Why the Oscars Are Irrelevant

[boffo]

30,000,000 people were foolish enough to waste their Sunday evening watching a self-congratulatory wankfest where a bunch of people worship themselves for their belief that they're better than you. Ostensibly this was to determine the best movies of the year

Comments

[phanatic]

The first list of won't-be-talked about, I mostly agree with, but there are a few. The Departed is Scorsese, and will be talked about on that basis, in the same sense that people still watch and talk about Mean Streets and Taxi Driver today. Pretty much the same for No Country for Old Men; it's a safe bet that people will still be reading Cormac McCarthy in 20 years, and the film will retain an audience in his penumbra.

The second list? No way will Transformers be watched in 20 years. None. The special effects will be ridiculously dated (and weren't all that great to begin with, although part of that problem was Bay's complete lack of directing talent that made the robot-on-robot fights visually resemble a tangle of two different colors of steel wool), the box office was driven mainly by Gen Xish nostalgia, and once you take those two factors away what have you got left? Turturro playing a role that's a dozen stories beneath him and a robot pee joke.

Let's go back 20 years. Here're the top box-office grosses for 1990:

Home Alone
Ghost
Dances With Wolves
Pretty Woman
Goodfellas
Total Recall
Die Hard 2
Dick Tracy
Bird on a Wire

The Oscar nominees:
Dances With Wolves
Goodfellas
Ghost
Awakenings
The Godfather Part III

Okay, not too many people still care about Dances With Wolves, but Goodfellas and Ghost are still definitely talked about, watched, and enjoyed. Dick Tracy? Bird on a Wire? I think as many people care about Bird on a Wire today as will care about Transformers.

[coderay]

Heh, despite anything I may think about its quality, everyone today still remembers Home Alone and it is still the source of an occasional joke or pop-culture reference. (same with Total Recall).

[boffo]

I think the Oscars were a lot more relevant 20 years ago, because they mostly nominated movies people saw. Note that three of the nominees were also in the top five for the box office. (And the other two are a movie that's been completely forgotten, and a movie that's only remembered as a shitty sequel nobody should see.)

Transformers was on the borderline of movies I thought would be remembered. I don't have a lot of confidence in that prediction, and certainly see your arguments against it.