"One more refreshing feature of this year's awards: There's no middlebrow crowd-pleaser, no Forrest Gump or Crash that threatens to smite the more interesting films with its unvanquishable mediocrity. "

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I think that one statement says it all about the Oscars multi-year plunge into irrelevance.

The critical community used to simply dismiss the Oscars out of hand while focussing on art films, etc. Now the Oscar voters follow the critics, and we end up with art film Oscars -- movies that most people don't see, don't talk about, don't KNOW about.

Oscars used to be delivered to the better versions of mainstream film (Gone With the Wind, Casablanca, From Here to Eternity, Ben-Hur, The Apartment, The Godfather); and to musicals (An American in Paris, Gigi, West Side Story) , and to other movies that critics had no use for (The Sting, Marty, Rocky) as well as to artistic acheivements like "Lawrence of Arabia" and "Bridge on the River Kwai," which usually functioned as adventures as well as art.

The Oscars of 40 years ago took in hip blockbusters like "Bonnie and Clyde" and "The Graduate" as well as popular hits like "In the Heat of the Night" and "Guess Who's Coming to Dinner" (hated by critics, but loved by Tracy/Hepburn fans watching the final duet of that screen team.)

Yep, that's a lot of "crowd pleasers." People actually went to those movies. (All of them, not just a couple, like "Juno" and "No Country for Old Men," neither of which have drawn half the crowds of "The Graduate" or "Bonnie and Clyde.")

"Forrest Gump," was a wry and sweeping overview of the Boomer era that only managed to get lines around the cinema for blocks for weeks and sported moving performances byTom Hanks and Gary Sinise to boot. Glad we don't have THAT piece of junk up against "There Will Be Blood," huh? (Yeah, "Pulp Fiction" was great that year, too, and influential, but it certainly had its flaws.)

Honestly, the Oscars have become something the critics will never have to worry about again. For the Oscars gave into the critics a long time ago.

And stopped being about the movies.

I sometimes wonder if it's possible to even make a popular "serious" picture anymore. The three shies at it I can think of (American Gangster, Before The Devil Knows You're Dead, The Great Debaters) are either too sour or too saccharine to appeal to popular audiences, and although Juno is really a nice popular comedy-drama, it's been too heavily marketed as an indie to be seen, at least for the moment, as the mainstream movie it really is.

As for the two big contenders . . . Ewww . . .

No Country For Old Men, on the page and on the screen, has always struck me as a cheap, mean truck-stop thriller inflated with a bicycle pump and stripped of even a good femme fatale for sexy fun (instead, we get a perfectly nice woman being horribly murdered).

There Will Be Blood suffers from the fact that Paul Anderson wanted to do an anti-big-business tract that was somehow More than an anti-big-business tract, but didn't really have the talent to round out the cardboard characters in Upton Sinclair's novel Oil! (and along the way, he lost the best part of the book, namely Sinclair's denunciation of cynical, money-grubbing ministers--Sinclair was not only a Socialist, but a Christian; indeed, I think a lot of his politics flowed out of his religion). In Sinclair's book, the oilman is bad because he's greedy and callous. In the film, there's supposed to be some great spiritual crisis at work on the fellow, but except for having Daniel Day-Lewis announce that it's not enough to win, but everybody else has to lose, we never really get any hint as to what the crisis is And as with No Country, there's a sense of rampant inflation of thin material, the conviction that if you get enough extras, enough big landscapes, enough explosions, etc., the material will have accquire gravity. And unlike Forrest Gump, there aren't any sympathetic performances to anchor the pretensions (not just Hanks and Sinise, but Sally Field and Robin Penn Wright and Mykelti Williamson).

I'll be watching Mary Poppins when the Oscars run. It's got a beat and you can dance to it. With the penguins.

Care to expound upon that final sentence?

What 'movies' has the academy stopped caring about this year by 'giving in to the critics'? What was overlooked? I might argue that Ratatouille could stand some more recognition, and The Bourne Ultimatum was a favorite of mine from the past year, but looking at the top 50 highest grossing films from the year the only films that would be considered 'Oscar' films and didn't get much recognition this year are Charlie Wilson's War (No. 39 of the top 50) and, MAYBE, Knocked Up.

The big blockbusters and family fare of 2007, by and large, paled in comparison to similar films from this decade, while the "art house" and "critic baiting" films of 2007 were EASILY, and nearly universally recognized as, responsible for making 2007 one of the best movie years in a long long time.

Simply put, there wasn't any 'best of the mainstream' film for the Academy to choose. The 'crowd pleasers' didn't really exist, either, since the big budget/high grossing films may have made lots of money but very few of them pleased the crowds. Well, ok, Ocean's 13. And Knocked Up/Superbad. But ultimately 2007 was a big year for small movies, and the Academy simply recognized it as such.

Irrelevant how? A lot of smaller films in recent years have found audiences in part because of Oscar buzz. Titanic doesn't need an Oscar win to find an audience, but There Will Be Blood might well find new life.

Same for Forrest Gump. Yes, it's a good thing we don't have it up against There Will Be Blood.

The Oscars are still about the movies. They're just more often about good movies instead of medicre ones.

Care to expound upon that final sentence?

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Yes. Which was, I guess, “The Oscars used to be about the movies.”

I’ll open with two quotes from David Mamet. One is factual:

“In 1958, Hollywood turned out 2,000 films which listed in their credits 230 producers, while in 2003, Hollywood produced 240 films with 1,200 producers credited.”

The other is his opinion:

“Films, which began as carnival entertainments merchandising novelty, seem to have come full circle.:

Put the two concepts together -- very few movies are made anymore, and most of them are “carnival entertainments” – and you end up where the Oscars put us pretty much every year: with a “shooting fish in a barrel” selection of a handful of good films to which Oscars are awarded because, well, nothing else is available and they have to give them to SOMETHING.

You wrote, persuasively:

“What 'movies' has the academy stopped caring about this year by 'giving in to the critics'? What was overlooked? I might argue that Ratatouille could stand some more recognition, and The Bourne Ultimatum was a favorite of mine from the past year, but looking at the top 50 highest grossing films from the year the only films that would be considered 'Oscar' films and didn't get much recognition this year are Charlie Wilson's War (No. 39 of the top 50) and, MAYBE, Knocked Up. “

Which further makes my point: in a movie year (a movie UNIVERSE) like that, the Oscar nominees were practically preordained: the miniscule group of films left over. In this case, the ones that the critics loved. Because, as you also note:

“Simply put, there wasn't any 'best of the mainstream' film for the Academy to choose.”

Bingo! There rarely is. And if there is, its only one: Million Dollar Baby. The Departed. Oscars used to go as a matter of course to mainstream films that everybody knew, from plenty of candidates. In 2007, they won’t.

“The big blockbusters and family fare of 2007, by and large, paled in comparison to similar films from this decade, while the "art house" and "critic baiting" films of 2007 were EASILY, and nearly universally recognized as, responsible for making 2007 one of the best movie years in a long long time.”

Point taken (though I can name about 38 better movie years right off), which leads me to note that since I posted my original post, I’ve since read an article elsewhere castigating my point (hardly original) that the Oscars go to little-seen indies (note: I do NOT contend this makes the awards “elitist.” I merely contend that it means the Oscars go to movies that don’t much matter in the popular culture.)

That article notes, as I will here, that the Best Pictures of the 2000’s are hardly an indie bunch:

Gladiator

A Beautiful Mind

Chicago

Return of the King

Million Dollar Baby

Crash

The Departed.

True. But those were usually choices made to offer some solace to the studio employees that vote for them. And honestly: how many of those movies are gonna make the roll call of the great movies of the 21st Century? Lay your bets. (I say: one and one-third.)

Amidst those hits (and one megagrosser in the LOTR 1/3 movie) were all sorts of Oscar movies of the 2000s (nominated and winning) that were seen by miniscule percentages of filmgoers: Pollock, Monster, Monster’s Ball, Capote, Venus, The Last King of Scotland. Honestly. Fine all those movies may have been, but they are not part of the movie world as “The Best Years of Our Lives,” “The Sound of Music” or “The Godfather” were.

Yeah. “The Sound of Music.” So there. The highest grossing film of the sixties. Everybody knows that one. Every home had the soundtrack album.

Better: “The Best Years of Our Lives.” Everybody KNEW that one. The highest grossing movie of the 40’s. 40’s critics called it sentimental and too pat in its plot resolutions, but postwar families of Veterans (like, everybody) related to the scene of Fredric March coming home to his wife and kids, or of Harold Russell showing his fiancée how he has to get himself to bed each night with hooks in place of hands.

Gregory Peck’s performance as Atticus Finch in “To Kill a Mockingbird” reportedly set many 60’s youth onto careers as lawyers (anecdotal, though I remember reading a few interviews with lawyers who said this.)

I simply don’t think that “No Country for Old Men” (or as I call it, “Charley Varrick 2007”) or “There Will Be Blood” will ever have that kind of societal impact.

Woody Allen in the 70’s said that he hoped never to make a hit as big as “Jaws,” because he would see that as failing – reaching a mass audience that he didn’t want to engage. Art films (I don’t include Woody here) by their very nature are not intended for a wide audience.

But many great films were.

The Oscars were about the movies when everybody saw the same movies. That era is over. We’re in the age that can support “Meet the Spartans,” “Saw 4,” “Shrek,” Kate Hudson/Matt McMovies, “Semi-Pro,” “Pirates of the Carribbean” and “There Will Be Blood” without the twain ever meeting.

So we give the Oscars to the only movies that are left to give them to. The Oscar-bait. Shooting fish in a barrel..

P.S. Proof this year’s Oscars don’t matter: a dearth of posts in the Fray on the topic. Though “Juno” triggered a ton of posts a few weeks ago here. Is that a clue?

To call No Country For Old Men"Charley Varrick 2007" is a insult! To the original Charley Varrick. Everybody in Men is incredibly stupid; almost from frame one. Varrick centers around a shrewd small-time bank robber who stumbles into mob involvement; the latter film on a brain-dead deputy sheriff who steals money from the scene of a drug-related massacre and assumes that he'll somehow get away from it. The Mafia types that Varrick (Walter Matthau) tangles with are smart cookies, particularly the hit man (Joe Don Baker) most closely on his tail (compare the natty, soft-speaking, pipe-smoking Baker with Javier Bardem, who has some inflated dialog but otherwise behaves like a dim relative of The Terminator). Indeed almost everybody in Varrick is pretty smart; small town cops and DA's, secretaries, passport forgers, even the Nevada madam who offers Baker one of her unoccupied rooms seems reasonably sharp. Indeed, the only complete idiots in this story are Varrick's wife (Jacqueline Scott), who panics and starts shooting at the cops (thus seriously complicating her husband's otherwise-successful holdup), and his right-hand man (Andrew Robinson). The wife dies in the first few minutes, and Varrick is smart enough to let Baker work out some of his aggression on the loose-tongued, trigger-fingered moron . . .

The people behind the camera on Varrick were smart, too. Dean Riesner and Howard Rodman, working from a novel by John Reese, didn't kid themselves they were working on some portentous, monumental study of Good and Evil like the Coen brothers (or should it be Brothers? makes them sound more like the vaudeville act they are) and before the Cormac McCarthy seemed to think they were. They were writing a thriller, and they seemed to take professional pride in making it smart and involving (Hollywood should worry less about Art and more about Craft--the movies would be better). Similarly, Don Siegel, who directed, kept the proceedings fast and tight. And like his screenwriters, he had an appropriate sense of scale and ambition; no portentous shots of the landscape, no attempt to make the characters into metaphors or archetypes. Entertain the audience without insulting their intelligence. What a novel concept . . .

What's this "these movies don't matter to pop culture" BS? No Country was ALL OVER the multiplexes in my suburban hometown this year. TWBB's "milkshake" line was quoted on SNL. "Juno" needs no introduction. Michael Clayton had uber-star George Clooney. The Coens have been in the business for decades, not exactly mainstream but not total strangers to regular moviegoers either. And Once grossed about ten times (OK I exaggerate) it's cost. And there was strong support for box office winners like Bourne Ultimatum and Ratatouille

As far as I can tell, these final noms WERE the "prestige Hollywood pictures" of 2007.

Members of Slate Fray are, once again, blaming people other than themselves for their own incredible lack of exposure to the wider landscape of movies.

Still, I don't think cherry-picking among the most memorable popular movie fare of the past 70 years versus what was offered in the past five years is fair. It's more a decision by Academy voters to be biased toward movies preordained as important, rather than towards more popular films that don't come wearing that label months before they even enter the cineplex. As implied earlier, popular films like The Bourne Ultimatum and Ratatouille could stand among the others in the best picture category (based on rottentomatoes, Ratatouille was more critically acclaimed than ALL of the best picture nominees, and Ultimatum was received more favorably than four of them). Academy voters just don't think they're "important enough." If they nixed Atonement and Michael Clayton from the best picture list, and substituted the aforementioned films, perhaps then the Oscars would not seem so preordained and actually be "about the movies." It would also help if the voters got over their drama bias, and nominate another comedy. Both of Judd Apatow's summer films, Knocked Up and Superbad, received much box office and critical accolades, but I guess the Academy perceives them as too silly and youth-oriented (and they already threw a bone to Juno, which was not released in the summer).

First: lump516, well at least you know and I know how great Don Siegel's "Charley Varrick" is. It won Best Picture of 1973 (at the British Oscars, for an American film.) Walter Matthau won Best Actor at those British awards, for it. Still, that no critics caught the matching plot premise to "No Country" amazes me.

The great Robert Boyle saluted Don Siegel during his fine speech, btw (at age 98, sounding great and with Nicole Kidman and another babe on his arms.)

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Saturday Night Live doing "I drink your milkshake" is a chicken/egg scenario, dontcha think? SNL felt it had to do an Oscar sketch, so they spoofed a few of the nominated movies. It wasn't really in the culture.

George Clooney is a star, but a low-grossing one. Kim Masters notes that Michael Clayton has made less that it cost to promote it. "Michael Clayton" follows low-earners like "Solaris," "The Good German," even the Murrow picture. Clooney's "Leatherheads" was moved from Xmas to April while they try to rehab his career a bit. The "Ocean's" movies make money, but they have Pitt, Roberts, Damon, Pacino, etc.

DVD sales will cover profits for most Clooney films, but a straight-to-video career does not a star make. Worse: there are reports he's turning into a star who keeps some people OUT of the theater. (See: Tom Cruise.)

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Here's some nominated Best Pictures in Other Years:

1956

Around the World in 80 Days

Giant

The Ten Commandments (Paramount's biggest hit of the 50's)

The King and I

I Can't Remember

1962

Lawrence of Arabia (Hit)

To Kill A Mockingbird (Big Hit)

The Longest Day (Blockbuster)

The Music Man (Big Hit)

I can't remember

1970

Airport (Universal's biggest hit to that date)

Love Story (Blockbuster)

MASH (Very Big)

Five Easy Pieces

Patton

1973

The Sting (Blockbuster)

The Exorcist (Ditto)

American Graffiti (Biggest profit-to-cost ratio til that time)

Cries and Whispers (Bergman)

A Touch of Class (Big Hit)

1975

Cuckoo's Nest (Giant Hit)

Jaws (Biggest hit of all time to that time)

Dog Day Afternoon (Big Hit)

Nashville (Altman flop, but respected)

Barry Lyndon (Kubrick)

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And so on. Now there are some "bad movies" in there, but they certainly reflected popular taste.

2007's crop simply isn't on the same scale.

The truth is, the movies have changed irrevocably. Video games, summer blockbusters -- the market is different.

Even TV is different. Movies mattered more when TV was filled with Aaron Spelling and Quinn Martin junk. But today, TV has "The Sopranos" and "Mad Men," and "The Wire" and "Dexter" and "Lost" and "Friday Night Lights" -- the writing is comparable if not better than most movies. (Sure, some of that's pay cable, but they won't qualify "The Sopranos" for the Oscars.)