The Oscar Warrior: What We Learned from The 87th Oscars

That’s a problem in itself, but when you have an awards ceremony where many of the winners are already known in advance, where some of the bits just don’t work and where only one of the movies has grossed over $100 million, you start wondering why people might tune in and what keeps them watching especially on a Sunday night with lots of other choices.

Oscar night is still a time-honored tradition for most movie fans, even those who don’t go out to the movies much, but we went to sleep thinking that there were lots of things that could be learned from last night’s Oscars that can be applied to future shows. We’re not just talking about the ceremony itself and any problems it had, but also what we can learn from the winners so the next time we fill out an office Oscar ballot, we’ll be more informed. 

Majority Rules

There’s something to be said about all the websites offering “expert” Oscar predictions that one should pay heed to when making their own predictions, but at a certain point, going with the majority is better than trying to go against it. For those filling out an office pool who haven’t seen all the movies, like the shorts, you usually can’t go wrong by using this method.

That said, the amount of Oscar predictors who can easily figure out the direction of the awards makes you wonder how many Oscar voters read these sites and vote for the frontrunner favorites, because that’s what’s expected to win. It’s a chicken and the egg thing that we’ll probably never know the answer to, but it seems like more than a coincidence that so many expert predictions end up choosing the same winner every year.

Trust the Guilds

One thing that definitely should be learned this year is that when the Directors, Producers, Writers and Screen Actors Guilds all pick Birdman as their top movie, there’s a good chance that it’s going to follow through and win on Oscar night. Only one movie has won those precursors and not won Best Picture, so the people still backing Richard Linklater’s Boyhood (and I’ll be honest that I thought Linklater might win Best Director) probably should have given that up as soon as the guilds started announcing. The Golden Globes and Critics Choice and BAFTA awards are all great precursors, but they’re groups made up of journalists and film critics rather than people in the industry like the guilds and the Academy.

Nothing Ever Makes Sense

Even after the Oscars have been handed out, there’s still a lot of questions about some of the nominations like why Bennett Miller was nominated as director for Foxcatcher, a movie that wasn’t nominated for Best Picture and didn’t receive a single award despite its four nominations. It’s one thing if you’re talking about the screenplay categories where there are ten nominees, but one wonders how movies like Selma gets a Best Picture nomination without getting nominated in any other major category like screenplay or director or acting, while others get nominated in other categories like acting and screenplay, but don’t make the cut for Best Picture. What can we learn from that? Not much except that nothing will ever make sense when it comes to the Academy.

If Nothing Else, the Academy Is Democratic

In the end, the movies with the most nominations, Birdman and The Grand Budapest Hotel, ended up taking home the most Oscars, essentially splitting many of the categories winning four apiece. (It was a good night for Fox Searchlight who distributed both movies.) The popular Whiplash won three awards, not only for J.K. Simmons’ acting but also for film editing and sound mixing, two factors that added to people’s enjoyment of that film. Boyhood got one Oscar, American Sniper got one, Selma got one, The Imitation Game got one and The Theory of Everything got one, so basically all the Best Picture nominees won at least one Oscar. You can’t get much more democratic than that.

Musical Numbers Work But…

As far as the ceremony itself, there’s little question that last night’s musical numbers were the highlight of the show. It’s pretty incredible that there were a few years where they didn’t think it was a good to perform the Original Song nominees live. The performance by Tim McGraw of what’s thought to be Glen Campbell’s last song was incredibly moving and the crazy “Everything is Awesome” definitely woke people up from what was quickly becoming a snooze fest. I also thought Lady Gaga was amazing with the way she channeled Julie Andrews for the tribute to The Sound of Music (which celebrates its 50th Anniversary next week). BUT when you’re almost three hours into a broadcast and you still have awards to give away, it seemed like it was just adding more time to the broadcast. That Sound of Music tribute should have come much earlier in the broadcast, since the first couple of hours of the show were painfully dull and needed something to pick things up. Things only really got going during the performance of “Glory” from Selma, leading to some great moments including the reunion of John Travolta and Idina Menzel from last year, which itself led to a powerful speech by Original Song winners Common and John Legend. That aforementioned Sound of Music tribute was introduced by Scarlett Johansson, but Lady Gaga’s performance seemed to be done solely to bring out Julie Andrews to present Best Score. There were so many standing ovations in the last hour of the show compared to the first half where the stars seemed to be trying their best not to nod off while applauding politely.

And that brings us to the biggest problem with the show and biggest lesson learned…

The Tonys Are Not the Oscars

As a New Yorker, I hate to crap on Broadway but most of those shows are put on to entice tourists coming to New York to spend ridiculous amounts of money on tickets. Musical fans probably can do worse than Neil Patrick Harris, but the jaded Academy members and industry people who attend the Oscars need to be impressed and Harris didn’t come close to doing that. Whenever the cameras cut to some of the actors in the audience, they struggled to make it look like they were having fun and enjoying Harris’ jokes, but even Oscar winning actors can’t convince us they are having fun when they clearly are not.

Harris ended up making two jokes about David Oyelowo not being nominated for a well-deserved Oscar and a third about it being the “whitest” Oscars. That goes beyond being mean or snarky and just seems unprofessional, because it’s rubbing salt in the wounds of those attending (and presenting) who didn’t receive their equally-deserved nominations. It wasn’t really funny.

On top of that, Harris did a similar Birdman spoof as the one on the Independent Spirits the night before (including putting Miles Teller behind the drumkit), and that was saved for the middle of the show while it was already losing viewers. I’m sorry, but if you’re doing schtick that’s being done at the less-viewed awards show the night before, then you’re clearly not doing anything to think outside the box.

The Show Needs New Blood

There’s Always Room for Surprises

But not many in the case of last night’s ceremony where many of the top awards winners were between one or two contenders that were predicted and foreshadowed well in advance. Maybe the biggest surprise was Disney’s Big Hero 6 beating DreamWorks Animation’s How to Train Your Dragon 2 in the Animated Feature Category, since the latter was fairly pervasive thanks to Jeffrey Katzenberg pushing his movie with television commercials and print ads well after it was already available on DVD. Even things like the Interstellar VFX win over the much more deserving Dawn of the Planet of the Apes wasn’t that big a surprise since the FX in Nolan’s outer space epic were equally impressive.

It’s All About Politics

For everyone who thinks that there were a lot of snubs or that the person who won the Oscar in any particular category wasn’t deserving, you have to remember that it’s as much about politics in the Academy and its voting as a sign of quality. Just because someone hasn’t won an Oscar after multiple nominations doesn’t give them an advantage unless they’re Julianne Moore. Poor Roger Deakins has been nominated and lost so many times for his cinematography that we don’t even talk about it anymore when he’s nominated. Clearly there has to be more at work when the Academy is voting than just not liking Deakins’ work because his films are always beautifully shot. He’s a true master. But maybe they just like other cinematographers like Emmanuel Lubeszki better.

Where Was Joan Rivers?

Others have mentioned this, but leaving Joan Rivers out of the In Memoriam tribute was a shame, because she had appeared in many movies including the excellent doc from a few years back. It seemed like an obvious oversight that everyone immediately picked up on, and hopefully we’ll find out what happened soon, because it was fairly inexcusable.

Get Off the Soapbox Already

On the other hand, Patricia Arquette used her win for Boyhood to rally for wage equality for women, which is a hot topic right now but what does it have to do with Boyhood? Did she not get paid the same amount as Ethan Hawke even though she had more to do in the movie over the twelve years of shooting? Sure, she got all the women in the audience on their feet for speaking out, but what does the amount women get paid have to do with anything? She’s an actress who probably gets paid more money to appear on a single episode of her television show than most women make all year, so she seemed like an odd spokesperson for this important issue that affects many women who don’t get movie star paychecks.

That’s it for this year’s Oscars and we won’t have much more to say about them at least until movies start premiering at Cannes in May, but more likely, we’ll be holding off on the next Oscars until September once the real festival season begins.

(Photo Credit: Apega/WENN.com)