Sounds like a hell of a topic that actually does make sense.. Should the Academy nominate more movies that the moviegoers actually do see cause let's face it: The wins this year for the movies nominated sucked at the box office indicating no one even saw these movies with the exception perhaps to NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN, but come on.. How about nominating and giving wins to more commercial movies that people actually care about???

I think it's proof that mainstream movies are shit and the general public are morons.

The day the Oscars turns into the Grammys is the day I stop watching them.

The great thing about the Oscars is that even when they get it wrong you can still see they are trying to award the best movies of the year, box office be damned.

We're not really on a downward trend, only 05 was particularly weak with Crash and Brokeback Mountain making the most at 83 million.

04/06/07 had
Juno
Departed
Million Dollar Baby
Aviator
Million Dollar Baby
No Country (Will finish over 80)

Theres been no huge films, but then again, most of them haven't appeared during high boxoffice periods like those of the past, and have opened more limited.

People should see more movies the Academy nominate.

I mean, if they had nominated films people actually SAW this year, the best possible BP lineup would be like Rat, Hairspray, American Gangster, Juno and Bourne.

Sucky lineup, indeed.

They should award what is good and not look at box office at all. The only uber grosser worthy of a Best Pic nom this year was Ratatouille and it has the animated category. And Juno was nominated. (Havnt seen American Gangster)

Snack - for a second i thought you were proposing SAW (IV) as a best pic nom

Pretty much.

You guys had Juno this year! What more do you want? Transformers? Spider-Man 3? Alvin and the Chipmunks?

Hell, Juno over Ratatouille is dubious as all get-out.

Hey, I agree that Rat. is better than Juno, Atonement, and possibly Michael Clayton. I was more referring to the two films that are head-and-shoulders above the rest this year (Blood and No Country) that have been largely ignored by the majority of people (Blood to a much greater extent).

Ok, fine. Nominating movies that people see would be good for all the deserving Pixar movies.

But our BP lineups would still look like:

Pixar
SUCK
SUCK
SUCK
SUCK

A lot of the old winners only became such popular film because of CRITICS and OSCARS, not because they were films with huge initial appeal. If No Country for Old Men had this kind of success ten years ago, it would've grossed $100-150m, unadjusted.

Yeah, seriously, I mean I love my mainstream movies a lot, but c'mon, nominating films simply because they were successful, that's bullshit. It's more of a flaw in audiences, not the Academy.

I mean, really, one could make an argument for Ratatouille (even though I'd disagree), but what else? Pirates? Transformers? Superbad?


C'mon!

Uh, Juno's a huge hit. Plus, the average moviegoer is a teenager with a 90 IQ and the attention span of a gnat. For every Pixar and Lord Of The Rings (or hell, every Spider-Man 2 or Harry Potter 3/4/5) there are over a half-dozen Michael Bay films and a couple good-but-not-great Pirates Of The Caribbean-type films.

http://www.thefilmexperience.net/Awards ... eview.html

Read the middle section about the gap between the Oscars and public. That chart more or less enforces the idea that the public has stopped listening to the Oscars, NOT vice versa. In what world would a movie like Ordinary People or Kramer vs. Kramer make half those amounts?

And please stop using Ratatouille as an example for the Oscar's indifference to the public, 'cause you know it would've had to make $500 million to even be considered, animated category or no animated category. And I loved that movie.

BO doesn't equate to popularity though. It shows the general trends, but you can't take the BO of every film and claim it to reflect the popularity. Crash was more popular than BM (it only earned less because of the release date) and the author is using very flawed logic to claim it makes the media hypocritical.

The Big 3 of May were not among the most popular of the year; they simply were among the top grossers because of massive opening weekends fueled by the popularity of past films in the franchises.

The top of the year would include Rat, Transformers, and Bourne 3.

If you bring up the kids/adults divide, Bourne remains far more popular than the oscar films.

What this is mostly about is that audiences want films that don't happen in our world, or that play on some extraordinary theme.

I don't think anyone can say Crash was more popular than BBM before the BP win.

I do.

Brokeback Mountain was a very isolating film -- I know that a lot of people even in my liberal area didn't want to see it "because it's about gay cowboys" -- whereas almost everyone I know in the real world either likes or loves "Crash," with a few very intelligent exceptions.

The thing is, most of those people hadn't even seen Crash before the BP win. And yes, Brokeback was very love it or hate it (an refusing to see it), so even though it wasn't necessarily well liked by the average person, it was very popular.

I think your comment at the end pretty much brings up, again, the ultimate divide between what the Academy has always liked and what the public now likes. Kramer vs. Kramer dealt with heavy, dark subjects, yet were still pretty decent hits (Kramer vs. Kramer a big one), movies that even with a Best Picture win wouldn't have made much more than NCFOM nowadays.

Granted, the Academy has awarded blockbusters in the past, but those were usually films with massive critical acclaim that became cultural phenomenons, be they Star Wars. or The Fugitive or The Sixth Sense or Lord of the Rings. However, since LOTR there haven't really been any blockbusters that were also genuinely great films. The only films that have probably come close to that since LOTR (Not including animated films) would be Spider-Man 2 and The Bourne Ultimatum, but both were already sequels to films that were weren't as well-received. Maybe also the Judd Apatow films, but they never reached that extra level of box office needed.

And while Crash was a more "mainstream" film than BBM, the latter was still more popular than Crash, and more of cultural phenomenon than any Best Picture nominee since LOTR.

For those out there believing that the Academy isn't nominating movies that people are seeing, here are a few points about this year's nominees:

- Juno was arguably the word-of-mouth sensation of 2007. It came out of pretty much nowhere to be a cultural high point of the year. And even without the BP nod, it still would have crossed $100 million without breaking a sweat.

- No Country for Old Men is the highest grossing Coen Brothers film ever released. The movie itself (or at least its ending) wasn't very mainstream at all, and yet it looks to finish around $75-80 million. A lot of that came from the word-of-mouth and the buzz brought about from being a big Oscar contender. Just wait for the DVD numbers to come out- I have no doubt that it will kick ass and take names on the rental market.

- There Will Be Blood is incredibly un-mainstream, yet it looks on track to finish around $40 million, making it Paul Thomas Anderson's highest grossing film to date. There were many mainstream movies released in 2007 that fell under that number.

- Atonement is on pace to make around $50 million. The Oscar buzz didn't do anything for it because the studio didn't really do a great job selling it (in my opinion at least). Yet with a complex (and admittedly tough to market) plot, R-rating, and lack of true star power, it still did pretty damn well before nominations were announced.

- Michael Clayton was a victim of crowded scheduling more than anything else. We Own the Night was direct competition for the older set and probably took away interest from those looking for a good thriller. It did pretty well in its debut on the rental market (over $8 million in its first week, which is nearly 80% of its theatrical opening weekend), so evidently there is interest in it.

Now consider the other two movies that had real chances at nominations: The Diving Bell and the Butterfly and Into the Wild. The two that supposedly just missed (given the precursor support) were each far lower grossers than any of the films nominated. Assuming TWBB (the lowest nominee) finishes with $40 million, it more than doubles the take of Into the Wild and is far, far, far ahead of Diving Bell's $5.5 million gross.

The Academy isn't picking movies that no one is seeing. No, they aren't picking blockbusters, but why should they be obligated to pick what's popular with the "common people?" I may have bitched about Juno being nominated (since, really, it didn't have much of a place there despite being a pretty good movie), but I totally would have lost my shit if Transformers had been up there.

If the mainstream people want to see the "popular" movies in charge, they can watch the People's Choice Awards. Leave the Oscars for the movies that at least kind of deserve to be there. These are, after all, the awards of the movie industry, not the moviegoers.

I agree with Webslinger... It's not so much the low gross, it's just that without true frontrunners for most of the year I don't think the companies knew how to market these films.

The only real film that I never thought could make money here was There Will Be Blood. Everything else was commercially viable on some level.

If anything it's not the Oscars that need to change... it's the release schedule for these films that need to change. They need to be out in late December when everybody is talking about them and people wnat to see them.. not on January 18th.

I completely agree with Webslinger. The MTV movie awards are for the common moviegoers, the Oscars award the BEST of the filmmaking industry.

I reckon they'd both make a comparatively large amount in today's world. It's easy to look at both films and their stars today and think of them as prestige bait with very few box office prospects. But Hoffman and Redford were two of the biggest box office stars in the world at that time. The closest modern day comparisons to both of those films would probably be something like American Beauty or A Beautiful Mind - both of which made more than half of Ordinary People and Kramer vs. Kramer.

I think the problem's more to do with the studio's handling of Oscar films today. For some reason, the studios are taking the kind of scripts they used to turn into quality, big budget star vehicles and handing them over to their indie divisions so they can turn them into small, quirky films they think Oscar likes to award.

For example, if the script for Tootsie landed on some executives desk today, they'd either completely retool it and turn it into your standard high-concept Will Ferrell vehicle (gutting it of any Oscar chances in the process), or they'd hand it over to their indie division for Alexander Payne to direct and Jason Schwartzman to star before gradually teasing it out around the country on a miniscule number of theatres for four months. On the flipside, were Little Miss Sunshine to fall on someone's desk in the 80s, it probably would've been directed by Penny Marshall, starred Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins and it likely still would've ridden its way to an Oscar nom.

Today, the only Oscar bait-y films getting a big budget and big stars seem to be political dramas and war films - something the public's already shown us they don't give two shits about.

No dice!