Q&A Pt. 2: Rain Men, Paperboys, Oscar Greats
Friday, June 5, 2015 at 4:36PM We had too many good questions last week to keep it all confined to one post. So now that you're read part one, so here's part two of the week's reader question roundup. I saved all the Oscar questions for this round to motivate me to update those Oscar chart this weekend. Ready?
SONJA: Why do we mourn/rage about "undeserved" wins so often? In reality it doesn't change anything....
It's as useless as making your bed in the morning but we still make our beds, right? Or in my case throw the comforter haphazardly across the sheets - close enough! Listen, I consider it a sign of good character to mourn poor choices from awards bodies as long as one does so pointedly and briefly and doesn't allow it to become part of one's whole character like hating an actr- OH WAIT OOPS.
People like to be dismissive about awards and say 'they don't matter!' but it's simply not true. THEY DO. Awards permanently influence resumes and entire careers by way of their temporary affect on opportunities and, yes, praise (once considered a "great" it takes decades for the petals to fall off that rose... it took decades for people to start getting snippy about Al Pacino & Robert DeNiro's work!
Plus it goes in the history books. Baby cinephiles decades later still look these things up and watch the movies that were awarded to teach themselves movie history. I speak from experience. I know this to be true.
CASH: Dustin Hoffman's win for "Rain Man" baffles me...
I was more impressed with Tom Cruises' performance than Hoffman's. Was that a weak year? Or was it a makeup for "Tootsie"? He already had the Oscar. Am I the only one confused by that win?
1988 was a long time ago but from how I remember it at least, he was the frontrunner the whole time. The only caveat was I believe some last minute longshot dreams for Gene Hackman (who was also already an Oscar winner) in Mississippi Burning. The other three were just 'glad to be nominated.' The public was obsessed with Rain Man (the #1 of its box office year) and Hoffman's performance in particular, quoting it all the time. It was kind of a Cuba Gooding "show me the money" type performance with the public reception only the lines you couldn't escape no matter where you went were less applicable to everyday situations.
"Definitely not wearing any underpants"
"___ minutes to Wapner"
If it helps think of the time period. Few people really understood what Autism was in the 1980s (new concept) and people confused it with mental retardation as a catch-all "mental handicap" and Oscar voters have always loved "differently-abled" men as much as they love "deglam" women.
SERGIO: As a Nicole Kidman fan I always feel angry for her having ONLY THREE OSCAR NOMINATIONS AND ONE WIN. I would have given her seven nominations and two wins. How about you Nathaniel? How many wins and nominations?
The Film Bitch Awards don't stretch back to the beginnings of Nicole Kidman's career but if they had I'd have the same count - 7 nominations and 2 wins (To Die For, Moulin Rouge!, The Hours, Birth, Margot at the Wedding, Rabbit Hole, and The Paperboy with the latter two being her wins). Naturally I would love to say a win for Moulin Rouge! but at the time I gave my win to her bestie Naomi Watts in Mulholland Drive which I'm still okay with as a call though if I believed in ties that's a good year to use one for)
The further we get away from The Paperboy (2012) the bigger shame it is that she didn't land an atypical nomination for that because boy was she swinging for the fences. She got closer than anyone thought she would (bless) but frankly she makes most of the nominees that year look like highly timid thespians. And compounding the frustration: it's starting to look like that was her last shot given the fate of her recent films.
STEVE: What do you think is the best decade of Best Picture winners?
This is an extraordinarily difficult question. Critics tend to value the 1930s and the 1970s as the best decades for American cinema and people need to accept that the Oscars are for American cinema despite the occasional foreign joy. I'm still elated that Marion Cotillard got that Two Days One Night nomination last season but we have to consider such things cherries on top and not part of the basic food pyramid in order to stay sane!
What's more the Oscars have always been schizophrenic with their ability to see greatness within what's put in front of them. Most schizophrenic for me in terms of super high peaks and embarrassing valleys among the Best Picture wins are the 1930s and 1950s. For every It Happened One Night or All About Eve you get a Cimarron and an Around the World in 80 Days, you know? It's sometimes hard to imagine that the same group of people is voting each year. Within each decade AMPAS members tend to choose about 3 greats, 2 duds and 5 semi-respectable choices that aren't remotely exciting to think of as a #1.
So what's my answer? Hell, I don't know. Though I'm desperately curious to hear all of yours in the comments.
I don't want to say the 1970s since I don't really love very many of those winners and there's only one year in which I would have voted the same as Oscar from their fields (Annie Hall) but there is something to be said for consistency and the 70s had it. Tough question. This decade is pretty good so far. We've got two vaguely respectable but ultimately dull winners (The King's Speech, Argo) bu the others have been great or highly entertaining. So I'm fully expecting this year's choice to be maddeningly awful because it's time for something dreadful to happen again. Like another Slumdog, Crash or Braveheart.
So let's end with a slightly different list instead...
Nathaniel's 3 Favorite Best Pictures From Each Decade (Chronologically)
1930s All Quiet on the Western Front, It Happened One Night, Gone With the Wind
1940s Mrs Miniver*, Casablanca, The Best Years of Our Lives
1950s All About Eve, From Here to Eternity, Ben-Hur
1960s West Side Story, Lawrence of Arabia, The Sound of Music
1970s The Godfather, Annie Hall, Kramer vs. Kramer
1980s Terms of Endearment, Amadeus, Out of Africa
1990s Silence of the Lambs, Schindler's List, Titanic
2000s LotR: Return of the King, No Country For Old Men, The Hurt Locker
2010s The Artist, 12 Years a Slave, Birdman
*I know people dismiss this movie as clunky wartime propaganda but whatever. I love it. Sorry not sorry.
YOUR TURN READERS
What is Kidman's ideal (imaginary) Oscar stats? Best decade for Best Picture wins? Sound off.
Reader Comments (54)
Nassos -- unfortunately STRANGERLAND (which I saw at Sundance) is not strong enough or accessible enough to sustain anything like an Oscar campaign. It's a strange film and underwhelming. I'm glad i saw it but it's more for Nicole Kidman obsessives than for general movie people who like her in certain things only (which is the camp Oscar voters fall into)
Now reading Nassos comment, I can understand a little bit more of Kidman's backlash especially related by Kidmaniacs on Internet... I mean, 15 nominations??!! Even Streep with a longer career, is having "too much" with 19 noms. And on top of that removing perhaps some of the most inspired Oscar nominations in the last years (Blethyn, Cotillard, Sevigny, Moreno).
I sorta agree Kidman is a little bit underrated and deserves more noms, but please come down... Or better yet, create a full new category called "Best Performance by Kidman" - LMFAO.
Also Nassos, if you're applying the current AMPAS rules, an actor can't be nominated twice in the same category. In situations like DiCaprio in 2006 or Winslet 2008, the performance with the lower number of votes is automatically disqualified even if the votes are enough to make the lineup. Precedent in Barry Fitzgerald case. Unless you change the AMPAS rules Kidman can't be nominated twice in the same category at the Oscars.
Jake the Hunk - what happened to Kidman is, IMHO, that her best or at least most challenging work is largely in unseen films (Birth, Rabbit Hole, Dogville, The Paperboy, etc.) so mainstream audiences and even Hollywood (I have a feeling a lot of people in the movie business don't see as many movies as we think they do) mostly know her from her middling mainstream films (Stepford Wives, etc.) and, even more so, for whatever bad work she's had done to her face. Whenever she comes up in conversation with non-cinephiles, that's the first and sometimes only thing people think of now (especially since she hasn't had a mainstream hit in a LONG time).
And I don't quite get the love for her work in The Paperboy either. Swinging for the fences doesn't automatically make for a good performance. It's fun to see her try, but by god do you see her trying all over that movie. And, through no fault of her own, she just doesn't read as lower-class/white trash, no matter how much bad makeup she slathers on. This sounds like I hate the performance but I don't. I just felt like I was watching an actress trying a character on (which can be fun to watch in its own way) than seeing an actual person.