Gondlem wrote:Probably the thing that bugs me the most about people complaining about the Oscars giving award to "Oscar bait" is that there are actually things that are way more "bait"-ey than the stuff that gets the criticism.
A good example is war films. I like a good war film, there have been some amazing ones over the years, but a high budget war film about a war people can remember within their parents lifetimes is absolutely Oscar bait. Saving Private Ryan was a well made, tense action film but if you remove the layers of sentiment and historical import attached to the setting it would never get an Oscar nomination for anything more prestigious than sound editing. In fact if it was a generic action film there would be moments in that film that would have been the subject of critical mockery, particularly the "emotional" scenes of people dying and shots of cemeteries with sad music and stuff.
Biopics about sympathetic historical figures are another one. Actually period dramas in general, but especially of the historical biopic variety - Ghandi, Braveheart, Good Night And Good Luck, Lincoln etc.
Eh... I can sort of agree. I guess it's something that people tend to feel more emotionally attached to, so there's some sort of implicit need to reward them if it made them feel patriotic, thankful, or reminiscent. However, there are subsets of that genre that are just really well done, and I feel like those deserve to be rewarded. Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, All Quiet on the Western Front, etc.
And when it comes to something like race, the films that are eye-rollingly likely to get Oscar noms aren't actually films about slaves or whatever but films which create an "overcoming racism" narrative about how we're all just people deep down. Crash being the classic example of a film that won because of it's message rather than it's quality. Or, say, The Help.
Yeah, The Butler fell under this category for me.
And don't get me started on The Artist - the fact that people called that Oscar bait was the most annoying given that it was a fucking black and white silent comedy made in France, a type of film that has never won a single Oscar ever. But because it was "arty" or whatever and got critical acclaim without being a box office hit, it simply had to be a pointless wank that never should have won over Toy Story 3 or whatever, a complaint inevitably made by people who hadn't seen the film. It couldn't be that it was just an amazingly special film - because the best film has to be a high budget Hollywood film with people you recognise in it, everyone knows that.
Totally agree.
Anyway this is kinda off topic because it's not really about 12 Years vs Gravity. I liked Gravity, and I think Cuaron is great. It just bugs me that every year at Oscar time you get the same complaints about Oscar bait and how out of touch the Academy is, but it's never directed at The Hurt Locker (a film I loved, incidentally), which is way more designed to win Oscars than most films you'll see.
Interestingly, Lone Survivor and Zero Dark Thirty were in a similar vein (released at the end of the year, gripping war movies) and really didn't do much of anything at the Oscars.
"The trouble with quotes on the Internet is that you can never know if they are genuine." - Napoleon Bonaparte