#188 - Oscar Nominations & You

America may not have many ceremonial traditions that we engage in as a country, but the Academy Awards has cemented themselves as one of them over the last century.

Even if you haven't seen the movies, even if you think Timothee Chalemet is kind of overrated and coasting a little off the fact that his name is French and therefore activates Americans inferiority complex/assumption that Europeans are inherently more cultured than they are, even if it's horrendous they continue to happen because the industry seems to have mostly escaped unscathed from the should-be shattering results of limited internal investigations into whether the people (mostly men) (almost 100% men but supported by many women playing cover-up so they too are culpable) running the damn thing are monsters.

(The answer to my question of "What do we do if the culture is rotted?" is a resounding: nothing.)

Also Los Angeles is/was literally on fire.

One of my goals this year is to consume less media about media.

I've been going to a lot of movies lately, forming my own opinion, and have been steadily breaking the habit of immediately needing to know what other people think about things.

Part of my distaste for the current state of the Movie Industry Podcast Complex is the fact that a lot of podcasts just...morph into movie review podcasts now. Even ones that start about books and like, the literal news.

The world isn't entertaining enough and god forbid we don't litter the world with weekly Blue Apron ads (that's an outdated reference but now they all do DraftKings and it makes me so mad I want to spit).

And I say this as someone who had a movie podcast – a lot of movie podcasts are bad. (We had no ads though, indie & in it for the love of the game babeyyyy.)

I listened to an episode of three friends talk about the movie The Holiday, a movie they had all seen for the first time in order to make a podcast about it. They got basic information wrong and seemed to have tuned out half the plot and then I remembered that I'm in charge of my own life and turned it off.

But anyway the Awards Season has become much uh, sportier than I remember.

When it comes to awards season, Movie Fans do fantasy drafts, they pick movies (teams) to root for, they compare stats, and talk about people as if it's "their year to go all the way". And now that sports betting is everywhere (scary! gross! should be regulated out of existence!) there's real gambling involved for a lot of people.

I think award season is funny because Louis B. Mayer was like "I bet I can appease my stars by giving them little statues" and it worked so well it's become a defining part of the industry. Life goals.

Careers made, realized, and derailed entirely.

The Oscars are fun. Everyone is dressed up, effort gets put into the award design each year, and we get a little seven minute standup (or if Hugh Jackman is hosting, a lovely little mini-musical) (The Reader, I haven't seen The Reader) about people and then they congratulate each other on being able to make their living as artists. And everyone gets to really see how many different categories of art go into a single movie.

Sound Mixing and Sound Editing being separate categories is how I found out they're different art forms.

The thing about awards season is – I love it.

I think it's so fun that for a few months everyone gets really deep into discussing art and the point of a film and how we can evaluate performances that are achieving similar feats in entirely different genres.

And of course the acting categories are overly focused on: that's celebrity culture. That's just what happens. Those categories often have a heavier "accumulative career nod" flavor to them too so that adds intrigue. Don't get that too often elsewhere except occasionally Best Director.

(Marty won his Best Director Oscar for a movie about...Boston. Like, okay.) (I watched The Departed for the first time last week and I've been watching a lot of The West Wing and let's just say Leo and I had similar freakouts over seeing Martin Sheens body like that.)

But art is so fun to discuss! And movie culture is so modern! People used to just see movies one time and assume they'd never have the oppurtunity to see them again! Imagine the first time someone was able to rewatch Singin' In The Rain forty years after seeing it in theatres!!!! What! A! Thrill!

(The movie technically came out in 1991 on LaserDisc which would make it 39 years technically before that became possible but who had those anyway.)

The funny thing is, for all the hubbub about snubs (in both nominations and ultimate winners), it doesn't matter. The films that stand the test of time get the "can you believe this didn't win an Oscar?" badge – a far more interesting one that always leads people to discover what else came out that year and get a snapshot of the cultural discussions over the years.

What was considered provocative, the technical advancements that went unacknowledged, the staggering miscalculations that drove Crash (2006) to win Best Picture.

Nominations can be seen as growing acknowledgement of a genre. Marisa Tomei winning for My Cousin Vinny was a comedy first and broke the brains of people who thought that tearful performances were always going to be valued above all.

My least favorite trend in modern films is when an actor is lauded for a a scene in which their character is auditioning. There's no pathos I'm just watching Emma Stone's character cry in a blank room now. Cool. Good to know Emma Stone could bring emotion to this movie if any scene had decided to include any human emotion in it whatsoever.

The awards don't exist as a definitive marker of history, they provide context for the conversation we're going to have. "Oscar Bait" wasn't common parlance a few years ago, but then came the comedians doing parody bits that called out certain preferences and well–Kate Winslet made fun of herself years before wining her first award.

(The Reader, I need to see The Reader. I even went down to the theater but there was a line, of all the people watching Iron Man a second time.)

It's art! It's supposed to be fun! It's all made up but isn't it so fun that what we've all agreed to make up are ceremonies where colleagues gather in great gowns/beautiful gowns and congratulate each other on a job well done.

It's honestly very sweet and fun and I think the competition part feels less relevant than ever before because the nomination is what advances the career more than the statue. It really is an honor to be nominated – you can take it straight to the bank.

Or, at the very least, the next contract negotiation.