Max Wilder wrote
Greg wrote
Max Wilder wrote
J.Lo went 21 years between good movies. Will voters hold that against her? They should.
You could just as easily be describing Glenn Close.
Who didn't win.
What about Jared Leto? What about Jennifer Connelly? What about... actually, to be honest, I hate myself for engaging in this argument. Voters should not hold anyone's previous career against them. They should simply vote for their favorite performance. Will they? Probably not. Jennifer Lopez is probably not going to win an Oscar for Hustlers.
That being said, if they push her for Best Supporting Actress, and she wins a bunch of critics awards, and the field is weak... hey, crazier things have happened.
Mister Tee wrote
I will, though, confess to an aging-guy worry: I've watched critical reaction change over the past few years. It seems to me we've seen a generation (if not generations) of critics move into place who've never known a time when serious movies were also popular movies (which was the norm well into my adulthood). Because, in their experience, most any movie with ambition has been a late-Fall release geared to an awards campaign, they tend to lump all of them -- from a dull biopic like The Theory of Everything to a PTA masterpiece like Phantom Thread -- as "Oscar bait," something to be mildly disdained. Conversely, they seem to elevate (I'd say overrate) genre pieces like the ones that have been their daily bread since childhood -- super-hero movies (the Dark Knight and Black Panther pushes), horror films (Get Out their big success, but also advocacy for things like Hereditary), pure action (hello, Mad Max: Fury Road) and broad comedies (Tiffany Haddish, Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder). None of these genres strike me as generally prize-rating -- The Dark Knight and Get Out are the films that come closest for me, and I'm 50/50 on either -- but I think we're heading to a future where more and more such films get promoted into prime Oscar position, because critics, who used to dismiss such films, are now promoting them past their station.
It's hard to argue against it.
When I began watching films in the mid-90's, it was certainly the case that "serious" films were released throughout the year. My first beloved filmgoing experience was to see Braveheart in May of 1995, a summer that also saw many more throughout the season and the year. Clearly some were angling for Oscar attention, but Apollo 13 was both a serious film and a popular film. I don't know if anyone looks to 1995 as a great year for films (I'll always have fond memories) but with the ramping up of blockbuster summers into blockbuster springs and falls, 1995 became a distant memory.
I think two things happened at the same time that at the very least affected the perception of "Oscar bait' like you're talking about. One of them is the rise of blockbuster summer and the other is Miramax's temporary (but at the time, seemingly eternal) vice-grip on the Academy.
While the studios were quickly turning their attention towards this model of filmmaking that almost certainly guaranteed massive return on massive investment, the Academy was so quick to fall for Harvey's model of Oscar bait (neither Phantom Threads or Dark Knights) that the distance between serious art cinema and middlebrow blue hair Oscar flicks felt negligible. Can you blame a 23 year old for making that mistake when Harvey Weinstein fooled so many adults into what should be taken seriously? Sure, there were aberrations here and there but it became sport to predict which undeserving Miramax film, which Lasse Hallstrom film, would make into the nominee's ring before something that just meant more. For years, it felt like Oscar movies were just for old Democrats. I certainly became more populist during this time, desperately clamoring for
something that struck a chord with the populace or anybody I know to be nominated.
I'm not just talking about the Academy awards, mind you. I'm talking about the perception of serious film storytelling. I think that movie culture in 2019 has been wildly infantilized over the years. That said, the bulk of my concern for the first half of my moviegoing life (95-08) wasn't the elevation of popular filmgoing into accolades but the opposite. The blind elevation of the meaningless into the meaningful. I think that's been extremely harmful because it forces people to look elsewhere for recommendation.