A-List: Best Picture Nominee Slates - Part 1
By J. Don Birnam
July 14, 2016
BoxOfficeProphets.com
To answer that question, we will be taking a look back at the relative strengths of the Best Picture nominees slate in the last 15 Oscar years (from calendar year 2000, for which Gladiator won Best Picture in the 2001 ceremony, through calendar year 2014, for which Birdman won Best Picture in 2015). I’ll rank the years from the weakest to the strongest field, taking into account the quality of the nominees as well as of the movies that were left out of the conversation. Today we are not focused only on most deserving wins or upsets by any particular movie (I could go on for days about that), but simply about the nominee field as a whole.
An interesting hypothesis developed while we were researching and writing this column: generally speaking, weak movies tend to win in stronger years, and great movies find it easier to triumph in a weak field. It somewhat makes sense: when the field is very good and very crowded, a lot of movies split up the “quality” vote and a blander movie can sneak in. What does this mean for this past year’s Oscars? Perhaps that Spotlight, a good but not masterpiece-type movie, could win the Oscar, as the field is crowded with good movies.
As usual, tweet me your reactions here, if you care! I’ll also post images from some of these movies onInstagram.
Here we go…
15. 2004: Million Dollar Baby Steals It in Weakest Year in Recent History
In 2004, the Best Picture nominees were Million Dollar Baby, The Aviator, Ray, Finding Neverland, and Sideways. Not one of those, to be frank, is on anyone’s best ever Oscar nominees list. Coincidentally also the last time Chris Rock hosted the Oscars, the ceremony was a snooze-fest where all the top acting and writing prizes also went to a Best Picture nominee, something that hasn’t happened since and that shows the thin bench.
The movies themselves - a boxing melodrama, a musical biopic and a confused hero biopic, along with a quirky but forgettable indie comedy and a touching but formulaic literary history novel - are mostly to blame. The field was so weak, in fact, that Million Dollar Baby, released the last week of the year, swooped in to win it all - the latest released Best Picture winner in nearly 30 years to win with a post-November release.
One way in which the Academy could have improved the lineup that year would have been to nominate Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mindfor the top prize, but there was not much else to choose from, unless you wanted to see Collateral, Vera Drake or Closer among the finalists? It was simply a year to forget, and forget it we shall.
14. 2003: Lord of The Rings And Not Much Else
The worst for 2004 was that it bested in badness the year that had just preceded it. In 2003, the Best Picture nominees were Return of the King, Lost In Translation, Master and Commander, Mystic River, and Seabiscuit. The eventual winner is a modern technical masterpiece, and I do think that Mystic River is one of the best crime dramas ever.
But, with apologies to what I know is a passionate contingency, Lost in Translation was trite in its quirkiness, Seabiscuit epitomized everything that’s clichéd about sports/triumph over adversity movies, and Master and Commander was as memorable as this year’s panned In the Heart of the Sea.
And there was not much that the Academy could have done to improve the lineup. Sure, City of God and 21 Grams would have helped, but when you have acting nominations for Cold Mountain, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Something’s Gotta Give, you know not even the snobby Academy members took this year seriously in any way. And if you need any additional proof of the weakness of the year, look no further than to Return of the King’s record-breaking clean sweep of the 11 Oscars it was nominated for. No one else deserved statuettes that year, it seems.
Good movies come and go in waves, it seems, because, as we shall see, the bad 2003-2004 years followed two very strong years.
13. 2011: The Artist Flattens Flat Competition
Also pretty forgettable was the slate in the first year of the sliding Best Picture nominees experiment (where there are anywhere between five and 10 nominees). The anointed nine were The Artist, Hugo, The Descendants,Moneyball, The Help, The Tree of Life, War Horse, Midnight in Paris, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. Most of these movies are, to be kind, divisive at the least. The Artist is an anthropomorphism of itself, collapsing under the weight of the own expectations it set up. There are flashes of brilliance in Sorkin’s Moneyball script, touching sentimentality in Scorsese’s Hugo, and comedic freshness in the performances in The Help. There is also a rekindling of brilliance in Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris script.
But even Spielberg wet the bed with the disjointed War Horse, I’m simply not a fan of Mallick’s megalomaniac approach as in The Tree of Life, and as you can see from my commentary on, for example, Sideways, I’ll never be a fan of a movie like The Descendants. And Extremely Loud is the lowest-rated Best Picture nominee in two decades.
Adding to the insult is the fact that the Academy left at least three worthy contenders on the table - Bridesmaids, Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo all deserved spots on the list if you ask me - and this was definitely not one of their proudest moments.
12. 2009: The Hurt Locker Wins in First Year of Expanded Race
In 2009, the Academy expanded the Best Picture field to ten nominees for the first time since the 1940s, forever altering Oscar history. In that first fateful year, also the first and only time a woman won Best Director, the chilling The Hurt Locker asserted itself over the groundbreaking and most successful movie of all time, Avatar, while leaving in the dust other worthy contenders from District 9 to Precious, Up, and Inglourious Basterds. Rounding the field of ten were An Education, Up in the Air, The Blind Side, and A Serious Man. I actually find that bottom five list to be somewhat weak, which is why I’m not enamored with this year and have placed it so low on the list.
Still, the year does show the Academy doing what it rarely does - recognizing themes and topics across a broad spectrum. In that first year of the expansion, each member was allowed to submit up to 10 nominees for Best Picture. Inevitably, or at least so the theory goes, this led to a more searching look for nominees. Thus, you have a war movie, a futuristic allegory of Apartheid, an animated movie, a spaghetti “western” about World War II, a quirky Coen Brothers movie, three movies aimed squarely at a female audience (one of them an unapologetic racial analysis), and a gutsy, innovative sci-fi movie with groundbreaking technology.
It’s somewhat unfortunate that the expansion came in a relatively weak year, because this arguably scared this Academy into requiring only five Best Picture votes of its members, allowing them to be once more insular in their picks. But, when you consider that the only viable contenders not nominated for Best Picture that year were Crazy Heart, Invictus, and The Last Station, it is clear why the first year of the expansion is near the bottom of the last 15 years.
11. 2005: Crash Delivers The Biggest Modern Upset
The year when Crash took Best Picture is infamously remembered as a bad movie winning, as it ousted the beloved Brokeback Mountain. Crash is perhaps the worst winner in this list of 15, but the rest of its lineup is nothing to sneeze at. On top of Brokeback you have Good Night, and Good Luck, Capote, and Munich. That year, Ang Lee won Best Director, but Crash took home the top prize.
Brokeback is a groundbreaking movie in its own right, and its presence alone moves the strength of the year up by several notches. Also great is Good Night, the first black-and-white nominee since Schindler’s List, a sort of mix between Spotlight and Bridge of Spies this year, and unabashedly political at a time when its politics were not in vogue. Munich, a much better turn for Spielberg (and his first of four and counting straight Best Picture nominees) than the later War Horse, is a difficult but intense portrayal of a tragedy. The year could have also had The Constant Gardner, Syriana, Memoirs of a Geisha, and Transamerica as credible nominees.
Still, overall, the win for Crash does taint the entire year, and leaves it much lower on the list than otherwise would have been.
Part 2 of 3 will be coming soon.