Whether you choose to believe them or not – and speaking for myself, I don’t quite – the media powers that be have currently reduced the 2010 Best Picture race to just two titles: “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech.” That’s entirely (and hopefully, lest things get too dull too soon) subject to change over the next four months, but given what we’ve seen at this point, it’s difficult to devise a could-win theory for many of the films most fancied for the remaining eight slots, be it “Inception” or “Another Year.”
I don’t really blame those in the blogosphere who are narrowing things down to this pair of films: after a lackluster Toronto fest failed to turn up a hidden dragon along the lines of “Slumdog Millionaire,” the slate of contenders looks much as it did before the fall festival season began. With expectations for “Network” and “Speech” pegged high all along, meeting them was enough to seal frontrunner status.
Moreover, the temptation to pit David Fincher’s modish Facebook story and Tom Hooper’s tony royalty porn against each other is hard to resist, given how conveniently the films are opposed: both acclaimed biopics after a fashion, but one concerned with present-day American youth, the other with British aristocracy of yore. “It’s the time-capsule piece versus the time-warp piece,” snarked one friend of mine recently, anticipating a narrative that will likely run all season, even if other frontrunners enter the fray.
Having not seen either film yet, I have no horse in this race right now – though I’d be lying if I said “The Social Network” isn’t the one that has me really champing at the bit. With both films just theoretical entities to me at the moment, however, the thing that strikes me as most interesting about this potential either-or scenario is that the films represent two very different schools of Oscar bait, one of which seems to have lost its pulling power in recent years.
Ever since “The King’s Speech” was announced as Harvey Weinstein’s weapon of choice for this year’s awards season, accusations of calculated baitiness have trailed it with varying degrees of irony. Bill Maher, of course, made the point most piquantly, suggesting that “a historical epic full of British actors in period costumes about Queen Elizabeth II helping her father get over his speech impediment” ticks so many Academy boxes that the Oscar ceremony itself ought be a mere formality.
Maher’s jab was a funny one, and if we were looking ahead to the Best Picture race of, oh, 1996, it might have been quite on the money. But he, like many casual industry-watchers, is adhering to a definition of Oscar bait that the last decade has rendered quite passé. No “historical epic” has taken the Academy’s top prize since “Gladiator” in 2000, and nothing filled with Limey cut-glass vowels since “Shakespeare in Love” two years before that. Even the biopic, ostensibly the Academy’s pet genre, has been on hiatus since “A Beautiful Mind” in 2001.
What have we had since then? Well, among others, a cheerfully misanthropic musical, an extravagant literary fantasy, a pair of bleak, bloody thrillers and a low-budget action picture set in a still-unfinished war. Whatever patterns you might draw from that rum bunch of winners, a preference for cosseted, corseted heritage film is unlikely to be among them.
Some, like Tom O’Neil, have concluded from recent Academy history that the definition of Oscar bait has shifted away from period prestige toward a preoccupation with the now. Academy voters, they would argue, increasingly embrace films that hold a mirror to contemporary society, provoking discussion of such still-tender issues as racial tension (“Crash”), euthanasia (“Million Dollar Baby”) or the Iraq conflict (“The Hurt Locker”).
By that token, “The Social Network,” the topic menu of which includes class warfare, youth alienation and the foibles of modern-day communication, would appear to be this year’s de facto bait, with “The Kids Are All Right,” which gently challenges widespread social prejudices and family structures, nipping at its heels. Both films, it should be said, sell themselves as sparky entertainments rather than sermons: porridgey capital-I Importance in the “Gandhi” vein, another widely misattributed Academy weakness, isn’t on the agenda these days. (If it was, the awards potential of Julian Schnabel’s “Miral” wouldn’t have been shot down from its first Venice screening.)
But that definition, handy as it is, doesn’t quite stick either: if the word “zeitgeist” ever entered the script discussions for a balls-to-the-wall genre workout like “The Departed,” it certainly didn’t make it onto the screen, yet the film triumphed one year after voters were forced to choose between two noble studies of minority oppression.
Such mood swings have always been part of the Academy’s charm: just two years after being widely blasted for their milquetoast caution in crowning “Driving Miss Daisy” the best of 1989, they took a shine to a heady Gothic stew of cannibals, serial killers and sexual insecurity. (No, not that one: “Forrest Gump” was a few years later.)
Almost a year ago, I used this column space to ask what constitutes an “Oscar movie” now, and was no surer then than I am today. In those green months when the likes of “Invictus” and “Nine” were still Oscar frontrunners in many pundits’ eyes, I predicted that neither would win, concluding that “picking the obvious prestige picture [is] more of an aberration than anything else these days.”
The eventual outcome of the race bore out that projection, but if I follow that line of thinking this year, I’d have to scratch both “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network” – “obvious prestige picture,” Mark I and Mark II – from the winners list. A win for either film would serve to reinforce widely-believed definitions of “bait” that may or may not even exist, which would make the start of a new decade a deliciously appropriate time for voters to wrongfoot us all by plucking something truly out of left field. “Black Swan,” anyone?
[Photos: Columbia Pictures, MGM, DreamWorks]