Cinema Hype

As I work my way through the annals of good movies and movies that seemed good at the time, I’ve been thinking a lot about the Oscar for Best Picture. It can be a confusing category, especially viewed over time. There are patterns, certainly (so many war movies!), and then there are winners that buck the trends completely. Sometimes it’s hard to see where the Oscar voters are coming from. Not to get all philosophical, but what is “best,” exactly?

For many years, my writer-geek mind has aligned “best picture” with “best screenplay.” Because what is the backbone of a film if it isn’t story, character, and dialogue? It seems to me that an exceptional script should result in an exceptional film regardless of whose hands it ends up in.

But maybe, I’m thinking, the Best Picture Oscar is an award for execution rather than theory, and for collaboration rather than specialization: who made the best combination of script, director, cast, and equipment? This is why Best Picture winners tend to be on the epic side: Oscar voters are about aiming high and pulling things off, about wide-angle rather than extreme close-up. It’s also why, to pull an example from this year’s nominees, Juno never really stood a chance in the Best Picture race. Juno was well-written and well-acted, but it was so much less complex, production-wise, than any of the other nominees that it didn’t really deserve to win. (Excellent screenplays for the other nominees didn’t help, either.)

I think this law-of-averages tendency makes a certain amount of sense—there’s something to be said for achieving ambitious goals, after all, and sometimes everything really does come together—but I also think it accounts for the number of head-scratchers on the past-winners list. After all, special effects age quickly. Acting styles go in and out of fashion (see: Clark Gable, shoutiness, Mutiny on the Bounty). Without any particular area of excellence, sometimes it’s hard to see what, exactly, seemed like such a good idea at the time. We end up honoring movies that are good, that sometimes speak to the times, but the great is the enemy of the good, and maybe a little more specialization wouldn’t have been such a bad thing. On the other hand, maybe that’s why we have categories for screenplays, acting, directing, and cinematography, and maybe the combination really is better than the sum of its parts.

I’m just saying: I think I get it now.

Oscars, Project 501, Academy Awards, Oscar winners, Mutiny on the Bounty, Clark Gable, Best Picture, Juno