There's a part of me, a mean, juvenile, unapologetically puerile part, that took absolute glee from knowing that The Dark Knight failed to land nominations for Best Picture, Director or Screenplay at the recently announced Academy Award nominations, and not because I have anything in particular against the movie itself.
No, my beef is with the legions upon legions of fanboys who infested messageboards like a loud, unstoppable plague for months before the release of TDK and were thumping their chests for months thereafter, like the asshats who posted messages like "TDKTDKTDK (add about 100 more TDKs)" and "TDK will pwn" on every update on Iron Man or some other movie of 2008, people who, as the film scooped up one accolade after another, were picking up a sickening momentum in terms of their collective cacophony. The snub at the Golden Globes, while it could have been seen as a precursor of things to come for the film, really meant little to nothing as the Globes have been somewhat widely ridiculed for years.
As patently absurd as it sounds, it struck me that, if TDK had garnered either Best Picture or Best Director nod, fanboys would have been morally convinced that they owned the world, and the entertainment industry would go to hell in a handbasket because Hollywood would agree. I mean, as it is, they already have a sense of self-importance more bloated than a drowning victim who's been floating around for about three months.
I have no idea if the Academy was thinking this and truth be told, they probably weren't, but I'm GLAD the fanboys are taking it personally; I'm GLAD that, to them, it's the Oscar folks flipping the bird right at them. The sound of their collective heart breaking as they post their spelling- and-grammar-impaired diatribes on messageboards decrying the Motion Picture Academy of Arts and Sciences is all the payback I'll ever need. Iron Man didn't get any major Oscar nods either but I couldn't give a damn; it's already performed well beyond anyone's expectations, even making it on at least ONE major critic's top ten movies of 2008 lists...a list which excluded TDK. In short, no expectations, no disappointment. I don't even expect Iron Man to win either of the technical Oscars for which it was nominated.
The more rabid TDK fans, intoxicated on the thought that for once, they were at one with the teeming masses, rode the gravy train all the way till it was abruptly derailed last Thursday.
It was funny how they loved to talk about how grosses mean nothing and yet point to TDK's b.o. as the reason why it's the greatest movie ever. It was funny how they talk about how awards mean nothing but cried like babies when TDK was snubbed in favor of The Reader, which, from all indications, is yet another meandering downer of a movie produced by the grossly overrated Weinstein brothers, Bob and Harvey.
Thing is, even though there was a part of me that took pleasure in seeing so many fanboys wailing like hungry infants, the greater part of me, to my SURPRISE, was sickened that yet again, the Academy has shown its true colors by throwing its most infamous "political figures," the Weinsteins, a bone, one that happened to be at Batman's expense. Of the five nominees, four were widely expected to make it into the race: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk and Frost/Nixon. The Reader, a film which was noted for Kate Winslet's portrayal of a Nazi, while well-regarded, was not expected to make the cut. It perhaps is not entirely coincidence that it happened to be released by the Weinstein company, the studio formed by the Weinstein brothers after Walt Disney Pictures eased them out of ownership of the studio they had founded, Miramax.
The fanboys whose pleasure gave me a rise can and actually should take solace from the knowledge that the Academy, in its history spanning over eight decades, has, time and time again betrayed its highly political nature. There have, throughout the years, been power players and I'm sure learned film historians could provide a pretty long list of them. Recently, in maybe the last four or five years, TIME's Richard Corliss, wrote about how downright ridiculous some of the awards in the last twenty years had been and I have seen a couple of lists of questionable nominations that some other writers have compiled over the years.
Of these power players, the Weinsteins are undoubtedly among the more significant of recent times.
Now, these guys have arguably done a lot for independent film, almost as much as Robert Redford did by coming up with the Sundance Film Festival. The studio they founded has enabled small filmmakers to make movies that a lot of mainstream studios wouldn't even touch. In fact, sometime in the 1990s, the Weinsteins helped make independent cinema "en vogue" at a time when studios seemed to be artistically bankrupt.
That said, the brothers, both at their time with Miramax and their new studio, the Weinstein Company, have come up with some real clunkers, some of which, absurdly enough, were able to garner Oscar nods or even wins and to my mind it's the Academy's irrational need to pander to these men that makes so many of their choices suspect, including some of the ones they made this year.
The late 1990s to early 2000s were the heyday of the Weinsteins in terms of Academy Award recognition. 1998 was a year that particularly grated on me as the moderately entertaining Shakespeare in Love achieved a shocking and widely despised upset over the sweeping war epic Saving Private Ryan. Moreover, Gwyneth Paltrow's Oscar for Best Actress left a lot of people grumbling, as did Roberto Benigni's Best Actor win for Life is Beautiful, a film in which he played...himself. The worst was yet to come, though, as 1999 and 2000 saw back-to-back nominations for Miramax that, in a word, seemed somewhat gratuitous on the part of the Academy. Lasse Halstrom's The Cider House Rules, a film based on John Irving's novel that was regarded by critics as somewhat tepid and which didn't even achieve much by way of box-office garnered Best Director and Picture nods to the dismay of many. I'd like to comment more on that but I haven't seen the film.
In 2000, though, the Academy gave quite a bit of recognition to a film I DID see and which I found distinctly underwhelming: Chocolat, AGAIN directed by Halstrom, and AGAIN distributed by Miramax. It got nominations for Best Picture, Actress and Supporting Actress, among others, and though I found it a charming little film I confess I was really left scratching my head by the Academy's choice. It was shut out when awards night rolled around, but in any event the nominations themselves were absolutely puzzling, and pretty much led me to believe that the Weinsteins somehow had the Academy by its collective balls, if that was at all possible.
Nor are the Academy's dodgy decisions limited to favoring the W brothers. Among some decisions I found somewhat risible were Kevin Spacey's Oscar for playing American Beauty's Lester Burnham, who was basically a total retread of a character he'd played in the late Ted Demme's The Ref, a movie that had come out five years earlier. There was Denzel Washington's Best Actor Oscar for Training Day, which he arguably should have gotten two years earlier for The Hurricane and which could have been an apology from the Academy for passing him over in favor of Spacey. Unfortunately, if it was an apology, it came at the expense of Russell Crowe, who deserved to be a back-to-back winner that year. Crowe had won a deserved Oscar for Gladiator but lost out on A Beautiful Mind, something I (and a couple of other people I know) feel was just...wrong.
And then, of course, there was all the brouhaha in 2005 about how Crash won the Best Picture Prize that, many believed, rightfully belonged to Brokeback Mountain. I won't even get started on that one.
It's all politics, really. It seems that the Weinsteins who are notorious for their aggressive campaigning come awards season, needed a slot and somebody had to get bumped off. In a way, it's the luck of the draw and considering TDK was primarily a summer blockbuster type of movie, it was the easiest choice to drop in favor of a "serious" film, i.e. anything from the Weinsteins that has an unhappy ending. I'm not saying there was anything as insidious as a buyout or something like that, but I am willing to bet money that the Academy's biases against certain genres and FOR certain producers, based on past history, may have played a role of one kind or another.
So TDK fans, content yourselves with your favorite movie's 8 Oscar nominations, critical acclaim and massive box-office. You may not own the world, but an Oscar Best Picture snub isn't nearly the terrible blow many of you may think it is.
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