Dark Jezter said:
See, that sounds like an implicit slam on those of us who did like SiL. Critics don't "love their costume dramas". I don't remember "The Affair of the Necklace" doing terribly well at the Oscars. So why were the critics so biased in favor of SiL? Was it because it had decent acting? An imaginative plot? Actual chemistry between the two leads? Good dialogue? Man, those critics are so taken in by that garbage.
Please don't confuse your opinion with reality -- or if you do, at least be honest about it. I didn't like "The Matrix", but I can at least acknowledge that it has good special effects and fight scenes.
Well, if you're talking to people online, you're not exactly talking to the masses, now, are you? I can't say I'm surprised by the lack of D&D player love for "The English Patient" -- it wasn't real meant to cross over into the action/roleplaying arena. On the other hand, it went for epic at a time when few movies went for epic anymore, and it had an interesting storytelling framing device.
I'll be honest. I didn't love it. It's not on my Ten Best list. But I can definitely understand it winning awards.
My lack of faith in the ENnies is more than just dismay over works losing that I feel should have won. It's mostly because I believe that the recipients of the various awards are decided more upon insider politics (you know, like who is the current darling among the ENWorld community, that kind of stuff) than whether or not they are the best in their respective fields.
Does the statement I just made sound at all vague and unsupported to you? If I'd posted that on its own, I suspect I would have gotten flamed. Of course, we're on ENWorld rather than a movie messageboard, but still.
I find myself in a weird position, because I'm not even all that into the Academy Awards. I sometimes agree and sometimes disagree with their picks, and I always feel that they're a little too conservative in what they're willing to recognize -- for example, I hated the fact that "The Truman Show" got nothing but Ed Harris because it came out in the same year as a poorly written boat movie. But you're making these blanket attacks that really, really, really need to be backed up with something more than "the movie I liked didn't win".
Dude, Spider-Man was a movie with enormous gaping flaws. That's why it will never be nominated for Best Picture. Rather than further hijack this thread, if you want me to give supporting evidence for Spider-Man being a flawed and extremely frustrating movie, bump some old Spider-Man thread from down the list and I'll post. (Although I will say that I didn't hate it or loathe it -- just that it had enormous gaping flaws that really screwed it up, in my opinion.)
Or, to paraphrase you...
I know that Spider-Man will never be nominated for Best Picture; the Academy is notorious for ignoring sci-fi and fantasy films unless they have a basic level of competence, like like Star Wars and The Lord of the Rings.
Hm. I suppose we'll have to wait and see.
You're right in that an Oscar pedigree is no guarantee of immortality -- it reflects the mood at the time, and the mood changes. For every Casablanca, which won for best director (I think?), there are a bunch of heavy winners that never get heard from again.
Whether that means that they're better or worse than movies that we still watch today is probably another topic, though -- that's the question of judging a movie's worth based on its shelf-life. Twenty years from now, "The Matrix" might well be utterly forgotten except in college classes that want to teach theories of loss of humanity and glorification of violence as a cathartic release for sedentary teenage males in the 1990s. Or it could be a classic. It depends on what the social climate is like down the line.
