In the aftermath of the Oscar nominations, a few random observations:
DINNER WITH 'DOGTOOTH'
One of Tuesday's more startling nominations was in the Best Foreign-Language Film category – where the daring, thoroughly unconventional Greek film "Dogtooth," a movie known to have been hated by the category's general voters, landed a nomination.
The film is a divisive, violent, deadpan, bizarre tale of a family that indoctrinates its children into a thoroughly twisted worldview; it can be read as vicious social satire, deadpan comedy or political allegory, but according to all reports it offended and was dismissed by the voters who first saw it at its Academy screening.
But it made it onto the shortlist as one of three additions from the Foreign-Language Film Award Executive Committee (nobody will admit that officially, but there's no doubt about it), and now it's quite possibly the strangest Oscar nominee ever.
So what happened? According to one witness, it might have come down to timing.
The final Foreign-Language nominees are selected by two special committees, most of their members chosen by longtime chair Mark Johnson. The committees, one in Los Angeles and one in New York, screened three movies a day last Friday, Saturday and Sunday, with a dinner break after the first two films.
In New York, "Dogtooth" was reportedly the second film shown on Saturday. One person who attended the screening said reaction to the film seemed quite negative when the film ended: "At that point, I wouldn't have given much for its chances. But they kept talking about it over dinner – and the more they talked, the more they realized that the movie had given them a lot to think about."
Would "Dogtooth" have made the list if it had been the first screening of the day, with a shorter intermission afterwards? Or if It had been the last film of the night, when the voters would head home afterwards rather than eating dinner together? There's no way to tell, but the implications are intriguing.
THE 4J CLUB
The Academy supplies lots of statistics with its nominations ("five performers have won Academy Awards for roles using spoken languages other than English"), and others have chimed in with more analysis of how the numbers break down and what it all means. But here's a stat I haven't seen anywhere: with four of the Best Actor nominations going to Javier Bardem, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg and James Franco, this marks the first time in history that four of the five nominees in a lead acting category have had first names starting with the same letter.
According to my quick trip through the Academy Awards database, all those J names are a first. In the Best Actor category, the Oscars had three years where three of the five nominees had first names starting with the same letter: Anthony Franciosa, Alec Guinness and Anthony Quinn in 1957; Art Carney, Albert Finney and Al Pacino in 1974; and James Garner, Jack Nicholson and Jon Voight in 1985.
