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JackRiddler wrote:Well we've gotten to what I thought the subject was when I first clicked on this thread.

Oh hell yeah. It's about politics, buzz, trends and market success as the Academy's downright embarrassing list of the greatest movies ever makes obvious - not that there aren't a few really good ones on it:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academy_Aw ... st_Picture

Cordelia wrote:What medium is more powerful, or manipulative, than film?

Cordelia wrote:I just remembered 'The Player', Robert Altman's 1992 dark comedy about the 'real Hollywood'. As a satire, it exposed and mocked the way films are made--it's been years since I saw it, but maybe it wasn't so outlandish after all. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dwnhRRRQtaI

JackRiddler wrote: The closing scene has the remainder of the victorious US platoon mopping up, marching with rifles still at the ready and singing the Disney Mouseketeers song. At the call of "Mickey Mouse," the response is not a defiant "Donald Duck" as in the orignal lyrics, but a repeated "Mickey Mouse!" Kubrick leaves no doubt about which side of the "American soul" he thinks came out on top.

<snip> With their track record of fuck-uppery, you'd think Hollywood would take the Oscars with a grain of salt. When the barometer for artistic success in your industry doesn't even really care if you're all that good at what you do, then why should you? If you took such an innocent attitude into an Oscar race against the Weinsteins, you'd wake up the morning of the Oscars wearing a necklace made from the teeth of the Chinese dignitary whose murder they'd framed you for.

Throughout the 90s, Miramax's entire business plan was built around creating films specifically tailored to the Academy's delicate sensibilities, banking on the added exposure a win would bring. This plan was put to the test in 1998, when Miramax's Shakespeare in Love was nominated alongside Saving Private Ryan, which spent the summer making every war film that had ever won an Oscar look like a high school play. It was a foregone conclusion Saving Private Ryan would win. And then the campaign started.

The month leading up to the Academy Awards are like an especially petty high school election, if high school students had access to the money cannon that made Transformers 2 possible. According to the Sydney Morning Herald, "Miramax spent an estimated $16 million (about $2,700 for each academy member) on its Shakespeare (in Love) campaign." Miramax also leaned on journalists to criticize Private Ryan for being historically inaccurate, a ballsy maneuver when you consider that Ryan's storming of Normandy made veterans of that battle shit their theater seats, and Miramax's film turned Shakespeare's creative process into a gender bending romantic comedy.

Didn't matter. On the night of the Awards, Shakespeare in Love shocked everyone by winning Best Picture award out from under the Citizen Kane of modern war films.

Which brings us to the Citizen Kane of all films: Citizen Kane. Anyone who cares a little too much about movies swears Orson Wells's 1942 film is the best thing ever projected onto a silver screen. And it's not like people didn't realize it at the time: It was nominated for nine Academy Awards, and was widely expected to win most if not all of them. Then William Randolph Hearst, the publishing giant whose life Kane is loosely based on, started a smear campaign that focused on director Orson Wells's contempt for Hollywood. On the night of the Awards, the audience of Academy members actually booed every time Wells's name was mentioned. The most influential film of all time lost Best Picture to How Green Was My Valley, a film that archeological records indicate nobody gave a shit about even then.

The passage of time reveals a movie's true quality, not the number of gold statues it won. Citizen Kane didn't win the Best Picture, neither did Raging Bull, or Dr. Strangelove, or Rear Window or Star Wars. Keep that in mind while you're watching the circus, and you'll have a better time all around.

vince wrote:Didn't "Taxi To The Dark Side" win an oscar?

Nordic wrote:Well there ya go. "Hurt Locker" it is.

Haven't seen it, so I can't really say much about it.

But Bigelow's acceptance speech wasn't exactly .... uh ...... revealing of any anti-war sentiments on her part. "I'd like to thank all our men and women in uniform" or whatever.

Why? For being suckers? For being victims? For being gangsters for capitalism?

Or for giving her the subject matter for her career-rocketing film?