Recently, the Huffington Post put this Oscar Prediction Dashboard up on there website, calming that they "crunched the sats on every Oscar nominee for the past 30 years to produce a scientific metric" in order for them to predict the winners of this years Academy Awards. In the data tables they give you "pertinent" info such as box office gross with a line graph that shows incremental increases during the films time in theaters; the audience rating average, which are based on average Rotten Tomatoes user reviews; critical rating average, which are based on Metacritic critic reviews, other awards the film has garnered; total nominations the film has received in other categories and lastly, the overall chance of winning.
Notice that I put the word pertinent in quotations above (feel free to re-read the sentence and perform air quotes for full effect). I say that because, if their data is accurate, it doesn't seem to make a difference what the film has accomplished, the Academy will play favorites and pick who they want to win anyway.
Case in point, Argo. Looking at the data it has an enormously high odds of winning Best Picture. The only other film that is close to winning is Lincoln and it has doesn't even have half a chance that Argo has, even though it's stacked with other nominations and shares the same critical rating.
Looking at the ratings makes things even more confusing. Argo doesn't have the highest ratings for any of the review categories. Zero Dark Thirty has an impressive 95 critical rating whereas Django Unchained's audience rating is 94. While being favorably reviewed, both films share nearly the same abysmal odds of winning.
Django itself is a mystery in that it is the highest grossing film, has the highest audience rating and shares almost as many nominations as Argo. The only thing it doesn't have is awards from other ceremonies. The momentum from the Golden Globes and the SAG awards seems to be the only thing carrying it. Although Zero Dark Thirty won big at the Golden Globes as well but has (almost literally) zero chance of winning. I think it's just being punished for shoving our nose in the crap from the last presidential administration.
I shouldn't care about awards, but I inevitably do. And I shouldn't let them get me flustered, but that's the position I find myself in. Year after year, I watch these proceedings in dismay as the inexplicable becomes reality and films that sometimes have no business even being nominated somehow winning. But recently, I had an epiphany, I finally realized why I hate the Oscar's so much: it makes me hate good movies.
Let's go back to Argo for a moment. I'll give you a short paraphrase of my reaction of the movie after a friend and I saw it, "That movie was awesome!" And yes, it was awesome, but it was a popcorn flick. It was basically The Avengers for middle-aged adults. It was suspenseful and gripping yes, but I didn't find the directing very memorable and Afleck's acting was mildly better than a cardboard cutout of him would have been. But I ended up liking it despite all of that.
Fast forward to award season. Argo is picking up every award it can, Oscar buzz is surrounding good but completely average films like Silver Linings Playbook and truly great films of artistic fortitude like Zero Dark Thirty and Amour are being shut out into the late winter cold and I find myself hating the only thing that I can blame, movies like Argo.
But I shouldn't hate Argo or The Artist or even The King's Speech. They are all terrific films that were fulfilling and skillfully executed. And then I see films that I believe merit high honor for their artistic achievement, films like The Tree of Life and The Master, get ignored and then I get mad. I get mad at the movies that are taking the spotlight away from much better films. I get mad at the Academy for not seeing the greatness in those movies. I muse, wondering if they even saw the same film as me and proclaim that, "they just don't get it!"
I have to realize that the Oscar's aren't about the artistic merit that went into producing an artistic work, it's all about the back-scratching and fist bumping. It's about the Red Carpet, the dresses and the overwrought pageantry of a nearly century long affair. When I accept that long-standing tradition has made the Academy Awards old and tired, I tend to hate it less. It's just like your senile old grandfather who just doesn't know any better. In time, maybe my feelings about the Oscar's will change. That is, until the 24th of this month when Jessica Chastain will loose out on another Oscar and I will have flipped a desk in rage.
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