Lots of people, apparently.
I love movies, I really do. But I can't quite fathom why otherwise intelligent people devote valuable brain power to obsessing about what awards the most mediocre talents in Hollywood will secretly conspire to give to this week's fads of the year.
I don't know anyone who claims to believe that the oscars are any kind of guideline to good movies. Just the opposite in fact. Here's my personal take on each Best Picture winner of the decade to date:
2000: Gladiator - mindless trash.
2001: A Beautiful Mind - boring crap wasting good actors on a piss-poor director.
2002: Chicago - mediocre musical starring people who cannot sing or dance well.
2003: The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King - not even a complete movie, seemingly endless, dreadfully scripted mediocrity.
2004: Million Dollar Baby - pretty good actually.
2005: Crash - oops, didn't see it.
In fact if you go back through all best picture oscar winners, the last time an enduring classic won the award was in 1975 (the year of my birth), it was One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, and it wasn't a patch on the book! More often it will got to quickly-forgotten mediocrity like Rain Man or The English Patient.
And still we care. I care enough to write this post.
I think the problem is that instead of Zeus and Osiris and even Jehovah, these days we have Tom Hanks and Julia Roberts and Reese Witherspoon. A tawdry and disposable bunch of gods for a tawdry and disposable age. We care deeply about them all, worship them with women's magazines and gossip columns, and ditch them faster and cheaper than Judas ditched Jesus. No wonder Tom Cruise went crazy.
Posted by pearce at March 7, 2006 5:42 PMAs anyone will tell you, I am a bit of a music obsessive. Nobody would bat an eyelid that I don't give a flying fug for the Emmies. The Oscars are the film equivalent of the Emmies. So yeah, why do people rate the Oscars?
That said, congrats to all the people I know who work for Weta.
Posted by: Andrew at March 8, 2006 10:46 AMAndrew: I thought the emmies were the tv awards?
Martin: well yeah it would be, why else would it win those oscars? ;-)
Posted by: Pearce at March 8, 2006 12:42 PMOh yeah. I meant Grammies. It's all the same to me.
Posted by: andrew at March 8, 2006 4:17 PMScott: I liked it too, but I did think that the dialogue was bad, there were about six endings too many (and I swear Frodo & co were stoned out of their treebeards for the last forty five minutes or so of the movie, they moved so slow), and as I said before it wasn't a complete movie.
I found it interesting that far and away the best acting in the movie came from a computer-generated special effect.
I also thought that two of the other movies nominated for best picture (Mystic River & Lost In Translation) were better in every way.
[rant]
The most galling thing of all for me was the Dominion Post jumping up and down and slapping themselves on the back because of what a good job "Wellywood" had done. You'd have thought the editors of that tasteless rag had something to do with the movie being a success. I wouldn't cry if most of the editorial of that particular "news" paper fell down a mine shaft (though I would shed a tear for three or four of them who I know are very nice people unlucky enough to be print journalists in a city where the only paper is trash).
[/rant]
Posted by: Pearce at March 8, 2006 4:41 PMRe: Dom Post and "Wellywood."
And when Weta / Three Foot Six placed strict media embagos and threatened legal action over news items during the *production* of the Lord Of The Rings films, who was leading the media charge with accusations of 'bullying' and 'hollywood's gone to his head' and other rubbish like that?
Yes, the same paper who later claimed the triumph when Fellowship of the Ring became such a success...
(And, yeah, I agree. Much as I do love Return of the King, I do acknowledge that Lost In Translation was a far better film...)
Posted by: Scott A at March 9, 2006 1:45 PM