An honor to be nominated

For not the first time, the announcement of Oscar nominations caught me off guard last Tuesday. I was getting out of the car, about to hike into the newsroom, when the NPR announcer alluded to “Oppenheimer” having received 13 nominations.

The nominations were out. Of course. It’s mid-January, I’m about to start my winter-session LifeQuest class. I’d better scan the nominees in self-defense.

So as soon I got to my desk I fired up the computer and took a cursory look at an AP story about the nominations. Nothing jumped out at me except that neither director Greta Gerwig or actor Margot Robbie received a nomination for “Barbie.” I closed the story and got to work, confident that I could give some sort of vague answer when a colleague asked me about the nominations.

They were about what I expected; what did you think?

“Oppenheimer” is precisely the kind of film that I expect to get a lot of nominations. It is not my favorite kind of movie, but it is a well-made piece of commercial art that serves a purpose, especially in a society as ahistorical as 21st-century America.

Christopher Nolan is a director whose work is intriguing, even if emotionally disconnected. “Oppenheimer” is a consensus favorite among critics and popular with people who love movies. I expect it will win the Academy Award for Best Picture and that Nolan will win Best Director.

But one could have made a tidy profit fading my Oscar picks over the years. There are people who are very good at picking the winners—we used to poll a panel of industry people and dedicated film followers on their Oscar picks, and most of them batted over .900 most years—but I’m not one of them.

I don’t pay attention to industry buzz or who is rewarded by the guilds. I stay off goldderby.com and other award sites. I have to look up what won last year’s Best Picture. (“Everything Everywhere All at Once”? Really? I would have sworn that was two years ago.)

My indifference to Oscar isn’t exactly hostility, though I find it a little ridiculous that we as a society care so much about what’s essentially a Chamber of Commerce event designed to promote the movie industry. There are only a few lines of work where people give awards to each other. If you happen to be in those lines of work, you probably understand what goes into winning a subjective award. It’s one thing to be top salesperson or batting champion—decided by accumulated numbers—and quite another to be named “best” anything.

The best salesperson might not move as many units as the top salesperson, but the one who best enlists the trust of long-term customers who will come back year after year. The best hitter is hardly ever the one with the best batting average; not every hit is equal to every other hit. A tworun single in the bottom of the ninth when the team is trailing by a run is worth more than a grand-slam home run in a 16-2 blow-out.

My industry gives out a lot of awards. I have been lucky to win a few, and to say I’ve been lucky is not false modesty. It feels good to win, but if you know how the awards are decided (I generally judge categories for four or five journalism contests every year), you understand the role of whimsy and caprice. Rarely is the winner clearcut. Sometimes you want to name five winners and sometimes you want to name none, but custom and convention call for a first, second, third and possibly honorable mentions to be ordered.

That’s not to say winning an award means nothing, just that the real accomplishment is putting yourself in position to be considered. It’s like making a hole in one; you have to get the ball to the green, to put it in position to fall in the hole, but the actual falling in the hole is a kind of happy accident.

A single hole in one can be accounted for by fluke; a friend made a hole in one under the lights at a goat track of a golf course in the first round he ever played by shanking an eight iron off a tractor shed and having the ball squirt onto the green and into the hole like a ferret seeking shelter in an air raid.

But the odds are better for a good golfer to make a hole in one. Though having more holes in one is certainly not definitive—a Texas teaching pro named Mancil Davis (now 70 and unable to play golf) made 51 aces, most of them verifiable.

Art Wall, a very good PGA tour player, claimed 45 in his golf career, most of them coming in the years before he played the tour when his primary track was nine-hole Honesdale Golf Club in Pennsylvania where he grew up playing. (Wall claimed he made 12 aces in 1938 and ‘39 when he was 14 and 15 years old. He made four in PGA tournaments.) And North Korea’s late Dear Leader Kim Jong Il once scored five in a single round.

(I will immodestly insert here that I have made four holes in one in my lifetime, one on a 323-yard par four.)

Aside from the incomparable Kim Jong Il, no reasonable person would consider any of the golfers mentioned above anything more than a pretty good stick. Certainly not better than Jack Nicklaus (20 holes in one, according to his website, most in casual rounds) or Tiger Woods (also 20, the first at the age of 6) or Arnold Palmer (21). While almost all the current players on the PGA Tour have at some point made a hole in one, major champion winners Collin Morikawa, Bubba Watson and Brooks Koepka have never had one in a tournament event. Bryson DeChambeau carded his first and only hole in one at the 2019 Masters.

Also consider that Oscars are decided by a popular vote of members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Surely more than a few of you will agree that one of the worst ways to decide anything is by popular vote.

Because I write about the movies, I will eventually have to address this year’s crop of Oscar nominees. Not because the awards certify quality (though this year the Academy seems to have done a fairly good job of identifying worthy films). But because people do care about the Oscars. Some of my friends consider the show their Super Bowl, a contest in which it costs nothing to invest, and they have a real impact on the power dynamics of Hollywood.

Even if I forget the winners by summer, it’s an honor just to be nominated.