Well, here’s where I come in.
This was supposed to be my inaugural post, before yesterday's best-picture news intruded. So, a day late, welcome to The Odds, a six-month excursion into the heart of all things Oscar. I suppose an introduction is in order.
I’ve been doing this for a while. I came to the Oscars a little late, after about a dozen years writing about rock ‘n’ roll, but by now I’ve been to 17 Oscar shows. One in the audience, two in the pressroom, and 14 backstage.
I was once trapped in a stairwell at the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion with an Oscar-toting Bruce Springsteen. That was pretty cool.
I once stepped on Meryl Streep’s dress outside the green room at the Kodak Theater, which wasn’t so cool. Except that it’s pretty damn impressive when the Greatest Actress of Her Generation stands a foot away from you and hisses “You’re standing on my dress!” in a tone that clearly means “I’m exaggerating my anger for comic effect, but you’d better move NOW or face my true wrath.”
For the last four years, I’ve seen every nominated film in every category (including foreign, docs, shorts…) before the Oscar show. Sometimes that felt like a lot of work. I don’t know that I can forgive the Academy’s makeup branch for nominating Norbit … or, for that matter, the music branch for giving a nod to a song from August Rush.
My Oscar book, The Big Show, made the bestseller list in 2005 for precisely one week, where I sat two slots below Bob Dylan and two slots above the Dalai Lama. I wish the book sold more, but I liked the company.
I believe that the Oscars, like Walt Whitman, are large. They contain multitudes.
I think the Oscar show is a circus, a mess, a free-for-all, a reality show with enough ego and silliness to put Kate and Jon to shame. Among many other things. Somewhere in there, it also has to do with good movies.
I think that we sometimes expect it to be all things to all people. We ask the show to honor the best movies, not ignore the blockbusters, pay attention to the indies, entertain viewers, move quickly, respect all the nominees but get the boring ones offstage quickly … and, by the way, get huge ratings so that ABC and AMPAS can make lots of money.
Face it: It can never do all that stuff.
Even with 10 best picture nominations, it can never do all that stuff.
And while we’re on that subject, I think that expanding to 10 best picture nominations was a gamble that might have been worth taking, and one that has a chance of reinvigorating the race.
But if I had to guess, I’d say that for the next few years, those extra five nominees will go to the same kind of small movies that usually get the first five nominations: The Wrestler, not The Dark Knight.
