Moviefone Editorial

Tag: academy-awards-2016

  • Oscars 2016: How Academy Voters Are Being Dragged Into the 21st Century

    GERMANY-US-OSCARS-GRAND BUDAPEST HOTELThe Academy‘s voters are often derided as being old and out of touch. But they’re being dragged, kicking and screaming, into the 21st century.

    Whether they want to or not, awards voters are being forced to contend with new technology, not just in the film’s themselves, but even in their own judgment and voting processes. But they’re also finding that the new ways are not all they’re cracked up to be, especially in a year full of cinematic throwbacks.

    On Wednesday, December 30, the Academy opened its private website to its members for online voting. It had mailed out paper ballots days earlier, but the organization would really like to modernize the process and get its members to vote over the Internet. “Encourage your colleagues to join you by voting online. Paper ballot delivery is not reliable — every year, many paper ballots are left uncounted,” Academy CEO Dawn Hudson wrote in a recent e-mail to voters. Given how wide-open many of the category races are this year, and how few votes it takes to actually earn a nomination (as few as 315 of the 6,261 members need to cite a movie as a favorite for it to secure a Best Picture slot), every vote really does matter. And because of the rush-rush awards calendar, Oscar voters have only 10 days to fill out those ballots, which are due back by January 8. So voters who don’t want to risk having their paper ballots arrive late in the mail really do have to go online.Idris Elba in Netflix's BEASTS OF NO NATIONBut not everything about the migration of the awards season to the Internet is running smoothly. Over at the Screen Actors Guild, the private website the voters use to stream some of the nominated films crashed last weekend for two crucial days as the SAG Awards voters were trying to pick winners. Among the film’s affected were such little-seen titles as “Beasts of No Nation,” “The Big Short,” “The Revenant,” and “99 Homes,” as well as modest box office hits “Bridge of Spies,” “Black Mass,” and “Spotlight,”

    It’s long been a common practice for campaigning studios to send DVD screeners to voters, but the makers of “Black Mass,” “Revenant,” “99 Homes,” and “Bridge of Spies” weren’t planning to do so because they were relying on the streaming site. To the extent that the SAGs have an influence on the Oscars — there’s some voter overlap between the two groups, and the late-January SAG Awards ceremony is held while Academy members are voting for winners among the nominees — the streaming blackout could affect the chances of both front-runners (Best Actor favorite Leonardo DiCaprio for “Revenant,” Best Supporting Actor leader Mark Rylance for “Bridge of Spies”) and those who could really use the attention (Supporting Actor long-shot Michael Shannon in “99 Homes,” Best Actor candidate Johnny Depp in “Black Mass,” and the entire casts of “Beasts,” “Spotlight,” and “Short”).Leonard DiCario in THE REVENANTThe paradox in this drive to make awards screenings and voting digital is that many of this year’s most noteworthy films are self-conscious throwbacks to earlier movies, earlier eras, and earlier technologies. The “Star Wars” prequels may have ushered in the era of digital shooting and projection, but J.J. Abrams made a point of shooting Best Picture candidate “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” on old-school celluloid film, in part to give the movie the same feel as the original trilogy from nearly 40 years ago. Quentin Tarantino has been talking non-stop for a year about how important it was for him to shoot “The Hateful Eight” on celluloid, too, and made a point of screening the movie last week in old-school 70MM at 100 retrofitted theaters around the country. Another old-fashioned western, “The Revenant,” made a point of shooting with only natural light. “Mad Max: Fury Road” isn’t just the revival of a 30-years-dormant franchise; it’s also shot using low-tech special effects, without CGI.

    “Brooklyn” is an old-fashioned romantic drama that obeys narrative conventions at least as old as its 1950s setting. Similarly, 1950s-set “Carol” is shot in a way that recalls Douglas Sirk‘s Technicolor romantic dramas of that era. “Bridge of Spies,” a Cold War spy thriller set in 1960, wears its old-fashioned-ness on its sleeve. Journalism procedural “Spotlight” echoes a 1976 Best Picture nominee about investigative reporters who uncover a vast, real-life scandal, “All the President’s Men.” And “Creed” depends on nostalgia for 1976’s Best Picture winner, “Rocky.”

    The most forward-looking movie in the awards race, “The Martian,” could be seen as a film about a hero who actually uses science and technology to solve his problems and stay alive. Its director, 78-year-old Ridley Scott, has heartily embraced new technology and choose to shoot the film with state-of-the-art 3D cameras. Then again, he’s been making movies about stranded astronauts since “Alien” 36 years ago. And he’s never won an Oscar, not even for Best Picture winner “Gladiator” 15 years ago, so many of his peers may consider a win for him for “The Martian” as a redressing of past wrongs. No matter how much the Academy wants to look toward the future, it’ll be forced to reckon with the past as well.

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  • Oscars 2016: Will ‘Star Wars: The Force Awakens’ Rewrite History?

    oscars 2015 star wars the force awakensIt’s fitting that “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” has become a disruptive force in the Oscar race.

    After all, the Oscars aren’t just about writing the current movie year into the history books. They’re often about rewriting past history — righting old wrongs, settling old scores, and dealing with unresolved old resentments and controversies that have returned with a vengeance. (Remind you of any current blockbuster space operas?)

    Think about last year, where the main competition between “Boyhood” and “Birdman” got pushed to the side, in favor of bitter arguments about how long-odds contenders “Selma” and “American Sniper” depicted recent historical events. Considering how many people learn their history in movie theaters, rather than classrooms, it mattered a great deal, especially to people who were directly involved, how accurate those two films were, how they interpreted controversial events, and whether the Academy would validate those interpretations with golden trophies.

    This year, thankfully, there are few of those controversies, at least when it comes to potential award-winning movies about real-life people. Sure, some individuals who are portrayed in an unflattering light in “Spotlight” and “Straight Outta Compton” have complained. Pundits have made similar complaints about “Steve Jobs” and “Trumbo,” but since hardly anyone saw those movies, no one seems to care. There were loud gripes about “Truth,” but that box office flop also fell off the awards radar. And now that “Joy” and “The Big Short” are screening widely, there may be grumbling about the wildly imaginative liberties those movies take with the historical record. But so far, at least, there hasn’t been the kind of sustained screaming we heard last year over “Selma” and “Sniper,” or over such recent Oscar front-runners as “Argo,” “Zero Dark Thirty,” and “The Social Network.”

    Instead, the historical issues this year are strictly Hollywood-centered. Should Leonardo DiCaprio finally get a Best Actor Oscar for “The Revenant“? Most pundits seem to think he should, not just because his rugged, ragged performance as a frontiersman fighting for survival merits a prize, but because it would make up for two decades of Oscar snubs.

    Similarly, if Michael Keaton wins a supporting prize for “Spotlight,” it’ll make up for his never having won, especially for last year’s “Birdman,” a Best Actor trophy he was highly favored to win. If likely honoree Ridley Scott wins Best Director for “The Martian,” it’ll be validation for the Oscar-less 78-year-old, who didn’t even win the prize for his Best Picture honoree “Gladiator” 15 years ago.

    And what about Harrison Ford? The 73-year-old is one of the most beloved stars in the galaxy, but he’s never won an Oscar. In fact, he was nominated only once, 30 years ago, for “Witness.” But thanks to “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” there’s now talk of a supporting actor nomination for him. It’ll be an uphill battle for Ford, whose chief competition may be Keaton, “Bridge of Spies” co-star Mark Rylance, and another old-timer reprising an Iconic role he created in the 1970s. That would be Sylvester Stallone, who was nominated 39 years ago for writing “Rocky” and playing Rocky Balboa, and who is almost certain to be nominated this year for playing the character again in “Creed.”

    The late entry of “The Force Awakens” into the Best Picture and Best Supporting Actor races has caused other upheavals. Most notably, it led to a controversy at the Critics’ Choice Awards, two of whose voters quit the organization this week in protest over the group’s late addition of “The Force Awakens” to its already-issued list of Best Picture nominees.

    When the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the group behind the Critics’ Choice Awards, announced its nominees on December 14, its members hadn’t even seen the new “Star Wars” yet, as Disney was keeping the film under wraps and spoiler-free until just a few days before its release. Citing the association’s own history — they made a similar exception 15 years ago for “Cast Away” when it screened late and proved a worthy addition to the list of Best Picture nominees — the BFCA held an emergency vote and agreed to make the new “Star Wars” the 11th nominee on this year’s Best Picture list. But they did not add it to any other categories.

    BFCA member Eric Melin (who’s also the president of the Kansas City Film Critics Circle) immediately quit the group. In his resignation letter, he complained that the “Star Wars” waiver “smells like a desperate ploy to get better TV ratings.” (The Critics’ Choice Awards airs January 17, a week after the Golden Globes, on A&E and Lifetime.)

    Salt Lake City critic Scott Renshaw wrote a similar resignation letter, saying, “It is obvious to me that this decision is based more on [‘The Force Awakens”‘] marketing value than on making sure that the best films are included. If that were the case, the entire nomination process would have been opened up again to allow ‘The Force Awakens’ to be considered in all categories. Any suggestion this decision was made primarily for any reason other than to improve ratings for the awards broadcast feels disingenuous at best.” (Neither Melin nor Renshaw were BFCA members in 2000 during the “Cast Away” decision.)

    Why does this matter? In part, it matters because the Critics’ Choice Awards have historically been a highly accurate predictor of the Best Picture nominees ultimately picked by the Academy. Adding “Star Wars” to the list indicates, at the very least, increased odds that Oscar voters will nominate the film as well.

    The incident also shows the bind critics are in over the year’s last-minute releases — not just “Star Wars,” but also such likely contenders “The Hateful Eight,” “The Revenant,” and “Joy” — movies that either screened too late for many awards groups to see them or else didn’t even get sent on screener DVDs to awards voters until late December. Sure the awards groups could all wait until after New Year’s Eve to issue their lists, but that would mean each group’s announcement would be crowded into the first nine days of January (since no one cares what the critics say after the Golden Globes ceremony and the Oscar nominations announcement in the second week of January), and none of them would stand out or get much attention. In recent years, there’s been a race among critics’ groups to be the first out of the gate, leading to an announcement creep that now sees some groups touting the year’s best movies at the end of November. The studios, however, haven’t accommodated the awards groups by screening or sending out their year-end movies any sooner; after all, they have their own marketing plans to stick to, regardless of what critics want. So the critics are forced either to bend their own rules to accommodate the studio marketers or leave potentially worthy movies off their lists.

    And the question raised by Melin and Renshaw — Is it pandering to include a blockbuster like “The Force Awakens” that doesn’t need awards validation to get noticed? — is the biggest historical controversy at the heart of this year’s awards race. As this column noted last week, the Academy has seldom given crowd-pleasing genre movies that are also critical favorites their due. This year, however, it has several chances to change that by recognizing such hits as “Mad Max: Fury Road,” “The Martian,” “Creed,” “Compton,” and “Inside Out.”

    Not to mention “The Force Awakens.” Remember, 38 years ago, the first “Star Wars” was nominated for Best Picture and nine other Oscars, but the top prizes that year went to “Annie Hall.” If the new “Star Wars” wins big this year, will that redress a historical wrong? Or will it be a sign that the dark side of the Force is ascendant?

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  • Oscars 2016: Can a Blockbuster Really Win It All This Year?

    oscars 2016 blockbuster best pictureYou’ll notice that not a lot of critics, much less awards-nomination lists like those of the Golden Globes or the Screen Actors Guild awards, included “Star Wars: The Force Awakens” among the year’s best pictures. That’s not necessarily critical snobbery; it’s just that nobody had seen the movie until Monday, after most list-making and awards-nominating deadlines had passed.

    But then the space epic screened, and critics went nuts, giving the film a 97 percent fresh rating at Rotten Tomatoes. And even the august American Film Institute, which released its annual top 10 list on Wednesday, included the new “Star Wars” among such already-anointed Oscar frontrunners as “Spotlight” and “Carol.”

    Could this be the year, then, that a big, populist, action-heavy blockbuster takes home top Oscars? Could this be the rare year that the Academy’s taste and the public’s are in sync?

    After all, the Academy has never had much love for sci-fi flicks or other genre movies. It usually doesn’t deem genre fare weighty enough to win awards. The original 1977 “Star Wars” did get nominated for 10 Oscars, including Best Picture; as a movie that had fundamentally changed the industry, it was impossible for even the Academy to ignore. But the top honors that year went to Woody Allen‘s “Annie Hall,” and no “Star Wars” installment since has made much of a dent in the Academy’s consciousness. Six years ago, “Avatar” proved a similar technical breakthrough, but while James Cameron‘s sci-fi epic did get nominated for Best Picture and a slew of other prizes, the top honors ultimately went to the indie “The Hurt Locker” instead.

    Still, over the past 20 years, the Academy has recognized a few genre films as Best Picture. Think 1995’s “Braveheart” and 2000’s “Gladiator,” essentially summer action movies dressed in period garb. “Titanic” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” were both mega-hit action spectacles, but they were also hugely ambitious epics with serious themes and grand-scale performances.

    The rule changes of the last few years that have expanded the Academy’s Best Picture nomination slots from five to as many as 10 have been the Oscars’ most drastic effort to keep splitting the difference between the serious-minded epics the Academy traditionally favors and the fan-favorite blockbusters it tends to snub. Indeed, the expansion was in part a response to the Academy’s failure to show much love to Christopher Nolan‘s brainy blockbuster “The Dark Knight.”

    Inflating the Best Picture category may not have had the intended effect; the Best Picture winners over the past six years have still been more art-house than multiplex. But if the Academy’s tastes haven’t changed much, the voters still know that, if they want more people to watch their awards telecast, it helps to nominate movies in which more fans have a rooting interest.

    “The Force Awakens,” with momentum only from the AFI list, may be too late to the party to be that fan favorite that drives Oscarcast ratings. Besides, it’ll have to compete for awards-group attention with such Oscar-friendly last-minute releases as “The Hateful Eight,” “The Revenant,” and “Joy.” But there are several other populist candidates this year, including such box office hits as “The Martian,” “Inside Out,” “Straight Outta Compton,” and “Mad Max: Fury Road.” Not to mention Steven Spielberg‘s “Bridge of Spies,” a modest-hit spy thriller for grown-ups that’s especially likely to see a supporting actor nomination for co-star Mark Rylance.

    True, “Inside Out” and “Compton” are long-shots for Best Picture wins, the former because no cartoon has ever won and the latter because its unlikely to be singled out for individual acting prizes. (And yeah, there’s also the prospect that older white voters aren’t going to relate to a biopic about gangsta rappers.) Still, they both have a strong shot at Best Picture nominations. “Compton” has already been recognized by the SAGs (where it’s nominated for Best Ensemble, the equivalent of Best Picture), the National Board of Review, and the AFI.

    Despite their sci-fi narratives, “Martian” and “Mad Max” have even better chances at nominations. “Martian” is being seen as a tour-de-force for 78-year-old Ridley Scott, who seems overdue for an Oscar. (Not even “Gladiator” earned him one; the directing prize that year went to “Traffic” helmer Steven Soderbergh.) A Best Actor nomination for Matt Damon would also boost its odds. (Indeed, last week, the Golden Globes nominated it for Actor, Director, and Picture.)

    As for “Mad Max,” it won the top film honor from the NBR and earned the most nominations of any 2015 movie on Monday (13 of them) from the Broadcast Film Critics Association, the TV-based group of reviewers that tries to upstage the Golden Globes every year with its early-January Critics’ Choice awards show. (“Martian” got nine, tying with indie darling “Carol.”) Director George Miller, another septuagenarian who’s never won an Oscar, earned a nomination at the Golden Globes, where “Mad Max” is also up for Best Picture.

    Of course there’s also the chance that one of the current Best Picture front-runners (say, “Spotlight”) could become a sizable hit in wide release, or that such likely Oscar prospects as “Hateful Eight” and “Revenant” could become smash hits once they hit theaters. (Last year at this time, no one dreamed that the yet-unreleased “American Sniper” would earn $323 million by the time it contended for Best Picture at the Oscar ceremony.) Which is to say that a movie doesn’t have to be a big special-effects spectacle to be popular, and that the mass audience and the awards tastemakers are likely to meet each other halfway more often than either side will admit.

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  • Oscar Race 2016: Why the Golden Globes Just Make Things More Confusing

    If you expected the announcement of the Golden Globe nominations on Thursday to bring some clarity to this year’s awards race, you would have been disappointed. Or maybe relieved.

    Most years, Oscar pundits complain that the race is too predictable, that a short list of front-runners has already coalesced by early December. This year, though, they’re complaining that it’s not predictable enough. Which is indeed bad news if you’re trying to win an Oscar pool, but good news for everyone who’s rooting for an exciting, suspenseful competition.

    The many year-end groups that have announced their winners and nominees over the past two weeks have spread the wealth so much that it’s hard to find any consensus. Some have favored “Spotlight,” some “Carol,” and some “Mad Max: Fury Road.” So our Best Picture front-runners so far include a traditional ensemble drama based on a true story, a period lesbian romance, and the reboot of a 30-years-dormant action franchise.

    And just behind those, we have the space epic that the Globe voters think is a comedy (“The Martian“), a couple of brutally violent Westerns from important directors (Quentin Tarantino’s “The Hateful Eight” and Iñarritu‘s “The Revenant“), a drama about a kidnapped woman and her little boy (“Room“), a dramedy biopic about a woman entrepreneur (“Joy“) and more.

    That’s one crazy list.
    This isn’t the race we thought we were going to see. A few months ago, it looked like we might all be talking about such seemingly “sure bets” as Johnny Depp in “Black Mass” (above), Robert Zemeckis‘ direction of “The Walk,” “Steve Jobs,” or Michael Fassbender and Marion Cotillard’s performances in “Macbeth.” But then critics actually saw the movies.

    The critics groups that have voted so far, including the New York Film Critics Circle, the Los Angeles Film Critics Association, the Boston Society of Film Critics, and the Washington DC Film Critics Association, don’t offer much value when it comes to predicting the eventual Oscar nominees and winners.

    They do, however, help define the conversation, determining which performers and films are worthy of consideration. They’re the reason that Fassbender still has a shot at a Best Actor prize for “Steve Jobs,” or that Kristen Stewart is under consideration for her supporting role in the arcane “Clouds of Sils Maria.” They’re also why we’re talking about such not-yet-widely-seen films as “Spotlight,” “Carol,” and “Room” in the first place, not to mention still-unreleased films like “Joy” and “The Big Short.”
    One happy result of the failure to agree on just a handful of worthy candidates is that this year’s Best Actress field is richer than usual. The annual complaints about how few good lead roles there are for women should be a little quieter this year, given how many strong performances have a chance of an Oscar nomination. Among the 10 Globe nominees this year (since the Globes pick five for comedy as well as five for drama), at least eight have a solid shot at Academy recognition, with the front-runners being Jennifer Lawrence (“Joy“), Brie Larson (“Room”), Cate Blanchett (“Carol“), Saoirse Ronan (“Brooklyn“), and Lily Tomlin (“Grandma“). Larson and Blanchett (pictured) are all but sure things, but the rest of the nominations are up for grabs.

    The Best Actor race is going to be the tight one this year, with top contenders Leonardo DiCaprio (“The Revenant”), Fassbender (“Steve Jobs”), Matt Damon (“The Martian”), Eddie Redmayne (“The Danish Girl”), and Bryan Cranston (“Trumbo”), and not a whole lot of others. (Michael Keaton, like the rest of the ensemble, are being submitted for supporting categories.) Let the guys complain this year about the dearth of meaty roles.

    There are still a lot of questions about how we got to this point and where the race could go. Does “Spotlight,” with its strong ensemble cast, really have a chance if that ensemble’s individual actors keep getting ignored (as they were by Globe voters)? Do big-budget blockbuster spectacles like “Mad Max” and “The Martian” have a real shot against the small-scale independent dramas that awards voters usually favor? Did screener DVDs get sent to voters too late for “The Hateful Eight,” “The Revenant,” “Joy,” and “The Big Short” to have more of an impact?

    Still, there’s something refreshing about the inability of the professional critics, the pundits who make up the voters for the Golden Globes and the National Board of Review awards, and the industry insiders who pick the Screen Actors Guild award nominees to settle on a consensus. It means there’s still a wide-open race in nearly every category — and nearly three months for us all to argue for our favorites to win big.
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