March 9, 2006

Reverse Overanalysis III (Parts I & II)

So much has been written on the Crash Oscar win already, by me and many, many others, that I will try to be brief.

We all live with the illusion of control. The more developed the structure, the more complex the illusion.

Journalists have become a part of the Oscar season in a lot of odd ways. Critics, feature writers, and columnists each speak to various forms of influence. But we all suffer from the urge to be "right," just as our readers suffer from wanting us to be "right."

Can a group like LAFCA be right about Phillip Seymour Hoffman and wrong about Vera Farmiga? Or is there any right or wrong involved? For that group of critics, the choices were absolutely right. For the NYFCC, their answers are right. Etcetera, etcetera.

But the notion of small samplings being reliable precursors has been a statistical game for a long while. It is an illusion designed to make us all feel a little more in control. And there is a real logic to it. Not because it makes sense in and of itself, but because these precursors influence both future precursors and the media as the season comes into focus.

It is not unlike a sports season… except that in a sports season, the game is played on a field with real head-to-head results. In the Oscar race, we pretend that there are real competitions. The truth is, there are a series of historic indicators that do have value as a basis for guessing. And as the season progresses, there are a series of qualifiers and disqualifiers that turn up. Almost none of them have any direct relationship with how any of us individually feel about any of these films.

For me, personally, Brokeback Mountain is superior to Crash… but Good Night, And Good Luck, Capote, and Munich are superior to both. And The Constant Gardener is superior to all five. And none of this matters to anyone but me.

Neither Crash nor Capote nor Munich was nominated for a Golden Globe for Best Picture. Those 88 people in the HFPA missed 3 out of 5 Oscar nominees all together. With multiple opportunities in Picture, Actor and Actress, the group managed to get 6 of 8 eventual Oscar winners… and not a person in America did worse than that in their home pool on Oscar night. So how seriously should the Golden Globes be taken in future?

Well how seriously should they have been taken in the past? Every year, journalists wrote story after story about what a joke the group is… and they proceed to covering the Globes like it is the one true Oscar precursor.

But they are doing better than the Independent Spirit Awards, which have become the Saturday Awards For People Who Will Lose On Sunday Awards. Yet, each year the Indie Spirits nominations move earlier and earlier, appearing from the outside to be desperate to appear to be a significant indicator of what is going to happen at the Oscars.

What about gambling oddsmakers setting the odds for the Oscars? It is a complete misunderstanding of how betting odds are made. The goal is not to be accurate about the outcome. The goal is to set odds that will keep betting balanced among all the competitors. It's not that some guy in Las Vegas thinks that the New England Patriots are going to beat the Buffalo Bills by 6 points… it's that if that is the spread an equal number of people will bet on The Patriots minus 6 and The Bill plus six. And all oddsmakers have to base their guessing on in the case of awards is what they read in the newspapers. So the odds are a very good reflection of what the press thinks… but it has NOTHING to do with actual Academy voting.

Guild Awards have a more direct connection to the Academy. But still, they are a small sampling and the influencers surrounding each guild - for instance, membership in each guild - are different than they are, in the end, for the Oscars.

And around all of these events, the press feeds and foments, defining and redefining the "reality" of the season endlessly. And never more than this year, as literally dozens of personalities emerged as "experts" as every media outlet in the world seemed to decide that they wanted a piece of the action in the entertainment Super Bowl.

The media drumbeat for Brokeback Mountain started in September and never really stopped. Along the way, Good Night, And Good Luck got picked up. And through the season, no chance to offer these movies a boost was missed.

And critics groups learned an odd lesson after anointing Sideways to be Oscar worthy last year. United we reign… divided we don't much matter. This is not to say that there wasn't a sincere love for Brokeback Mountain in the critical community. But BBM's leadership with critics was not so overwhelming that it suggested such unanimity. Yet, there it was.

(Sidenote: Brokeback Mountain could not have been Indie Spirited nominated under last year's rules… the only Best Picture nominee that needed the change to qualify.)

The media's speculative period of pre-October has to be forgiven. But if you read the press as the season went along, every minor tremor was put through the grinder and pronouncements were made. The one pronouncement that was made without reserve was the success, the importance, and the inevitability of Brokeback Mountain.

And the result, in a loss that isn't really all that shocking, is essentially, "But you said…!!!!" And that is completely understandable. Because we did "say." We "said" over and over and over again. We raised every good moment to a great moment. We attacked other films. And we sold the importance of the award season because it was important to our ability to draw an audience.

Rachel Weisz emerged as the press friendly contender, supplanting the unavailable Michelle Williams. Phillip Seymour Hoffman kept winning awards and pushed the unavailable Heath Ledger aside. Reese Witherspoon survived her unavailability by being a movie star and facing only the well-liked but still TV-based Felicity Huffman. And the charms of Terrence Howard, Amy Adams, and George Clooney paid large dividends.

Ang Lee never had much competition because Paul Haggis' work on Crash was seen as the work of a writer first and then a director while the works of Clooney and Miller was seen as "small," while Spielberg was written off in an early December flame.

Notice how none of this is primarily about the work?

But in the end, when many were terribly disappointed by what had been presented as an inevitability for such a long time, the Reverse Overanalysis sought different, less procedural answers. And with due respect to the fact that there are homophobes in the Academy and in any other large group (including, dare I say it, GLAAD), the answers are in process and not in The Magic Of The Oscars.

The reason that you cannot actually bet on the Oscars in Las Vegas - even as some bookmakers try to draw attention to themselves by publishing odds, which is only slightly less whorish than a Perfect Ten model boxing with your company tattoo sprayed on her décolletage - is that the awards do not involve chance. Yes, a sporting event can be fixed. But the reason that is such a big issue is that if they were to be fixed on a regular basis and anyone knew, Vegas sportsbooks would have to shut down.

I am not saying that the Oscars are fixed. I am not even saying that the Golden Globes have been fixed in recent years. What I am saying is that the Globes could be fixed. And the nominations, in particular, are completely susceptible to whim.

No serious Oscar watcher I know disagrees that if Steven Spielberg had left his home and shown up for the screening of Munich for the HFPA that the film would have had a Best Picture/Drama nomination. But my question for you, dear reader, is not whether the HFPA sucks, but rather, would that nomination mean anything of substance? And if your answer is, "no," then how can the lack of that nomination be of substance?

The answer I will expect to hear is "history." But as is clear to anyone who studies any history, things change. And things change in a hurry.

And so much for brevity. Looking back, there was no way to get into this in short order. After all, the asides about the HFPA and the bookmakers and LAFCA… all necessary;

Oh.

Yeah. All a choice.

It might have been easier to simply punch holes in the "Academy homophobia" argument by asking whether people really think that Ang Lee won because he is married or to wonder aloud about Diana Ossana's sexuality or to try to rationalize Phil Hoffman winning for Capote, etc, etc, etc. But that too would be reactive.

It just isn't that easy.

EMe.