Why *None* of the Nominees Can Win Best Picture This Year

by Abe Fried-Tanzer

For those of us who live within the world of Oscar history and statistics, every year brings with it the proclamation that certain benchmarks need to be achieved in order to merit a Best Picture win. In just the past decade, multiple insurmountable obstacles have been bypassed, with Argo triumphing without a Best Director nomination, Birdman winning without a film editing mention, and The Shape of Water managing a win even after it didn’t make the SAG list for its ensemble. All eight films nominated this year have a variable number of impediments standing in their way this year – here’s a breakdown of the top limitations for each nominee.

BlacKkKlansman
This incredible tale of a black cop who infiltrated the KKK has actually checked most of the boxes. It has nominations for directing, writing, and editing, and earned bids from all the relevant guilds. The problem is that it hasn’t won anything, suggesting that it doesn’t have the momentum it needs to garner first-place votes. If anything, it will be Lee who upsets to win the Best Director prize or the film’s screenplay that takes home an award. Being everyone’s third choice won’t help it win the top prize.

Black Panther
As if being the first comic book movie to contend in this race wasn’t enough, the seven-nomination haul for this Marvel blockbuster is actually pretty disappointing...

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Open Letter to the Academy -xo

For Valentine's Day we would just like to smooch every prominent artist in Hollywood who signed this letter, quoted here in full:

An Open Letter to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences and The Producers of the 91st Annual Academy Awards Broadcast:

On Monday, February 11, 2019, John Bailey, President of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, announced that this year’s Oscar presentations for Best Cinematography — along with Film Editing, Live Action Short and Makeup and Hairstyling — will not be broadcast live, but rather presented during a commercial break. This decision was made to reduce the length of the show from four hours to three. The vocal response from our peers and the immediate backlash from industry leaders over the Academy’s decision makes it clear that it’s not too late to have this decision reversed...

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10 Days til Oscar... The Past 10 Years of Stats

Happy Valentine's Day y'all ❤️. It's officially 10 days until the Oscars so it's a perfect time to go list crazy and look at the past 10 years of Oscar honors (2008-2017) for multiple top tens, don't you think? Not that we need excuses to go list-crazy. We make them up when they don't present themselves!  How have the past ten years been for you? We hope you'll share in the listing fun. In addition to ranking the Oscar winners we've notated whether the same achievements medalled in our own annual film bitch awards that year.

PAST TEN BEST PICTURE WINNERS RANKED 

1. Moonlight (2017) *silver medal
2. The Hurt Locker (2009) *gold medal
3. Birdman (2014) *silver medal...

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11 days til Oscar - Is Bette Davis a 10 or an 11?

The closeup changes everything. In 1934, Bette Davis became a STAR.

A very random question for you Oscar fanatics out there. Do you count Bette Davis as having 10 or 11 nominations? In other words, do you count her write-in nomination for Of Human Bondage (1934), her breakout star-making role which obviously led to her first win for the lesser performance in Dangerous (1935) the very next year, as one of her nods or do you go by the Academy's 'Of Human Bondage is not an official nomination' stance even though it's such an intrinsic part of Oscar lore of the 1930s?

#PresentAll24

This just in. The Academy has announced their plans for which awards aren't going to be shown live this year and it's not actually as bad as we thought it would be in that it is not as MANY as we though it would be. They're leaving four off the air: cinematography, editing, makeup, and live action short. Not being as bad as we thought, though, is NOT to say that it is any less horrific. The decision remains as tone deaf in its disrespectful, self-destructive, and against-the-point way as it always was. It's easily in the top two or three most terrible decisions that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences has made in its entire 91 years.

Once you start demoting categories to "less important" you're sending a message to the world that the craft of filmmaking doesn't really matter; just look at the gowns and sit through the commercials which make us money...

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