An Honor to Be Nominated?

So, all right, let's get our initial Oscar thoughts out of the way. The 82nd annual Academy Awards will be broadcast March 7, and much prognostication will occur between now and then. We will refrain from any predictions for now and wait to see how the odds shape up. For now, then, just some thoughts on the nominations.

This year, the Academy has nominated ten films in the "Best Picture" category--up from five in prior years. It should be noted that, during the 1930s and early 1940s, ten films were nominated for Best Picture, so this is not so much an innovation as a throwback. Still, one can't help but feel that the abundance of nominees somehow diminishes the honor just to be nominated. At any rate, the nominees are:

Avatar
The Hurt Locker
An Education
The Blind Side
District 9
Up
Up in the Air
Precious
Inglourious Basterds
A Serious Man

The obvious parlor game is to try to guess which five films WOULDN'T have been nominated under last year's system. We hate to be obvious. But since you KNOW we hate to be obvious, then the least obvious thing we could do would be the obvious thing. So here goes:

Without a doubt, "Up in the Air" and "The Hurt Locker" would have been nominated. As would "Avatar""--while not a GREAT movie, it is certainly a great MOVIE, i.e., a great cinematic experience, and as such is worthy of an Oscar nod. Which other two films would have made it? Probably "Up," despite the fact that it's animated--no critic had anything but effusive praise for that one.

(Digression: And don't you think a case could be made that "Avatar" should have been nominated for "Best Animated Feature Film"? EOD)

For the fifth one, we're going to go with "Precious": This would have been the Awards' official dark horse small film that nobody saw but everybody talked about.

We absolutely refuse to believe that "The Blind Side" is THAT good. "A Serious Man" is probably terrific, but Coen Brothers' movies need to be "bigger" (see "Fargo" and "No Country for Old Men") to attract that kind of attention. We don't know much about "An Education." The buzz we always heard around "Inglourious Basterds" was that Christoph Waltz, who plays the main Nazi badguy (and who received a "Supporting Actor" nomination), is fantastic but that the rest of the movie is good, but flawed. Finally, we were pleasantly surprised to see "District 9" nominated: In many ways (e.g., plot and characters), this is a superior movie to "Avatar," but we are under no illusions that a second science-fiction movie would have made the cut in a five-film field.

And while you would think an expanded field of ten films would minimize the incidence of deserving-but-overlooked movie, we can't help but wonder where the "Wild Things" are. No, we haven't seen it yet (full disclosure, of the nominees, we've only seen "Avatar" and "District 9"), but this, like "Up," was a universally hailed film. Is it really not as good as "The Blind Side"? And also, if you're going to nominate TWO science-fiction/fantasy films, why not a third?

Or a fourth? A case could be made for "Star Trek," as well. Not quite as visually spectacular as "Avatar," but, again, from a plot and character standpoint, arguably superior.

We'll get to the other awards in future posts. And maybe we'll even see some of the movies.