Concerning the 86th Academy Award Nominations

I like the Academy Awards. I freely admit it. When it comes to this subject, opinions are very divisive. There are many who don’t like them either because they’re too consistent in the types of movies that they honor or because they honor the wrong ones. Some don’t care for the political aspect of it all, arguing that awards should be given based on the quality of a picture and not on how much a producer campaigned, which I agree with to an extent. Others just plain don’t care what the Academy has to say, because “it really doesn’t matter.” In my opinion, it does matter.

The simple fact is that the majority of the people who keep up with the Academy Awards every year are the very people who don’t watch any movies. As odd as that may sound, “normal” people don’t go to the cinema every week just in case something is good. Many wait to see which way the awards go. Now, that may sound like an ignorant way for the American people to be, but let’s face it. Only people who devote their lives to a certain medium will be able to recognize a great example of that medium blindly. Most everyone who hasn’t studied art won’t recognize a masterpiece unless one’s pointed out. So it is with films.

The greatest good that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences does with its awards is point people in the direction of great movies they otherwise would have never heard of, much less seen. The average filmgoer doesn’t need help in deciding to see something like The Avengers, but often needs a nudge towards something like The Descendants. To make my point even more obvious, I will mention that almost everyone who saw The Artist saw it because it won Oscars, and I believe anyone who saw The Artist, for whatever reason, is better for it.

Looking back through the years of Oscar history is like looking through your high school yearbook on your deathbed; you look back at everything that was popular, nodding solemnly at the Casablancas and To Kill a Mockingbirds and scratching your head at the Greatest Show on Earths and Shakespeare in Loves. Whether the Academy actually dictates what is truly the best every year or not is often debatable, but they almost always take the popular road, while occasionally favoring the underdog (Marisa Tomei anyone?). This makes the awards an interesting guide to just what was considered great in its day and what we know was great now. This also leads to some decisions that inspire debate to this day (Was Grace Kelly really better than Judy Garland in 1954? You’d be surprised how much each actress’ fans still argue.).

So, this is why the awards are important, why I find them fun to watch and why this year’s nominees are so disappointing. Firstly, I must address the Academy’s annoying new tendency to try to be as hip as possible. The two movies with the most nominees this year are American Hustle and Gravity, probably just about the hippest movies of the year, leading the awards with 10 nods each. They’re both great movies and recognition for them is fine and dandy, but less so when it’s at the expense of the lesser known, arguably better movies they replaced on the ballot.

Let’s start with Gravity, a movie I genuinely enjoyed and admired and one I truly feel will last through time as one of the great film spectacles of our age. It is a remarkable feat of intensity and effects and if director Alfonso Cuaron wins, you’ll hear no complaints from me. In fact, all of its nominations make perfect sense and perhaps wouldn’t feel so overbearing if it hadn’t tied with American Hustle. Don’t get me wrong, I liked Hustle as well, but nobody can argue that it wasn’t flawed and I feel that probably half of its nominations are wildly unnecessary.

First of all, it was a very popular movie with young, “cool” people, who were blinded by its dazzling showmanship. Perhaps the Academy voters were blinded as well, enough to nominate Christian Bale for Best Actor instead of the clearly better choice of Robert Redford in All is Lost, or even the more popular choice of Tom Hanks in Captain Phillips. How Bale made it in is beyond me, and how the film failed to get a nod for Makeup and Hairstyling (in favor of Bad Grandpa and The Lone Ranger, I might add) is absurd. Why did they change the name of the award to include hair work, if all the nominations are evidently exclusively for makeup?

I am mortified that Emma Thompson was not nominated for her superb performance in Saving Mr. Banks in favor of Amy Adams for her role in Hustle, though now that it’s happened I would love to see Adams win, seeing as how her previous four nominations all slipped by failures. Bradley Cooper and Jennifer Lawrence very much deserve their supporting nominations for the film too, though it will irk me a bit to see Lawrence beat out her three first-time nominees competition when she just won last year, even if she did steal the show here.

Not seeing Thompson or Hanks’ name anywhere on the nominations list really was shocking, and although I blame Bale and Adams for replacing them, some of the other spots in those categories weren’t exactly shoe-ins either. Leonardo DiCaprio will probably win for starring in Martin Scorsese’s over-nominated Wolf of Wall Street, and if he does win, like Adams, it’ll be more for not winning in the past than for the quality of the performance for which he’s actually winning. Jonah Hill getting noticed as Supporting Actor for Wolf was a huge shocker, even though I thought he did well. Again, he really doesn’t belong here because of who he’s replacing, including Tom Hanks in Saving Mr. Banks and Daniel Bruhl in Rush, a well-made picture which got a grand total of zero nominations, by the way, for absolutely no good reason.

It’s similarly obnoxious seeing Sandra Bullock (Gravity), Meryl Streep and Julia Roberts (August: Osage County) all listed here when they’ve already won in the past and weren’t as extraordinary as others not present. And again, I must confess I enjoyed all three performances, but that doesn’t make them less irksome. I also must protest the nod towards Barkhad Abdi for his first screen role in Captain Phillips, a nice gesture, but not entirely logical.

Other serious snubs include Stories We Tell being ignored in the Documentary Feature category (I truly thought it would win) and the whole mess that ended up being the Foreign Language category this year. The Great Beauty and The Hunt are obviously good choices, but there’s no real excuse for The Past and Wadjda not being present and Blue is the Warmest Color not being eligible because of a silly technicality (It opened in France one week later than it was supposed to or something). Also, not as big a deal, but still puzzling, is the random Original Song nomination for Alone Yet Not Alone, a movie I wonder if the voters even saw.

Perhaps the biggest huh moment this year is all the success for Dallas Buyers Club, being one of the top nominees in six categories, a pretty good movie at best and one that didn’t resonate well with the public. Stars Matthew McConaughey and Jared Leto deserve attention for their physically demanding work, though the film’s nominations for Best Picture, Original Screenplay and Film Editing are rather odd, especially considering that longtime critic and audience favorite Inside Llewyn Davis was neglected to a measly two nods for Cinematography and Sound.

All of that said, I was pleased by how successful Nebraska was (Should I even bother hoping Bruce Dern and June Squibb win for their performances? Probably not) and that Blue Jasmine and Before Midnight got away with some recognition too. These are the sort of movies I was talking about that made the awards worth something. These are the sort of movies people need to be discovering. Also somewhere neatly in-between the two worlds of obvious choice and undiscovered masterpiece is Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave. I predicted last month that it would win Best Picture, which it still easily could, but now it’s not so certain. I am glad to see the film’s three big stars get nominated, especially Michael Fassbender, who was unforgivably robbed of a Best Actor nod for Shame two years ago. However, how the score and cinematography went unnoticed is astounding. At least Spike Jonze’s Her got a Score and Best Picture nod, even if it doesn’t stand a chance at either.

Alright, so I shouldn't be complaining. After all, of the 9 Best Picture nominees, 6 were in my top 10 for the year. So what if they screwed over a few little movies, right? All in all, this will end up being a year like any other at the Oscars: some good, some bad, some ugly. The nominations are so misguided, though, that I’m afraid there’ll be more ugly here than we’ve seen since 2005, when the miserable Crash won Best Picture in a year mostly made up of unsatisfying nominees. On the bright side, if my theories are correct, these nominations mean more people will see Nebraska, Her and Philomena than otherwise would have. On the other hand, does anyone really need to see Captain Phillips?