February 2009 is a long way away, but you wouldn’t know it from the crazy Oscar buzz already in full swing. Well, at least the Oscar buzz surrounding Christopher Nolan’s smash success The Dark Knight. The star of this media frenzy is of course Heath Ledger, aka the darkest, most demented Joker this side of Gotham City. Could he be the second actor in history to win a posthumous Academy Award? While his performance is certainly stunning, and slightly reminiscent of the only actor in history to achieve this honor (okay, Peter Finch’s character in Network isn’t exactly a psychotic, clown-faced criminal but the underlying more-sane-than-he-seems theme is apparent in both) it’s still pretty early to say. Any potential Best Picture, Director, Screenplay or general special effects nominations/wins are even tougher to call.
That definitely hasn’t stopped people from talking about it, though. Amidst this ceaseless conversation, many have raised once again the call for more “popular” movies to be included in the Academy Awards. However, what most people don’t seem to realize is that not only is popularity a huge factor in winning an Oscar, it usually doesn’t yield the best results.
To prove my point, let’s examine some past Best Picture winners. Last year, the seemingly anti-Hollywood Coen brothers triumphed with their dark thriller No Country for Old Men. The ironic thing is just how Hollywood this choice was. Many people, myself included, believed the smaller Paul Thomas Anderson drama There Will Be Blood deserved the title. But who really saw that? Not a lot of people, at least by Hollywood standards. While TWBB's $40.2 million domestic gross was probably more than was expected, it looks pretty shameful next to No Country's $74.3 million. And despite its glowing reviews (some even compared it to Citizen Kane and Giant), many were put off by the movie. Too weird, too confusing or too radical for the 2008 BP. As for the other nominees, Juno was too quirky to win (the Academy still needs to maintain its austere respectability), Atonement, despite being a critic darling, also underperformed at the box office (only $50.9 million) and Michael Clayton was seen by even less people (roughly $49 million). No County thus pleased the general public and critics, making it the safest choice for the Academy.
(For the record, I’m not saying No Country is without merit. Javier Bardem absolutely earned his Best Supporting Actor win, and the suspense was executed marvelously. But I gotta say it: that ending was awful. For a lesson on adapting a tricky book finale well, see Atonement.)
The year before that had almost the exact same set-up, with the Coen brothers’ older counterpart Martin Scorsese taking home the gold for The Departed, his most commercially successful movie ever. Now, I truly believe this win was justified, but why would the Academy finally wake up and give Marty an Oscar after snubbing him in favor of, among several others, Kevin freakin’ Costner? The answer’s simple: he finally made a bonafide crowd pleaser.
I’m sure the pattern’s already becoming apparent, so I’ll save my rant on how Crash isn’t half the movie Capote or Good Night, and Good Luck is. But I’ll bet a lot of you are thinking “Kristin, those movies that won were still pretty good. What’s the real harm?” Well, allow me to jump back a little over a decade. The year was 1997 and the movie was Titanic, the now current (albeit perhaps not for long) record holder for domestic gross. This epic love story walked away with a whopping 11 Academy Awards, a fact that countless people lament today. While I do think Titanic gets a tad bit more grief than it deserves, it’s impossible to argue that it was an 11 Oscars movie in retrospect. Yet Oscar critics constantly point to this embarrassment as the award show done right. Sure, it pulled in a much bigger audience than the Academy currently boasts, but at what cost?
Don’t go thinking Titanic was the only case of a popular yet less-than-Oscar-worthy movie to clean up at the Academy Awards, either. For more evidence, see Rocky (1976 BP winner; losing nominees include Taxi Driver and Network), Forrest Gump (1994 BP winner; losing nominees include Pulp Fiction and The Shawshank Redemption), Chicago (2002 BP winner; losing nominees include Gangs of New York and The Pianist), and Ghost (1990 Best Supporting Actress win for Whoopi Goldberg; losing nominees include Lorraine Bracco in Goodfellas), among many others. Oh and I discovered this gem in my research: Julia Roberts was nominated for an Academy Award for her groundbreaking work in Pretty Woman.
The Pulitzer people would never give James Patterson any serious consideration, despite his being one of the most wildly successful authors alive. So why do we constantly complain that the Academy is condescending and out-of-touch? The Oscars are already all about politics and popularity. If we push them any further, we may one day find ourselves yearning for the years when a sinking ship or an anorexic Renee Zellweger reigned supreme at the Academy Awards.
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