And the Winner Was…

By Jaime Weinman - Monday, March 8, 2010 at 12:18 AM - 8 Comments

Brian Johnson expertly handled the Oscar live-blogging, but once you’ve finished reading that, come back here (where I wrongly believed that Avatar was the front-runner) and answer this question: what do you think of the decision to bring back “And the winner is…” when announcing the recipient of the award?

As the article explains, in 1989 producer Allan Carr, not content with producing one of the most-hated awards shows of all time, decided to change “and the winner is…” to the more neutral “and the Oscar goes to…” This was the golden age of kinder, gentler language, and the idea behind the change was that calling someone a “winner” implies that everyone else is a “loser.” This is, in fact, true, but that’s not the point.

The producers this year decided to bring back “and the winner is…” precisely because it is a little nastier and more blunt than “goes to.” They told Steve Pond that for those in the know, bringing it back feels “naughty” and “rude.”

Now, I remember hating the change at the time, and ever since then, I have felt it sounded wrong to use the bland “and the Oscar goes to.” The important thing is not that they got an Oscar, it’s that they won and four or more other people lost. So I’m happy to have “and the winner is” back. It’s one of the few really good decisions these producers seem to have made.

However, people who started watching the Oscars any time since 1989 are probably just as used to “and the Oscar goes to” as I was to “and the winner is.” When Kate Winslet slipped up and said “and the Oscar goes to Jeff Bridges,” some Twitter reactions lauded her for using the “traditional” phrase “and the Oscar goes to.” And I suppose that since it’s been around for 22 years, it is traditional now.

So what do you think? “Winner” or “goes to?”

And after you think about that one, here is something to play us out after that disappointing show: the wise and temperate observations (with dialogue by Harlan Ellison) of Frankie Fane and company.

Live-blogging the Oscars!

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 7:09 PM - 23 Comments

7:08 p.m. Let the Games begin. As in Vancouver, we’re rooting for the Canadians. Which means King of the World (aka James Cameron), Jason Reitman and Ivan Reitman (director and producer of Up in the Air). And the two men behind District 9, writer-director Neill Blomkamp and co-writer Terri Tatchell.

Watching Ben Mulroney on the red carpet. Mo’Nique has just called him “brother.” Ben, you can take that to the bank. Jason Reitman has his soundbite down to a weary koan. On Up In the Air: “It’s a movie about family and it was made by a family.”

James Cameron talking to Ben about his rival, and ex-wife: “Kathryn has done a number of small films. She doesn’t play the Hollywood game.” And on the results tonight: “The tea leaves tell me that it’s going her way.”

7:13 pm: Barbara Walters’ Special. Her last special. OMG. Mo’Nique has just finished talking about the frictional specifics of being abused by her brother, and now she’s leaving Barbara Walters slack jawed by talking about how sex outside of her marriage is not a deal breaker. Next the camera moves in for a close-up of her hairy legs, as she delivers defence thereof.

7: 32 pm: We’re flicking between Barbara Wawa and Ben collaring Hollywood royalty. Ben asks George Clooney whether he gets more mileage out of an Oscar or being People’s Sexiest Man Alive. George says being sexy goes further. Ben, morphing into crazed fan, lunges at Meryl Streep as she sashays by, and she pats his microphone maternally. Media version of an air kiss. Or a polite way of saying, “Get lost.”

7:57 pm: This live blog, by the way, is coming to you from Helga Stephenson’s annual Oscar party. Helga is a former director of TIFF, chair of the recent Toronto Human Rights Watch Film Festival, and a global among cinephiles. Her annual Oscar soiree is always a blast. But I feel like a freak: typing at a party while watching television is perverse. Continue…

And the gold medal, er, Oscar goes to…

By Brian D. Johnson - Sunday, March 7, 2010 at 12:12 PM - 4 Comments

For BDJ’s live blog of the Oscars, go to LIVE BLOG….

Oscar Sunday!  I know it’s not as big as Super Bowl Sunday. And after the Winter Olympics, it’s pretty hard to get into the mood for another Epic TV Event, especially one with no sports—only opening and closing ceremonies. But with Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin at the helm (will the opening monologue become an opening dialogue?), tonight’s show should be good for a few laughs. Anticipating the Oscars, of course, is always more exciting than enduring them. But given the David-and-Goliath duel between Avatar and Hurt Locker, and their ex-spouse directors, there’s a nifty element of drama. And if we’re lucky, there may even be the odd wardrobe malfunction.  I’ll be live-blogging the Oscars tonight, starting at 7 p.m. So for those of you who get a charge of multitasking—surfing the web while watching TV, tweeting, and shoveling nachos—consider this an opportunity. I thought of live-blogging the show from home, but that that seemed too depressing and studious. So to raise the bar, so to speak,  I’ll be typing from a crowded Oscar party, trying not to spill my drink on my laptop, while abstaining from  that ongoing war between those who want to talk at the screen and those who want to watch in reverent silence, afraid they’ll miss something.

For the record, I’m about to trot out my predictions. But don’t consider this a cheat sheet for your Oscar party pool, because I’m not going to weigh in on the marginal categories (none of us have a clue, really). And I have never won an Oscar pool in my life. However, I will predict that, at some point in the evening, Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will wear 3-glasses and speak Na’vi. Jeff Bridges will not wear a conventional tuxedo. Mo’Nique will give an inspirational acceptance speech that will make make us wonder what drug she’s on and where can we get some? Jim Cameron will still have the same bad non-haircut. There will be a photo opportunity in which he kisses his ex-wife, Kathryn Bigelow. On the red carpet, Brangelina will deserve an honorary Oscar for Performance by a Pretend Couple. And the person who receives the Oscar for best documentary short will give the longest and most tedious speech.

As for the awards, here are my votes on who will win, and should win, the major categories:

Best Picture

Because there are 10 nominees this year, and there’s a wacky new preferential voting system that allows second and third choices to vault into the running on ballots whose first choices have been eliminated  (you still with me?), anything could happen. I think Avatar will win—and should win, not because it’s a perfect film, but because it’s a humongous accomplishment, and it has brought magic back to the tired world of Hollywood spectacle. But I wouldn’t want to put money on this one. Hurt Locker ‘s slingshot has momentum and may well carry the day.

Best Director

Kathryn Bigelow will win for Hurt Locker for the same reason that Avatar should win Best Picture: she’s making history, and Oscar loves history. Bigelow won who the Directors Guild prize, a reliable bellwether, and if she wins tonight she’ll become the first female director to win an Oscar. Continue…

Oscar Moments From Days Gone By

By Jaime Weinman - Friday, March 5, 2010 at 5:47 PM - 3 Comments

Just to get in the mood for that awards show that’s coming up (or as George Sanders called them in All About Eve, “those awards presented annually by that… film society”) I decided to look at some Academy Awards show clips. My rigorous standard for including them here? They had to be a) On the internet and… well, that’s about it. My standards are high.

1. Here’s one of the most famous/infamous good-bad Oscar-show musical numbers: at the 1957 awards, an Oscar-winning song from several years earlier was performed by one of Hollywood’s biggest young stars, Rock Hudson, and one of its most famous semi-retirees, Mae West. The weirdness of the combination made the number an instant cult hit; it was a camp classic even before the term “camp” was mainstreamed.

2. My favourite kiss-off speech is Alfred Hitchcock winning the Irving Thalberg Memorial award at the 1967 Oscars. Hitchcock had never won an Oscar and was apparently not impressed with being given an award that is for producing, rather than directing (so it’s not even an honourary Oscar for his directing achievements). So he nonplussed everybody by keeping his speech to exactly five words.

3. For some reason I really love this promo for the 1987 Oscars. Why? Because the network managed to make it seem exactly like a promo for one of their drama shows. The tone of the announcer, the way the clips are chosen or edited — it’s like the Oscars are a gritty action drama. Which would make them more fun.

4. To represent controversial political moments and star self-congratulation, here’s the Vanessa Redgrave speech at the 1977 Oscars. This clip also includes the almost-as-famous reply by Paddy Chayefsky. For Continue…

AVATAR vs. HURT LOCKER: The Historical Favourite Question

By Jaime Weinman - Thursday, March 4, 2010 at 4:49 PM - 8 Comments

Scott Macaulay tries to explain the new Oscar voting system and how it works, with quotes from economist Justin Wolfers. Wolfers also provides some follow-explanation here. The use of ranked voting, familiar to those who follow sports MVP voting, means that a movie has the potential to win even if it doesn’t get the most first-place votes.

But that doesn’t really answer the big question: should Avatar or The Hurt Locker be considered the favourite to win? No one really seems to know. Unlike the other big categories, where the winner is almost pre-ordained, Avatar and Locker have sort of been co-favourites for a while; sometimes Avatar seems to have the momentum, and sometimes it’s Locker. (If Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy were alive, they would right now be playing Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron in romantic comedy about a divorced couple whose films are competing for the Oscar.) They’re different types of filmmaking, and both of them are types of movies that would, at certain times in Oscar history, be considered the likely winner. The question is not whether history will repeat itself this year, but which moment in history will repeat itself.

I reflexively think of Avatar as the favourite, because it’s a type of production that usually wins Best Picture: the long, huge-budget mega-blockbuster that “saves” the movie industry and gets the award because it’s doo too big to ignore. Winners that fall into this category include Gone With The Wind, The Sound of Music, The Godfather, and Cameron’s own Titanic. These were movies of epic length and scale that became tremendous hits (often after people thought the studio was going to lose its collective shirt on them). They combined massive popular appeal with technical finesse and a tendency to impress movie insiders: Continue…

Will a change to Oscar voting give us better Best Picture winners?

By Colby Cosh - Monday, March 1, 2010 at 10:45 AM - 1 Comment

Every Oscar-watcher knows that the process of choosing the Best Picture this year has changed. Last June, the board of governors of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS) announced that the field of nominees for the ultimate Oscar would be expanded to 10. The idea was to open up the Best Picture field, making it less of a “Best Arty Tear-Jerker Released Late in the Year” prize. What most people haven’t noticed is that this change was followed by another, potentially more profound one.

In August, the AMPAS board announced that the Best Picture winner will be selected from the wider field, not by a simple first-past-the-post system, but by means of a preferential ballot. Most Oscars will be awarded, this year as ever, according to the simplest possible voting system: every eligible Academy member votes for one nominee, and the nominee with the most votes gets the statuette. Best Picture voters, however, will be asked to rank all 10 nominees by preference from one to 10. Oscar accounting firm PricewaterhouseCoopers will sort the votes into 10 piles according to their “No. 1” votes. If any nominee has a majority, it wins. If not, the nominee with the fewest No. 1 votes will be taken out of the running, and its votes reassigned to the nominees next in order on each slip. The process is repeated until a nominee gains 50 per cent support and achieves victory.

Canadians ought to be familiar with preferential voting. It’s more or less how our political parties routinely choose leaders, and Ontario and British Columbia held recent referendums on electoral reform in which the transferable vote played a major part. The idea behind the new process is pretty much the same one that motivated those reform efforts: to get a Best Picture supported by a consensus, rather than by a plurality of first-choice supporters.

Continue…

The Oscars' war of the worlds

By Brian D. Johnson - Tuesday, February 2, 2010 at 11:50 AM - 28 Comments

The new and improved, fluffed-up Oscar nominations were announced this morning, and surprise! . . . there were virtually no surprises. The Academy Awards are now so heavily upstaged by the glut of awards leading up to them that the Oscar campaign is like an election that just ratifies the results of the advance polls. The race comes down to a David and Goliath duel between Avatar and Hurt Locker, which have nine nominations apiece—and between their once married directors, James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow. Aside from the Battle of the Exes, a showdown tailor-made for Entertainment Tonight, we have a battle between two very different war movies, and two opposite worlds of high-risk movie-making—a duel between indie nerve and blockbuster brawn. Cameron has made a ideologically tinted, eco-minded anti-war epic that champions Mother Nature’s feminine spirit.  Bigelow has made a gritty, no-nonsense, ultra-masculine Iraq thriller that’s remarkably free of any anti-war sentiment.  The traditional polarity of male-female sensibilities is reversed. So that’s shaping up to be quite a battle.

Oscar’s big makeover this year, of course, is the expansion of the Best Picture category from 5 to 10 nominees. So let’s see how that played out. We can separate the 10 nominees into two halves. Had there been just 5 nominees,  they would likely be, in roughly descending priority: Avatar, Hurt Locker, Up in the Air, Precious and Inglourious Basterds. So the five “extra” nominees are An Education, District 9, A Serious Man, The Blind Side, and Up. The Academy expanded the category to make room for more boffo popcorn movies, in the hope of bumping up TV ratings for the show. That seems to have worked, up to a point. District 9, Up and The Blind Side all grossed over $200 million worldwide. But the other three films that squeaked in are all relatively small. And Star Wars Star Trek, the year’s best popcorn movie aside from Avatar, didn’t make the cut. It’s nice to see A Serious Man and An Education nominated. The Blind Side, one of the phoniest “true” stories ever filmed, has no business being there. And Up‘s nomination all but guarantees it will win in its native category, Best Animated Feature.

No matter how many movies are nominated for Best Picture, however, the number is beside the point. This is Hurt Locker vs. Avatar. Bigelow’s low-budget masterpiece has been winning the industry’s major awards. Yet Avatar is such a historic feat that Hollywood, a company town, may rally behind it. After winning the Directors Guild prize, however, count on Bigelow to take home the Oscar for Best Director, which would be a historic feat in its own right—she’d be the first woman to win that honour. Continue…