Movies I learned existed from the Golden Globe nominations

I'm never going to get that watchlist down am I.

As it does seemingly every year, the release of this year's Golden Globe nominations put several films I had no idea about on my radar. Did I have no idea about them because my head was in the sand or because the Hollywood Foreign Press has bizarre and indefensible taste in movies? Probably a little from column A and a little from column B.

But, since I'm now adding them to my watchlist, I thought I might as well tell you about them.

1) Empire of Light
Nomination: Best actress in a drama (Olivia Colman)

The fact that I didn't know about a new Sam Mendes movie points a bit more to the head in the sand explanation above, but the fact is, I had not heard about this at all until yesterday, when I finally checked the nominee list while waiting for Avatar to start. (More on Avatar tomorrow probably.) As tends to happen, I then the next day immediately heard two people discuss it on a podcast, with pretty lukewarm feelings about it. So maybe it's not a must-see.

2) Living
Nomination: Best actor in a drama (Bill Nighy)

So the writers on this are novelist Kazuo Ishigiru (Remains of the Day) and Akira Kurosawa. How is that possible, Vance? Isn't he dead? It appears to be an adaptation of Kurosawa's Ikiru. I can't remember if that's one of the ones I've seen or not. (Quick check: no.) Not to generalize too much here, but it's usually the female acting nominations that come from movies I've never heard of, if we are following the regrettable Oscars pattern. 

3) The Inspection
Nomination: Best actor in a drama (Jeremy Pope)

Okay now it's not only the movie I've never heard of, it's the actor. That could be because this is only his sixth credit. This reminds me that I still haven't caught One Night in Miami, in which he played Jackie Wilson.

4) Inu-Oh
Nomination: Best animated feature

IMDB logline: "A cursed dancer and a musician stun society with electrifying concerts in this animated rock opera." After reading that, I remember that I did indeed hear this mentioned on one of my podcasts at the very beginning of the year, but I mustn't have remembered to add it to my watchlist and it got lost in the torrent of titles that has come along since.

The best foreign language film category includes three films I've never heard of, but that's par for the course.

If you are keeping track at home, my watchlist is up to 103 movies now. I just ... can't ... get down to double digits.

Tom Cruise is doing things I like

It doesn't feel like that long ago that we all wanted to write off Tom Cruise for his couch jumping and his Scientology and his other personality deficits that made him a creepy weirdo.

Since then, his PR team has been working subtly, quietly, to restore his good name as a fine and upstanding celebrity.

First they re-introduced Cruise's cool factor, reminding us that he does all his own stunts, and reminding us exactly how ridiculous those stunts are in a succession of Mission: Impossible movies. Impossible mission indeed. "Did you hear Tom Cruise held his breath underwater for 13 minutes for the latest Mission: Impossible?" I believe it.

But lately, improbably, Cruise has impressed for something that I never considered much of his makeup as a public figure: his conscience. 

First there was the tirade that was captured on audio against his crew for Mission: Impossible 9, or whatever number we're up to, who were shirking their COVID responsibilities and endangering the production. It was like Christian Bale but for altruistic reasons. 

And yeah, if you want to be cynical, you'd say he didn't care about the health of the people involved, only about the health of the production and how it contributed to his bottom line or his star wattage. (Because he can't make these movies forever, even if the evidence suggests that he might.) But I didn't hear a lot of people saying that. I heard a lot of people saying "Good for him."

But I don't think you can be cynical about the news this week, where Cruise put the physical symbols of his accomplishments as a Real Actor on the line for something he believed in. Unless you just want to be cynical about everything any celebrity does, which I think is a fruitless and unfair exercise. 

That's right, if you haven't read about it yet, Cruise returned the three Golden Globes he's won as a means of protesting the lack of diversity in the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

That's not nothing. Not for Cruise. We may turn our nose up at the Globes for being so much less prestigious than the Oscars, but for a guy who is probably never going to win an Oscar, this may be as good as it gets.

And he threw it back in their faces.

Celebrities often don't have to put their money where their mouth is, but Tom Cruise just did. 

He's probably still a creepy weirdo, but he makes damn entertaining movies, and we now know -- almost for sure -- he really cares about people other than himself. 

That's good enough for me.

A fine line between best and worst

As the interminable wait continues for the Oscar nominations to finally be revealed -- just two more days now -- the penultimate 2020 movie "awards" announcement has gotten the internet's attention the past few days.

The Golden Raspberries delayed their own announcement of 2020 dishonors to coincide with that of the Oscars, as they always do, and one of the nominees has reminded me of my own problematic position on a 2020 movie. 

It's actually a 2021 movie for all intents and purposes, but those are the times we live in.

And it's actually a movie that has already gotten a different kind of "golden" nomination -- a Golden Globe.

When I went to see Sia's feature directorial debut, Music, back at the end of January, the ticket seller did something I thought was sort of unusual for someone in her position: she badmouthed the movie. She hadn't actually seen it, but thought it was possible to badmouth it on reputation alone. "Good luck with that," she told me. "I understand it's pretty rough."

In Australia, this use of the word "rough" -- assuming my memory is correct and this is actually what she said -- would colloquially be understood as "bad," not "emotionally challenging" as an American might interpret it. You know, like "rough sledding."

When I came out of the movie, though, I thought she'd misheard. I understand why she gave me the warning, but I thought Sia largely pulled it off. I was conscious that I might be going against the grain of the popular perspective on the movie, but I gave it a 7/10 on ReelGood when I reviewed it. I don't let ticket sellers who haven't actually seen the movie bias my reviews, whenever possible.

My limited affection for Music seemed to be justified when, lo and behold, Sia's film turned up among the Golden Globe nominations just a week later. Not just one nomination, for the film itself as best musical or comedy, but a nomination for Kate Hudson as best actress in a musical or comedy. At the time, its inclusion surprised me more on the basis of its release year, as I thought this was a genuine 2021 release (and in most years would be), than on the basis of its quality. Though I was also surprised to see this apparently shit movie, according to the hearsay propagated by theater ticket sellers, embraced as decidedly not shit.

Music didn't win any globes, which I think would have been the biggest surprise of all. And probably would have started to fade into our collective memories if not for the Razzie announcement.

Music didn't just slide in there with one nomination, but it was almost leading the pack. It was nominated for worst picture, worst actress (also Hudson), worst supporting actress and worst director. In fact, if not for Dolittle and the Netflix movie 365 (gotta watch that now), which led with six, Music probably would have gotten a lot more headlines than it did.

Perhaps that ticket seller had her finger on something after all.

The Big Problem with Music, of course, is that it does that thing that is an absolute cinematic no-no: It casts a normally abled actress as a person with intellectual disabilities. It "goes full retard," to use the intentionally offensive parlance of Tropic Thunder.

This actress, Maddie Ziegler, is a veteran of a number of Sia videos. She was cast for her abilities in the dance numbers that populate this film and dramatize the title character's inner life. Turns out, she's also an actress of some ability. I don't suppose I found her portrayal 100% free of the reasons we are legitimately worried about normally abled actors essaying these roles, but it could have been a lot worse. And I thought the character was ultimately sweet. If you decide you are forced to do this for logistical reasons, like the actress needing to perform complicated dance choreography for the role, Ziegler walks that tightrope about as well as you might hope. (That's not to say a person with autism couldn't also be an amazing dancer, but I suspect it's considerably less likely.)

Of course, as it turns out, most critics stopped at "normally abled actress as a person with intellectual disabilities."

When I saw how the Razzies had rained scorn on Music, I had to do something I hadn't yet done for this film: check out its Metacritic score. With this new information that contradicted the praise of the Golden Globes, I guessed it was worse than I thought it might be. I guessed 37. It was worse than that: 23.

Ouch.

Of course, at that moment I started to panic about my own review. Had I gotten this really, really wrong?

The 18 Metacritic reviews are divided between mixed (six) and negative (12), without a single positive review in there. The highest individual score listed was 60, which I suppose is only ten points lower than my own converted score of 70 would have been. But still, giving the movie a better review than the 18 other critics on Metacritic gave me a wave of nausea that reminded me of other extreme outlier positions I've held in the past, like my affection for the universally loathed The Emoji Movie. (Fortunately, I had the good sense not to review that one, a consequence of seeing it a good two months after it actually came out.)

But then I noticed something interesting: the user score. That score exactly equalled my own 7.0 rating of the film (Metacritic includes the decimal point in this calculation), based on a lot more than 18 opinions. 

That's right, among users of Metacritic, Music has a staggering 113 positive reviews, 48 negative reviews, and somehow only four mixed reviews. I guess you either love it or you hate it. 

With these new data points, I started to feel a bit better about my own positive review. I mean, if you're a critic, you're likely to turn your nose up at what the rabble thinks of any movie. But if you go back to the guiding principles of why you started reviewing movies, one of those was to make useful recommendations to average moviegoers. My review of Music would have steered at least 113 people in the right direction. 

This is the latest strong bit of evidence about a disconnect between critics and the people they write for. There may be a lot more film snobs going into film criticism than ever before, as the cheery working professionals who championed popular entertainments are steadily retiring. I don't know why that would be -- the industry should have been peopled with snobs from the start -- but the obvious gulf between critics and audiences on Music has to mean something, and this may be it.

It seems to be an example of the way our core assumptions fail us sometimes. A core assumption is that a movie where an actress goes "full retard" is going to be patently offensive no matter what. It isn't going to matter if there are subtleties in her performance, moments where she held back and opted for a less showy way of demonstrating the traits of the character's affliction. But a movie about a person with autism can't be all moments like that; she has fits and moments of extreme agitation, and for those critics who judged Maddie Ziegler harshly, the moment the script called for one of those moments, they started writing the review in their head.

Let's be honest, they started writing the review even before they watched the movie. It helps that Sia is an easy target. She's got a unique combination of traits that make her easy to pick on. For one, she offends critics by suggesting that anyone can direct a feature film, even a musician who theoretically excels in a different type of artistic expression altogether. (Though Sia has been directing her own videos for some time.) Then she's got that eccentric public personality that includes airy fairy statements and wigs that cover her eyes entirely. This is a person they can pile on without getting a guilty conscience. 

The critics are right that Music should not have worked. But the truth is, it does. And you have to review the movie you're seeing, not the movie you assume it will be.

Of course, the community of critics is no monolithic entity who do any one thing for the same set of reasons. I have to assume there are plenty of critics who did give Music a chance, but it still didn't work for them, possibly as much for their antipathy to Sia's colorful dance numbers featuring silly outfits (I said she had a "Teletubby aesthetic" in my review) as for Ziegler's casting or performance. And in fact, I noticed the critic who has the highest listed review of Music on Metacritic -- Tara Brady of The Irish Times -- states in the part of her review they excerpted, "Ziegler's performance is the best thing about Music." I'm not sure I agree, as I did sort of go for the dance numbers and for Hudson's performance, but I'm glad she had the courage to say what she did.

But back to the Golden Globes and the Golden Raspberries. One thing that's for sure is that the Globes' endorsement of Music, even if having some validity according to me, is a bad look for them in a year in which the Hollywood Foreign Press has gotten some of its worse PR ever. That body has come under fire this year, quite rightfully, for having almost no racial diversity, and I'm sure its decision to honor Music only contributes to that sense of its fatal tone deafness. 

In truth, even though I like it, Music would never have made my own nominee shortlist. It's one thing to say a movie succeeds on its own terms; it's quite another to say it is among the best of the year. And at least I can provide some separation between myself and the Hollywood Foreign Press on that one. 

In determining who votes on the Golden Raspberries, I noted Wikipedia describes the voting body as being comprised of "filmmakers and very opinionated film buffs from around the world," and that members hail from "all 50 states and every continent except Antarctica." (That's good; I'm glad that neither climate scientists nor penguins are taking time from their busy schedules to trash the worst movies of the year.)

I wonder if the Razzie voting for Music was a direct sign of outrage at the Golden Globes, and that maybe if the movie hadn't already been singled out by that body, it would have just slipped under everyone's radar as a problematic movie that wasn't as problematic as it seemed like it should have been. Instead, now it will live in infamy as a movie straddling the line between a dubious best and a dubious worst of 2020. 

And all this for a movie that didn't even come out that year. 

What the hell to do with these Golden Globe nominations

I just saw the Golden Globe nominations, and I have thoughts.

Given the rules changes to extend the eligibility period, I kind of feel like I'm awakening after a year in a coma when I look at the list of films that have been honored. Half of them haven't come out yet, and in some cases I have only just heard of them for the first time in the past few days. 

I guess that's not completely abnormal. Since these nominations usually come out at the start of December, there are usually some big holiday releases in that list that I'm only just becoming aware of. I remember the year Selma received a number of nominations, the Golden Globes were the first time I'd ever heard of the movie.

But not half the nominees. That's a bridge too far.

I had certainly heard of some of the following titles, but not all. I'll list them in order of their number of nominations, the most first:

The Father - 3 nominations - best picture (drama), best actor (drama), best supporting actress. I've known about this Anthony Hopkins vehicle for a while now and knew it would be the poster boy for films that are taking advantage of the extended eligibility deadline. So this is not a huge surprise, though nominations for any category other than the obvious one for Hopkins may be a bit of a surprise. U.S. release date: February 26th.

The Mauritanian - 2 nominations - best actor (drama), best supporting actress. I only just heard about this yesterday during Filmspotting's 2021 preview podcast. Note that says "2021 preview," not "2020 review." U.S. release date: February 12th. 

Music - 2 nominations - best picture (musical or comedy), best actress (musical or comedy). This gives me quite a different perspective on what I had been thinking of as a consummate 2021 "January release" (I saw it in January here in Australia anyway), which had actually been billed to me as a turd and likely to offend people, even though I liked it. I guess being a turd, had it been one, does not alone disqualify it from getting nominated for a Golden Globe. U.S. release date: February 12th.

The United States vs. Billie Holliday - 2 nominations - best actress (musical or comedy), best original song. I only knew about this because I saw the poster on the front page of IMDB once. U.S. release date: February 26th.

Pieces of a Woman - 1 nomination - best actress (drama). I had to look this up. I had never even heard of it. But I do like Vanessa Kirby. The fact that I'd never heard of it is even stranger given the U.S. release date: January 7th.

French Exit - 1 nomination - best actress (musical or comedy). Never heard of this either. Michelle Pfeiffer is in it. In fact, she got the nomination. U.S. release date: February 12th.

Judas and the Black Messiah - 1 nomination - best supporting actor. This I had known about but I thought it was coming out later in the year, a genuine 2021 release. Nope. U.S. release date: February 12th.

I Care A Lot - 1 nomination - best actress (musical or comedy). Again, I had heard of it but I thought it was coming out mid-year or something. It's nice to see that at least one movie will be released on U.S. release date: February 19th.

The Little Things - 1 nomination - best supporting actor. Now this might be the strangest one. People have been chattering about this one the past few days on social media, but almost all the chatter says it's like a 1990s serial killer movie, which is not exactly the makings for traditional awards bait. And the chatter has been largely negative. U.S. release date: January 29th.

February 12th is going to be a busy day at the (mostly closed) American multiplexes.

Oh and then there's Promising Young Woman, which was on my 2020 list but was not available to U.S. audiences until recently (January 15th). It's pretty much leading the pack with four nominations. 

Interestingly, Minari -- which, like The Father, was a "February frontrunner" -- got basically shut out, earning only a nomination for best foreign language film. 

Oh, and there's another goofy thing, which is that Lin-Manuel Miranda got nominated for Hamilton even though I really don't think that's a proper "movie." And even if so, he gave the performance all the way back in 2016.

(Plus, as a continuaton of my axe to grind, so to speak, about Small Axe, I noted that it was honored in TV categories, not movie categories.) 

The confusion over all this is highlighted on IMDB, where most of these movies have a release year of 2021, while only a few are listed as 2020 films. You can't really call a movie that was not released anywhere in 2020 a 2020 movie, can you? But I guess you can still qualify it for a 2020 award.

You could ask me, what did I expect a list of awards nominations to look like in these weird COVID times? I guess my answer is, "I don't know, but not this."

What this list of nominees does do, however, is kind of reframe my idea of what I will allow entry into my 2021 rankings and what I will consider to be 2020 releases that I missed. I was all set to exclude the movies that made a big splash at the Golden Globes and Oscars, as the sniff test would suggest these movies are from a year that's done and dusted, and there's not a good reason for me to be talking about how much I loved them in January of 2022.

But now that so many nominally 2021 titles have actually been considered, at least by the Hollywood foreign press, I have to reconsider that stance. And movies I thought for sure would be movies I missed in 2020, like Minari and One Night in Miami, may now elbow their way into the 2021 conversation.  

I guess the expansive rules are the way to go. I tried to rent Minari and One Night in Miami when I was closing down my 2020 list, but obviously, neither of them were available. One Night did become available on Amazon shortly after my list closed, and I'll probably watch it pretty soon. So they've got a solid argument to be made as 2021 films. And it sounds like I might be justified in getting over all my arcane rules and asterisks, sucking it up and counting them that way. 

So what if my list is out of sync with an awards show ten months in the past? I say that now. Let's see how I feel in December. 

Chaos, I tell you! I just wish two different movie years didn't have to get fucked up by COVID, but especially now that a bunch more potential spring releases have been delayed another six months, 2021 well and truly has been. Here's hoping 2022 can bring back some semblance of the normal, at long last. 

Questions/takeaways from the Golden Globe nominations

As I expected, a pretty weird list, if only because four of the ten movies nominated for either best
drama or best musical/comedy originated on Netflix. (With a theatrical run to qualify them for these awards, of course.)

The cinematic landscape is shifting under our feet, people.

Questions/observations:

1) Who in their right mind considers The Farewell a comedy? (Awkwafina got nominated for best actress in a musical or comedy.)

2) Who in their right mind considers Once Upon a Time in Hollywood a comedy? It’s got funny parts, but it ends in a bloodbath. (Though I guess that bloodbath is supposed to be funny.)

3) I haven’t seen it, but how is Fred Rogers a supporting character in his own movie? (Tom Hanks was nominated for best supporting actor in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.)

4)  J. Lo is a supporting actress in Hustlers. While Constance Wu’s character is undoubtedly the protagonist, you could make the argument that J. Lo is a co-protagonist, if only because we also see her at work trying to get time off from her boss, etc. In other words, we don’t only see her through Wu’s character’s eyes. But maybe she has a better chance of winning in this category.

5) The assigning of Daniel Craig and Ana de Armas as lead actors for Knives Out makes the assigning of J. Lo as a supporting actress for Hustlers even stranger. Plus, although Craig may be my favorite part of a movie I didn’t like as much as most people, I wouldn’t necessarily call it “good acting.”

Takeaways:

1)  Joker is considered best picture material. I can’t grasp this. I know there are people who liked it, but I’m not entirely sure if I trust them. Then again, one of my foundational movie critics as a twentysomething was Owen Gleiberman, then of Entertainment Weekly and now of Variety, and he named it as his #1 movie of the year.

2) Bombshell may be more than just this year’s year-end release about a recent historical event. There’s at least one every year. (Other recent examples: I, Tonya and The Front Runner.)

3)  I only heard about The Two Popes for the first time like five days ago. It’s all over these nominations. And since it’ll be on Netflix starting December 20^th, I’ll be able to rank it this year.

4)  I know it got nominations for best director, best screenplay and best foreign language film, but Parasite’s absence from the best drama list is a major failure to recognize the most critically acclaimed film of the year. Actually, best comedy could also have been an appropriate category. I wonder if Oscar will follow suit. 

5) It was not a great year for animation if the top contender for best animated feature is Toy Story 4.

Were some of these questions/observations actually takeaways, and were some of these takeaways actually questions/observations?

In a topsy-turvy year, anything’s possible.

... and eat it too

Absorbing the Golden Globe nominations this morning, I noted a number of surprises (I've barely even heard of the movie Selma, which got three nominations, including best director), but the biggest was that Jennifer Aniston was getting a nomination for the movie Cake.

It's not that she's bad in Cake -- how would I know, as it won't be available even to most American audiences until late January. That means we won't get it here in Australia until April.

Rather, it's that Cake had its origins in a screenwriting organization where my wife used to work -- and she was there at the time it came through. So I'm feeling a little rush of pride for her right now. (Pride also being a movie represented among the 2014 Golden Globe nominations.)

The surprising thing is not that Aniston got a nomination, because one of the ways my wife mentioned Cake to me was in the context of learning it had garnered the actress some Oscar buzz. It's that at the time, I thought this movie was still off in the distance somewhere, and that the aforementioned buzz was speculative Oscar buzz for 2015. I didn't realize that Cake was descending so soon and was actually making Aniston a contender for this year's Oscars, since this was October or thereabouts and I hadn't heard of the movie other than from my wife.

But I happened to just watch the trailer last night, and indeed it does seem like an Oscar-buzzy type of performance, one where she fully eschews her former tightly controlled vanity. And as this year is not considered an astonishing year for women -- I suppose Reese Witherspoon and Julianne Moore are her primary competition, Moore for two different roles -- it's conceivable that Aniston could actually win.

I'm finding a little bit of personal validation in this nomination as well, as it's proving me to be a bit of a prognosticator.

When Sandra Bullock won her Oscar for The Blind Side back in 2009, I was suddenly possessed of the certainty that Jennifer Aniston had a post-prime Oscar win in her future as well. I don't know why I knew -- I don't even know why it occurred to me to link together these two events, one that might never happen with one that just had. Except that Aniston shared some things in common with Bullock. Both were America's sweetheart types who had legit acting chops, but both seemed mired in B-movie romantic comedy careers that threatened to consume them, and seemed to preclude any possibility of eventual award accolades. Simply put, they were both in ruts and had no clear way out.

But I knew as she got further into her 40s (she's closer now to 50, poor girl!), Jen would figure out how to leave behind the likes of The Bounty Hunter and Just Go With It and make something that gave her a shot at that little bald, golden man. And it looks like she's done it.

Funny -- Bullock was 45 (for a few more months) when she accepted her Oscar for The Blind Side, and Aniston will have just turned 46 if she accepts hers this March.

But now I'm getting waaaaay ahead of myself. I mean, I only just heard of Cake a few months ago, and now we're talking Oscars?

So today, I think I will just concentrate on being proud of my wife.

Slow down! You move too fast!

I take it all back!

Less than a week ago, I wrote a post called "Why I root for James Cameron" -- a post I very much regret, even if it was designed primarily as an opportunity to tell the story of my first screening of Titanic. Seeing Cameron on the Golden Globes last night -- not once, but twice -- reminded me why I shouldn't root for him, and in fact, in the space of a week, no longer do.

Two shocking Avatar-related things happened over the weekend, actually. I'll list them in order from least to most disturbing.

The first was that Avatar raked in another $41.3 million at the U.S. box office, making that five straight weekends in which it has crossed the $40 million threshold. It blew past Star Wars at the box office, now up to $492 million, and seems certain to eventually pass Titanic ($600 million) as the highest grossing film of all time. (Again, apologies for being U.S.-centric in my box office totals.)

This I can take. Accolades from the public come in famously strange forms. Witness the $146 million box office haul for Paul Blart: Mall Cop, one of the worst movies of 2009. Besides, that $492 million is, as we all know, inflated by IMAX and 3-D ticket prices. Inflation is an argument purists used to identify Gone With the Wind over Titanic as the true all-time box office champion, since it had the most individual tickets sold (rather amazing, given how many fewer theaters there were). The same logic holds true for Avatar.

No, the thing that really bothered me was the second thing that happened: Avatar won best dramatic feature at the Golden Globes. Which may just make it the frontrunner to win the Oscar for best picture.

This is a new piece of information I need to incorporate into my understanding of the phenomenon that is Avatar. Not only public acclaim, but critical acclaim.

I suppose I should put critical in quotation marks. The body that selects the Golden Globe winners, the Hollywood Foreign Press, is a famously lambasted entity. This same body gave a nomination to Bobby, Emilio Estevez' ridiculous ensemble drama about the assassination of Robert Kennedy, a couple years ago. This same body also gave best musical or comedy to The Hangover last night. I like The Hangover fine, but I don't feel like it's the kind of movie that should be winning best anything, do you? The fact that the Golden Globes have a category where it would actually be a logical contender shows you a little bit about the populist standards of the Hollywood Foreign Press.

But the Hollywood Foreign Press does show some predictive ability in terms of which movie wins the Oscar. From 1996 through 2003, the Golden Globes picked the eventual Oscar winner in one of the two available categories, honoring The English Patient, Titanic, American Beauty, Gladiator, A Beautiful Mind and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King as best drama, and Shakespeare in Love and Chicago as best musical/comedy. All of those films won Oscar's best picture.

It wasn't until 2004 that the streak was finally broken, when Million Dollar Baby lost out (rightly) to The Aviator before going on to win best picture. Since then -- and this is what gives me hope -- it's been kind of a mixed bag. In 2005, eventual Oscar winner Crash wasn't even nominated for a Golden Globe -- and hallelujah to that. In 2006, Babel beat out The Departed -- and though I strenuously disagree with that, it ended up being a happy surprise to see Scorsese's film take the Oscar statue it richly deserved. Then in 2007, I applauded the Golden Globes again when the superior Atonement beat out the overrated eventual Oscar winner No Country for Old Men -- though for true justice, There Will Be Blood should have beaten them both. Last year it was back to the status quo, with Slumdog Millionaire winning both top awards.

The strange thing is that I shouldn't be too disappointed to see Avatar rise to these heights. I did like it, I just didn't love it. And of the two films I considered to be the best picture frontrunners until last night -- Up in the Air and The Hurt Locker -- I like Up in the Air only marginally better than Avatar, and I like The Hurt Locker less. Yes, I like The Hurt Locker less than almost everyone I know, a topic to which I may devote an entire post later this week.

But I guess what happens every year around this time is that I realize some of my favorite films are not going to get any Oscar love, and films that left me feeling more "meh" than I wanted to -- like Avatar -- start gaining momentum. You won't trick me into talking about those films here. I've got two weeks and one day before I post my own year-end list.

Oh, and then there's the issue of Cameron himself. During his acceptance speeches last night -- he also won the best director award -- he reminded me what an ass he can be. In an attempt at magnanimity, he asked the people in the room to applaud themselves for having "the best job in the world." (The camera cut to Leonardo DiCaprio, who was sitting on his hands.) It was the perfect example of how being an asshole is a condition that oozes through a person. Cameron wasn't even trying to aggrandize himself here, or at least not directly. But he did think he'd "have the room" by telling a bunch of highly paid entertainers -- of which he himself is implicitly one -- to pat themselves on the back. (He also went for the most tired joke line in the book, talking about how they better not start the music to hurry him off because he has stuff to say. That might have been funny the first time someone made a reference to the show's internal time management protocols, somewhere around 1983.)

Cameron's attempt to whip up a furor of self-approbation didn't really work -- the applause was half-hearted at best. Here's hoping that the voters sitting in this room, who will cast their ballots for the Oscars in the coming weeks, will remember that icky moment of self-congratulation disguised as peer generosity, when they decide whether to make Cameron "king of the world" again this year.

And maybe somehow I'll get my best picture nomination for [name withheld] after all.

I don't like this one bit

I've only known about this for the past 90 minutes, and I'm still at work, and both of my bosses are around, so they could catch me blogging at any time.

But I'm going out of town tonight, I doubt I will post while I'm gone, and gosh darnit, I must register my shock and disillusionment with what I've just heard.

There are going to be ten (10) best picture nominees for next year's Oscars.

Ten. Twice what there has been for the last, oh, 70 years.

I don't like this one bit.

The Academy Awards have been all about re-examining themselves the past few years, hence, the cabaret-style Oscars we got this year with host Hugh Jackman. I liked those changes just fine.

But start messing with my categories, and you start messing with me. Especially best picture, which is the movie lover's holy grail of awards -- regardless of how rarely it honors the actual best film of the previous year.

I know they are trying to return to the roots of Oscar. The story I read -- surely anticipating an onslaught of blogosphere complaint, like the kind I'm making now -- went into an immediate defensive stance, explaining (actually, quoting Academy president Sid Ganis) that the Oscars of 70 years ago contained the following ten nominees: Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, Stagecoach, Wuthering Heights, Love Affair, Goodbye Mr. Chips, Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, Of Mice and Men, Dark Victory and Ninotchka. (Darn good year, 1939). Ganis' theory being, I suppose, that it would have been difficult to deny contention to any one of those august movies, let alone five of them.

Whether he's got a point or not -- and whether movies like The Dark Knight and Wall-E could have gotten nominations had this been introduced a year earlier -- misses my point in objecting to it.

Namely, we already have a system that nominates ten films for best picture. It's called the Golden Globes. And trying to be more like the Golden Globes is not something anyone should aspire to.

The Golden Globes spoil enough for us already. They rob the Oscars (by more than a month) of our excitement of discovering which films might be on the verge of enshrinement with the other greats that came before them. No, the Golden Globes (famously) do not always forecast Oscar's best picture winner, but I think I'm pretty safe in saying that no film has ever won best picture without first being nominated for a golden globe. (And if you find an exception, well, kindly inform me in my comments section, I don't mind).

Accepting the Golden Globes as an institution that's here to stay, the interest then becomes in determining how Oscar will deviate from the Golden Globes. After all, they've got to cut the Globes' ten (and sometimes more) choices in half.

Well, not anymore.

You could argue that half the Golden Globes' nominated pictures are musicals and comedies, and that this will leave Oscar the leeway to nominate five more dramas that would not ordinarily get recognized. But see, that's what Oscar intends to do, too: honor comedies, musicals and animated films, in part as proof that they're not stuffy, stodgy or out of touch.

So then what's the difference between the Globes and the Oscars?

It's just wrong. There's something magical about those five best picture nominees -- they've got a glow around them, and all the sudden, they demand to be seen by all serious film fans. (Those who haven't already seen them, that is). The writers, directors, producers and stars of those films can point to this as the ultimate form of validation, where being nominated truly is enough.

With an extra five nominees hanging around, however, it all just gets watered down. And feels like overload. I can just see the host at next year's Oscars: "Now, a two-minute clip from the first of our TEN nominees," and then collapsing to the floor over the enormity of it all.

Sure, there's a part of me that would have loved to see my favorite movie of last year, The Wrestler, crowned as one of Oscar's gold standards. And with another five slots open, it almost surely would have been.

Well, I want the movies I love to be good enough to make the top five. The six through ten spots ... then you're really getting into territory where reasonable people can say that those movies stink. It's hard enough to find five movies each year that are truly slam dunk nominations, let alone another five good enough to make the cut.

But this is Hollywood, and we should hardly be surprised at Hollywood demonstrating its love for itself. Implicitly, Hollywood is saying, "We are producing so much quality material these days, why would we want to deny ourselves the chance to bask in our own brilliance?" More nominees means more opportunity for self-love.

But mark my words now. Next year, on February 2nd, when those nominees come out for a March 7th telecast -- two weeks later than this year, and two weeks even less interesting as a result -- we're going to be running to our computers, getting on the internet, and cattily dismissing at least three or four of the nominations as unworthy. Yeah, we all liked The Hangover, but does that mean there should be a spot in the best picture nominees for it? Just because it may become the most profitable movie of the year?

Maybe they are trying to design the Oscars for the common man, to pat the common man on the back for liking The Hangover more than he likes Sense and Sensibility. Maybe it's all just a big ratings stunt.

But I like the idea that the Oscar nominations force the common man to see good movies, movies he might not realize he should want to see. The Oscars, at their very best, are intended to point us to the best cinema out there -- and since many of the nominees hit theaters in December, in most cases, you can actually still see them in the cinema.

If the Oscars just want to pat us on the back for liking The Hangover, how does that make them any different than the People's Choice Awards?

Not so Golden

While many of my film geek friends are gearing up for the Golden Globes -- or perhaps already watching -- I am sitting here writing this blog posting. I'll likely spend my evening catching up on network TV or possibly watching my third movie of the day.

Why no love for the Golden Globes? Well, countless others have said it better than I. Outside of a handful of members of the Hollywood Foreign Press, there isn't a person who actually likes these awards better than the Oscars. Even with how many totally legitimate complaints there are about the Oscars.

But you'd think that a professional film critic would have enough interest to at least tune in to the second-most-important film awards show, wouldn't you? We're not talking getting together with friends, filling out pool sheets or making a bunch of hors d'oeuvres -- just at least tuning in and giving it 30 percent of my attention?

Nope.

I can't really explain why I've been such an Oscar loyalist all my life. I mean, many times I've disagreed with the Oscar verdict -- sharply enough that you'd think it would embitter me. One prominent example came three years ago, when the Golden Globes got it right, honoring Brokeback Mountain, where Oscar somehow flaked out and picked Crash. Can anyone remember a best picture winner that has soured in our collective mouths so quickly after its selection as Crash? Talk to anybody these days, and almost no one is willing to support that movie. The Golden Globes also smartly picked The Aviator over Million Dollar Baby, and even though I would have given it to There Will Be Blood last year, at least their pick of Atonement sat better with me than Oscar's selection of the vastly overrated No Country for Old Men.

Yet I've continued to stick with the Oscars even through such travesties.

Why? Well, let's examine some of my concerns about the Globes:

1) The nominations come out too early. This obviously needs to be the case in order to meet a January 11 air date, but I feel like it's a very abrupt push into awards season to learn who's being nominated for the year's best pictures when half the movies haven't even had their theatrical release yet. It's like being told what the zeitgeist will be, rather than letting the zeitgeist wash over you like the zeitgeist always does.

2) There are too many categories. And I'm not talking about the fact that TV is included in these awards as well, though that undoubtedly waters down the focus. No, it's that we've got two genres of movie nominees: Drama and Musical/Comedy, which divides up not only the best picture nominees, but also the best actor/actress nominees. There are some benefits to it -- two great war-themed movies that many people feel were robbed for best picture, Born on the Fourth of July and Saving Private Ryan, were recognized by the Globes as best drama because the movies that beat them for the Oscar, Driving Miss Daisy and Shakespeare in Love, were busy winning best musical/comedy. I also take great pleasure in knowing that my favorite movie of 2003, Lost in Translation, was feted by the Globes as best musical/comedy (even if it seriously stretches that categorization). But just as often this results in total goofiness, like the much-reviled Sweeney Todd winning last year's best musical/comedy award. I haven't seen it, but I don't know anyone who even likes it, lets alone considers it the best of anything from 2007.

3) Who decides this stuff? The Hollywood Foreign Press, that's who. There has been much written about the nebulous identity of this group, who have much more power than any group that hazily defined every should. And while there was some quibbling about their judgments in the previous paragraph, I'll include a little more here: Emilio Estevez' ridiculous would-be epic Bobby getting nominated for best drama two years ago? And what's up with them randomly boosting the number of nominees in a given category? Last year, seven films were nominated for best drama -- and this is with five more nominated in the musical/comedy category, lest you forget.

I could go on, but you know this stuff. I just figured I should chime in to let you know I agree with it.

Now, excuse me while I go watch this week's Kath & Kim. (And yes, that was an intentional parting shot.)