HEY OSCAR! PASS THE POPCORN
It’s the return of the blockbuster at the Academy Awards, as some of the year’s biggest box office draws have piled up nominations. Peter Howell lifts the lid on what might be the most fan-friendly Oscars in history.
And the Oscar goes to . . . regular moviegoers!
The eight Best Picture nominees for the Feb. 28 Academy Awards make for the most multiplexfriendly list in years, encompassing films seen by the general public and not just critics.
Leading nominees The Revenant (12 noms), Mad Max: Fury Road (10) and The Martian (seven) are popcorn pictures, adventure genre films that put mass entertainment ahead of making artistic statements — although there’s a lot of art behind all three.
The other five Best Picture nominees — The Big Short, Bridge of Spies, Brooklyn, Room and Spotlight — are also films with broad public appeal, ranging from thrillers to romances.
These are all movies that regular people have seen, or at least intend to, never a sure thing with Oscar nominees.
To put things into perspective, the combined $435 million (U.S.) take at the North American box office for The Revenant, Mad Max and The Martian is more than double the $203 million combined take for all eight of last year’s Best Picture contenders on nominations day — and The Revenant has only just opened.
These nominations should put to rest, for now at least, the traditional knock against the Academy that it favours art-house films over blockbusters.
A case in point is Todd Haynes’ lesbian romance Carol, a critical favourite that grabbed six Oscar noms — including Best Actress for Cate Blanchett and Best Supporting Actress for Rooney Mara — but failed to make the cut for Best Picture and Best Director.
Add box-office behemoth Star Wars: The Force Awakens to the 2016 Oscar mix, with its five nods in technical categories, and the Academy is looking at a massive TV viewing audience that should reverse the declines of recent years. The 88th annual Academy Awards show might approach the record 88 million viewers notched in 1998, the year of Titanic’s prize sweep.
The viewership is bound to be an improvement over last year’s nearrecord low of 37 million viewers, when Birdman and Boyhood duked it out for top honours and many moviegoers shrugged at the outcome for art house films few had bothered to see.
Birdman won, also earning Best Director honours for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, who could be back in the winner’s circle again this year with The Revenant, a wilderness survival epic starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Tom Hardy. These two fan favourites are also nominated for Oscars — DiCaprio for Best Actor and Hardy for Best Supporting Actor.
DiCaprio seems destined to win in his fifth attempt at an Oscar, one of the few sure bets this year and continuing a winning streak that includes honours at last weekend’s Golden Globes. First-time nominee Hardy similarly has huge public appeal and it doesn’t hurt that he’s also the star of Mad Max: Fury Road, runner-up to The Revenant for most Oscar chances.
These audience-friendly 2016 Oscar noms promise a happy ending to an unusually volatile awards season, where for many months it seemed as if nobody could settle on a likely Best Picture champion.
Carol and the journalism procedural Spotlight both led the charge for a while in straw polls like the Gurus o’ Gold on MovieCityNews.com that I participate in. And both Mad Max and The Martian, while ultimately ending up on the Top 10 lists of many critics, mine among them, were initially dismissed by many scribes as being too popular for serious Oscar consideration. I certainly heard that at Cannes last May: Mad Max premiered out of competition, having been deemed not arty enough for Palme d’Or consideration.
The Revenant is something of a curious beast, as Iñárritu films tend to be. It’s a widescreen and almost-silent film epic that appeals to both art house and multiplex audiences.
But the big crowds that turned out for its wide debut last weekend were there to see DiCaprio get mauled by a bear, not because they heard that cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki, also Oscar nominated, approaches the rapture of a Terrence Malick film with his lustrous lensing.
What accounts for what seems like sudden love for mainstream movies by Academy voters, who are often slagged as being old, white and out of touch? Youth and ethnicity could have something to do with it: the Academy’s 6,200 voting members include 1,223 new inductees from the past five years, with last year being “the most diverse class we added to our ranks,” an Oscar spokeswoman told me Thursday. (The Academy doesn’t revealed detailed stats about its members.)
If change is indeed coming to the ranks of Academy voters, it won’t be a moment too soon for people who understandably object to yet another year of all-white Oscar nominees in the acting categories.
But any group that can embrace movies about a bear-fighting vengeance seeker, an apocalyptic antihero and a disco-hating stranded astronaut is certainly one that’s open to a wide range of entertainment options. Peter Howell’s book Movies I Can’t Live Without is now available in premium paperback through StarStore.ca/movies