12 Days Till Oscar. What Happened to the Juvenile Oscars?

Remember when... Okay, scratch the "remember when?" question this time. Unless there are some really really ancient AMPAS members reading. The Oscars weren't televised yet so nobody could remember this one unless they were there.

What was Judy Garland so happy about at the 1939 Oscars? (circa February 1940)

I mean besides sitting with 'The First Lady of MGM' Norma Shearer which would obviously make anyone euphoric.

Judy G was having a good night because The Wizard of Oz was up for six Oscars including Best Picture. It won two music prizes (Best Score and Best Original Song to the very nearly cut "Over the Rainbow"). Judy also won a special juvenile Oscar, presented to her by her frequent co-star Mickey Rooney who had won the year before.

One wonders why they don't still award those. They weren't annual so it took a special performances for the Academy to go there. They only did so 11 times in their first 33 years ending with Hayley Mills for Polyanna (1960)

I can think of several people through the years who would have been relieved if they passed those out instead of letting the kids compete with the grownups. Every time a child is nominated an adult gets bumped out of the shortlist. I mean would Winona Ryder be an Oscar winner today if Anna Paquin had been given a miniature Oscar instead? Would Madeline Kahn have been an Oscar winner for Paper Moon (1973) if Tatum O'Neal hadn't committed category fraud and won doing so for the same film?

Do you think child acting should be judged separately?

If they were still handing them out do you think Thomas Horn would've been the recipient this year since they obviously liked Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close more than critics did?

Perhaps I should have a child acting category at the Film Bitch Awards. I never know who to nominate at the BFCA "Critics Choice" award in their "young actor" category because I always forget to think about child performances.

Curio: Oscar Unsheets, Part III

Alexa here.  With less than two weeks till the Oscars I'm spotting more and more fabulous unsheets (or fan poster art) inspired by the nominated films. (See last week's post for some criminally overlooked films). This week I'm moving on to the Best Picture nominees.  Interestingly, The Help seems to be one of the nominees most posterized this year; is it the lure of illustrating pie? 

The Help by Hector Pahaut.Here are some of the best celebrations of the Mississippi Maids, along with some key-themed designs for Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, mathematical minimilism for Moneyball, and evocative staircase imagery for The Descendants. Click for more.

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Burning Questions: What Explains the Extremely Loud Nomination?

Michael C. here to take a shot at one of the curious questions that came out of the Oscar nominations. 

A little over a year ago I published a post in which I tried to determine just how bad could a film be and still make the big category. In an attempt to squeeze popular opinion into chart form I subjected the last decade of nominees to an extremely unscientific examination wherein I averaged their Metacritic rating with their Rotten Tomatoes rating to come up with a rough measurement of a film’s critical reception. You can read the full post here but one of the main conclusions I reached was that the Best Picture minimum was set right about the 60% mark. This was the average Blind Side and The Reader, the two worst reviewed nominees, had received. It was a result that jibed pretty well with intuition. It’s tough to think of a nominee that received a resoundingly negative reception. 

But this then begs the question: How exactly did Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close manage a Best Picture nomination? I know critics don't get a vote but rarely, if ever, has the gap between the two been this glaring.

more after the jump

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"No Relation" ...an Oscar Name Game

Last year 'round about this time our movie buddy Kurt was having fun with mash-ups of Oscar nominees. He sent us a few this year for posting (Thanks Kurt!) and, as he puts it..

These unlikely pairs of hopefuls may seem like they were separated at birth, but there's no relation aside from their mutual hunger for Oscar gold."

So here we go...

 

EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY GLENN CLOSE

 

MICHEL / MICHELLE

CLOONEY / ROONEY

Ha! Well Lisbeth definitely could use some sun. Though I can't imagine Hawaii would suit her exactly. Though she probably wouldn't flinch at berating defenseless coma patients or investigating ex-lover real estate agents.

Kurt had two more ideas that I visualized to wrap up (after the jump)...

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How We Did On Our Predictions! How About You?

I am not one to put too much stock in "scores" for Oscar Predictions. It's more exciting to predict something fewer people saw coming and this is why, I think I'm much better at "year in advance" predictions than most pundits; I don't always embrace the "sounds good on paper" options. But there's a flip side! My willingness to take risks always hurts my stats somewhere down the line. Nevertheless we have to take stock. It's fun to survey where you soared and plummeted each year. On average I'm completely happy with my track record. Here are my hits and misses!

I had a sensational batting average with Moneyball

My Perfect Scores
Supporting Actress. I knew Janet McTeer was stronger than people were guessing. She's a gender bender and Oscar loves drag. She totally steals the movie and Oscar loves Grand Theft Movie. Plus, it's a moving role with modern resonance.
Best Director. I figured Terrence Malick was too much of a god among directors for his peers to pass up.
Cinematography. Though I'll readily admit that this didn't feel too terribly tough to predict.
Moneyball and The Artist and Hugo and A Separation. I guessed their every placement correctly...which seemed risky with two of them.

Incorrect Guess That I Was Still Kinda Right About
I knew that if Rooney Mara prevailed it'd be Tilda taking the dive. Tilda Swinton joins Sally Hawkins from Happy Go Lucky in the exclusive sorority of  "People With More Precursor Notices Than One Could Possibly Dream of But No Oscar Follow Up" ...It's a very long name for a very tiny club.

Abject Failure
Wow did I ever miss on Original Song this year. Even with five guesses I couldn't manage 1 correct one. But then, this category is the worst. The documentary branch and the foreign film branch get the most push back each year on needing guidance and rule adjustments but it's actually the music branch that's in dire need of infrastructure work. More on that in the podcast (coming in a couple of hours. It's uploading). I also made a mess of the Documentary Feature category where I only guessed 2 correctly (Pina and Paradise Lost 3).

The Single Thing I Feel Stupidest About Missing
John Williams double nomination for score. I only guessed War Horse. I predicted him to get his umpteenth double nomination for practically the whole year until the precursors and other pundits convinced me to jump on the Dragon Tattoo train which I never felt right about (in that particular category) since Reznor & Ross's Oscar success with The Social Network felt like such a wonderful anomaly. Wonderful anomalies rarely repeat themselves.

The Long Shot I Most Wish I'd Predicted for Bragging Rights
Max von Sydow in Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. In retrospect it'll feel kind of obvious to people especially since Supporting Actor felt unstable beyond Plummer. And here we have a legendary actor in a mute role (when does Oscar not go for that?) 

Something I Both Overestimated and Underestimated.
The Power of The Weepie. I put all my eggs in The Help's basket but War Horse and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close both ate into the demographic that Mark Harris amusingly dubbed "tear duct based voters" 

My Stats
37/44 in the big eight categories 
74/104 in the categories everyone tries to predict... the sound-based categories just destroyed me! 
83/119 if you include the shorts which many people don't bother with. 

How'd you do? 

*purists (you know who you are!) may quibble that I predicted only 6 Best Picture nominees. But hello the number is a separate guess from the titles ;)  I listed them in order of likelihood "if 6 nominees then... if 7 nominees then... if 8 nominees then... " etcetera which means I scored 8/9 for the Best Picture nominations. Ta da! If you don't count it that way it penalizes the people who guess fewer and awards the scaredy-cats who guess ten spots to cover all their bases.