Beware The Pop Oscars! (Whoops, Hang On: False Alarm)

Iron Man: Will nominations for wildly popular movies transform the Oscars into something even an ordinary Joe can enjoy? Paramount Pictures

 

by Linda Holmes

A couple of days ago, the movie blog FirstShowing.net talked about whether there are too many Oscar-contending movies this year.

Not really "too many," of course -- just enough that it made sense for Paramount to bump the Jamie Foxx-Robert Downey Jr. drama The Soloist to next year, as it recently did.

Today, the New York Times weighs in with an even more alarming prospect than a crowded slate: the invasion of the Oscars by movies that a lot of people actually watched. (Say it ain't so!)

From WALL-E to The Dark Knight to ... well, to mostly those two (though apparently a long-shot Iron Man campaign is rumored), there seems to be a serious possibility that some Oscar nominations will go to summer movies that made hundreds of millions of dollars.

The danger, apparently, is that those nominations therefore won't be going to December movies that a lot of people meant to see, but never got around to because of grocery shopping, the tight economy, and the irresistible lure of Beverly Hills Chihuahua.

The Times doesn't really argue that either WALL-E, which got remarkably good reviews, or The Dark Knight, which is far more likely to snag a nomination for Heath Ledger than for the film itself, is undeserving of the honor. And yet the paper can't help sneering, "Welcome to the pop Oscars."

Oh, the horror!

Movies you may have seen stake their claim to quality, after the jump...

Rest assured, the vast majority of the Oscar nominations will go to the same kinds of movies that get them every year.

And it will be as true as it always is that far more is involved than quality. The Academy loves to reward serious movies with lots of yelling and/or weeping. It systematically ignores mainstream comedies. And the voters give extra points to any story set more than 15 years ago.

These will not be the pop Oscars. Nobody is going to nominate Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull just because it made $300 million. Nobody is going to nominate Kung Fu Panda or Sex And The City or Journey To The Center Of The Earth, nor should they.

So what's remarkable here? To the Times, apparently, the fact that studios are arguing for a handful of nominations -- for three movies that both scored with critics and bewitched ordinary viewers -- represents the transformation of the awards to something common.

In truth, the Times piece doesn't demonstrate how "pop" the Oscars are going to be this year; it demonstrates how deeply rooted the suspicion of popular entertainment has become, and how much we've regrettably learned to separate the Good Movies over here and the Popular Movies over there, and never the twain shall meet.

All this overlooks not only the existence of good popular movies, but also the cynical business that already represents Oscar campaigns. If it were really about being the best movie of the year, award hopefuls wouldn't be so heavily stacked in November and December.

Honestly: Is it really likely that your movie would be the best one of the year, but because you released it in July, people would have completely forgotten about it -- "I can't believe I forgot all about the best movie I saw all year when people asked me to nominate the best movie I saw this year!" -- by the following January?

There is nothing more inherently odd about the concept of the "pop Oscars," potentially saluting widely seen movies, than there is about the traditional "November and December Oscars." I don't think WALL-E is likely to get a Best Picture nomination, but if it does, the Oscars will survive.

By which I mean the real Oscars, which will be just as full of bluster and flash as they always are. Far more bluster and flash, I'd point out, than you'll find in Iron Man.