Tim and Brian Bitch About the Oscars

OK, we're all going to watch the 78th annual Academy Awards, right? Anyone? Anyone? Funny how Hollywood always forgets to program any big releases against the telecast. Problem is, the box office is going down, down, down, as Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon sing in Walk the Line. The 2005 U.S. theatrical take fell 5 percent from the preceding year, according to Variety; over five years, attendance has shrunk 14 percent. The video market (DVD, VOD, Netflix, etc.) is much bigger than the theatrical business, and the video game haul (PSP, Xbox, etc.) dwarfs them both. Kids have better things to do than see movies. Adults are sick of seeing comic-book-based movies aimed at kids. And everybody's sick of the cell phones, ads, crying babies, and patrons rudely talking during the show. With giant flat-screen TVs, TiVo, and all the other at-home entertainment amenities, a night out at the multiplex has become increasingly unattractive.

So what does that mean for the movies, the Oscars (whose ratings have been unimpressively flat for years), and us poor filmgoers trying to balance blockbusters and indies? SW's two chief film critics sat down to discuss the dilemma.

Brian Miller: I don't even have a TV to watch on Sunday. I'll just check the results online. What will you be looking for?

Tim Appelo: A drink, to begin with. It's like there's some mass-suicide pact going on in Hollywood. The big studios don't even try to make Best Pictures anymore. And all five nominees are so small that they got stomped at the box office by the likely documentary winner, March of the Penguins.

Miller: Probably. And a scandal when Werner Herzog's infinitely better Grizzly Man wasn't even nominated.

Appelo: That's another thing that calls for a drink to numb the pain. Are they trying to drive down the Oscar broadcast's ratings even farther? When has there ever been so little suspense, so little drama?

Miller: Right. I think we both agree that Wallace & Gromit wins Best Animated Film, Crash wins Original Screenplay, and Brokeback Mountain wins Adapted Screenplay. What's your call for Best Picture? I know you loved Crash.

Appelo: Brokeback gets both Picture and Director. Because if an anti-blockbuster like Crash somehow wins, it's a sign of bad times. And Hollywood has enough of those already. But the controversy would help. Roger Ebert picked it as best film of the year, and at our sister publication LA Weekly, Scott Foundas picked it as worst. (Even Ebert's Web site editor, Seattle's own Jim Emerson, razzed it on rogerebert.com.)

Miller: Hollywood loves Brokeback, because gay is the new Jew—so we can all congratulate ourselves for being so over homophobia. But I pick Hoffman over Heath, and Reese over Felicity, so it's a draw in the gay-versus-straight acting categories.

Appelo: Those are my bets, too, and I'll bet most Oscar handicappers agree. Word has it that Harvey Weinstein refused to push Felicity's Oscar vehicle, Transamerica.

Miller: It's an average performance in a weak field. Seriously—Judi Dench gets an Academy nod just for showing up on the set in the morning? (What happened to Ziyi Zhang in 2046, Joan Allen in The Upside of Anger, or Q'orianka Kilcher in The New World?) But a crap movie. At least Brokeback is well made in the getting over things department.

Appelo: And yet, Hollywood has a limited tolerance for tolerance. It's like that old Jonathan Miller joke: "I'm not really a Jew. Just Jew-ish. Not the whole hog, you know." It's OK to be gay-ish, but there are limits. The Hollywood Reporter's Anne Thompson quoted an anonymous insider saying about Transamerica, "Harvey [Weinstein] thinks it's just a stunt performance by Felicity of interest only to homosexuals and urbanites." It could be because he wants to avoid pouring advertising money down the drain of the theatrical release, when the real profit potential is DVD.

Miller: Aha! That's the future of Transamerica, the future of Crash, the future of the movies. Crash has already sold 4.5 million units on DVD, even before the Oscars. Soon, commercial outcasts like Transamerica will go the Bubble route: simultaneous video and theatrical releases, with the latter basically a form of advertising for the former. Although no one wanted to see that chalk-tasting Soderbergh flick in either format.