Amph 2023 Oscars (discussion of likely award-winning films)

Why?

 

The reason the Academy largely ignores superhero movies is most of them are not any good. That's not to say that good movies are always nominated and awarded, but it's easy to see why MCU Entry #34 gets shut out.

 

I didn't know that all sequels belong to the "adapted" category, so Glass Onion competes for adapted screenplay even though it's an original story. It's an interesting choice, given that stories about real people are rather labelled as original if the screenplay is not inspired by a book.

 

it is not a genre. it is a factory farm driven almost completely by a single studio for a single franchise, manufacturing grey mediocrity for those happy to accept vapid banality with little to no competent editorial craft, care for effects quality, much less story, since its whole existence is predicated on the notion that nothing matters since it has to continue indefinitely so it can pad the pockets of Disney shareholders' great grandchildren

 

Yeah, it's dumb.

Also, in re: Avatar -- despite what folks think, even the detractors of plot say that A:TWOW is just a staggering marvel of, you know, filmmaking. Hence, Best picture nom. It's not going to win, but it's a nice admittance to the craft of the film.

 

There is no way for me to say this without sounding like a douchebag, so I won't even try: the general audience has awful taste.

 

People don't really go to the movies for anything but spectacle nowadays and studios expect big returns on bloated budgets. The box office used to be a lot more diverse. It's not the Academy that has changed and the situation has gotten even worse because of COVID.

 

he's still one of the most influential figures in the industry. He got a lot of acclaim for "his most personal film" and whether or not the movie is better than those other films Spielberg has the brand name for the voters. And this is a very performance-driven film so actors like it and know he hasn't won an Oscar in a while but this is an excuse to give him more. He's getting to an age where Spielberg could win it as more or less a lifetime achievement award. I can almost guarantee he wins at least one of director/best picture.

 

At one time there was more overlap. For one I think people in general used to have more sophisticated taste.

At some point the things that interested me at age 5 morphed into what many consider to be actual culture or the arts. It’s really not art or culture - more like merchandizing.

I do still think Avengers: Endgame was cinematic achievement on a magnitude we’ve never seen before and might never see again.

It’s like Return of the King but instead of closing out just a trilogy it is the conclusion to something like 24 movies over 11 years.

But awards are just another marketing ploy themselves.

 

it was an incompetent culmination to a mediocre body of work, that also didnt actually close out anything

 

Just heard about how / why Saving Private Ryan didn’t win best picture.

That was eye opening and changed the way every studio there after lobbied to get votes for their movie.

 

13 years ago Avatar was up against Hurt Locker , HL won. I think that was the year when there was a shift with the Oscars , in the previous 20 years big popular movies could win best picture , Forrest Gump, Gladiator, Braveheart, LOTR etc. But since then it's been the small budget / Independent type movies.

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was there a shift in the oscars or a shift in big popular movies? perhaps a bit of both.

 

also what movies made the most money at the box office changed in 1999. The Phantom Menace opened a lot of eye eyes to the easy money in making established stories with a built in audience. That is quickly followed by a flood of new movie franchises.

Franchise installments don’t win Oscars.

And since 1999 only American Sniper in 2014 (seen more in winter of 2015) is the highest grossing film of a year to be a stand alone story not be part of a bigger or existing series.

(Avatar in 2009 was also an original story but it was planned to be series a well.)

 

eh you could take it back to LOTR, that's one piece of we got to the MCU

 

The Jackson LOTR film most of all the movies up front trilogy model then use the success of the first film to fund bigger post production for the next film, and so on - pretty much duplicated by Cameron for the Avatar sequels.

 

And then Harry Potter for sustaining a franchise 10 years.

But it did change. For the most part sequels came back to diminishing returns before the 00s. After 1999 it’s often the sequels topping the box office. It becomes building franchise that makes more over time. Basically everything tries to follow the model established by Star Wars.

Goodbye to an era where a movie like Rain Man could be the highest grossing film of the year.

 

@Jedi_Sith_Smuggler_Droid True but that also has to do with the fact that Hollywood is pushing out big budget films every year like crazy compared to that era where that obviously did not happen too often. Ironically the year that Rain Man came out (1989) had a bigger share of big budget films with Batman and Indiana Jones 3 compare to previous years.

Ultimately though I been saying for years that the academy in order to keep it's sort of relevance needs to pick films that are popular not only to be nominated but to win as wel. Yes Avatar 2 and Top Gun 2 getting nominated is good but they have almost no chance of winning especially when you consider neither one got a best director nomination. Rarely do you see the best picture and best director be two different films let alone does best picture win when the director is not even nominated. I am not sure if that is even happen before but perhaps I am wrong.

 

It starts with the Star Wars Special Editions. Very eye opening to have a trio of old movies make a huge amount of money and become an event. I think before that movie studios felt after an initial hit movies didn’t have much long term value.

But studios took a long time to understand how home video changed things. Movies had a life of their own at home. And DVD did even more to help this,

Next the prequels are three of these big movies announced at the start to be released over 7 years. Easy to forget that was not common at the time. But really there was no surer bet than Star Wars - but it was still a risk. Episode 1 does big business and lots of studios want in on action like that.

2001 sees the Lord of the Rings. That’s three movies planned from the start as a trilogy and released a year apart over three consecutive years. That was never done before like that. It was a major risk if the first one tanked.

And 2001 has Harry Potter which endeavors to make a series of 7 books into movies. They’re largely locked into making 3 upfront but then it’s a wait and see idea from there. If the movies do well more will be made.

Out of LotR and Potter we get the MCU. And now the MCU has innovated on itself with three movies a year and TV shows.

 

Endgame was never going to win Best Picture, nor should it have.

But if Cameron's bloated VFX reel is worthy of a nomination then why don't other massively high grossing movies like Force Awakens get the nod?

It's brown-nosing by the Academy because Cameron is doing it in the new pandemic era and saving cinema, or something.

 

the Oscars have changed over the decades , I mean I don't think it was much of a big deal in the 60's and 70's , many of the nominees didn't turn up. In the 80's the industry seemed to get more aggressive in promoting itself and the Oscars was livened up with better presenters , Hollywood was 'glamorous' again, stars were big etc.

With the 90's we now had home video as common place and we could see pretty much any movie we'd heard of with a trip to the video store, we all became cinephiles..

the last 15 years seems to have gotten caught up in identity politics.