Introduction: Why We Care
The Academy Awards holds a special place for many people – for some, it is a celebration of cinema, competition and glamour, with warm, family-time memories spent watching tuxedos and sparkling dresses exchange gold statues. For others, it is a backslapping, near-masturbatory, never-ending, annual slog about movies that you do not care about. And for a select portion of the population – it is an afterthought.
For years now, a cottage industry (which is an understatement – more like a mansion industry) has cropped up around prognosticating who gets what on the big night. For the awards nerds out there, the cinema equivalent of the Super Bowl is Oscar Nomination Day. The saying goes, it is an honor to be nominated – and there is truth to that. There are those among us who know when Nomination Day is coming up, and make plans to tune in the live webcast of the announcements early in the morning.
Why care?
The first reason – Everybody loves lists. An Academy list’s purpose is no different from any other traffic-driving list online. A 2013 New Yorker article went into why we love lists – among other factors, a Best Picture nomination list alleviates our paradox of choice of what the best is – our spatial mind feels comforted when a (supposedly) accredited and knowledgeable group of people lists the best movies of the year. The more information and options we have, the worse we feel, so when it’s narrowed down to ten or less, we feel better than having to grade and rank the nearly 600 movies a year that are released from Hollywood (not to mention foreign films). Our brains are drawn to this organization intuitively – and the cottage/mansion industry thrives on this. To narrow down 600 to 10, experts and editors from all over predict who will make it and then spend as much time breaking down the surprises, snubs and flubs (couldn’t help myself – when was the last time anyone heard the word flub without snub in front of it?).
Background – from 1945 to 2008, there were five films nominated for Best Picture. In 2009, the list of BP nominations doubled to have ten films. This leads us to our second point of why anyone would care about nominations. There are many reasons cited for why this expansion happened, but the main one is this – declining ratings (at a nadir in 2008, literally the lowest since they started looking). Not very exciting, is it? But the cause of the declining ratings was thought to be the lack of a rooting interest in the race. In the five-year period from 2004 to include 2008, there was not a single film in the ten highest grossing box office movies nominated for the big prize. Now this is not the Populist Awards, and no one was advocating for Night at the Museum (#2 box office of 2006) to be in the Best Picture race, but people like to support movies they have seen or at least heard of.
The few of us tune in early on Nomination Day to see if we have a dog in the fight. We all have our special movies – our #1’s. Mine in 2015 was Mad Max: Fury Road; in 2014, Whiplash; in 2012, Silver Linings Playbook; we do not need everyone to have the same special movie, but we can appreciate it when it makes the list. We all want our opinions validated. Or else, we want to react against the invalidation of not making the list. Just check Twitter on January 24th. We come up with our own fresh surprises, snubs, and yes – flubs.
That is what makes 2009 special – expanding from five to ten doubled the possibilities for our special movies to join the conversation. 2009 saw an animated movie make it for the first time since 1991’s The Beauty and the Beast (Up); the #1 box office winner of all time (at the time) / 3D Sci-Fi rollercoaster (Avatar); three movies with women in leading roles with their own stories (The Blind Side, An Education, Precious); a beloved Sci-Fi social satire done for way under-budget (District 9); left of center offerings from indie legends Quentin Tarantino (the bloody and batty Inglourious Basterds) and the Coen Brothers (the knotty, dark comedy A Serious Man); and so forth.
The expansion made the nominations more exciting because it allowed different kinds of movies to make the cut. I do love an English period piece (as does the Academy; think Shakespeare in Love The Queen Theory of Everything English Patient Elizabeth Howards End Hope and Glory Remains of the Day Sense and Sensibility Room with a View Master and Commander Finding Neverland Passage to India Imitation Game Gosford Park Atonement, etc.), but the expansion allowed nomination beyond biopics to Sci-Fi, horror, animation, foreign films, comedies, indies and thrillers – it’s no coincidence that these are the movies with fervent fan bases and followings that the Academy was chasing when they went beyond the five. The Academy backtracked a bit in 2011 when they revised the stance that the 10 was a max limit and not a set number – but we still see better chances of genre diversity in the nominations to this date.
It was a good idea that was a year or two or five or ten late. Since we were at a rigid five from 1945 until 2008, there were fringe or outlier movies that deserve to be special movies that did not make the cut. And since 2008 was the flash-year that inspired the expansion, I wanted to research my obsession with nominations – and what would 2008’s Best Picture slate look like, if the expansion were one year earlier. What if 2008 had ten?
The Actual Nominees
Here are our five Best Picture nominations we received in 2008:
- Slumdog Millionaire (Winner) – the flashy movie
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button – the technical achievement
- Frost / Nixon – acting like real people, politics edition
- Milk – acting like real people, social justice edition
- The Reader – World War II
Disclaimer: There are many articles, podcasts and websites devoted to breaking down what actually happened in any given Oscar year. So this exploration will rarely touch on what the actual choices were, unless it is as a comparison.
With that out of the way – The Media By Us is going to go through what possibly could have been choices six through ten of this magical year in a new series. We will go through historical statistics, trends, and opinions that break down the year in 2008 cinema – and host some nuggets that may be useful for future predictions for the Awards Nerd Super Bowl: Nomination Day.
