Burning Questions: Is '12 Years a Slave' Really Too Rough For Oscar?

Michael Cusumano here. Oscar balloting closed 24 hours ago and this final crunch before Oscar night has me pondering the gap between pre-Fall buzz and the reality heading into the big ceremony.

If the breathless predictions about 12 Years a Slave that sounded out of Toronto last September were to be believed there should have been zero suspense left in the Best Picture race long ago. Like The King’s Speech before it, McQueen’s film appeared to be such a direct hit to the Academy’s sweet spot that many called the race then and there. So what happened? 12 Years may still emerge victorious but why isn’t it rolling over the competition like a Sherman Tank? 

The popular theory is that 12 Years is turning off the more squeamish voters with its unsparing physical and emotional violence. These voters are supposedly fleeing to the comforts of Gravity, which is nerve-shredding but in the unthreatening context of an action-thriller. This seems logical enough but I wonder if it's too easy an answer.

Is 12 Years a Slave really too rough for awards voters? Or is something larger at play?

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"Nominations for Everyone!" - Saturn Awards

I maintain that a lot of "special interest" awards bodies would instantly be more respectable if they'd limit their number of nominations in a category. The Saturn Awards, who've been handing out prizes for sci-fi/fantasy/horror films for 40 years now, are one such group. When you narrow your field of eligibility -- as all special interest awards bodies must to still fit within their special interest boundaries -- why then should your nominee list be larger than the standard model (that'd be Oscar. pay attention). Despite what seems like a neverending barrage of pictures released that are catering to the comic-con community, there are actually less movies like that than those that are eligible for other prizes which only have "release date" as criteria. And yet the Saturn Awards feel the need to have six-seven nominees in all the acting categories and multiple Best Picture awards. If you combine all of their Best Film categories, they have 34 Best Picture nominees! though Gravity and The Hobbit: The Smaugening are the nomination leaders.

It must be so insulting for any picture that was not nominated... though I can't think of any that weren't offhand. Hundreds of nominations with brief grumpy commentary are after the jump. 

Best Comic-to-Film Motion Picture:
“Iron Man 3″
“Man of Steel”
“Thor: The Dark World”
“The Wolverine”

The only snubbee I can think of here is Blue is the Warmest Color but those lesbians have no superpowers beyond very limber bodies and the ability to eat huge amounts of food without gaining a pound. 

30 more Best Picture nods after the jump...

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Curio: And The Nominees Are

Alexa here with your weekly art appreciation post. This being Oscar week, all the alternative poster designs for the nominated films are making the rounds: see the nominated films posterized as Legos, or as one-liners!  I prefer a less gimmicky, graphic-artist-inspired approach myself.  Unlike last year, the Oscar site does not feature alternative poster designs; I do wish the Academy would follow the lead of the BAFTAs on this.  

To fill the void here are my favorite designs for each of the nominated films.  Happy Oscars everyone! 

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Best Pictures for Home Viewing

all links in this article go to my favorite post about the movie in question

For those of you who live too far from major markets  to see everything before the Oscars, or who love watching a movie over and over and over again, you won't have to wait too long to fulfill every viewing impulse you have for this year's batch of Oscar nominees. Almost every single Oscar nominee will be on DVD and BluRay by the end of March except of course for the handful that don't have to follow the normal rules of release like foreign film and animation: Omar, Ernest & Celestine, The Wind Rises, The Missing Picture which have just started their theatrical runs or are coming soon. There's no word yet on late arrival The Invisible Woman, nominated for costume design. The only Best Picture that hasn't announced a BluRay release date is Spike Jonze's Her which is slightly surprising since its competitors, which are mostly still going stronger at the box office, have. 

Coming Tuesday!
Best Picture nominees Gravity & Nebraska hit stores the day Oscar voting ends. So they won't be able to tout any of their potential wins on their jackets

Already Available. Will you have seen them all by March 2nd?
Best Picture nominees: Captain Phillips & Dallas Buyer's Club; Screenplay nominees: Blue Jasmine & Before Midnight; Animated Features, Visual Effects and Craft nominees are often available before the other shortlists since they're less reliant on Christmas releases to win gold. So you can already get: The Great Gatsby, All is Lost, Star Trek Into Darkness,  Iron Man 3, Despicable Me 2, The Lone Ranger, The Croods; Plus: the grim thriller Prisoners, about child abduction nominated for Best Cinematography, and Denmark's Foreign Film nominee The Hunt starring Mads Mikkelsen as a man accused, and thus presumed guilty, of child abuse which is suddenly and uncomfortably extra topical. 

Coming in March

March 4th
Best Picture nominees 12 Years a Slave &  Philomena plus costume & cinematography eye candy kung fu in Wong Kar Wai's The Grandmaster 

March 11th
Two musically-focused nominees: Inside Llewyn Davis, nominated for Sound Mixing, and The Broken Circle Breakdown Belgium's Best Foreign Language Film nominee is a cancer drama but it's also one of the best performance musicals of recent years; moving bluegrass family drama. I don't plan on buying either movie but my god the music. Gimme the soundtracks!

March 18th
Best Picture nominee American Hustle plus two Best Original Song features Mandela and Frozen. I find the Disney behemoth's home video date surprising. It's still in the box office top five. You can make money on home video forever but theatricla revenue comes just once (until the next technological breakthrough for which you can retrofit it and rerelease) so why cut off that money? 

All the Best Pictures will be on blue ray by March 25th (except Her)

March 25th
A cushion-your-ass double feature. Got a free five & half hours? Best Picture The Wolf of Wall Street (180 minutes) and Best Foreign Film The Great Beauty (142 minutes) arrive on the same day. 

April 7th
That's the day you get the three fire breathers: Smaug from The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and Violet and Barbara Weston (Meryl & Julia) in August: Osage County.

CHECK OUT THE OSCAR CHARTS 
And make sure to vote for your favorite Picture, Actor, Supporting Actor and the like.

9 Days Til Oscar. Should 9 Times Nominated "12 Years" Worry?

Steve McQueen's 12 Years a Slave, once the Oscar frontrunner and perhaps still, has nine nominations. As we move into the final days of voting (ballots are due on Tuesday the 25th), how many of its categories can it win? I'm thinking about 12 Years again today due to Harvey Weinstein's awful potshot at it over at Deadline where he suggested that Quentin Tarantino's Django Unchained was better at covering slavery.

I liked 12 Years A Slave, but Quentin covered a lot of that ground first, and dealt with violence, slavery and oppression, shining a light on the American holocaust, as he called it.

Oy!

I'll flesh out some of the following thoughts in the "final predictions" article a week from now but until then, let's discuss it's upcoming Oscar battles... 

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Interlinker

The New Republic Mark Harris interviewed on the politics of movies and Oscar races
Guardian Meryl Streep joins the period drama Suffragette as feminist icon Emmeline Pankhurst. The film stars Carey Mulligan with Helena Bonham-Carter and Romola Garai in the supporting cast (but it sounds like Streep's got a glorified cameo)
Dissolve a graphic designer looks at Her 

Gurus of Gold if you haven't checked out the charts lately, you should. David Poland has posted "if we could sway the Academy and there's not much time left to do so. 
Daily Beast Michael Musto talks to an Oscar voter about how friendliness at luncheons affects his vote and how scandals don't  
MNPP on the bad wigs in Bryan Singer movies. Ugh. Quicksilver, one of my favorite characters, looks just atrocious
Twitter an account sharing Top Gun scene by scene... almost frame by frame. LOL
TFE have you voted on our recent polls? Bette Midler? Beauty vs. Beast: Hustle? Who you want to win the pic & acting Oscars?
Josh Cooley a Pixar artist does really fun cartoons of R rated movies, like this one from Psycho...

Moving Picture Blog classy low-key Oscar campaigning from Jeremy Irons circa 1991. An SNL classic
First Showing talks to Matthew McConaughey about the ambitions of Interstellar 
Slate great piece on that makeover moment at the tale end of Frozen's "Let it Go" -- that's the only part I don't like myself and this is exactly why!

Exit Vids
The Onion nails it again while talking Netflix. This is exactly what I use Netflix for though I pay a lot more than $5 a month! Also the "Kid Oscars"... I think the Captain Phillips one is best because methinks it's funnier when kids adlib rather than read dialogue.

12 Days Til Oscar: Best Picture Nominations by the Dozen

Tim here, with your daily dose of Oscar numerology. We’re now in the third year of the Academy’s undoubtedly well-intentioned "some random number that always turns out to be nine" approach to selecting Best Picture nominees, and for some of us, this is irritatingly arbitrary. But it could be so much worse. Think of how awful it must have been to been a rabid Oscar fanatic in the first decade of the award’s existence: depending on the year, there were anywhere from three to twelve Best Picture nominees, until it was finally nailed down at a nice, round ten at the 9th Academy Awards, for the year 1936.

The magic number of the day being 12, I'd like you to join me, for a closer look at 1934, the first of two years with 12 nominated films (for space reasons, I am alas compelled to leave 1935 to fend for itself) - the first year, as well, that the awards corresponded to a single calendar year. What can we learn about the Academy’s tastes and habits down the decades from each of these?

BEST PICTURE – It Happened One Night (released by Columbia)
What It Is: One of the greatest of all screwball comedies, in which the sexily odd-looking pair of Claudette Colbert and Clark Gable cross country and banter.
The Slot It Fills: The long-abandoned "comedies are a valid form of artistic expression like anything else" spot. But, of course, the period in which the film came out was unusually good at producing top-notch comedies starring the best movie stars of the day.

Only 11 more slots to fill after the jump

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