If you paid close attention to the online Oscar prognosticators, last night’s Academy Awards were among the most predictable in decades. Jeff Bridges, Sandra Bullock, Mo’Nique, and Christoph Waltz won the acting prizes -- basically the same set of names that we’ve been hearing for months now.
The Hurt Locker picked up six Oscars, including Best Picture and Best Director -- it was the long overdue coronation of a female director, not to mention the revenge of an ex-wife (director Kathryn Bigelow) over an ex-husband (fellow nominee James Cameron).
But if you step back and take the long view, this turned out to be a strange and memorable Oscar season. Momentum shifted. Fortunes rose and fell. With each passing week, a new competitor seemed to emerge from out of nowhere.
Consider The Hurt Locker, which actually premiered at the 2008 Venice Film Festival. The first published review of the war thriller, in Variety, was mixed. The independent film -- Bigelow’s first film since the dreadfully received K-12 (2002) -- had no distributor at first. When Summit Entertainment finally acquired the picture, the company waited until the following summer to release it. Despite much stronger reviews on this go-round, it failed to connect at the box office. A lot of awards analysts assumed it was out of the Best Picture race entirely.
Alas, here was a case where a steady-as-she-goes tortoise just kept chugging along, while any number of hot-out-of-the-gate hares quickly flamed out. The dramedy of the fall festival season, Up in the Air ended up peaking too soon. By the time it finally hit theaters in December, voters seemed bored with it -- or had simply decided it was overrated. For a brief while, the gritty ghetto drama Precious looked as if it was going to end up steamrolling. But after an impressive opening weekend at the box office, it eventually sputtered -- a lot of people were resistant to the film’s intensity and explicit portrayal of abuse. Avatar entered the scene in mid-December, and instantly vaulted to the top of the heap. Until people got sick of Cameron and his billions of dollars. They soon came to realize that, beyond the dazzling effects, Avatar wasn’t much of a movie at all.
All the while, The Hurt Locker kept picking up accolades, from critics and Hollywood luminaries alike. (Sean Penn was quoted as saying he thinks it’s one of the greatest war pictures ever made.) The campaign was built around two strong ideas: a) the time had come to give the Best Director prize to a woman (only four have been nominated in Oscar history); and b) wouldn’t it be wonderful if this tiny indie David slayed the Goliath that was Avatar. Come awards night, this strategy played out exactly according to plan, with The Hurt Locker taking even the prizes (chiefly, the Sound Mixing and Original Screenplay) that were expected to go to other films.
Indeed, Oscar campaign junkies will likely be debating the subtle twists and turns of this season for many more seasons to come. The Best Actress prize, for instance, slipped out of the fingers of Carey Mulligan, whose star-is-born performance in An Education electrified the Sundance Film Festival last January, and into the hands of Meryl Streep, who looked as if she would finally win a third Oscar for her exquisite turn as Julia Child. Until that Oscar seemed to land in the lap of Sandra Bullock, for a movie that even the studio didn’t think would play with Oscar voters. Again, the overall narrative of Bullock's campaign -- plucky movie star proves she’s a "real actress" -- was impossible for voters to resist.
(That said, it's hard not to feel a twinge of sympathy for Streep, who has now lost 12 consecutive times. One wonders if the actress has simply set the bar too high for herself: Nothing short of an iconic, Sophie's Choice-level performance will persuade voters to give her the prize again.)
The downside of an ultimately predictable set of awards? Markedly little excitement or weirdness during the telecast. All of the winners, especially Waltz (Inglourious Basterds) and Mo’Nique (Precious), seemed to know they were going to win -- and their acceptance speeches, while affecting, felt a tad rehearsed. We kept waiting all night for a Cuba Gooding-as-Tigger moment, but it never came. From this critic's perspective, it was also a bummer to see Quentin Tarantino's magnificently inventive Basterds take home only the Best Supporting Actor prize. The writer-director's loss to The Hurt Locker for Best Original Screenplay felt like the night's biggest robbery.
There were a couple of curious surprises sprinkled among the awards, chiefly the as-yet-unreleased Argentine film The Secrets of their Eyes beating out two brilliant efforts, A Prophet from France and The White Ribbon from Germany for Best Foreign Language Film. But, as usual, the presenters (Tarantino and Pedro Almodovar) didn’t do much to frame the competition for the larger audience. Most viewers would have no idea that an upset had even occurred. (Seriously, Oscar producers: Why not post odds as you announce the nominees -- it would give us a stake in even the lesser categories?)
The switch to a slate featuring ten Best Picture nominees ultimately had little impact; the films that likely wouldn't have made the top five -- An Education, District 9, A Serious Man -- ended up going home empty-handed regardless. And for all the hype about the extra nominees, it was wholly bizarre when Tom Hanks turned up to announce the winner -- and then just opened the envelope without announcing the names of the nominees. It made for a rushed and anti-climactic Best Picture Oscar; more than a few people in the blogosphere wondered if Hanks had a train to catch.
Still, there’s no denying that inviting more films to compete lent a new texture and energy to the entire awards season -- and, in a few cases, became a critical tool in the campaign process. (To wit: Bullock’s campaign really took off once The Blind Side made the Best Picture cut, while Julie and Julia got left out. Suddenly it became clear that voters were taking the schmaltzy football drama seriously.)
If the final telecast ended up being a little perfunctory -- and if, by now, most of us are fairly sick of hearing about The Hurt Locker and Avatar -- well, that’s probably inevitable. Whether we’re talking about presidential elections of tiny gold statues, ours is an age where political theater -- the three-ring circus of a never-ending campaign -- has triumphed over actual politics.
Or, to put it another way: Oscar 2010 was all about the journey and not the destination.
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