World news – The strangest thing about this year’s best picture nominees

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The 2009 Oscars’ Best Picture expansion, initiated after the Dark Knight nomination debacle, was designed to increase audience interest in the awards by ensuring that art-house films were made are placed on the list of the best pictures according to quality. With a few exceptions, that didn’t really happen. Instead, the enlarged « Best Picture » box has largely proven its worth by including improbably small movies in the mix. An Education, Winter Bones, The Tree of Life, Amour, Beasts of the Southern Wilds, Nebraska, Selma, Phantom Thread, The Favorite, Little Women: the Oscars were better to include all of these films, even if there was never a chance of them win.

There are costs associated with expanding the field. The cost is that more films are nominated these days that are actually bad. In the 11 Oscar ceremonies since Best Picture was expanded, more than a dozen Actually Bad films * have been nominated for Best Picture. Just last year the really stupid Joker giggled into the category – yuck. Compare these numbers with the previous 20 Oscars, which with their limited-edition best-picture panels only contained four Actually Bad films. **

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That’s why the pandemic-cursed film year 2020 is remarkable: the list of this year’s Oscar nominees for the best picture, zero actually contains bad films! There are great films and solid films as well as pretty good films and films that are sure not to be for everyone. But none of this year’s films stink downright. In a year when everything went wrong for Hollywood, one thing went right. It’s pretty shocking. Let’s take a look.

The Father, Judas and the Black Messiah: Good Movies! You may enjoy one better than the other based on your love of historical sagas or family dramas, but both of them have something to recommend.

Mank: A movie that will be injected right into the bloodstream of Hollywood history buffs should. This is a great reason to have something nominated for best picture. And it’s a much better version of such a film than previous Best Picture nominees of the same type.

The Chicago 7 Trial: Basically silly, but thoroughly entertaining. Deserves the nomination for Mark Rylance’s wig alone.

Promising young woman: Oh, that’s interesting. Emerald Fennell’s revenge drama has its critics, including Dana Stevens here in Slate, who writes that the film’s message is so murky that it is imperceptible by Fennell’s attempts to portray his heroine as both a avenging angel and a dangerously driven vengeance junkie . You could argue that it is actually bad. I would suggest that, despite its shortcomings, it provides many viewers with the kind of grim catharsis they would expect from such a story. As with previous nominees Birdman, Precious, and Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, it’s not really bad, but it’s worth arguing about. Every collection of Best Picture nominees should have one of these!

First, the collapse of cinemas caused by the pandemic may have been bad for the economy, bad for cinematography, bad for awards shows, and bad for people, that rely on the stock market to act rationally, but it seems were great for the Best Picture Slate. Boffo Box Office could no longer give Oscar voters cover to nominate a turkey like Joker, Bohemian Rhapsody or Midnight in Paris. In recent years, it has been easy for voters to convince themselves that their bad taste was actually good taste when it was backed up by hundreds of millions of dollars. About nothing made hundreds of millions of dollars this year, so that possibility was off the table.

I also suspect that it has at least something to do with this year’s weird, toned-down, and rather bluish campaign season. The lack of the typical press-the-meat events that define Oscar season in Hollywood may have made it harder to resonate with the types of bad films that often win nominations for best picture. Instead of being convinced by very serious bodies that Hillbilly Elegy, like Green Book, has something important to say about our times of division, voters have only decided that it is not very good. Instead of being the targets of a high-voltage, starry campaign claiming the prom was Broadway magic put on screen like Les Misérables, voters watched this at home and were unfazed. Nice job, voters!

Speaking of those voters, each year they get younger, less masculine, and more diverse in terms of ethnicity and work experience. This had an impact last year when Parasite won, and I think this year’s nominees are suggesting the effect lasts.

Look, the time will come when the Oscars once again have an absolute eye-roller for the best Nominate picture. Most likely, next year will come when moviegoers return to theaters, movie stars return for cocktail hours with award-winning lures, and movie studios release a backlog of Oscar lures, some of which are sure to suck. Let’s enjoy this unlikely situation while we have it. You can see each of the nominees for the best picture and have a great night at the cinema. And really, what else are you going to do?

* Actually bad nominations for the best picture, 2009-2020: The blind side, the king’s speech, The help, Extremely loud & Incredibly close, midnight in Paris, Les Misérables, American Sniper, The Revenant, Darkest Hour, Green Paper, Bohemian Rhapsody, Vice and Joker.

** Actually bad nominations for best picture, 1989-2008: Miss Daisy, Forrest Gump, Braveheart and Crash Drive. It is remarkable that all four won.

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