On 1.23.07, or 15 and 1/4 years ago, the 2006 Oscar nominations hit like an impact grenade. Many blogaroos went into shock; almost everyone in the award-season loop was speechless. For on that darkly historic morning, Bill Condon‘s Dreamgirls — one of the most heavily hyped Best Picture contenders of all time — failed to be Best Picture-nominated, and it was like “Casey at the Bat” times ten. It gathered eight Oscar nominations but not for Best Picture.
And So A Question: That was then, this is now. Sometimes time and fresh perspectives can shed new light upon a film’s reputation. Who in the HE community has recently re-watched Dreamgirls…okay, within the last five years, say — and how does it play?
Here’s how I put it minutes after the announcement: “Dreamgirls, the musical that many, many people (David Poland included) had predicted would win the Oscar for Best Picture, hasn’t even been nominated for Best Picture….double, no, triple-strength shocker!…an omission that will live in the annals of Oscar nomination history.”
“The clouds hanging over the Dreamgirls camp right now are extremely dark and Cecil B. DeMille-y. For what it’s worth, my sincere condolences to Bill Condon, Larry Mark, Terry Press, Nancy Kirkpatrick, David Geffen and the gang. I never hated Dreamgirls or rooted for its demise. While we all knew it couldn’t win the Best Picture Oscar, I honestly thought it would at least be nominated.”
I was in Park City that morning, staying at Carol Rixey‘s Star Hotel (this was two years before the infamous cowboy-hat incident).
If anyone in the community was thrown for a loop it was Poland, one of Dreamgirls‘ most impassioned and tireless allies for months on end: “For those of you desperate for me to say ‘I was wrong’, I was wrong,” Poland wrote. “If you think [this is] a big deal for me, you have missed my reality completely.”
I was also deeply disturbed that Alfonso Cuaron‘s Children of Men, my personal hands-down choice for the year’s finest film, was also blown off in terms of a Best Picture nomination. Easily one of greatest films of the 21st Century (and featuring three of the most innovative action sequences in movie history), and not even nominated.
Condon didn’t get nominated for a Best Director Oscar, and yet United 93, arguably the most gripping and skillfully made disaster film ever, resulted in Paul Greengrass snagging a nom in that category.
There were only five Best Picture nominees that year — The Departed (brilliant), Babel (sad, meditative, cosmic, heartbreaking), Letters from Iwo Jima (hasn’t aged well), The Queen (ditto) and Little Miss Sunshiner (a near-perfect family comedy).
Posted on 2.20.07: “The defeat of Dreamgirls was a thunderclap moment along the lines of Roman Polanski winning the Best Director Oscar for The Pianist.
It was the Academy members saying en masse, “You guys can hype Dreamgirls all you want but we don’t really like it that much. It was diverting and energetic, of course, but not good enough for the Oscar big-time…the third act was weak, Beyonce‘s character amounted to almost nothing, that moment with Jamie Foxx looking at Jennifer Hudson‘s kid at the very end — throw it all together and the ticker tape read, ‘Not bad, pretty good but no cigar.'”
HE’s top seven 2006 films, in this order: Children of Men, United 93, The Departed, The Lives of Others, Volver, Little Miss Sunshine, Babel.