The obvious change to this year’s Academy Awards nominations is the decision to override the five-film limit on Best Picture nominees that has been in force since 1944. Now ten titles are competing for the prize that tells idiots which movies they should ask their teenage children to download illegally on their behalf.
For all the difference it will make to the end result, the Academy might as well have expanded the category to 50 films, or 4,423 films, or simply everything that has ever been released in the civilised world since the Lumière brothers first announced in the pages of Heat magazine that they were planning something “totally massive”. It’s a cinch to look at that ten-strong tally and pick out the titles that would scarcely have been acknowledged in an ordinary year.
Under the old system, the nominees wouldn’t have stretched beyond Avatar, The Hurt Locker (hooray!), Inglourious Basterds (hooray again!), Precious and Up in the Air. Loosening the elastic has accommodated two deserving nominees that don’t stand a chance (District 9 and Up), as well as An Education, which would be this year’s Little Film That Could, if only Precious didn’t already occupy that role more convincingly. Just for a lark, there’s also something populist (the Sandra Bullock vehicle The Blind Side, which opens here next month) and something gormlessly arty (A Serious Man).
The new system is a form of sucking-up, necessitated by the mini-scandal of a colossal hit like The Dark Knight missing out in the categories that count. The ten-film rule placates the studios behind those pictures that would not normally be nominated. And it gives the fanboys something to root for now that their favourite film is ostensibly in the running.
A bit unnecessary, that, because the fanboys’ choice, Avatar, is going to snatch Best Picture anyway. First Titanic, now this: James Cameron is such a consummate highwayman that maybe we should all start referring to him as Dick. (As in Turpin, obviously.)
At least Avatar hasn’t made any impression in the two writing categories. (How could it? It’s only the film’s 3-D effects that have distracted most people from noticing that the script barely scrapes into the one-dimensional.) Hope springs eternal in the writing nominations. In the Loop certainly deserves its Best Adapted Screenplay nod. If it wins, can Malcolm Tucker do the acceptance speech, please?
Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will be hosting the awards ceremony on 7 March, teaming up again after their recent gromcom* It’s Complicated in a crafty piece of cross-promotion which will benefit that film’s forthcoming DVD release no end.
But it doesn’t really matter who’s holding the microphone and dishing out the spiky-seeming yet crypto-congratulatory quips. Surely the perfect Oscar show would feature the corpse of Bob Hope, reanimated with the help of technology pioneered by the Avatar boffins, performing a four-hour soft-shoe shuffle to Radiohead’s “No Surprises” while Ron Howard, James Cameron and other undeserving recipients of the Best Director prize receive a Thai massage on a bed that is slowly revealed to be a vast and fully working griddle.
(*Gromcom: a romcom in which the participants are grey/silver-haired and/or some way outside the usual 18-35 casting range. I made that term up. You can have it.)
Ryan Gilbey blogs for Cultural Capital every Tuesday. He is also the New Statesman’s film critic.
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