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Academy Awards Often Predictable, but Surprises Remain - New York Times

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Awards Season |Academy Awards Often Predictable, but Surprises Remain



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Awards Season


Academy Awards Often Predictable, but Surprises Remain





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The Sweet Spot: Here Come the Oscars


In advance of the Academy Awards on Sunday, David Carr and A. O. Scott discuss some of their favorite picks and some of the movies they loved that were not nominated.










LOS ANGELES — With its high-gloss party rites and cheery suspension of disbelief — it’s all about the movies; we’re thrilled just to be here; honest, the heels don’t pinch — the 86th Oscar night finally arrived as welcome relief from a marathon awards season that whipsawed contenders through highs, lows and some unusually mean hairpin turns.


In contrast to the rainstorms that pounded Los Angeles on Friday and Saturday, early signs pointed toward a relatively calm, less abrasive sort of Oscar show. Ellen DeGeneres, returning to host after a year in which the deliberately outrageous Seth MacFarlane alienated many viewers, promised a “classy” ceremony this time around. No word on length, although her 2007 show, at 3 hours and 51 minutes, was the longest of the last 12 years.


Neil Meron and Craig Zadan, who produced last year’s show, have promised another musical mishmash this year. They arranged for U2 to perform its Oscar-nominated song, “Ordinary Love,” from the Nelson Mandela biopic. Pink, known for singing while twirling on a trapeze, will appear in “a highly anticipated moment,” the producers said in a news release. They also lined up some events — a Bette Midler number, a Liza Minnelli-led reunion of Judy Garland’s children — that seem oddly irrelevant.




An Oscar statue being prepared on the red carpet. Noel West for The New York Times

The show’s promised theme of movie heroes past and present also seems weirdly inapt for a year when the most talked-about pictures focused on victims, like Chiwetel Ejiofor’s Solomon Northup in “12 Years a Slave,” or scoundrels, like Christian Bale’s Irving Rosenfeld in “American Hustle.”


As viewed by Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences insiders, one hero will be missing on Sunday night: Thomas M. Sherak, a recent president of the group, who oversaw its surge to a new prominence with a planned movie museum, died in late January. His passing sent a shudder through the institution. It also led to the usual speculation about pre-Oscar deaths: Will Mr. Sherak, and Philip Seymour Hoffman and Harold Ramis, who both died in February, make the show’s carefully watched obituary sequence?



Mindful of attracting young eyeballs — the number of adults 18 to 34 years old who tuned in last year increased 20 percent compared with the prior year — Mr. Meron and Mr. Zadan have made sure to sprinkle the stage with eye-candy presenters, recruiting the likes of Zac Efron, Emma Watson, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Kate Hudson and Channing Tatum. Also opening envelopes will be more seasoned stars like Brad Pitt, Robert De Niro, Daniel Day-Lewis and Penélope Cruz.


By the time the Academy gets around to presenting its little gold men, Hollywood knows 90 percent of the outcome. This time around, Matthew McConaughey seems all but a lock for best actor after a string of wins at less prestigious ceremonies and nonstop campaigning. (Did you hear? He lost more than 40 pounds for his “Dallas Buyers Club” AIDS patient.) Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine” is the pundits’ No. 1 choice for best actress.


Alfonso Cuarón’s “Gravity” seems poised to dominate the technical categories, while Mr. Cuarón is the favorite to take home the best director prize.


But unlike many recent years, there has been real drama over which film would win best picture. “12 Years a Slave,” “Gravity” and “American Hustle” are all viewed as conceivable winners — in that order. The best documentary race is also a tossup, while Jennifer Lawrence of “American Hustle” and Lupita Nyong’o of “12 Years a Slave” seem to have equal chances at taking best supporting actress.


On Saturday, Ms. Nyong’o scored a win at the Independent Spirit Awards, where “12 Years a Slave” was named best feature film and picked up five prizes. But as the Oscars approached, Hollywood’s publicists were still cleaning up messes, and planting messages meant to keep their wobbling clients on track.



The team behind “Blue Jasmine,” a best picture nominee from Sony Pictures Classics, continues to defend Woody Allen, its writer-director, from a late-season opinion article by Dylan Farrow on the website of The New York Times, who challenged viewers and the movie fraternity to shun Mr. Allen for, by her account, sexually abusing her as a child. Mr. Allen had struck back with a vociferous defense, and claims that Ms. Farrow’s memories were manufactured, leaving Oscar voters in the middle of a two-decade-old family drama.


And pious Christian viewers, if any remained after last year’s bawdy Oscar broadcast — “We saw your boobs” was the refrain in Mr. MacFarlane’s opening number about nudity — had new reason to be wary. In the season’s final weeks, the Academy took the severe step of rescinding its nomination of a song, “Alone Yet Not Alone,” from a faith-based indie film of the same title, for a campaign violation by its co-author, Bruce Broughton.


That dust-up came atop another: Harvey Weinstein, a master of the Oscar game, used newspaper ads to promote his “Philomena,” another best picture nominee, about Irish nuns selling adoptive babies, as a victim of pro-Roman Catholic criticism. “Decide for yourself!” the Weinstein campaign demanded.


Subtler, though barely, was another challenge laid down by Fox Searchlight on behalf of “12 Years a Slave,” the apparent front-runner for best picture, having picked off bellwether awards from the Producers Guild of America and the British film academy. “It’s Time,” said the new ads from Fox — and the message, lost on no one here, was that Hollywood was more than due to confer its top Oscar on a film by a black director, in this case, Steve McQueen.


So a racial issue was on the table, though for months it had figured in private conversations, as Oscar voters weighed personal preferences, industry obligations and the increasingly aggressive campaigns. The season had brought an unusual surge of black-themed Oscar contenders: “Fruitvale Station,” “Lee Daniels’ The Butler” and “Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom” among them. But in the home stretch, only “12 Years a Slave” remained standing.


Amid all this, the Academy on Friday night slipped out an annual report with a bit of an embarrassment tucked in the footnotes: The reported value of a chunk of Hollywood-district land purchased for the group’s now relocated movie museum was reduced by $8 million to reflect changes in a real estate market that, like much of the film business, lacks its past exuberance.


At least Paramount Pictures was having some fun as the mean season ended. Having taken some heat for seeming to celebrate drug-fueled thievery in Martin Scorsese’s “The Wolf of Wall Street,” the studio finally decided to embrace the bad with a Sunset Strip billboard that framed two of the movie’s howling stars, Leonardo DiCaprio and Jonah Hill, with an unapologetic pitch: “Because It’s Awesome.”



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