My Oscar Ballot – 2020

The best thing about the 92nd Academy Awards is how early in the year everything is happening: from the Golden Globes on 5 January to the Oscars on 10 February, a five-week awards season is the shortest in living memory, and the most gratifying in an age where the Oscars clutch furiously with their Gollum-arms at a veneer of prestige and relevance.

The worst thing about the Academy Awards is to mistake their importance. They have practical significance, in boosting the careers of certain actors, craftspeople, and other working celebrities, but they no longer reflect what the rest of the world is interested in watching nor any kind of majority consensus in what constitutes the best being made in movies today.

My Oscar Ballot – 2018

The Oscars remain the least important thing to happen each year, and not only in the movie calendar. Oscar night is like a depression in significance, except for the cultural and aesthetic value of the fashion exhibited and meme fodder generated on the evening. The results are worthless except in practical ways to the winners: If you win an Oscar, the advancement of your career becomes easier in Hollywood. Okay, maybe there’s another important effect: If a movie wins an Oscar, the industry and its aspirants are likely to try make more just like it. But Academy Awards and actual artistic importance only ever align coincidentally.

My Oscar ballot is the selection of films that I think are most likely to win, not necessarily my favourites — in fact, hardly ever my favourites. I haven’t seen most of the nominated films yet, anyway; the only ones I have seen are Call Me By Your Name, Get Out, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, The Post, The Shape of Water, and Strong Island. Read my own selection of what I found to be the greatest films of 2017.

My Oscar Predictions

This year’s Academy Awards face a slightly unusual circumstance: more people than usual will be watching the results keenly to see how the nominated individuals fare, but, perhaps, (hopefully), more people than ever before have also realised how trivial and irrelevant are those results. Following a few months of political tumult, and in the midst of a global uncertainty in just about all regards that matter, people who care about movies know that there’s no consequence in who the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences think gave the best supporting performance, or which film they think was photographed best. Award names like “Best Picture” and “Best Actress” have always merely been the Academy’s homonyms for the actual best film and actual best lead performance by a female actor in a year; any concurrence between superlative artistic merit and industry recognition has always been strictly coincidental; statistically, the two matters are mutually independent.

But this year there’s increased attention on the results, because, for one, the Academy has managed to nominate films and individuals that resonated more deeply through the culture than recent years’ selections, and because viewers understand that Oscar success, while fatuous and meaningless in itself, is a marvelous help to the career of many film-makers; if the movies and individuals we love win Academy Awards this evening (tomorrow morning before dawn in South African time), they’re likely to be given both more opportunities and more freedom in making the kinds of movies they feel strongly about. For example, Martin Scorsese went through the routine struggles of making the feature films and documentaries he dreamed of making, and ran into the usual kind of financial and creative obstacles that plague directors in the system; but since he won his Oscar in 2007, for The Departed, he’s found much greater freedom in Hollywood to bring his grand visions to exhilarating, sublime realisation, and that freedom has shown in the three films of his that have been released here (Shutter Island, Hugo, and The Wolf of Wall Street) that was markedly missing from all his previous films.

My Oscar Ballot

My general disaffection with the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences aside, it is always a pleasant gratification to play the game of predicting the Oscar winners. I’ve not yet come across any betting pool to take part in and make money off my predictions (or lose it), but I’m willing to take bets from any readers who think they may have a better handle on the odds or decision-making logic than I do. True, you’ve seen enough articles in newspapers and on your Facebook newfeeds laying out the probable choices – not to mention that my own post is going up at the latest possible moment – and one wouldn’t think it’d be particularly difficult for anyone to predict winners as I do now. Notwithstanding, I’m still eager to make a few last-minute calls, and, after all, it’s not my fault everyone else seems so intensely interested in the silly business. Bored entertainment journalists are entirely free to publish yet another article on how this year is “Leonardo’s year,” and on how he deserves this Oscar more than anyone else has ever deserved anything; but – as I reminded a group of unsuspecting shoppers yesterday morning while reading just such an article in yesterday’s Beeld in Pick ’n Pay – you and I, dear reader, are just as free to shout out angry expletives when a journalist does so.

This year’s batch of nominees is particularly dismaying, with not a single daring work of artistic excitement among of the seven best picture nominees I’ve seen (I have yet to see Room, and will hold out on commenting on it, hoping that it may be the one contender to get behind). In recent years, the Academy has indeed nominated a few magnificent films (The Wolf of Wall Street, The Grand Budapest Hotel, The Tree of Life, Hugo, The Social Network), along with a handful of excellent ones (Selma, 12 Years a Slave, The Descendants, Midnight in Paris, Black Swan) and the idiosyncratic works (Inception, War Horse, Lincoln, Her, Boyhood etc.); but this year offers pitiably little to stand up for. With frontrunners like The Revenant, Mad Max, and Spotlight, one resigns oneself to a season of glum, pious head-nodding at the winner’s solemn proselytising, and chest-swelling pride at the winning films’ social “victories,” which – oddly – no one seems eager to note are all pretty easy positions to take up years or decades after the true radicals, visionaries, and champions have cleared the path and tarred the road.

(See The Back Row’s choices of the best movies of 2015.)

Impressions on the Oscar Nominations

Image: blogs.indiewire.com

The Oscars are a bore. Any awards are, naturally, but the Oscars in particular because – despite entirely fair recent criticism of them as out of touch – millions of people around the world, and most people in the American film industry still take them and their decisions all too seriously. I should think that the description of a performance or a script as “Oscar worthy” is really a slur, given the artistic calibre of what usually gets nominated and awarded, but hack critics belch out the phrase as if shouting for encores. But one shouldn’t be too surprised, because the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences always amazingly finds itself to be in complete accord with critical consensus, and what gets labelled as Oscar worthy is generally officially stamped and packed just so, which gives some clue as to how much our of our annoyance with the Academy is attributable to either the unanimity-seeking critical community, or the industry’s enslavement to their opinions.

The Oscar choices represent what Hollywood would like to think of itself, and what it would like us to think of it. A quick flip through the nominees of each year can give a good impression of what’s on the industry’s mind, and where it likes to picture itself standing on some or other issue. What can always be relied upon at the Oscars is that message is a far stronger factor in success than artistry, and ostensible political correctness or moral decency is far preferable to relevance or entertainment. One can discern that this year, for instance, Hollywood and its journalistic myrmidons applaud filmmakers for venerating a lawyer who upholds the US Constitution; for blessing us with the sweet, good-natured story of an upper-lower-middle immigrant who finds happiness in America; for deciding for itself that action pictures with female leads may be entertaining and commercially viable after all; for enthralling us with the wonders of technology and human innovation, to the exclusion of humanity and its own wonders; for chastising greedy and fraudulent financiers and traders who profited massively from their millions of customers’ losses and got away with it; for inflicting pain and discomfort on major stars in the interest of so-called realism and authenticity; and for censuring the Roman Catholic Church for sheltering child rapists. In short, it doesn’t exactly go out on an ethical or intellectual limb, and the aesthetics of its choices can always be trusted to match this moral timidity.

Oscar Predictions

This year's Oscar host, Neil Patrick Harris

In one week, the winners of the Academy Awards will be announced and their statuettes distributed. 2014’s theatrical releases will be honoured (and poked fun at, usually in the lightest of sardonic touches), stars will be gazed at and adored, and host Neil Patrick Harris will oversee the single most important event in Hollywood’s calendar. The releases of Avatar and Harry Potter, the Cannes and Venice film festivals, and Clooney’s wedding, though frenziedly anticipated and observed, cannot match Oscar’s remarkable clout and stamina as a cultural phenomenon, nor its influence on both an entire industry and art form. Bar its Peace Prize, the Nobel committee’s activities have long passed from mass consciousness, and the events of the People’s Choice Awards are annually forgotten and dismissed the morning after, when the ringing of high-pitched squeals and shrieks has dispersed.

Granted, when considering Oscar night afterwards, it’s difficult to find any proportion between the hype and the pay-off – particularly in the proceedings themselves. Most presenters – usually a cluster of just-emerging, impossibly gorgeous, (sometimes questionably) talented adolescents – slip or stumble a little in their preamble to the presentation, with their halting interactions with the teleprompter marking for us the inexperienced, the flustered, the short-sighted, and the under-rehearsed. And the winners can hardly salvage it, with their often insubstantial effusions of gratitude and praise. Very few of them ever say very much. In decades past, Oscar winners could be depended upon for letting slip remarks on the state of the nation, or at least the state of cinema, with controversies to muse on for a short while afterward; not the staid, sodden and sometimes very bland show we need to sit through nowadays to understand any of the comments we’ll find the next day on various social sites, usually to do with fashion.

Impressions on the Oscar Nominations

The nominees for Best Picture at this year's Academy Awards

We’re in the throes of award season once again – the Golden Globes were handed out a few weeks ago, followed shortly by the Critics Choice Awards, the Screen Actors Guild Awards and the Producers Guild of America Awards – and any self-respecting film blogger has something to say, vehemently, about the way things are turning out. The most important thing to Hollywood is, as we all know, turnover: the bigger, the better. But next in importance to the businessmen of cinema is prestige. The film releases in coming years are determined, for most of the year, by the box office grosses of the studio’s product and, right at the end and beginning of the calendar year, by the acclaim and accolades a production can rake in. We would like the Oscars to award our favourite movies, because then studios and independent producers will endeavour to make something similar in the upcoming years.