Talking About the 2011 Oscars

Tonight is the ceremony for the Academy Awards, my favorite award show other than the First Annual Montgomery Burns Award for Outstanding Achievement in the Field of Excellence.  Watching the Oscars, complaining about the award recipients and snubs, and mocking the fashion choices is a guilty pleasure of mine.  As such, today’s Sunday linkspam will be focused on the Oscars.

First, I must direct everyone’s attention to this piece of brilliance:

Oh, trailer.  You had me at “Hello.”  Or, to be specific, you had me at, “A toast to establishing me as the wealthy, successful protagonist – who is handsome!”  I love this trailer not only for its effective parody on bad movie dialogue, but for its pointed satire on the structure of most movies.  The Academy loves movies where a woman/homosexual/person of color/person with disability/other marginalized person enters the life of a privileged white male and Teaches Him A Lesson About Life.  In this case, the privileged white male learns from a woman, a homosexual, a person with a disability, a Latin American teenager, a Native American metaphor, and receives friendly black optimistic advice.  Oh, and the mentally disabled person is also apparently dying of an illness!  It hits almost every note that the Academy loves.  All it’s missing is a reference to the Holocaust.

That got me thinking about this year’s crop of Best Picture nominees, all of which have been reviewed by the good people at Bitch Flicks.  I have seen four of the nominees (The Kids are All Right, True Grit, Black Swan, and Toy Story 3).  (I am eager to see The King’s Speech, intrigued by Winter’s Bone, The Fighter, and 127 Hours, might eventually see The Social Network, and have no interest in seeing Inception).  I looked at the Best Actor and Best Actress nominees and was surprised by what I saw.  Four of the five Best Actor nominees come from Best Picture nominees.  That wasn’t the surprising part.  The surprising part was that three of the five Best Actress nominees come from Best Picture nominees – Natalie Portman, Jennifer Lawrence, and Annette Bening.  That’s rare.  It happened last year, but in the year before that, Kate Winslet in The Reader was the only Best Actress nominee in a film nominated for Best Picture, while three of the five Best Actor nominees came from films nominated for Best Picture.  While actresses were lauded for their performances in these “smaller” movies, these “smaller” movies were not considered Best Picture-worthy – perhaps because they were about women’s experiences and therefore not as “universal?”  It would appear that expanding the Best Picture category to include ten films instead of five has resulted in more recognition for movies about women.

It hasn’t, though, seemed to improve the field for other marginalized groups, because, as Shakesville pointed out, not a single person of color was nominated in the acting categories.  I guess no people of color acted in any movies last year!  Or else, the Academy filled their quota last year by giving nominations to Gabourey Sidibe and Mo’Nique and don’t feel the need to recognize any other people of color.  Excuse me while I go roll my eyes.

The Academy also filled their quota of female directors last year.  In 82 years of the Academy Awards, they finally recognized a female director (Kathryn Bigelow) and awarded her for her work on The Hurt Locker. I guess no women made movies this year, because the Best Director category is all male.  Bitch Flicks asks the question: Do we need a Best Female Director category?  I’m not sure how to answer that one myself.

Finally, in honor of Black Swan, I would like to offer a bit of random YouTubery.

This is yours truly doing the white and black swan dances.  I trained for a vigorous six minutes prior to filming.  I will not be available to attend the Academy Awards, and therefore if I win, Natalie Portman will be accepting on my behalf.