Sixty-five years ago The Oscars shrunk the number of Best Picture nominees from ten to five (there had been as many as twelve in some of the earlier years of the award). In all those years since going down to five, The Best Picture winner and Best Director winner have differed only thirteen times. Back from the '49 to '53 ceremonies it happened four out of those five years: 1949
Hamlet/John Huston (
Treasure of the Sierra Madre), 1950
All the King's Men/Joseph L. Mankiewicz (
A Letter to Three Wives), 1952
An American in Paris/George Stevens (
A Place in the Sun) and 1953
The Greatest Show on Earth/John Ford (
The Quiet Man). Once in the 1960s: 1968
In the Heat of the Night/Mike Nichols (
The Graduate). Once on the 1970s: 1973
The Godfather/Bob Fosse (
Cabaret). Twice for flms released in the 1980s: 1982
Chariots of Fire/Warren Beatty (
Reds) and 1990:
Driving Miss Daisy/Oliver Stone (
Born of the 4th of July). Then there was another spate of separation where it happened recently four out of the eight years from 1999 to 2006: 1999
Shakespeare in Love/Steven Spielberg (
Saving Private Ryan), 2002
Gladiator/Steven Soderbergh (
Traffic), 2003
Chicago/Roman Polanski (
The Pianist), 2006
Crash/Ang Lee (
Brokeback Mountain). All of the others since going down to five Picture nominees in '45 have been the same Picture and Director, and for the thirteen that were different all those Director's films were Best Picture nominees.
The only ONE instance in sixty-five years that the Best Picture winner's director did not even get a nomination was
Driving Miss Daisy. Despite the big prize and four wins out of nine nominations, the Australian Bruce Beresford (
Breaker Morant, Tender Mercies, Black Robe) somehow didn't make the cut on the ballot. He had been nominated back for
Tender Mercies, but not the Best Picture winner of the 1990 ceremony. Still seems strange. He didn't get a nom from the DGA, either.
All of that Oscar history preamble is to reinforce that anybody who thinks
The Blind Side, District 9, An Education, A Serious Man or
Up have ANY realistic shot of winning the top prize are delusional. Which is why I think this expansion back to ten Picture nominees is a waste of time. The theory behind it, besides the fact that you've now doubled the number of producers and Studios who get to promote their product as "Best Picture Nominee" on the DVD box, is that now there is more of a "mix". They believe that because of that mix the television audience for the Oscars will magically expand so that the kids and casual moviegoer who don't care about the usual kinds of dramas (and often box office under-performers) that have garnered most of the Picture noms will now tune in....to watch their favorite not win. How exciting!
If you look at this year's Best Director nominees you can figure out four of the likely five Best Picture noms had it still only been a limit of five in the category:
Avatar, The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious and
Up in the Air. Of those, I'd say
Avatar, Hurt Locker and
Up in the Air were locks for noms, even with only five spots, and you likely would have gotten at least one of the other two for the fourth spot. In the past fifteen years alone, Picture and Director matched up exactly only twice in 2009 and 2006, matched up for four out of the five in ten years, and only had three of the five match up three times: the differences being in 2002
In the Bedroom &
Moulin Rouge! Picture/
Black Hawk Down &
Mulholland Drive Director, 1996
Apollo 13 &
Sense & Sensibility Picture/
Dead Man Walking &
Leaving Las Vegas Director, and 1995
Four Weddings & a Funeral &
The Shawshank Redemption Picture/
Bullets Over Broadway &
Three Colours: Red Director.
So let's assume for sake of speculation at least four of the five would have matched up this year. That fifth spot would have been filled by a more mainstream piece like
The Blind Side or
Up, or barring those two even the British drama
An Education. So going back to the Picture winner always being either Best Director or at least a Best Director nominee, that would have left really three movies as the only ones with a realistic chance:
Avatar, The Hurt Locker and
Up in the Air. Which, you know, is where we are anyway. Why not name twenty-five movies as Picture nominees? It's always going to come down to two or three of them anyway. The rest are 100% superfluous.
Now going back to the Best Director category and that Kathryn Bigelow has already been named Best Director for the DGA Awards which is a near-lock of a predictor, we're down to a two-horse race for Best Picture this year:
Avatar or
The Hurt Locker. Both lead the pack with nine total nominations each.
Avatar does not have any nominees in the four acting categories. It used to be almost unheard of for the Best Picture winner not to have even one acting nom. Going all the way back to the 1948 ceremony, in those SIXTY years the only Best Pictures not to have any actors up for awards were
An American in Paris (1951),
The Greatest Show on Earth (1952),
Around the World in 80 Days (1956),
Gigi (1958),
The Last Emperor (1987),
Braveheart (1995),
The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003), and last year's
Slumdog Millionaire (2008). Eight times in sixty years, four of those coming in the 1950s, though it has happened for two of the last six, and one of those was an FX-laden mega-blockbuster.
The biggest thing
The Hurt Locker has going against it is its very small box office take, because unfortunately this
is the business of show doing the voting, and very often that rears its head. Now obviously just about everything ever made has a lesser box office take than
Avatar, which has made a couple BILLION and is still going strong. But
The Hurt Locker made about $17-million as a worldwide TOTAL. I mean, people in the biz made some derisive comments about the 2006 ceremony where
Crash and
Brokeback Mountain were the favorites, movies that "nobody" outside of Hollywood had even seen supposedly. But even there, while their final numbers were surely boosted a bit by their Oscar nominations,
Crash made about $55-million in the U.S. and nearly $100-million worldwide while
Brokeback $83-million domestic and $178-million total.
So you can look at all the percentages about this or that and the historical Oscar trends, but it may simply come down to the more fiscally-minded Academy voters not being able to ignore one of the biggest successes in their history in favor of a movie that made barely a dent at the box office, no matter how good or bad it may be. Not that
Avatar needs a Best Picture Oscar to validate it, but the disparity between the two front-runners in regards to money may be too incredibly lopsided for the underdog in the bomb disposal suit to overcome the odds. I'd like
The Hurt Locker to win, or even that there is some jaw-dropping upset that nobody predicts and
Up in the Air is the movie printed inside the envelope, but no matter what I want the deck does seem stacked...even if it is a computer-generated deck.
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