I’d Like to Thank the Academy: Ten Steps to Bring Oscar Home |
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| Written by April Yorke |
| Sunday, 01 March 2009 19:00 |
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There's no award in the film world to rival a Best Picture Oscar from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Even when they went all PC and decided to start calling everything "achievement in," Best Picture hung onto its original moniker. Why? Because nothing compares to the unadulterated power that comes with winning Best Picture. No matter how good a movie is, out of the hundreds of films released in the U.S. every year, only one can be crowned Best. You can't buy that kind of prolonged pull in the industry (well, maybe you can, but let's pretend you can't). So how do you do it? How do you win the big prize? Let's have a look at those who did in the last decade and see what it takes.
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Comments (3)
What?
No rule about movies making a Social! Statement! to prove that Hollywood cares (but not about the gays)? That's gotta be the only reason Crash won (that and Oprah controlling the universe). Could also be why Slumdog won too, though it coincidentally happened to be the best of the bunch. |
For 1999, 
Gladiator defeated Chocolat, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, Erin Brockovich, and Traffic for 2000. As you can see, all five contenders followed step one and three stuck by step two. Also, once again, the Lasse Hallström movie goes wanting. Step three: if you are going to be a weird foreign movie, at least have the good sense to be in a foreign language, so you can pick up the Best Foreign Language Film Award as Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon did that year.
When A Beautiful Mind bested Gosford Park, In the Bedroom, The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, and Moulin Rouge for 2001, it upset people a little bit. This, however, is why being Ron Howard only works some of the time. While his movie may have picked up the award, his next collaboration with Russell Crowe wouldn't garner nominations for either of them, and he would be further shut out until 2008's Frost/Nixon. Much like that movie, A Beautiful Mind is the only true story in the bunch. Step four: If you must adapt a book, go for non-fiction. 
Apparently the nominees for 2002 didn't hear about step one. The Hours, The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers, and The Pianist, along with Gangs of New York, lost to Chicago. One word titles make the Academy happy! Chicago is also the shortest of the candidates. Step five: keep your running time under two hours. If you can get Renée Zellweger's skeleton to shimmy all over the stage in revealing outfits, that will probably help, too.
When The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King captured Best Picture over the likes of Lost in Translation, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Mystic River, and Seabiscuit for 2003, it broke the rules in order to create a new one. Step six: Go big or go home. If you are going to put "the" in your title, don't wuss out like Master and Commander with a measly two (and none in the short form!). Drop four in there. At 141 minutes, second longest nominee Seabiscuit falls a full hour short of King. It's also the third novel in an insanely huge series and has foreign (read: made up) languages. Don't bend the rules; utterly destroy them.
2004 
Capote and Munich tried to cash in on the short titles craze for 2005, but they lost out by one letter to Crash. Paul Haggis' (see?) treatise on RACISM in L.A. also beat out Brokeback Mountain (Step eight: don't be gay) and Good Night, and Good Luck, a movie about a bunch of guys in smoky backrooms with barely a woman in sight (Step nine: see step eight.). Capote was also about a gay man and his quasi-sexual relationship with a murderer. Homosexuality is - allegedly - not one of the oldsters' issues.
When The Departed beat out Babel, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Queen for 2006, it introduced a little known, but not to be forgotten, rule: Step ten: don't underestimate 
Last year, Atonement, Juno, Michael Clayton, and There Will Be Blood couldn't hold a candle to No Country for Old Men. It's got old men right in the title, no "the" in sight, no overt homosexuals, it hits the two hour mark, and, best of all, it was made by a pair of weirdoes with whom the Academy has a tricky long term relationship. Simply by virtue of following the steps above, it won. That No Country was genuinely one of the best movies of 2007, not to mention the decade, was probably an oversight on the part of the Academy.
How kind of the Academy to crown Slumdog Millionaire as 2008's Best Picture over The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and The Reader. It follows steps one, three, five, eight, nine, and ten. Actually, rooting for the underdog is a known favourite activity among the oldsters, not to mention making themselves feel better about being rich by watching poor people succeed. That bumps it up to a whopping seven out of ten by our standards. Being Ron Howard remains not all it's cracked up to be, and it's a wonder the people behind Benjamin Button didn't realize that having Brad Pitt put on a New Orleans accent for three hundred years wouldn't cut it. But who will rush the stage next year with 
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