Can La La Land match Titanic?
La La Land just joined one of the most elite groups in Hollywood.
Tuesday’s Academy Awards announcement netted the musical 14 nominations, tying it with Titanic and All About Eve for most ever.
Damien Chazelle’s boy-meets-girl musical starring Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling follows the ups and downs of trying to make it big in show business.
The 1950 drama All About Eve, starring Bette Davis, is also set within the entertainment industry, centring on an aging Broadway actress.
All About Eve has secured a permanent place among cinematic classics; it ranked 16th in the American Film Institute’s 1998 list of the 100 greatest American movies.
La La Land also got plenty of critical acclaim. But it’s unclear whether a movie known for its attempt to recast an old genre will be remembered in a similar fashion decades later.
“La La Land ... pulses and glows like a living thing in its own right, as if the MGM musicals of the Singin’ in the Rain era had a love child with the more abstract confections of Jacques Demy,” wrote Washington Post film critic Ann Hornaday.
The film created “a new kind of knowing, self-aware genre that rewards the audience with all the indulgences they crave — beautiful sets and costumes, fanciful staging and choreography, witty songs, escapist wishfulfillment — while commenting on them from the sidelines.”
It’s also worlds apart from James Cameron’s epic Titanic. Despite the 1997 movie’s long running time — three hours and 15 minutes — audiences flocked to see the giant ship go down in a story that combined action, drama, romance and a charttopping theme song in Celine Dion’s My Heart Will Go On.
Titanic became one of the biggest box office hits ever — it’s fifth on the list of highest grossing movies in domestic sales, adjusted for ticket price inflation.
By the time nominations for the 1998 Oscars were announced, Titanic had transcended from a Hollywood favourite with technical feats to an iconic movie that had incredible mass appeal. While in retrospect it may be considered a bit corny, Titanic earned pretty solid reviews at its release, and it has an 88 per cent positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes.
And it’s spurred numerous cultural touchstones. The Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet “I’m flying!” scene has been imitated and mocked on TV shows and in movies for years, and whether Leo could have fit on her raft remains an enduring question, one that even the Mythbusters tried to debunk. Not to mention the role Titanic had in catapulting DiCaprio into a blockbuster leading man.
Titanic tied with Ben-Hur and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King for the most Oscars ever at 11.
La La Land won seven Golden Globes this year — a record number, so whatever happens at the Academy Awards next month and beyond, Chazelle’s movie has already made history.