Non-Fiction RR: Oscars, Fooling Us AGAIN?

A strange thing happened on Groundhog Day at the Gurus o’ Gold panel.

            The Gurus o’ Gold panel is made up of 14 awards watchers who write for Entertainment Weekly and the Hollywood Reporter. They predict the movies/actors/directors that will be nominated for an Oscar. Every year, for the past decade, they have predicted the correct Best Director nominations and the correct Best Picture nominations. This year they predicted, in order: Steven Spielberg, for “Lincoln”; Ben Affleck, for “Argo”; Kathryn Bigelow, for “Zero Dark Thirty”; Ang Lee, for “Life of Pi”; David O. Russell, for “Silver Linings Playbook”; and Tom Hooper, for “Les Miserables. A few on the panel thought that Michael Haneke, for “Amour” and Quentin Tarantino, for “Django Unchained” would sneak in the nominations category.

            But boy, did they get a surprise when the nominations were revealed. Ben Affleck, Kathryn Bigelow, Tom Hooper, and Quentin Tarantino were all snubbed nominations. Michael Haneke and Benh Zeitlin, whose movie “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was his first feature film, were nominated. “Beasts of the Southern Wild” was a small budget film about a fable, and “Argo”, “Zero Dark Thirty”, “Les Miserables”, and “Django Unchained” were all large-scale films that attracted a wide audience. It might as well have actually been raining cats and dogs.

            I think that this article is very interesting. It shows how even the most top notched people in award business get it wrong. I think this shows how the Oscars are always one step ahead of us in the fooling department. We can never fully know what they’ll throw at us each year. We can’t prepare ourselves for what happened last year. We have to be ready for something different to happen.