Predictability, Pointlessness, and Homophobia: It must be Oscar Season!

Okay, so here we are in late January.  The Golden Globes have happened already, and the Oscar nominees are announced in a week.  We’re heading into the heart of awards season.  Therefore, I’ve decided I should go ahead and warn you: I have no intention of blogging about any of it.

(and no, I don’t just say that because for the past couple of weeks I’ve had trouble finding time to blog at all)

Now don’t get me wrong- I’ll probably watch the Oscars.  I might even, if I feel like it, post an entry afterward, but it will be about who wore the best clothes and how the hosts did and where the dead people montage fell on the touching/cheesy spectrum (and does Vic Chesnutt get a spot?  Because he was really memorable in Sling Blade), because these are the reasons why one watches the Oscars.  What I’m not going to do is pretend that the Oscars is an experience that has anything to do with film.

If the Academy chose the most popular films every year, there wouldn’t be much of a point to watching, but at least there would be a discernible purpose (even if it was a questionable one, like legitimizing lowest-common-denominator entertainment with a meaningless statue).  On the other hand, if the films that won tended to be those that are widely regarded as the best by critics, the Oscars would gain a lot more respect amongst people like me, but we’d have to tune in to the Sundance Channel or wherever to watch the damn show, because it sure wouldn’t be on network TV.

But the Oscar dinosaur doesn’t do either of those things.  Instead, it becomes more predictable each year, giving the big prizes to films that contain enough elements from some sort of Master Best Picture Checklist:

• Is it the epic story of an underdog?
• Is it a reasonably good effort by someone we should have honored years ago when they were doing their best work?
• Does it involve disability or perhaps disease?
• Does it make big cultural problems like racism or poverty seem solvable through individual goodwill and effort?
• Is it about the holocaust?

If you can answer yes to at least three of these questions, and you also have Weinstein or Warners throwing cash around in your name, you’re on the way to a Best Picture Oscar.

And while I’m ranting, let’s talk about institutional homophobia.  I don’t know what the age breakdown of the Academy voters is like, but I hope they’re kind of old, because that’s the best possible explanation I can come up with.  In the past 20 years, there hasn’t been a single Best Picture winner which featured a sympathetic queer character in a major role, despite nominations for The Crying Game, Four Weddings and a Funeral, As Good As It Gets, The Hours, Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Little Miss Sunshine, and Milk.  I’m not saying all of those films should have won (or that they’re all fantastic portrayals of LGTBQ characters), but certainly one of them ought to have won at some point.*  Furthermore, in that same span of time there have been two Best Picture winners that feature self-loathing queer murderers, and one that used unsympathetic gay characters to represent the growing decadence of 13th-Century British royalty.**

Within this unfortunate context, one wonders if the Academy voter sees the many actors awarded for playing queer (Tom Hanks, Hilary Swank, Sean Penn, etc.) as categorically similar to those awarded for portraying the psychologically unbalanced or mentally disabled (thus accounting for Hanks’ early ’90′s twofer).  Of course, the Academy also loves it when beautiful women are deglamorized to show their “dedication” to a part, so the very best thing you can do to win, as Nicole Kidman and Charlize Theron will tell you, is to play a mentally unstable queer woman who’s uglier than you (and playing a real person always helps too).

Anyway, I apologize if this entry is particularly long and disjointed, but I’ll get back to my point: I refuse to blog about the Oscars (or the Golden Globes, which are so much more pointless that I haven’t bothered addressing them here).  I will, however, try to blog more in general.

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*Specifically, Brokeback Mountain should have beat Crash, at the very least.  I mean, I thought Milk was far superior to Slumdog Millionaire, but at least Slumdog has fans.  I don’t know anyone, critic or layperson, who got anything out of Crash.  Seriously, Crash?  That one single shot in Brokeback Mountain where Heath Ledger stands up angrily in front of a sky full of fireworks has more cinematic interest in it than the entirety of Crash.

**A special prize to the first reader who names all three of these films.