I picked 17 of 24 right at last night’s Academy Awards, and the 7 I was wrong about were not too far off.
This is not a statement of being a great prognosticator (I think it was entirely possible to have nailed all 24 last night based on the way the night went), but rather a statement of how stale the season has become.
In their zeal to make the Oscars more unpredictable, by shortening the season and lessening the impact of the Globes and the BAFTAs on the process, they made the season utterly more predictable. Once nominations get made for the Globes and SAGs, people quickly ossify those choices as potential nominees, and once someone starts winning awards, they keep winning. Hence, Julianne Moore, Eddie Redmayne, JK Simmons, Patricia Arquette: winners of not just Oscars, but Golden Globes, SAG Awards, BAFTAs. Utterly predictable, formulaic, and Hollywood needs to shake this system up—not just because the year’s best performances (Jake Gyllenhaal and David Oyelowo) were not even nominated, but because we are getting fed up with stale, predictable pole dances.
That said, they did a good job this year.
Yup, I said it.
When history looks back on the 2014 film year, and these Oscars, they will see that a flawed but vital film won Best Picture—and Birdman is the one people will still watch in 25 years, not Boyhood, though people will study Boyhood’s filming history. Boyhood will likely be the one with theoretical cachet, but Birdman will be the one whose cinematography is regarded in the Lubezki pantheon, and whose editing we will marvel at (unnominated as it was, since it did what editing is supposed to do—make itself invisible).
You never know what history will do—Nightcrawler may very well be remembered as a modern classic, or Whiplash. Selma may age into the seminal film about the civil rights movement. Time will tell.
What time will also tell is that the Oscars get it wrong.
Constantly.
Ask Helen Hunt about that.
Ask Deborah Kerr.
Ask Gwyneth Paltrow.
Ask Taxi Driver, Rocky, All the President’s Men, Raging Bull & Ordinary People, Saving Private Ryan.
Ask Nick Nolte and Sir Ian McKellan about Roberto Benigni.
These people will have opinions (if they are polite, they will not express them to you).
In two, ten, twenty years, Michael Keaton may have the same opinion about Eddie Redmayne, much as I suspect Gloria Swanson did about Judy Holliday.
History shows that Swanson (and Bette Davis) gave classic performances in 1950; history also shows Judy Holliday was pretty terrific in Born Yesterday, though no one will call it classic (correct me if I am wrong). Oscars don’t always identify what is classic or memorable, which is why, when their careers are finished, we can note that Elizabeth Taylor, Jane Fonda, and Meryl Streep have at least one Oscar each for an undeserving performance, but have at least one other performance in the repertoire that demanded an award but went unrewarded. Meanwhile, Deborah Kerr, Peter O’Toole, Richard Burton, and Glenn Close can only stare at our esteem on their mantles.
So, when I was asked last night if I was “happy” with the results, I was, as ever, quizzical.
Happy is not the right word for Oscar night—it’s not a football game, after all.
I wonder on these nights, “Did they make an egregious error? Is there folly here?”
They played it safe last night. A good film won Best Picture, and they rewarded some solid performances (Moore’s is quite good, despite the fact that her win last night was as much for Amber Waves and Carol White, two decades late), but history will not judge them too unkindly.
At least, that’s my guess—history will do that work for me.
In the interim, we will watch beautiful films, and we will watch political machinations that have nothing to do with honoring art, and each year we will pretend they have something to do with each other for a cold Oscar season of gawking at the stars, with an eye not to the glittery dresses, but to how future supernovas will judge our yearly constellations.
