Neil Calloway looks at why a certain type of movie will always get the nod at the Oscars…
This coming Tuesday sees the announcement of this year’s Oscar nominations. We’ve already had the Golden Globes, and if you really care about that sort of thing, the Baftas are next month. We’re deep into awards season, and you can probably tell which will win big at the Academy Awards this year. It’s the same sort of film that always does.
You know The Post and Darkest Hour are going to do well with nominations, and The Last Jedi – despite raking in more than a small country does in a year – won’t get any apart from a few technical nods. The Oscars like big, important films about big, important issues, starring big important, actors and directed by big, important directors. I haven’t seen The Post yet but you just know it’s A Big, Important Film.
Big, Important Films usually deal with real issues – as in the case with The Post, Darkest Hour and countless other films that have been laden with awards (Spotlight springs to mind as a film in the same vein as The Post – John Slattery’s character in that film is the son of Tom Hanks’s in The Post, a character previously played by Jason Robards in All The Presidents Men, which won two Oscars).
All The Money In The World is another film that will do well this award season; again, based on real events and directed by a big, important director, and originally starring a big, important actor, but then came Kevin Spacey’s downfall, and he was replaced by Christopher Plummer. When I see a poster for the film that crows about Plummer’s Golden Globe nomination, I want to scream “but you didn’t want him in the film!”. One of the main reasons Spacey was so swiftly replaced in the film was so it would qualify for Oscar nominations.
It’s not always the case that Big, Important Films about real issues do well with awards. Truth, the 2015 film about the exposure and fallout of a scandal about George W Bush’s time in the National Guard, starred Cate Blanchett and Robert Redford, but it all but sank without a trace, garnering no major awards nominations. This might be because the film was very average, but maybe because the history it dealt with was too recent – Spotlight gets away with covering recent history because its target is the church, rather than divisive party politics. The Post and Darkest Hour are both set far enough in the past that they transcend left/right politics.
Until Marvel makes a movie about Watergate, or Disney produce a Star Wars film that deals with Iran-Contra, they’re going to miss out on the big awards.
Neil Calloway is a pub quiz extraordinaire and Top Gun obsessive. Check back here every Sunday for future instalments.
