He's 13 1/2 inches tall. He wears only a sword. He's shiny. Everybody wants him. This is a new weekly Sunday series --my attempt to keep Oscar discussion corralled in the weekends ...at least until we're truly in the season.

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I’ve never met an Oscar devotee who didn’t have pet peeves about or outright disdain for some element of the whole circus they stay enthralled by. With the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and their external “fans” for lack of a better word -- it’s not really the right word – Oscar season, night, nominations,wins inevitably lead to a love/hate thing. Dedicated long term viewers develop pet years where they feel especially grateful to the Academy for surprisingly good decisions, a particularly satisfying nomination that wasn’t a foregone conclusion or indelible moment in the actual ceremony but, flip side now, they’ll also have the bizarre version of all of those things: decisions that continue to rattle one’s psyche with their boneheadedness. Certain years haunt like some clingy unwelcome poltergeist, always threatening to wreak havoc in the repeating, tossing good films to the side violently and sliding mediocrities into the center and forefront. 1999 is just such a year for me. I always fear that its specter will return. Will 2007 go there?

I’ll be more specific. There’s a solid block of cinephiles and critics who praised 1999 to the heavens at the time for its wide array of “masterpieces”. I was less enthusiastic about the year as a whole having reservations about many of the hosanna’d but there was no denying that the films people became wildly enthusiastic about were worth discussing and contemplating, even if you fell on the negative or reserved praise side of the divide. What a vivid array of films the Academy could choose from: Fight Club, Eyes Wide Shut, The Iron Giant, Run Lola Run, All About My Mother, Being John Malkovich, Election, Three Kings, American Beauty, Magnolia, The Insider, The Straight Story, Topsy Turvy, Boys Don’t Cry, The Blair Witch Project to name a dozen or so of the year’s most loved/argued about pictures, an all you can eat buffet of real cinema. The Oscars saved room for fast food.

My theory of Oscar supply and demand is hard to measure but it’s vaguely this: If there are too many great films, AMPAS voters are far less swayed by critical opinion (if critical opinion is not monolithic its naturally quieter --maybe they don’t hear it through the marketing din?) The best picture nominees that year: American Beauty, The Insider and then soft populist choices like The Sixth Sense, The Green Mile, The Cider House Rules. Mileage may vary on any of those three but did we really need all of them? Does anyone even remember that The Green Mile and Cider House Rules existed? Think of the films that had to be shoved aside to honor them. What a world.

I bring this up because I’m already starting to worry about two films and their Oscar prospects. No Country For Old Men (which I have seen) is masterful but it’s also challenging and dark. The ending refuses to coddle traditional movie expectations. There Will Be Blood (which I have not seen but Paul Thomas Anderson has never directed a movie that was less than very good) is, according to early reviews, a thing of similarly prickly potency. Will Oscar look for gentler film experiences?

My fears of a disturbing 1999 haunting are probably accentuated by the return of writer director Paul Thomas Anderson. He's long overdue for emphatic industry recognition and he was one of 1999’s most prominent casualties for his sprawling smart California epic Magnolia. It’s especially frustrating in light of the Academy’s recent embrace of Crash. I don’t mean to use the Haggis picture as a punching bag (Lord knows I’d rather let the Academy’s darkest moment go) but it’s a telling counterpart, since that film also concerns itself with disconnected unhappy Los Angelenos and lifts rather shamelessly from Magnolia’s "Wise Up" sequence for its own emotionally pivoting musical moment "Into the Deep." Whatever one thinks of Crash 's overall cinematic worth, it’s an intellectual and artistic midget in comparison to Anderson’s 1999 film.

Anderson’s artistic impulses aren’t always Oscar friendly (Punch Drunk Love, his last picture and Hard Eight his first, were never going to be “oscar pictures” on account of size or genre experimentations) but isn't it indefensible that Boogie Nights and Magnolia have not a single statue between them? Perhaps P.T.A. pictures are just one of those unfortunate blind spots that Oscar voters develop. Anderson may have erred on the side of indulgence in the past but it’s still maddening that he’s never been recognized for direction when Paul Haggis has. That strange awards imbalance reminds me of the 2001 Directorial fiasco when Ron Howard beat Peter Jackson (!), Ridley Scott(!!), David Lynch(!!!) and Robert Altman (!!!!) --injustice quadrupled. Both preferences are reminders of Oscar’s determinedly middlebrow nature and their collective tendency to shrug rather than hug when a real artist approaches them.

That said, you’ll see that in my predictions I’m thinking positively and assuming No Country and Blood will both score major nominations. But is there really room for two. And if they garner the lions share of praise from critical organizations does that mean that more traditional but still thoughtful films like Michael Clayton or, say, Into the Wild will suffer?

If there are too many “masterpieces” (all years should have this problem!) the Academy may pull a ’99 and look for cozier easier films to settle down with in the history books. Then again, with the Academy you never know. In 2001 they had rather spectacular choices and aside from the winners they did pretty well for themselves in their shortlistings.

 

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