And Then There Were Ten – in which our intrepid hero goes back and expands the Academy Award Best Picture nominations to ten nominations, and goes about filling those hypothetical slots. This time – it’s 2008 – the previous entry is The Dark Knight (Box Office Hero).
Chapter 2: Actors Acting for Acting Actors (Doubt)
The Actors’ showcase is a great way for a film to get its foot in the Academy door. More than that, an actor-friendly film is an established pathway to not just multiple acting nominations, but typically a Best Picture nomination as well. The Academy has only about 6,000 members – nearly a fourth of the members are actors. It is not a stretch to posit that Academy members are capable and even pre-dispositioned to recognize its own department as the key to an exceptional film. Our beloved statistics bear this out as well.
If we just look at recent history when the field was greater than five (after 2008), 9 out of 10 movies with three or more acting nominations also had Best Picture nominations, including three Best Picture Winners (The King’s Speech with Colin Firth, Geoffrey Rush and Helena Bonham Carter – 2010, 12 Years a Slave with Chiwetel Ejiofor, Michael Fassbender and Lupita N’yongo – 2013, Birdman with Michael Keaton, Edward Norton and Emma Stone – 2014). If we go back even further, to an insane degree of going back, this percentage holds true.
From the first Oscars in 1928 to Spotlight in 2016, a staggering 84% of movies with three or more acting nominations lead to a Best Picture nomination. So it bears out that when a movie has great support for its acting, it is likely to predict BP success. Looking inversely at the data, there have only been three years in history over a span of 88 years, that an Oscar year has one or more movies with more than two acting nominations that did not have at least one BP nomination. Those three years are 1936 (apologies to My Man Godfrey with 4 nominations), 1962 (two “fowl” at-bats with Birdman of Alcatraz and Sweet Bird of Youth) and… You guessed it, our favorite year of 2008.
These statistical lead us to the Oscar anomaly of Doubt. In this adaptation of the 2005 Tony Award winner for Best Drama, charismatic reformer Father Flynn (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is suspected by the hopeful and innocent Sister James (Amy Adams) of spending too much attention on the first black student in the strict St. Nicholas in the Bronx – this seed of doubt is ammo for the iron-fisted principal Sister Aloysius Beauvier (Meryl Streep) for a moral and philosophical fight for the community. The movie is very “based on a play” visually and is directed plainly by the original playwright John Patrick Shanley (who was also nominated this year for writing his own adaption). But the staid direction also gives the film an electric feel, a voyeuristic thrill in watching these heavyweights fight for the fast-paced running time.
Doubt is in this conversation not just because it has more than two acting nominations, but because it managed four! Meryl Streep being Meryl Streep was nominated for Best Actress and Hoffman and Adams both nabbed Supporting Actor and Actress noms, respectively (and respectfully). These nominations are all certainly well deserved. In addition, the film introduced Viola Davis to the big stage, after getting a Supporting Actress nomination mostly for a searing and ravaging single scene and roughly 8 minutes of screen time. If you haven’t seen her here – First, do it – Second, recognize that it’s up there in the record books for the acting equivalent of Basketball’s PER (Player Efficiency Rating).
Speaking of the record books, four acting nominations in a year moves this into an even more exclusive club, with only 37 movies making this mark in the history of Oscar. From these movies, 89% of 4+ acting movies have been nominated for Best Picture. Last statistic – probably – Amy Adams and Viola Davis make up two-fifths (40%) of the Supporting Actress field for this year. There is an interesting statistic here as well (at least to me) – movies who manage more than one acting nomination in a single category fare well in BP nomination success – with 78% of double-category-nomination movies (DCNMs) earning the bid. And Doubt didn’t.
Strangely enough and on a minor tangent, Supporting Actress is the most likely category for multiple nominations – of the 68 DCNMs, 34 of them occurred in Supporting Actress (50%), compared to 17 in Supporting Actor (25%), and 17 combined in Lead Actor and Actress. Furthermore, of the 15 DCNMs that were not nominated for Best Picture, 12 movies (80%) had double nominations in the Supporting Actress category. Does the correlation from these statistics potentially point to a bias in the Academy? – Supporting Actress roles that are recognized in our annual list do not lead to overall movie support, while special acting recognition in other categories does. Definitions may vary, but there has only been four movies over 89 years which feature women exclusively in lead roles and won Best Picture– All About Eve (1950), Terms of Endearment (1983), Chicago (2002), and Million Dollar Baby (2004). Often derided for its lack of diversity in its choices, the Academy calling the shots for what films are important is said to be 76% male and 94% white. If the nominated roles were gender swapped, and the sole female acting nomination was in Supporting, would Doubt have been nominated for Best Picture? Maybe, but that’s not the whole story.
Doubt was previously described as very “adapted-from-a-play.” The Actor’s branch is roughly a fourth of the total academy, but below the line support from sound, special effects, production design, and so forth helps carry a move to the big list. For a comparison, we need look no further (although we might a little later) than Frost/Nixon from this same year. Frost/Nixon was a Tony Award nominee in 2007, but it has 1970s vintage flair to the direction of its two true-life male characters – and a big Academy name behind it. Directed by Ron Howard, a previous Oscar winner for A Beautiful Mind, Frost/Nixon naturally had an advantage with its real-world characters and higher production values than Doubt’s nearly grayscale, matter-of-fact direction from the playwright John Patrick Shanley, whose previous directing effort was 18 years prior with Joe Versus the Volcano. Another comparison after the expansion is Steven Spielberg’s War Horse (2011), which is a Tony-winner and a Best Picture nominee. Despite middling reviews (72% on Metacritic), the production values are epic and the direction is sweeping thanks to multiple Oscar-winner, Sir Stevie. Previous support and an epic “the-march-of-War” scope leads to overall support and six total nominations for its year. Also, its lead character Albert is male, and the main horse is male as well. Just saying.
The comparison is also more apparent when one looks at the other Broadway adaptation avenue – the musical. Musicals are naturally flashier, eye-catching and obvious with lively musical numbers and dynamic direction. Think Les Miserables (2012) or Moulin Rouge! (2001), which were nominated, or Chicago (2002) which won Best Picture (or La La Land, which probably will win this year) – all of which have production design, cinematography, sound or directing nominations/wins. That is below the line support – for a movie on the borderline, the non-acting support can carry a film to Best Picture nomination success. Back in the day of five nominations, a borderline, acting-showcase film had an uphill climb to make it.
Two things potentially hurt this movie, to which a fourth of the academy was pre-dispositioned to support. Most of the action and plot is carried out by strong female characters, and the passive directing style and low production value turned off the rest of the academy and relegated this strong film to less than full support: actors acting for acting’s sake.
But I have assigned five extra magical slots for Best Picture in this year.
So EFF that. Doubt takes my second slot.
ONGOING LIST
- Slumdog Millionaire
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- Frost/Nixon
- Milk
- The Reader
- The Dark Knight
- Doubt
Next in And Then There Were Ten for 2008, we look at pure imagination from a studio with a cult-like following.
The Animated Exception.
Statistics and Oscar history courtesy of: Boxofficemojo.com; Rottentomatoes.com; Imdb.com; Wikipedia.org
