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mfunk9786 wrote:It bothers me when a bad or mediocre movie is rewarded disproportionately because it's got a pro-movie message, whether that be the primary plot thread or something almost shoehorned in, the latter being the case with The Shape of Water. If I didn't like movies I wouldn't be on this forum

As I said last year when it came up against La La Land, I think people are generally very reductive towards in applying these arbitrary definitions. While they may be the movie with the most 'Hollywood! Show biz!' appeal of their respective years, Argo, Birdman, La La Land, and the Shape of Water really aren't about the movies in any particularly substantial way.

It's been years, but I still seem to recall Ben Affleck winking at me during Argo.

Everyone here lives at some level for the messiness and ensuing drama of the Oscars. Don't lie folks! We're all here for it!

aox wrote:It's been years, but I still seem to recall Ben Affleck winking at me during Argo.

Sounds like you got off easy!

Ribs wrote:While they may be the movie with the most 'Hollywood! Show biz!' appeal of their respective years, Argo, Birdman, La La Land, and the Shape of Water really aren't about the movies in any particularly substantial way.

Isn't that exactly what the complaint is, though?

No. He means they ostensibly are not movies about movies in the way Subset Blvd is, not that their depiction of movies is lacking

I'd agree that rewarding a movie solely because it highlights the professions of the voting body is wrong-headed, but I think that believing that this happens often might be a false assumption, in that the people making films also passionately, obsessively love movies, and so films (especially auteurist films) are disproportionately seeded with references to other films and the medium generally. Many films that fail to win or are ignored completely during awards season are just as loaded with film references (with varying degrees of relevance to the core of those films) as the Best Picture winners that draw this complaint.

Shape of Water also has a weird on-screen cinephilia. The theater is showing a second-rate biblical epic that no one today remembers to nearly empty seats. The "good" movies are on a fuzzy TV set. Despite the loving production design, I think the film's an attack on baby boomer nostalgia for the 60s, though it turn reflects a nostalgia for the films of the 30s (which isn't really willing to interrogate).

At the very least, it's hard for me to see how the movie references in The Shape of Water were "shoehorned in". They seemed baked into the cake from both a narrative and thematic standpoint - the film grew out of a Creature from the Black Lagoon remake, didn't it?

I guess that doesn't mean that they had to live above a movie theatre, but in a period-piece monster movie from Del Toro, details like that hardly seem forced or out of place.

lacritfan wrote:Least-watched Oscars in history

thats not surprising, Oscar ratings correspond pretty closely to the box office success of the nominees. iirc, The highest rated shows in recent memory were the years with avatar, rotk and titanic.

And the ratings were relatively stable before 2005, because in general the films nominated were all top twenty at the box office. but ratings began to decline at 2005. Nowadays, outlier nominees like avatar are extremely uncommon and it’s rare that any of the nominees are in he years top twenty at the box office.

What changed? Well up until 2001, most screeners were vhs, 2002 saw a lot of piracy of newly popular DVDs, 2003 saw the academy making special DVD players, 2004 saw the total screener ban, and in 2005 there were no restrictions on screeners going forward, and crash flooded the marketplace, this four year period also corresponded with an explosion of internet based punditry, analysis, aggregation and awards trackers like gold derby, gurus of gold, in contention

And lest we forget cellular phones being used to access the internet became more and more common, over this timeframe, and most people in the industry transitioned early on to a blackberry (or equivalent) smartphone with the iPhone dropping in 2007 and dominating going forward

The combination of the awards aggregators, easy internet access, and voters receiving fifty plus screeners means that recipients started using google to figure out the annual buzz and thus filter what they should prioritize out of the pile. This has lead to a relentless march of nominees that every year are less seen (by the movie going public) than the year before. Since year after year the films nominated are less familiar to the population at large, ratings for the Oscars continue to drop.

The ratings continue to drop at pace with almost the entirety of television, though, and are still one of the most watched events of the year, with a rating of ~20 (regular TV shows are considered massive hits with a rating of 2!). I think people yelling about declining ratings are incredibly short-sighted, the same as those who think the show's too long, and don't seem to think, "wow - 25 million people watched! Amazing!"

There's basically no reason whatsoever for them to change - this year's Best Picture nominees had an average gross $7 million higher than last year's going into the ceremony. Would you rather them NOT have nominated Call Me By Your Name and Phantom Thread to goose that number? Phantom Thread has, without question, probably made north of double what Focus expected before nominations and is still playing in semi-wide release, probably still going to make another million or so before the BP nomination will definitely help carry it to some stronger home video sales than previously expected.

I dearly wish we'd have a winner that had made just a ton of money, but it just seems like it won't happen, which sucks. I really did not believe in Get Out's narrative, but to me, that was the real winning argument for why to vote for it, and I know that's really deeply cynical.

Took him long enough.

Clarence wrote:Seriously, no clip for Jeanne Moreau?

Well, we didn't even give her an In Memoriam thread here, so who are we to cast stones?

Big Ben wrote:Everyone here lives at some level for the messiness and ensuing drama of the Oscars. Don't lie folks! We're all here for it!

I’m really not. I’d die if I had to watch five minutes of it.

No, you wouldn't

furbicide wrote:

Big Ben wrote:Everyone here lives at some level for the messiness and ensuing drama of the Oscars. Don't lie folks! We're all here for it!

I’m really not. I’d die if I had to watch five minutes of it.

When I realized Naked 33 1/3 accurately parodied award shows-I could no longer watch without cringing. It all feels like the Masterpiece Video scene from Ghost World. When I was a kid, I did enjoy Billy Crystal’s monologue.

The only enjoyable part of these awful shows was Joan Rivers doing Fashion Police and Howard Stern goofing on it the day after.

furbicide wrote:

Big Ben wrote:Everyone here lives at some level for the messiness and ensuing drama of the Oscars. Don't lie folks! We're all here for it!

I’m really not. I’d die if I had to watch five minutes of it.

I take umbrage with this. It would take you much more than five minutes to die. Maybe after the third hour when you realize there's another hour left.

I haven't watched the Oscars in years. I have no interest and would rather watch a film instead. Usually enjoy opening a brand spanking new Criterion blu which I did sunday night. I watched La Chienne.

It's almost like people who like making movies like movies and like making movies where people also like movies.

So what you’re saying is Ready Player One is going to sweep next year?