Now I am looking at the list of highly nominated films, and I see the weakest field I have ever seen. Hardly an entertaining or memorable movie in the lot of them. This field sucks.
This former institution is diminishing rapidly, and it is all because of one thing: The Academy has gotten locked in an artistic ivory tower, and they have lost touch with the people. So why is this true?
- One Oscar boss observed "This ain't the people's choice awards." He is certainly right about that... and it's not a good thing.
- There is now a describable type of film that can be nominated for and win an Oscar. These films are usually off-beat and on bizarre subjects. Frequently, they challenge common morality. The are loosely typed as "Prestige Pictures".
- Prestige Pictures suck: They are almost never entertaining. They usually don't make money. Rubbish like American Beauty, The English Patient, Million Dollar Baby and Crash are already well forgotten. I never liked any of these films in the first place, and I would not have voted for them.
- The big studios aren't supporting prestige pictures anymore: The hardened pragmatist inside the 5 major studios wonders why the firm wastes big money on movies that win Oscar gold but don't entertain or make money. They aren't even remembered well in retrospect. The result is that movies like The Wrestler, and Milk have been put out in extremely limited release. The studios know full well that these movies won't make money, even if they win the gold. The consequence is that very few people have seen these highly nominated films, and very few ever will.
- You can't predict victory: Odd ball movies frequently walk off with the title. How about last year's winner No Country for Old Men? That was an odd victory. A studio in financial trouble like Paramount may intentionally engineer a film like Benjamin Button with the objective of winning Oscar gold, but this is no recipe for making money or getting out of financial trouble. Further, Paramount is not guaranteed to win an Oscar this weekend. It could well be Slumdog Millionaire.
- When you nominate Milk instead of Wall-e, you have committed both an artistic and a marketing blunder. Milk has less than 2% of the artistic merit of Wall-e, and it has 1.0e-23% of it's long-term commercial value in terms of residual income. Wall-e will be popular for the next 50 to 75 years. Milk will be totally forgotten in the next 2 or 3 weeks.
- On the 2/20/2009 edition of All Things Considered, NPR's evening news broadcast, film critic Bob Mudello openly declared that if the Academy wants to reverse the negative slide in Oscar ratings, they are going to have to start nominating movies like Wall-e and the Dark Knight. You can listen to that audio HERE. Nominating these films would drastically increase the number of people who had seen one of the nominated films, and give the people a sense that they have a dog in this fight to cheer for.
- Speaking of not seeing any of the Oscar nominated films. MarketWatch.com printed a very nice piece in which they showed that the films nominated for Best Picture have the lowest combined box office total in the 81 year history of the Oscars. This is the pure effect Ivory Tower made manifest in dollars and cents. People don't like the shit that has been nominated. They won't pay money to see it, regardless of what the critics and the Academy says. You can read that story HERE.
- Prestige pictures suck
- The studios know it.
- The people won't buy tickets for that crap.
- The studios won't market that crap
- The Academy nominates these crappy pseudo artistic, pseudo important, pseudo intelectual films and gives them the gold
- Ergo the rating of the Female Super Bowl are sliding.
- A lot of women are just going to watch for the fashion show.
