Oscars' best picture derby: Will there really be 'Blood'?
Yesterday "There Will Be Blood" was voted best picture by the National Society of Film Critics — after previously winning the same accolade from the Los Angeles Film Critics Association a month ago. That's great Oscar news, eh? Well, maybe.
Over the past 20 years, 6 of the 7 of the films that won both awards ended up being nominated for best picture by the academy. The one that wasn't: "American Splendor." Two overlapping choices won the Oscar for best picture ("Schindler's List," "Unforgiven"). So the odds may look good that "Blood" will be nominated, but beware: all of those overlaps that agreed with the Oscar High Five occurred prior to 2003 when the new Oscar calendar debuted. Arguably, the game is different now for late releases like "Blood," but more on that later. For now, let's look at The Envelope's own Buzzmeter tea leaves. At this exact moment, it is Sunday night, Jan. 6. Current predix were logged before NSFC results were known. Check out those predix: CLICK HERE, then click on the link for "Individual Panelist's Rankings" — make sure the drop-down menu says "Week of Dec. 30." New predix will be posted tomorrow.
Currently, only 8 of our 25 pundits put "Blood" in the top five of likely nominees: Jack Mathews (New York Daily News), Sasha Stone (AwardsDaily.com), Jeffrey Wells (Hollywood-Elsewhere.com), Bob Tourtellotte (Reuters), Dave Frear (Time Out NY), Clay Smith ("E.T."/"The Insider") and Jeff Goldsmith (Creative Screenwriting Magazine) and me. Mathews not only believes it will be nominated, but he asserts, "You can count on it!"
However, Some of our more notable Oscar seers do not list it, including Dave Karger (Entertainment Weekly), Pete Hammond (The Envelope/ Maxim), Peter Travers (Rolling Stone, Scott Bowles and Susan Wloszczyna (USA Today) and Kris Tapley and Anne Thompson (Variety.com). I suspect that some of them will change their minds when they vote tomorrow on a new Buzzmeter, but why do so many of them have such little faith in it as of today — just six days before Oscar nomination ballots are due?
Journalists tend to love the film. "Blood" gets a 90 percent "Cream of the Crop" rating from RottenTomatoes.com and 92 from MetaCritic.com. Our pundits' lack of faith probably has to do with the fact that those Oscar ballots were shipped out on Dec. 28 — that's less than two weeks after Paramount Vantage shipped "Blood" DVDs to academy members. When the DVDs finally arrived, voters still hadn't seen many pix that they were eager to watch. Did most of them really bump "Atonement" or "Juno" to devour "Blood"? I doubt it.
But "Blood" doesn't need a lot of votes to be nominated for best picture — just about 850 number-one or number-two-ranked votes out of the academy voting pool of less than 5,300 members who cast ballots.
Over at AwardsDaily.com, Sasha Stone explains why she think it'll be nominated: "It's the preferential voting, stupid . . . . It is the kind of movie you love or you hate. A lot of people love it and thus it will be a number one on a lot of ballots."
"A lot," Sasha? I don't agree with that. I know for a fact that a lot of voters haven't seen it. I've even heard reports that many refuse to watch it because of its off-putting title and grim subject matter. You'd be shocked to discover how many Oscar voters don't bother to watch key screeners every year for ridiculous reasons like that.
But I agree with Sasha that there will be "Blood" in the best-picture race. One key indication: Support for the film was so adamant at the voting session of the National Society of Film Critics on Saturday that it won best picture, director and actor on first ballots. NSFC exec director Elizabeth Weiss — who has monitored voting for decades — told Gold Derby that she believes such a romp is unprecedented.
That means we can probably expect lots of number-one votes among academy members, too.
Personally, I think it will nab enough among the fraction of academy members who've seen it. It appeals strongly to the acad's average demographic: those "steak eaters," as Harvey Weinstein calls them, or "Joe the Sound Guy," as Dave Karger of Entertainment Weekly imagines the typical voter. Sure, actors comprise the academy's largest branch, but those 1,300 people are dwarfed by all of the Joes in the various tech branches put together.
At this point, now that "Blood" seems to be on a roll with other awards, Sasha Stone is now claiming that it'll win the best-picture Oscar. Whoa! Hold your derby horses, Sasha! Yes, that can happen, but academy has only agreed with the national society X times in X years. Let's see how momentum for "Blood" suddenly drops off this Tuesday when Paul Thomas Anderson is not nominated by the Directors Guild of America.
Yes, that's right — I suspect Anderson and "Blood" will be snubbed by the guild — just like most films coming out so late this year. We saw the December pix punished at another guild's noms — SAG. That tells us we may expect to see much of the same at DGA where directors of early releases like Sean Penn ("Into the Wild") have a strong edge over Anderson, Joe Wright ("Atonement"), Tim Burton ("Sweeney Todd") and Jason Reitman ("Juno"), whose films came out so late this year.
Let's recall what happened to great late-December films like "Cold Mountain" that got snubbed by DGA after failing to adopt to the new Oscar calendar when it debuted in 2003. It lost all Oscar momentum and virtually got frozen out of the derby ahead. Back in 2003, it didn't matter that the New Yorker declared "Cold Mountain" to be better than "Gone with the Wind." After being pooh-poohed at the Oscars, it's remembered today as a flop. Only highly anticipated, late-breaking films by superstar directors like Clint Eastwood ("Letters from Iwo Jima," "Million Dollar Baby") and Steven Spielberg ("Munich") have been successful exceptions.
I agree that if There Will Be Blood doesn't get a DGA nomination, its Oscar chances are pretty grim, but that is only because I think it is almost guaranteed a nomination.
Cold Mountain is a bogus precedent. That film didn't lose out on a nomination because it was released too late, it missed the nomination because it was a terrible movie (despite what the New Yorker said, Cold Mountain was mediocre at best).
Also, I don't buy the screeners issue. Paramount Vantage has been running an extremely shrewd campaign. Paramount Vantage understands that seeing TWBB on the big screen is important to its overall impact so they have been trying to force voters to seek it out in theaters. To make up for its late release, they did a lot of advance screenings in November and December in LA and NY. It was already on everyone's minds and many people had seen it by the time it was released at the end of December. Its late release has allowed it to become the hottest thing right when the Oscar nominations are being decided.
I think it is slowly getting closer to joining No Country for Old Men as a locked nominee. I still don't see it winning, but I think a Best Picture and Best Director nomination are close to guaranteed.
Posted by: chasgoose | January 06, 2008 at 10:46 PM