How can you tell when a year in movies is especially strong? One sure-fire sign is when a film receives a high honor like a Golden Globe and controversy stirs. This year, we have Ben Affleck's Argo, one of the most critically acclaimed films of the year as well as a big hit among anyone who has seen it, myself included. Perhaps the win for both the film in the Best Drama category as well as a Best Director award for Affleck represents some sort of payback for being snubbed in the Oscar nominations for the latter category. If it is, it represents a glorified "participation trophy."
You don't have to think long and hard to understand why this is. By the time awards season has come and gone and we start looking toward blockbusters, does anyone remember the Golden Globe winners? I'd be hard pressed to recall any without consulting IMDB or Wikipedia. There's a reason the Academy Awards are presented last. They're essentially the Super Bowl of the movie industry. But unlike that spectacle, which contains images and sounds that linger for years, if not longer, this one fades quickly. And the same goes for the nominations.
Twitter, Facebook, and 24/7 media has drastically reduced the life cycle every story, especially something trivial like movie award nominations. When the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences unveiled this year's nominees, your usual outcry of robbery erupted ("WTF were they thinking snubbing Bigelow, Hooper, and Affleck in the Best Director category?") but it dominates headlines for no more than a day. Once upon a time, I decreed the Oscars as "just another committee's opinion" when my favorite movie of 2006, Dreamgirls, was left of the then-five choices for Best Picture (it can now go up to ten). My stance isn't quite that forceful today; it's obvious that winning an Oscar increases an actor/filmmaker/writer's marketability moreso than any other award he/she could receive.
Like the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame, which has become a laughingstock after some writers protested the Steroid Era by turning in blank ballots, the AMPAS is on shaky ground. Zero Dark Thirty was the most critically acclaimed movie of 2012, but director Katheryn Bigelow already took home gold for 2009's The Hurt Locker. She already won, right? The same goes for Tom Hooper, bypassed for Les Miserables this year after winning for 2010's The King's Speech. Dynasties are boring, let someone else get a chance, right? Such is one school of thought, and if it's true in this case, then you're not truly nominating the best, now are you?
Right now, Steven Speilberg's Lincoln is the prohibitive favorite. It's the safest, least controversial of the nominees, and for my money, the best (it finished No. 2 on my Top 10). Plus, it has the benefit of being hugely relevant in a time where partisan squabbling in Congress has everyone turning up their noses. A win here for a movie that celebrates one of our nation's greatest political victories and the compromise it took to reach it would be a very positive message indeed.
As anyone who has read my Top 10 list knows, I made the massively unconventional choice of naming the sci-fi thriller Looper as my No. 1 movie of 2012. In spite of being a critical success (93% on Rotten tomatoes, 84/100 on MetaCritic) and opening the 2012 Toronto International Film Festival, not for a second did I believe it would score any major nominations, not even for Original Screenplay (which I argue is the movie's greatest strength). It's not an "actors" movie; it relies more on plot, ideas, and moral dilemmas for its success. Plus, it has too many of the trappings of an action thriller to be interesting to the serious, stodgy Academy. It's not the "best" or most "objectively well made" movie of 2012 (how the hell would I or anyone know what that is?), but unquestionably my favorite and I'll happily defend it against anyone who wants to challenge me.
2012 was the year I jumped face first back into movies after not writing much about them since 2009. The fact that critics went one way with their best film of the year (Zero Dark Thirty), the Golden Globes went another way (Argo), and the Academy will presumably go another (Lincoln) only illustrates the full platter we've had to savor.
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