The Oscars — both the nominations and the actual awards — are inevitably an occasion for howls of protest that threaten to drown out the triumphs. How could they leave out Christopher Nolan for directing Inception? What about Ryan Gosling, who gave the performance of the year — well, alongside Javier Bardem in Buitiful, maybe — in Blue Valentine? Or Paul Giamatti, the Oscar's perennial also-ran, who won a Golden Globe for Barney's Version but gets nothing but air from the Academy Awards?
When people are complaining about who didn't get into the golden circle, rather than who did, you know that Oscar got most of it right. There weren't any embarrassing nominations, keeping in mind that one man's embarrassing nomination — Sandra Bullock for The Blind Side? — is another man's Oscar-winner.
And it's hard to think of whom you'd omit from the best actor category, for instance, to make room for Gosling, or Giamatti, for that matter. It would have been good for Mila Kunis to have been nominated for her supporting performance in Black Swan, but it's great that the academy reached out to the little-known Australian actress Jacki Weaver for Animal Kingdom.
Such indie names — including Blue Valentine's Michelle Williams, John Hawkes and Jennifer Lawrence from Winter's Bone, and Winter's Bone itself — are sprinkled throughout the Oscar nomination list. It's no longer a collection of movie stars, but a more interesting roster of familiar names and worthy newcomers.
When the academy expanded the best picture category to 10 movies, some critics thought it would dilute the honour of being nominated — there goes the neighbourhood — and suddenly everyone and his uncle was going to be able to put "Academy Award Nominee" in the movie ads. But it has opened up the category to smaller films, such as The Kids Are All Right and Winter's Bone, that deserve the added attention. They're among the Top 10 movies of the year, so why not salute them in some official way?
Blue Valentine would have been another worthy choice, and there would have been room for it, too, if Toy Story 3 hadn't been among the nominees. It's a wonderful picture — another of the year's best — and it provided one of the most moving moments in its final valedictory to childhood. But the academy should change its rule so that animated movies, which have their own category, can't be nominated in both. The producers of Toy Story 3 should have to decide whether they want their movie to be a nominee for best picture, where its chances of winning are slim, or the Oscar-winner for best animated movie, where it's the front-runner.
If they went for best picture, it would have opened a spot for Despicable Me or Megamind, two fine animated movies that were left off this year's list. If they stayed in the animated category, Blue Valentine might have made it.
That's one change I would like to see in the Oscar nomination process. Here's another.
In 1996, the jury at the Cannes Film Festival created a special award for "audacity" to honour David Cronenberg's strange and violent sexual fantasy, Crash. It was an award made on the run, because Crash didn't fit into any of the other categories at Cannes. It still doesn't, in fact.
At the time, I remember thinking that it's too bad the Academy Award people hadn't thought of that 10 years earlier, for David Lynch's strange and violent sexual fantasy, Blue Velvet. It was a riveting experience, certainly the best movie I saw that year, but it was snubbed by the Oscars (except for Lynch's direction). The Oscar that year went to Platoon.
I still think it's an idea worth considering. The Oscars have a far more formal, bureaucratic system than the hit-and-run mischief of a Cannes jury of a dozen people meeting for a couple of weeks. But there's no reason the academy couldn't build in provisions for the occasional special Oscar, something unannounced that could constitute an Oscar-night surprise. This year, for instance, a small jury of filmmakers within the academy could meet and decide that perhaps Gosling's performance — his immersion in the role of a desperate husband who just doesn't know how to make his wife happy — should get something. The ukulele scene alone is worth some kind of parallel Oscar, an acknowledgment that film acting has been advanced a little bit by what he was doing. Or maybe Nolan could get an award for the boldness of his imagination. Or one of a dozen other smaller movies could move from the cozy precincts of independent movie awards to get some of the big-league brass of Oscar.
