by Nathaniel R
It is 16 days until the Oscars. Since you're all being so freakishly quiet, let's talk about something we know you'll have an opinion about: 2016. Oscar was all about Emma Stone in La La Land and Moonlight in general with pockets of support for Arrival and Manchester by the Sea and Fences. And for some reason Oscar decided Mel Gibson was cool again via Hacksaw Ridge. If you could change one thing about the Oscar outcomes of 2016 what would it be?
I have one other question for you about the Oscars after the jump...
This was Oscar's Best Picture list (in rough presumed order of their preference given the nominations and outcomes). But seriously what was #10? It's so tough to know because nothing quite feels right. Films that were "in the conversation" as they say, due to precursors and hoopla were: Nocturnal Animals, Deadpool, Sully, Loving, Jackie, 20th Century Women. Beats me! None feel like they were even close given the nomination outcomes and/or the types of films they were. No international titles had enough heat either. The Salesman won the International Oscar but it wasn't even up for Screenplay like Farhadi's previous winner A Separation... and other popular foreign titles that year like The Handmaiden, Elle, Train to Busan, and Toni Erdmann were surely too "out there" for Oscar voters.
Was it Jackie despite that film being so divisive?
Nathaniel's 2016 Top Ten
My top ten went like so:
- 20th Century Women (Mike Mills)
- Moonlight (Barry Jenkins)
- The Handmaiden (Park Chan-wook)
- The Witch (Robert Eggers)
- La La Land (Damien Chazelle)
- Arrival (Denis Villeneuve)
- Jackie (Pablo Larraín)
- Love and Friendship (Whit Stillman)
- The Lobster (Yorgos Lanthimos)
- Embrace of the Serpent (Cirro Guerra)
Runners up: Fences and Little Men
But the public were like "Nah!" to my choices and Oscar's choice. They flocked to only visual effects franchises or animated features...
Top 10 Box Office Titles of 2016
We've been living in the hellhole of extremely limited public taste for over 10 years now with only franchise titles (usually visual effects extravaganzas) and animated films topping the charts. If you look back over the whole of cinematic history you'll find that there has literally never been a time like this when only one, maximum two, types of films were what the public wanted to seet. The only non-visual effects, non-franchisey, non-animated films (excluding 2020 an anomaly in every way since the year stopped a few months in) to become top ten public favourites in the past entire decade (!!!) were the concert-like biopic Bohemian Rhapsody (2018), the military drama American Sniper (2014), and the comedy Ted (2012). Just three titles in ten whole years. A Star is Born (2018) almost accomplished this but not quite and that's also a franchise in a way.
So don't believe the media when they say that Oscar tastes drifted away from the mainstream. It's the other way around. The public, like Oscar, used to have a fairly wide range of films they'd become obsessed with from dramas to visual effects spectacles to comedies, to biopics, to romances, to animated features to action flicks. They would all intermingle in the top audience favourites each year for over a century! I mean look at the much healthier variety from 1996, just twenty years earlier...
- Independence Day (visual fx spectacle)
- Twister (visual fx spectacle)
- Mission: Impossible (action franchise)
- Jerry Maguire (sports/romcom)
- Ransom (crime thriller)
- 101 Dalmatians (family film remake)
- The Rock (action)
- The Nutty Professor (comedy remake)
- The Birdcage (comedy remake of foreign film)
- A Time To Kill (drama based on a bestseller)
In the Aughts the great narrowing happened rapidly until there was next to no variety at all by the 2010s. Strange. Didn't mean to end on a bummer but how will we ever get out of this tailspin into homogeny? Will there only be superhero films released and maybe multiple Batman and Spider-Man titles in the top ten hits of 2031?