Saturday
Jan302010
Saturday, January 30, 2010 at 6:17PM Poll: The Biggest Best Picture Oversight
I don't like the word "snub" when it comes to awards. It peaked last year with The Dark Knight, and fans of the film thought it was "snubbed" for Best Picture. Well, let's see...there are over 6,000 Academy voters, so that's an awfully big conspiracy just to keep a very popular movie out of the race. The assertion is even more ludicrous when you consider the nominations it did receive were in the categories where the film was truly excellent. There was no "snub" of anything; nobody had an axe to grind against The Dark Knight.
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Reader Comments (10)
It has to be Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind ......
I mean I have never seen the film yet, so I cant form an opinion about it, but by judging on how many "Best of the Decade" lists I saw it on a month or so ago, that is definitely not a coincidence...
There are some tough choices up there, kinda shocked, I mean The Shining, The Usual Suspects, Almost Famous, Singin in the Rain, 2001 A Space Odyssey, etc.....all those films are amazing
Great compilation in coming up with the list....good post
I wouldn't go so far as to say nobody had an ax grind against The Dark Knight as there were some voters who made perfectly clear they would never vote for a film as based on a comic book character. The same thing happened with WALL E since some voters will just never cast a ballot for a cartoon. (On that subject it would have been nice to see some animated films make your list of biggest snubs.)
That said Seven Samurai has to be the best movie ever overlooked by the Oscars. It is generally regarded as the greatest action movie ever made and one of the top three movies ever made in a language besides English. Seriously, when a movie makes On the Waterfront an undeserving Best Picture winner you know you have something special.
D - That's simply not true. The biggest group of Oscar voters are actors. Between actors, editors, art directors, sound technicians, visual effects artists, and directors - which I'd say would be the groups most likely to nominate a comic book movie, especially that one - they're half the Academy. I simply don't accept that half the Academy would ignore a movie that speaks directly to their own passions because it's about a comic book character, especially when the individual guilds nominated it for nearly every tech award, and the actors gave Ledger the Oscar.
Besides, all three Lord of the Rings movies were nominated for Best Picture and the last one picked up a dozen Oscars. The geek glass ceiling had already been shattered.
I'm not saying it was some sort of conspiracy to keep The Dark Knight out of the top 5. I'll even admit that it was probably on more than half the ballots. I'm just saying that it is naive to think that there wasn't at least some small portion of voters (that were most likely in fact found in the actors contingent) that were never going to vote for a comic book movie period. I mean if you don't believe that voters are prejudiced against certain forms of all films how do explain the fact that only a handful of foreign language films have ever been nominated for Best Picture and only ONE animated movie has been.
On your second point, Lord of the Rings just isn't a fair comparison. The Dark Knight was a straight ahead action film based on comic book characters while LotR were a series of fantasy/adventure movies based on a piece of classic (or at least modern classic) English literature. Just because they both have geek level followings doesn't mean it's apples to apples. And for what it's worth the LotR were released before the recent expansion of the voting bloc that was specifically designed to generate more nominations for deserving indie/arthouse fare at the expense of the blockbusters that had normally dominated the Best Pic catagory.
(On an unrelated note my previous most should have said "some more animated films".)
Well, for one thing there are now separate categories for both Foreign Language films and Animated films. So I'm sure it doesn't really cross that many people's minds to vote for those. Unless, of course, they are amazingly exceptional. I do think Wall-E should have been nominated, but I'm not cutting myself over it.
My point is, there's not a separate category for "Comic Book Movies" so I don't think it's quite the same as with Foreign Language and Animation. I highly doubt THAT many people were against voting for it. There were just better movies out there. Besides, like Coin said, TDK won all the awards it should have. And even if it had been nominated for Best Picture, it wouldn't have won.
Haha er, *Colin, not coin. >.>
The foreign film thing is simple: They don't have to be released in the US to be eligible in that category, but everything does for Best Picture. They really slip through the cracks.
For a long time, animated films were looked upon as sitting in coach, but I don't think that's true anymore. To be fair to the voters, animation was geared for family viewing for so long that there wasn't a consistent stream of animation that really deserved to be in the discussion. Is 101 Dalmations really Best Picture-worthy? The Rescuers? That's different now, especially since The Incredibles.
The problem is, they have their own Oscar these days and it's usually so clear-cut as to which one will win, they aren't pushed as heavily for Best Picture. And the voters know Wall-E will win that award, so they look to fill Best Picture with something else. That's not fair, either, and I'll admit it's more troublesome than either the Foreign Language category or the comic book movie situation.
Batman is a classic literary character, and a few years ago was even named to a list of the 101 most influential people who never lived, based on pop cultural and historical relevance. In fact, he's been studied by psychologists for years precisely because the depth of development and mythos rises above almost everything else in the comic book universe (that's particularly true of serialized heroes). However, The Dark Knight had major, major story flaws and wasn't really an improvement over Batman Begins except when Heath Ledger was on screen. Bale was not that good, Gyllenhaal was pointless, the arc for Two-Face was bungled. In fact, since you have the greatest villain in comic book history, why is he even sharing the screen with Two-Face?
I'm not comparing it note-for-note with LOTR. I've just heard the argument that the Oscars don't reward sci-fi or fantasty films in any way, but I don't think that's it. I think that so many films in those genres can be seen as "not serious" that most of them usually don't get attention at the Oscars. Plenty of comedies get ignored for the same reason. Nobody thought that about Dark Knight, though. It just missed the cut. Did it deserve the nomination over The Reader? Well, it's a better movie than The Reader, so if it's just down to those two films, sure. But it's not just those two movies. Last year was a much stronger year for movies and I'm sure, like Avatar, Dark Knight was either number one on a ballot or not in the top five at all. And that's what murdered its chances.
Some of these are the victims of crowded years, and some simply did not get the attention they deserved as classics until long after the years in which they were released. I can't really speak for some of the older films and their awards momentum (like The Searchers which should be required viewing for any film fan). And while it is true that it is not fair, animated features having their own category now makes it an excuse to not consider them for the big prize. Up will get nominated this year only because of the stupid expansion of the category. Wall-E and The Incredibles would both have been guaranteed nominations had the Academy decided to implement that stupid idea in the years those were released.
Having said all that, the biggest atrocity in my lifetime not even being invited to the party was the exclusion of Do The Right Thing. It was lauded, relevant and important and baffling in it's absence. Especially considering that year's Best Picture apparently directed itself...