Eighttp://www.thewrap.com/sites/all/libraries/fckeditor/editor/skins/defaul...); background-position: 0px -304px; " class="TB_Button_Image" alt="" src="http://www.thewrap.com/sites/all/libraries/fckeditor/editor/images/spacer.gif" />ht months after “The Hurt Locker” was released and the Academy doubled the number of Best Picture nominees, seven months after “Inglourious Basterds” debuted, six months after “Up in the Air” and “Precious” came roaring out of Toronto, two months and $2 billion after “Avatar” debuted, and two weeks after it all got ugly, a long Oscar season came to a close Sunday night at the Kodak Theater.
And while people are still asking questions about the Farrah snub and those hip-hop dancers, the end of the season did provide a few answers, and teach us a few lessons.
For instance:
Last minute attacks on the frontrunner don’t work.
“The Hurt Locker” producer Nicolas Chartier sent out stupid emails, and was punished. Some military personnel thought the film was inaccurate, and complained. Sgt. Jeffrey Sarver thought it was too accurate, and sued.
The bad news came fast and furious during the last days of the campaign, a hellish week for the favorite in which it seemed almost inevitable that some of those hits would do damage. But the criticism didn’t stick enough to hurt, any more than the charges stuck last year when “Slumdog Millionaire” was accused of taking advantage of its young cast; or in 2002, when “A Beautiful Mind” came under near-constant attack on a variety of fronts.
The fact is, by the time a film assumes frontrunner status, it’s probably too late. (“Brokeback Mountain,” the last favorite to slip, didn’t lose because of attacks.) Academy members don’t follow the latest awards news as closely as those of us who make our living at it; even if they’re voting late, they’re doing so because they need to see the movies, not check out the latest attacks.
Besides which, even when the wounds are self-inflicted, as Chartier’s were, a degree of suspicion inevitably falls on the people who stand to gain by the attacks, which gives an extra bit of urgency to the frontrunner’s supporters.
Despite those boxoffice records, the industry is still threatened by “Avatar.”
It’s not just the actors branch that looks askance at “Avatar,” and its motion-capture world. At the American Society of Cinematographers awards, many of the cinematographers I spoke to showed real ambivalence toward the movie, much of which was created in the computer rather than in the camera. (It won the cinematography Oscar nonetheless.)
And even more instructive, at the Animated Features Symposium three days before the Oscar show, Bill Kroyer, a member of the AMPAS board of governors who represented the Short Films and Feature Animation branch, openly mocked “Avatar,” essentially saying that it was pretending to be something it’s not.
“We had 20 films qualify in the Animated Feature category,” he said. “And we would have had 21, but one film – that outer space movie, it did pretty well – even though it met the qualifications, the director said, ‘This is not an animated film.’
