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. Check out the previous entries here.
Chapter 4: The Quote-Unquote Comedy (A Three-Way Throwdown)
The “Comedy.” If you’re even reading this multi-post treatise of speculative Oscarology, then you’re probably already aware that comedies generally get little respect in this arena. Since the successful days of comedy/musicals in the 1950s, nominations are hard to come by and wins are harder still for comedies. 2008 is no slouch in this judgment, with zero comedies nominated for BP – the funniest of the bunch is probably Slumdog Millionaire, but one would be hard pressed to consider that a chuckle fest – aside from the poo scene – poo is funny.
In this self-celebration of seriousness, comedies are ranked as less significant than traditional dramas. Why do they get less love in this respect than their other genre compatriots? I don’t know yet – so, an analysis of the nomination statistics is in order. And later on, I’ll create my own Sadness Index to figure out a winner.
From 1980 to 2008 while there were five nominee slots, an average of 0.9 comedies per year were nominated for Best Picture. It is strange to report that 90% of a movie is nominated – like having only the first 2 hrs and 11 minutes of Funny People nominated (not a bad idea) – so, rounding up yields roughly one movie a year. Post-expansion, we have an increase in this number – after the slots expanded past five, the Academy nominated an average of 1.9 movies per year. Pretty easy math, it more than doubled. The Academy did not all of a sudden appreciate the art of comedy, it just doubled the chances that comedies had to make the field.
The numbers have been consistent – in the 1980s, 20% of nominees were comedies; in the 1990s, 18%; 2000’s, 18%, and 2010’s (so far) 19%. Therefore, if we have 10 nominations, our overall comedy nomination percentage of 18.4% across these decades would lead us to roughly one to two comedies in a 10-nomination year. Being conservative, we can round down and at least expect one comedy in this kind of field – so what will the vacant comedy slot for 2008 be?
To figure this out, let’s look at the comedies that have made it prior. In the five years prior to 2008, there were a total of four nominated comedies – Lost in Translation (2003), Sideways (2004), Little Miss Sunshine (2006), and Juno (2007). The common denominator for these disparate movies is the slash. They’re all comedy/dramas – they are the right mix for the Academy, enough sugar (in this case drama) to make the unsavory medicine go down (the comedy).
This is taken from the five years prior, but is a trend throughout Oscar – they appreciate a comedy that has sadness and tragedy in favor of laugh out loud crowd pleasers. That is not a condemnation, because these are fantastic movies, but it does explain why Bridesmaids doesn’t make it in 2011, despite critical raves and a Best Screenplay nomination. Kristen Wiig’s movie has moments of drama and sadness, but the comedy/drama mix isn’t quite right for Best Picture (although it also features a poo scene in the tradition of winner Slumdog). So what is “slash” enough to make it in 2008 with the expanded list?
To answer that – another question: what comedies were nominally recognized in this year, in other ways? To explore that, we’ll dig into non-BP categories and wade into the boozy backslapping of the Golden Globes, which have their own Comedy & Musical category.
First, although no comedies made the BP list in 2008, there were other nominations for comedic films. To simplify the list, animated films will be excised, since the token animated film was already chosen in a previous entry of this endeavor – that removes WALL*E (6 nominations) and its Best Animated nomination-buddies, Bolt (1 nomination) and Kung Fu Panda (1 nomination). This only leaves four movies, all with 1 nomination a piece:
Tropic Thunder (Supporting Actor – Robert Downey, Jr.)
Vicky Cristina Barcelona (Supporting Actress – Penelope Cruz – won)
Happy-Go-Lucky (Original Screenplay)
In Bruges (Original Screenplay)
Acting and Screenplay nominations and an outright win – but no separation really between the candidates for the comedy slot. Hitting a wall to differentiate between these with Oscar, we turn to a dark and desperate place: The Golden Globes.
The Golden Globes are completely unconnected to the Academy in their nomination process. They are only interesting in this context for the incidental overlap with Academy choices. There is a slight correlation between the comedy types nominated for Best Picture and the movies nominated or winning the Golden Globe for Best Comedy or Musical. The same correlation could be drawn if one asked both The Recording Academy and, say, the nation of Iceland, what the best album of the year was. They’re drawing from the same pool, but have nothing to do with each other. However, the GG for Best Comedy or Musical does have some interesting correlation with Academy success.
Starting in 1951, there have been 69 GG Comedy/Musical nominated films that have gone on to be nominated for Best Picture – but that is out of 338 total GG chances, leading to 20.4% nomination rate. Taking the data from only post-expansion in 2009, the percentage goes up to 35.0% (14 GG C/M nominees over 40 total chances). The statistic for average number of GG Comedy/Musical movies in the Best Picture field follows the overall comedy stat as well; prior to 2009, the Academy averaged 0.95 GG Comedy/Musical movies in the big field – and this doubles when looking post-expansion, with 1.75 GG Comedy/Musical nominated movies for Best Picture.
The chances get even better when we focus on the winner of this Golden Globe – of the 65 winners, 39 were nominated for Best Picture (60%). In fact, in the seven years of post-expansion, the only winner to miss a nomination was the first expansion year in 2009 – The Hangover, an actual comedy-comedy, won the award, but did not make the big race.
The nominees for the Golden Globe this year are below, with the winner in bold:
Burn After Reading
Happy Go Lucky
In Bruges
Tropic Thunder
Vicky Cristina Barcelona
All of the movies above have at least one nomination in 2008, except for Burn After Reading. I am a fan of this Coen Brothers’ crazed black-comedy, with George Clooney and Brad Pitt playing idiots with such flair. The CoBros built a weird sandwich with this movie with No Country for Old Men, the Oscar winner the previous year, and A Serious Man, a Best Picture nominee the following year, being the bread. Burn was not the Academy’s cup of tea at all, so it is out of the running for the extra comedy slot.
Before spending too much more time on it, Tropic Thunder is also out of the running for the same reason. The Academy nominated Robert Downey, Jr. for his gleefully insane turn in this movie, and the degree of difficulty could not have been higher. The actor was in blackface as one layer in the Russian nesting doll roles within roles within roles. The movie is eminently watchable, and actually laugh out loud funny, but it gets lower marks for seriousness and the comedy/drama mix is weighted almost entirely comedy. So it is out – I am a big fan, but it does not make it.
So we’re down to three – Happy-Go-Lucky, In Bruges, and Vicky Cristina Barcelona – offerings from Brit Mike Leigh, playwright Martin McDonagh and Woody Allen (respectively, and respectfully). In the spirit of VCB, a three-way seems appropriate. With similar Oscar and Golden Globe support, and no significant difference in guild support (VCB has a WGA nomination over the other two, but WGA is a poor predictor), I am forced to invent a nonsensical index to differentiate how sad these comedies are. Behold, the Biutiful Index.
I wanted a way to quantify the comedy / drama mix of these three comedies to go along with the more objective statistical backing for these hypothetical predictions. So, I turned to the crowd-generated database, IMDb.com – one of the features of IMDb is listing keywords associated with a particular title. The three candidates’ keywords were analyzed word by word and assigned as either neutral or dramatic. Phrases like “teacher,” “guitar” or “alcove” were rated as neutral, while “suicide,” “infidelity” or “abuse” were dramatic. The rating for each keyword is subjective to a degree, but it is something to go on.
The number of dramatic keywords was divided by the total keywords for a Drama Percentage. Then, in order to normalize the ratings, these were compared to the most humorless, miserable and dramatic movie I could think of – Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Biutiful. This movie has its sweatshop running, orphan main character (who is also a human trafficker played by nominee Javier Bardem) try to reconcile with his ex-wife, an alcoholic, bipolar prostitute and ensure that his children are not abandoned when he dies from cancer. Damn. The Drama Percentage from the candidate comedies are then divided by Biutiful’s Percentage and then multiplied by 10 so that the Iñárritu movie is a 10, and the rest are on a scale from 0 to 10.
Happy-Go-Lucky has some moments of drama, but it is a very light affair so it understandably earns a 4.9 for its Biutiful Index (BI). In Bruges, a personal favorite, is a very black comedy with suicide and murder, but is very funny and gets a 7.0 BI. Vicky is not outright funny and has infidelity, violence, threesomes, and more and gets the highest BI with a 7.8. Helping VCB is the Woody Allen factor as well – his movies have earned a total of 53 nominations across the board and three total Best Picture nominations – winner Annie Hall (1977), nominee Hannah and Her Sisters (1986), and post-expansion benefiter Midnight in Paris (2011). Allen has 16 nominations over 46 films for Original Screenplay – if VCB was a player in the BP field, I think Allen probably would have knocked out Patty Jenkins’ Frozen River in 2008 for Screenplay (since Allen already had a WGA guild nomination this year), and could have brought the nomination total to three, theoretically.
A Serious Man (2009), Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2011) and Selma (2014) all made it with two total nominations, so it has precedent. And it was a Golden Globe Comedy or Musical winner, for all that’s worth.
With the Biutiful Index to guide the way, the comedy/drama films have some separation and our next slot is assigned for the hypothetical 2008 race. VCB is not great, just good – my personal pick would have been McDonagh’s In Bruges, but I’m trying not to get personal with these picks. Thanks to the Golden Globes and Javier Bardem (both for his misery in Biutiful and his smolderiness in the Woody Allen nom), VCB makes it.
Fourth slot, assigned.
ONGOING LIST
- Slumdog Millionaire
- The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
- Frost/Nixon
- Milk
- The Reader
- The Dark Knight
- Doubt
- WALL*E
- Vicky Cristina Barcelona
Next in the last And Then There Were Ten for 2008, we look at the random, out-of-nowhere, nobody’s-seen-it slot:
The Indie Wildcard in our Temple of Gloom.
Statistics and Oscar history courtesy of: Boxofficemojo.com; Rottentomatoes.com; Metacritic.com; Imdb.com; Wikipedia.org
