of right now and based on the trends I’ve seen in the past, Wall-E is the safe bet because it caters to the whole ‘go-green’ theme the Academy loves to embrace along with charities and bashing Republicans.
But, still, why no Dark Knight for best picture? A couple of reasons:
1. It’s not heart-warming or based on true events/novels.
2. None of the characters are gay, racist or dying of cancer.
3. Christian Bale is not an Oscar-caliber actor (even I don’t know what that means).
Don’t get me wrong, I love The Dark Knight and I, like many, thought it was the best movie of 2008. But is winning an Oscar really going to make people take comic book movies seriously? Is it going to make the movie any better or highly regarded? Will anyone even give a crap? Look, years from now, people will still remember The Dark Knight as a perfect action film, despite not winning Best Picture. I mean, can you honestly name the Best Picture winners of the past twenty years? Oscars mean nothing other than an extra quote to put on the DVD packaging.
So, yeah, I won’t be watching the Academy Awards. I’ll look at the technical awards list the day after, but I really don’t have any interest in terms of Best Picture and Best Actor or the ceremony itself. Even with the obvious winner for Supporting Actor, Heath Ledger as the Joker, I really don’t care considering there will be at least two retrospectives on the man. And I’ve already seen about a billion of them before The Dark Knight even came out. Also, where is the love for Sydney Pollock and Stan Winston? They’ve done more for the film industry than Ledger ever did. And if you don’t know who those two people are, you don’t know jack about film.
