Quick show of hands – how many of you have actually seen all five Oscar nominees for Best Picture?
One or two, sure. I bet a lot of you have seen Juno, that now-beloved and, crowd-pleasing teen pregnancy comedy (the most successful Best Picture nominee at the box office with $118 million). Maybe Atonement. But, come on, Michael Clayton? Having the dubious distinction of actually having seen all five Oscar nominees, I say No Country for Old Men is the only one of them worthy of being crowned Best Picture. Which means it probably won’t win.
“The Oscars aren’t about quality,” Empire Magazine’s Patrick Peters scoffs. “They’re peer group nods of approval, and, as a result, there’s been a surfeit of unworthy Best Pictures, and, rest assured, there will be many more to come.”
How true. The Oscars are rife with problems – most notably an opaque, overly secretive voting process – but also a tendency to reward box office winners (Gladiator, Titanic), feel-good heartwarmers (Rocky, Forrest Gump), historical epics (Braveheart), self-important prestige pictures like literary adaptations (The English Patient, Shakespeare in Love) and, worst of all, the fake independent film that’s really a studio film in disguise (Juno, Little Miss Sunshine).
Rocky might be the perfect case study of the kind of film the Academy loves. It’s inspirational, simple (maybe simplistic), heartwarming, it doesn’t challenge the mind, and made a lot of money at the box office. To think that Rocky beat out Taxi Driver and Network for Best Picture! It breaks a film lover’s heart.
So many Best Picture winners have been just plain awful. Cecil B. DeMille’s The Greatest Show on Earth (1952), an inconsistent, nonsensical portrait of life and intrigue at a circus, typically tops lists of the worst Best Picture winners. Mike Todd’s Around the World in 80 Days (1956) won its Best Picture statue just on the virtue of its extensive location shooting, A-list cast, and intrusive celebrity cameos (Frank Sinatra playing the piano in 1890s San Francisco equals the death of cinema). Ponderous, formulaic biopics The Great Ziegfeld and The Life of Emile Zola won Best Picture in 1936 and 1937, respectively, and have no value for today’s film fans other than use as cures for insomnia. Superficial social problem films like Gentleman’s Agreement (1947) and In the Heat of the Night (1967) won the top slot through their timid attempts to address prejudice. 2001’s winner A Beautiful Mind seems to suggest that only true love can cure mental illness. And who even remembers Cimarron (1931) or Cavalcade (1933)?
Laurence Olivier’s soporific adaptation of Hamlet in 1948 beat out John Huston’s masterpiece The Treasure of the Sierra Madre for number one, even though Olivier savaged Shakespeare’s play, cutting out Rosencrantz and Guildenstern and relegating Hamlet’s monologues to voiceover. He even trivializes Hamlet’s monologues, the greatest achievement of Western literature, by proclaiming at the beginning in stilted narration “This is the story … of a man … who could not … make up …his mind.” Chicago Sun-Times film critic Jim Emerson calls it “a shallow interpretation of the play and the character.”
“They say (Olivier) was great onstage,” Emerson adds. “This film is only one notch above his hilarious rabbi in Neil Diamond’s The Jazz Singer.”
Academy Awards-historian Robert Osborne picks Titanic as the all time worst Best Picture winner. Right before the blockbuster’s win in 1998, the Turner Classic Movies host and Hollywood Reporter columnist said, “I realize everyone likes Titanic, but if they give the Oscar to Titanic I think I’ll stop writing books about the Oscars. For $200 million you’d think that James Cameron would have made Dr. Zhivago on board a ship or Lawrence of Arabia on the high seas. Instead, he wrote this sappy little story.”
But for my money, the worst of the worst, the bottom of the barrel, the most loathsome film to ever win Best Picture has to be Paul Haggis’s Crash from 2005. This is a film where Sandra Bullock’s character falls down a flight of stairs, for no reason other than that her hatred of minorities prevented her from walking properly, and Ludacris rants about being labeled with unfair stereotypes and then conforms to those stereotypes by stealing a car, before later rescuing enslaved Cambodians. Has there ever been a more superficial survey of race relations?
Haggis has no perception for nuance in the human experience; to him, racism automatically means shouting racial slurs and committing hate crimes. He ignores all of the more subtle forms of racism and prejudice still lurking in our society. It’s the kind of film that makes pseudo-progressives pat themselves on the back and think, “I’m not like those people onscreen. I don’t shout out racial epithets or commit hate crimes, so I must not be racist, right?” It does nothing to make people look inside and confront the prejudice which still exists within, as much as we’d like to deny it. For a truly great film about race relations, check out Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, an American masterpiece, which was conveniently overlooked by the Academy in 1989 in favor of another piece of pseudo-progressive dreck, Driving Miss Daisy.
None of this year’s nominees can approach Crash in terms of all-out awfulness, but the Academy has gotten it wrong so many times we need to take their results with a grain of salt.
Then again, who am I kidding? I’ll still be watching Sunday night. I just won’t get my hopes up.
