Are you going to watch the Academy Awards this Sunday? Please don’t. You’ll only drive yourself crazy. If you love Donald Trump, you’ll be outraged at all of the idiotic, self-important protests. If you hate Donald Trump you’ll be exasperated that the idiots in Hollywood somehow managed to find the most annoying and counter-productive ways to oppose the Orange Menace. It’s a lose-lose proposition.
Plus, La La Land is going to win everything. All the statistical models show that it has a 95.3 percent chance. So it’s a lock. Those things are never wrong.
Though, in all seriousness, La La Land really is going to win everything. This is the least suspenseful Oscar night since 1997.
So do yourself a favor: Instead of sitting through the Oscar telecast, watch a movie!
I know, it’s a crazy idea.
On this week’s episode of the Substandard podcast—which will be posted here this morning—we argue about the best and worst movies to have won the Oscar for Best Picture. I don’t want to spoil it. But I will say this: In prepping for the show, I was shocked at how mediocre Best Picture winners are, as a class.
If you take the last 50 Best Picture winners, it’s hard to find even five legitimately great movies. It’s impossible to find ten of them in the bunch. Most of the winners are pretty good; some of them are just embarrassments.
And when you look at the last twenty years, it turns out that most of the movies which we now regard as modern classics weren’t even nominated. If we had time, I could write you a convincing 4,000 words arguing that The Dark Knight, Layercake, and Heat are the three best movies of the last two decades. None of them were nominated for Best Picture.
Neither, by the by, were The Big Lebowski. Or Jurassic Park. Or Boogie Nights. I could go on and on and on.
On the one hand, I’m sympathetic to the notion that it’s hard to judge art in the moment and that you can’t really evaluate the greatness of a film until you’ve had a few years to let it sink in.
On the other, I don’t understand how anyone could have walked out of the theater from any of those films and not understood they had seen something special. And I cannot imagine how anyone walked out of The Cider House Rules and thought, “This might have been the best movie of the year!”
So skip the Oscars. Go watch Layercake—which is smart and funny and interesting and the greatest gangster movie since Goodfellas (at least).
