The Golden Globes and SAG-influenced shifting of favorites in the latest Gurus of Gold posting is nothing short of pathetic. David Poland himself tweeted that he is “stunned, though not really surprised, how much weight my esteemed fellow Gurus give SAG and GG noms in guessing Oscar noms.”
It’s a given, I think, that the mushy-minded Academy won’t support anything nervy or ballsy or envelope-pushy, like American Hustle, or some piece of jolting social criticism like 12 Years A Slave or The Wolf of Wall Street. It’ll be Banks or Gravity or…you tell me. I hate myself for having just written that. I just gave a slight assist to the bad guys!
I wrote the following on 8.24.11: “Every year I ask what could be more worthless or contemptible in the eyes of any fim lover with the slightest trickle of blood in his or her veins than a group of online journos saying, ‘What we might personally think or feel about the year’s finest films is not our charge. We are here to read and evaluate the feelings and judgments of that crowd of people standing around in that other room…see them? Those older, nice-looking, well-dressed ones standing around and sipping wine and munching on tomato-and mozzarella bruschetta? Watching them is what we do. We sniff around, sense the mood, follow their lead, and totally pivot on their every word or derisive snort or burst of applause at Academy screenings.’
“If I could clap my hands three times and banish the concept of Gurus of Gold and Gold Derby Oscarologists from the minds of my online colleagues and competitors, I would clap my hands three times. (Even though I love Tom O’Neil and am a regular Gold Derby contributor.) For it is the task of Movie Catholics (which includes all monks and priests and followers of the faith) to stand up and lead at all costs.
“And I mean especially if these temperature-gauging, tea-leaf readings contribute to a snowball mentality or growing assumption that a certain Best Picture contender has the heat.”
Back to the present: It’s Thursday, 12.12.13, and I’m wondering how the Gurus feel about having pushed along the sense of inevitability about The King’s Speech, The Artist and Argo? Good? Proud?
The Academy had a reasonable, fair-minded history in their Best Picture preferences from the mid aughts to ’10 but then ldid an about-face in ’11 and, in a startling cave-in to British kowtowing and comforting gutty-wut sentiment, gave the Oscar to an admirable-but-far-from-good-enough contender. And then The Artist won the following year. And then along came Argo. Capitulations of this sort must never happen again. But of course, they will. They are.
