Not even worth mentioning, but I will

If anyone cares, the Oscar list is also up. The Academy Awards continues its decline.

This list puts me to sleep. Going all the way down into the bottom of the list, I’ve only seen three movies: Cars, Superman Returns and United 93.

Cars, mind you, is such a good film that it should be up for Best Picture, if only the Oscars hadn’t created that stupid Animated category as a way of saying that animated films will never be recognized as real films. Some years it’s a struggle to come up with three truly Oscar-worthy animated films to fill that category.

How is it possible that the Oscars can continue to have any pull with the popular culture when, again and again, they go for movies that the public doesn’t even care about? Let me just stop you here and fend off a few obvious responses: I’m all for highlighting excellent films that the public may overlook, and I’m not saying that putrid overblown over-budgeted trash like “Armageddon” should be getting Best Picture just because it makes a lot of money.

Here’s what I am saying:

While I hardly see anything in a theater anymore, I buy hundreds of DVDs every year. Hundreds. (I can generally get them at Hollywood Video one month after their debut for $8, the price of a movie ticket for one adult…and anything I don’t enjoy I resell at my summer garage sale and online.) My current DVD collection, if I include the 130 DVDs for sale and don’t count the few hundred I’ve sold, is 785 movies long. About 20 or 30 of them I haven’t even watched yet, because I stock up whenever Hollywood has that sale.

Point is, we watch movies in this house. Yet year in, year out, I’ll have hardly seen anything on the Oscars list. A good many of them I simply have zero interest in, the rest sound mildly amusing if I could see them for cheap. Aside from the Lord of the Rings year, I haven’t watched the Oscars. No, wait, I didn’t watch it that year either, though I was happy about the results. I guess I haven’t watched it in years.

There just isn’t any suspense! Given that the public at large hasn’t seen these movies either, why should they watch? "Ooh, it’s a tight race between Dame Judi Dench and four actresses I haven’t even heard of in five movies that I haven’t seen! This is intense!"

The big problem here is not Hollywood being totally out of touch with the tastes and desires of the general public and choosing unpopular movies out of snobbery. Don’t misunderstand, that IS a huge problem with the Oscars and Hollywood in general. But there’s an even bigger problem: DVDs on home theaters.

Given how many people wait for DVDs these days, the BULK of the viewing audience of the Oscars are many months away from seeing these movies. Unless you’re talking an Oscar-worthy picture that was big enough to draw people to actual theaters in droves, such as Titanic, Gladiator or The Lord of the Rings, movie releases now serve as alerts for what you should add to your Netflix list for later.

For the last few decades, companies wanted their video release to be after the Oscars in hopes they could slap an “Academy Award Winner For…” label across the front and increase the audience draw. Now those DVD renters/buyers aren’t just padding for an already successful release; more and more they are the source of most of the movie’s profits. Even people who really want to see the movie aren’t going to the theater to do it. Some of these films may be good… we just haven’t seen them because they’re barely a month old (and in some cases, still in limited release).

If the Oscars wants a tune-in factor, picking a bunch of December movies that won’t be on DVD until after the Oscars is not a way to draw a large audience. So why do so many of these film companies rush out movies in the last few weeks of the year as "Oscar Contenders"? Because the Academy has a short attention span and can’t remember a good movie released many months earlier

Consider the case of Cinderella Man, a film which would seem ideally positioned to combat the problem I’m talking about. It debuted in May 2005 to rave reviews but it only garnered $61 million in theaters. Then it hit DVD in December, right before Christmas and accompanied by a great rank on the Tomatometer. The public at large is finally watching one of the most acclaimed movies of the year (sadly, IMDB does not have DVD sale data), but all the Academy can talk about is Brokeback This and Brokeback That and Cinderella Man gets a piffling few technical nominations.

This may seem a minor thing, really. The Academy Awards and the Academy Awards telecast are two different things, and perhaps the profitability of airing the awards is not as important as the act of awarding statues for film work. Ideally, that would be so. But I think it’s sad that the Academy Awards should be rendered meaningless to the public just because we’re on a different release schedule. The Hollywood crowd is all abuzz about little-seen and largely unprofitable films playing on ten screens across the country. Meanwhile, the majority of Americans who want to enjoy a movie night are taking in films from last spring that the Academy has forgotten about.

It’s like the American populace has all been moved to Malaysia or Guam, the kind of country that is finally getting the Austin Powers sequel at their local cinema, and the Oscars are merely noteworthy recommendation lists for something we might watch someday.

I don’t know why I should care about the Oscars, really, but I’d LIKE to. I’d LIKE to have a horse in the race, like back in the days when I’d scream at the stupidity of Annie Hall beating Star Wars. It still bugs me that “Best costume design” didn’t go to Tron but instead went to Gandhi, a film that went to India to film Indians dressed like Indians. How frickin’ hard is that? I used to care about the Oscars. My friend Kevin has a contest every year to see who can predict the winners, but it’s becoming akin to knowing which of the 26 cases holds the million dollars. I may as well use a dart.

The day may come when few films open in that last week of December, instead hoping to have the marketing campaign for their DVD release creating the Oscar buzz. We shall see.

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