On Indian forums they are saying that ' 12 years a slave ' won't win too many Oscars because it does not give a great image of America , that ' Slumdog millionaire ' got many awards because it made the Americans feel better about themselves compared to Asians like people from India , but ' 12 years a slave ' would not make Americans feel better about themselves and would rather expose something that they would like to forget .
I don't know how much water that holds, even if
12 Years A Slave doesn't win many Oscars. Fairly recent Best Picture winners have been far from "rah-rah America", as FOX News will be happy to tell you.
The Hurt Locker was hardly a glorification of the U.S. involvement in Iraq, and though it didn't overtly address the justifications or grander geo-political themes, you can't say that dark, psychological look at a couple of soldiers in that combat zone was designed to make "Americans" feel better about themselves. And it won over a very escapist mega-blockbuster in
Avatar.
Going back a little further and though fictional films not based on historical facts,
The Departed's world of police corruption is hardly a great image of America,
Million Dollar Baby's emotional drama rests, ultimately, on the moral issue of assisted suicide (U.S.A.! U.S.A.!), and for all of its detractors about it being too-pat or simplistic or whatever in its depiction of racial disharmony, if
Crash is designed to make this country feel warm and fuzzy about itself, I'm not seein' it.
In general, dramas about Slavery and the U.S. Civil War have not fared particularly well with Best Picture. Spielberg's
The Color Purple, which is Post-Slavery but set in the Jim Crow era South dealing with many of the same issues, famously was shut out after receiving eleven noms, including Best Picture. Spielberg's
Lincoln lost out to
Argo just last year, and his
Amistad was not even nominated for Best Picture.
Glory, Ride with the Devil and
Cold Mountain were unnominated.
Django Unchained, which is of course is a fantasy action piece and not historically accurate, was nominated last year.
Dances with Wolves won Best Picture and starts on a Civil War battlefield before moving far away from that conflict. You have to go all the way back to
Gone with the Wind to find the only Picture winner that is expressly about The Civil War or Slavery.
If you want to use all of that as proof that The Academy "would rather [not] expose something that they would like to forget", you can. But it should be noted that
"Roots", the 1977 television mini-series based on Alex Haley's novel, is one of the most honored and watched series in the history of the medium.
If you want to say that the general uncomfortability of the subject matter in
12 Years A Slave, for mainstream Americans or Academy members or anybody, may give pause to viewers and voters, I don't disagree. It's very brutal and far from a "fun" film, of course. Movies about grim historical subject matters presented in all their horrors have won Best Picture before, including the Holocaust in
Schindler's List, the Vietnam War in
Platoon and
The Deer Hunter, a WWII prisoner of war camp in
The Bridge On the River Kwai, and the rise of the Orcs under Sauron in
The Lord of the Rings: The Retrun of the King (that last one may, in fact, be a joke).
As the great screenwriter William Goldman (
The Princess Bride, Butch Cassidy & the Sundance Kid) opined about Hollywood, "Nobody knows anything. It's all bullsh!t." When you try to ascribe reasons to a voting body like The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which currently has around six thousand members, or extrapolate that further to somehow being what Americans in general feel about one thing or another, you are welcome to any and all theories...but mostly, it's all bullsh!t.
Reply to Topic
