For the first time in years, the motion picture academy has a bona fide blockbuster, Avatar , as frontrunner to take home armfuls of awards. It also has a plucky David to the CGI monster's Goliath, in the low budget Iraq drama The Hurt Locker .
And, of course, it has its own soap opera style battle of the ex-spouses in the head-to-head competition between the two films' directors: James Cameron, director of Avatar , and his former wife, Kathryn Bigelow, who made The Hurt Locker .
Yet, for all the appearance of drama, this year's Academy Awards are distinctly short of the one commodity the occasion surely cries out for: movie stars. Neither of the frontrunners features a big name actor in a leading role: although Sigourney Weaver appears in the sci-fi blockbuster, neither of its leads, Sam Worthington or Zoe Saldana, are established household names. The Hurt Locker 's cast has no major names.
The lack of big stars continues down the line: no blockbuster names (aside from Mariah Carey, in a minor role) in Precious , or A Serious Man , or District 9 , or An Education .
That leaves just three out of the 10 films in the expanded best picture category with big name leads: George Clooney in Up In The Air , Brad Pitt in Inglourious Basterds and Sandra Bullock in The Blind Side . Of the three, only Bullock is fancied to win a major acting award.
The drought might seem more extraordinary if it weren't for a broader trend in Hollywood away from the old model of tying a movie's commercial fortunes to an actor deemed bankable enough to carry the entire enterprise on his or her shoulders. Cable television, pay-per-view, video-streaming services and the web have diminished the status and influence of feature films, and recession-conscious producers have become more reluctant to spend the first $15-20 million of their budget on a single star.
It is not just the stars that are missing. The box office bump traditionally associated with Academy Award nominations has been somewhere between modest and invisible this year. Avatar 's takings — $2.5 billion worldwide and counting — were unstoppable anyway, while some of the other films — the animation feature Up and The Hurt Locker — were released too long ago to enjoy much benefit now.
“It used to be for years, the [nominated] pictures would be re-released at Oscar time,” motion picture academy president Tom Sherak said. “But it's not viable to do that any more, so most studios don't.” This year the academy has doubled the number of best picture nominees from five to 10, an attempt to shake things up and guarantee the presence of a few more crowd-pleasers and big-name stars and thus attract a bigger television audience.
“The press said we had better start doing something different,” Mr. Sherak said. “The committee listened to what went right and what went wrong.”
But it is far from the clear that the gambit has paid off. Avatar aside, the best picture nominees have added a paltry $24 million at the box office since the list was announced last month.
As Paul Dergarabedian, of the industry tracking website Hollywood.com, put it: “The bottom line is adding five more movies didn't necessarily add two times the gross to the crop of films.” Much of this year's Oscars race has been like a presidential election primary. First the frontrunner ( Avatar ) found itself in an unexpectedly tight race with The Hurt Locker . Then the accusations and recriminations began: Hurt Locker was not all that accurate. Hurt Locker was engaging in unethically negative campaign tactics, leading one of its producers to be denied tickets to the big night. Hurt Locker , finally, may have been ripping off a real-life bomb disposal expert who launched an 11{+t}{+h}-hour lawsuit deemed frivolous by most Hollywood watchers.
Unlike the outcome of presidential primaries, of course, none of this really matters. And it is unlikely to do much to shift the opinion of academy voters — a cautious, rarely adventurous crowd who like to find a movie to champion and then stick to it. What that means in practice, we'll have to wait until Sunday night to find out. — © Guardian Newspapers Limited, 2010
