In Entertainment Weekly, Issue #866, March 3, 2006, ("The pre-Oscars Issue"), the cover the gamut of Oscar predictions, including the regular movie reviewer's and anonymous members of the Hollywood machine itself, the latter being the most interesting.
To wit, "The Actor" had a great quote:
"These are insular movies," he says, "the kind people in Hollywood like to see, with the kind of statements they like to make. But the public is screaming, 'We don't want to see it!'"
Well, amen to that.
Even Roger Ebert asks this interesting question (on his site): "The Oscar nominees represent filmmaking at a high level, but who do you know who has gone to see more than two or three of them?"
Anyway, back to the EW article, "The Producer" says:
"These movies are all trying very hard to say something, but I don't know that moviegoers will be talking about them 10 years from now," she says. "Then again, don't listen to me because 40 Year-Old Virgin would be my vote for best picture."
Which sums up their common opinion: The 40 Year-Old Virgin was the best film of last year. And it was.
And I can't let this one pass: the lead-in picture for the main prediction article shows the boys from "Brokeback" like this:
Guess they just help from jabbing that particular scab. I scoured the picture for subliminal words like "neener neener" or "in your face xians," but so far have detected none. But then maybe the halos were considered enough.
2 comments:
Yes, these were insular films, all five of them, though I'm glad to see that the Academy did the right thing in the end by giving the BP award to Crash. No, not because Crash was a great film. None of them were. But I was afraid that they would give it to Brokeback Mountain, and we all would have had to endure even more gassing about this "watershed moment in the struggle for gay acceptance," even though the film grossed less in the box office than a documentary about penguins.
Basically, I figure the Academy minimized the damage to their own reputations. Good on them.
I couldn't agree more that a bullet was dodged re "a watershed moment." Thank God.
I predict, too, that within the year it will be reported that the box office for that film was exaggerated.
The numbers on the sites that report box office just don't jive with the size of release it had and the potential audience. I bet they're made up.
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