The Great Oscar Panic Of 2009

by Linda Holmes

We're getting into the swing of Oscar season here, so look for coverage to continue this week. On Saturday, I will be sacrificing my posture and possibly my sanity to perform selfless acts of live Twittering from the all-day, multi-hour, good-for-your-soul AMC Theaters Best Picture Showcase, and on Oscar night, we'll be having live commentary on the show, which we'll discuss in more detail very soon.

Generally speaking, Oscar night is a frothy cocktail of pretty dresses and teary speeches, and it's unusual for the occasion to feel quite as fraught with tension as it does this year.

First, you have the pressure created by the failure to nominate The Dark Knight for major awards outside of Heath Ledger's Best Supporting Actor nomination. There was immediate disdain for that decision, particularly in combination with the failure to nominate WALL*E, another very popular movie that was very well reviewed and also didn't snag a Best Picture nomination.

More generally, the five films that were nominated for Best Picture had, as of the beginning of this week, grossed a little less than $275 million between them. While that's a large amount of money for a randomly selected group of five films, it's not a lot for a crop of five Best Picture nominees, and as Variety points out, it's in the neighborhood of $40 million less than last year, which already wasn't about nominating blockbusters.

Not only that, but the movies that did get nominations didn't get as much of a post-nomination boost as might have been expected, with the exception of Slumdog Millionaire, word-of-mouth about which had already boomed before the nominations came out. So on top of the fact that smaller films were nominated, it doesn't even seem to have done those small films very much good.

Furthermore, it's my sense that not only are people not excited about the Oscar nominees because they haven't made a lot of money; they're not excited about them because with at least a couple of them, even many people who have seen them don't think they're all that good and will tell you so.

Does seeing Benjamin Button mean you care whether it wins awards? After the jump...

The Curious Case Of Benjamin Button, to name the most obvious one, is a movie about which many eyes have been rolled and many teeth ground. It's too long by literally an hour, it's dull, it's a retread of many other movies (of which Forrest Gump is only one), and the "aging backwards" conceit -- along with everything they try to milk out of it -- falls apart very quickly under any kind of scrutiny. This one has the biggest box office. This is the one the most potential Oscar viewers have seen. But do they care about it enough to follow its awards fortunes?

Similarly, I have yet to hear a single ordinary human being rave about Frost/Nixon. It seems to have arrived, been praised, passed by, and become a Best Picture nominee without making an impression on anyone but critics. As for The Reader, I know almost no non-critics who have even seen it.

These things are, of course, always influenced by the circles you travel in, but in my own experience, the excitement this year among people who don't see exclusively big movies was about Rachel Getting Married and The Wrestler. Both got acting nominations, but both were snubbed not only for Best Picture, but for their directors and screenplays. So even among non-blockbusters, they've skipped the most interesting ones, such that even people who see "arty" movies will find their favorites missing.

Believe it or not, there's even more working against the Academy when it comes to drumming up interest in the telecast. There might have been a Bruce Springsteen performance to look forward to -- you remember that guy; he got a little bit of attention for performing during the halftime show of that one football game a few weeks ago? -- if his marvelous song from The Wrestler had been nominated, as just about everyone expected. It wasn't.

And wait -- don't forget the crushing recession! Not everyone feels like coming home from another day of worrying about whether there's still going to be a job when they get to work the next day and watching a bunch of rich people congratulate each other on how awesome they are.

Efforts to drum up viewer interest in the show are verging on the ridiculous. The Academy is refusing to say who will present awards in order to preserve suspense, which is, if you think about it, extremely strange. It isn't a wildly unpredictable show; awards will be presented by famous Hollywood people from a closed list. Concealing names carries the implication that if they tell you who the presenters are, you won't care enough to watch, but if they don't tell you, then you might tune in hoping to see different people who aren't actually going to be there, and by the time you are disappointed in their actual list, you will have already watched, HA HA HA, they win!

Even stranger is a reported request that presenters not walk the red carpet for the pre-awards coverage that's become traditional on outlets like E!, where they're asked what designer they're wearing and so forth. The idea, presumably, is that if viewers can't see what, say, Angelina Jolie is wearing ahead of time, they'll watch the show to see.

This? This seems absurd. People who are invested enough in the Oscars to sit through red-carpet shows, which are stuffed with filler and nonsense, are going to watch the Oscars. Whatever is wrong with ratings (which were low last year), it's not that people are watching the pre-show and then not the regular show.

More generally, the veil of secrecy that has been draped around the show is ill-advised. The Grammys recently got strong ratings after heavily publicizing exactly who was showing up. Predictability is the one thing awards shows have in common. If you tell people an awards show will be a crazy ride, they won't believe you, nor should they.

So we all will have to see what happens on Sunday. Maybe the Academy will be proved right and everyone will tune in to see what craziness they've got planned. Maybe it doesn't matter how popular the movies you nominate are. Maybe the controversy itself -- the very sense of doom currently in the air -- will get people to tune in to see whether the show falls apart. One thing is certain, however: my favorite movie of 2008 will go home nearly empty-handed, which is a matter for another day -- specifically, tomorrow.