Maybe it’s just me, but it seems like Hollywood is trying
to ruin my holiday season.
As I consciously try to see all the Oscar-contending films
before the nominations so I can complain about how wrong the
Academy got it this year, Focus Features released “21
Grams” right around Thanksgiving. One of the more depressing
movies to be released this year, “21 Grams” is pretty
much the antithesis of a holiday movie. And something tells me
“The Cat in the Hat” won’t get too many
nominations.
It doesn’t get any better around Christmas. “Cold
Mountain” and “House of Sand and Fog,” both
scheduled for release on Dec. 26, are generating Oscar buzz, but
one is a Civil War epic, and one is basically a Greek tragedy. When
it comes to my post-Christmas activities, I’m guessing
I’ll be sitting on the couch with a copy of the
“Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black
Pearl” DVD.
The practice of releasing downer movies in the festive holiday
season is unfortunately not a new one. Last year, both “The
Hours” and “The Pianist” were releases on Dec.
27, and the year before “In the Bedroom” premiered
close to Thanksgiving in New York and Los Angeles on Nov. 23, and
had a limited release on Christmas Day itself. All three films
mentioned in this paragraph were nominated for Best Picture.
Is the studio secret to get a sad movie a Best Picture
nomination simply setting a release date close to a happy
holiday?
Not exactly. Because of the much written-about shortened Academy
season, studios attempt to release their potentially Oscar-worthy
movies as close to the Dec. 31 deadline as possible. Since the
movies the studios deem Oscar-worthy tend to be dramas,
there’s a bottleneck of them released during the most
wonderful time of the year. To go even further, with the recent ban
on Academy screening DVDs (to protect from Internet piracy), you
can probably expect big heavy dramas’ release dates to get
pushed back even closer to the deadline.
The situation brings out exactly what’s wrong with the
Oscar nomination system. Not that there’s a particularly good
time to release a movie like “The Pianist,” but
balanced out more evenly over the course of a year would make it
easier to watch a bunch of movies with similar depressing tones
than it is to watch them all in a few weeks. The line of thought is
that Academy voters won’t remember a film if it’s
released too early, which certainly doesn’t speak very highly
of the mental capacities of the people we allow to tell us the
single best movie of the year.
But it’s not all the Academy’s fault. Some of the
blame has to go to the studios and the public for pre-determining
which kinds of films are Oscar-worthy. We tend to put drama on such
a high pedestal that we ignore everything else. Other than
“Chicago” last year and “Shakespeare in
Love” in 1999, the last comedy to win Best Picture was
“Annie Hall” in 1978, and neither “Chicago”
nor “Annie Hall” are really full-blown comedies.
Ultimately it’s just a rotten system that doesn’t
have any remedy in sight, unless it’s all just a big form of
reverse-psychology. As I think about it and get grumpy,
“House of Sand and Fog” is ready to capitalize.
Tracer hopes Academy members think all the way back to
September and remember “Lost in Translation.” E-mail
him at jtracer@media.ucla.edu.