Why do Oscar voters prefer real-life roles?
Oscar voters have lots of strange biases. They love dreary costume epics, laugh off comedies. But nothing's more peculiar than their passion for films based upon real people and events.
After all, voters work in a make-believe biz. They create movie fantasies for a living and their most successful films are usually ones that are the most fantastic. Consider the top 10 movies of last year -- "Star Wars: Episode III," "The Chronicles of Narnia," "Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire," etc. None of them were based on real life. When it comes to actual moviegoers, wizards, talking lions and space aliens get their vote at the box office.
So why is it that, when it comes to declaring the best films of a given year at the Oscars, academy members frequently pooh-pooh their most successful work in favor of little movies about an Australian pianist ("Shine") or a prostitute-turned-serial killer ("Monster")? Continue reading my feature article — CLICK HERE!
Photos: Charlize Theron in her Oscar-winning role in "Monster" (left) and Oscar-nominated role in "North Country" (right). Both were based upon real-life women. In "Monster," the Hollywood beauty radically de-glammed herself.
(Newmarket/ Warner Bros.)
It’s strange to see someone say that the events in “The Queen” are a “discovery” for viewers and that that’s the appeal. One reason I haven’t run out to see “The Queen” is that there doesn’t seem to be anything to discover at all. The historical events are all to vivid for me. We all remember the demands that the queen “Speak!” after Diana’s death, and the pundit chatter about Tradition versus Oprah -fication, and all that. It hasn’t even been ten years yet. If kids need to learn this history, a TV documentary piecing together old news footage would cover the same ground, without the invasiveness of a major motion picture and its campaigning actors and Oscar hype. None of this is to knock Mirren or Frears or Sheen or anyone else. But there seems to be a sort of ... callous hipness to turning the gossip surrounding a real-life tragedy into grist for a seemingly unnecessary motion picture, while many of the parties concerned are probably still recovering from it all.
Posted by: raeann | November 30, 2006 at 11:52 PM