The WGA Strike and The Academy Awards

I’m usually the first to bemoan the Oscars, the next-to-last person to watch the ceremony, and the absolute last person to pay any attention to the shallow procession on the red carpet prior to the show.  So I find myself surprised to say that the thing I will miss most this year as fallout from the WGA strike is not the “missing” half-seasons of 30 Rock or SNL or the lost months of Colbert and Stewart during the primary campaign season.  What I might miss most this year is the Academy Awards show, provided some hunches I have come to pass.

I hate Oscar because he refuses to award the best films.  And I shouldn’t blame it on Oscar, he’s just a statue.  I blame it on Hollywood, and on the Hollywood professionals who vote for the Oscars.  These are the folks who reward simpleminded tripe like Forrest Gump in the year of Quiz Show, The Shawshank Redemption and Pulp Fiction.  The folks who make an annual ritual of patting themselves on the back in self-celebration of works like Gladiator (over Traffic), Chicago (over Gangs of New York), Shakespeare in Love (over maybe 300 better films that year.)  The meaningful films of the last 20 years by the emerging and existing master talents have been ignored in favor of crowd-pleasers by directors who are little more than seasoned and highly professional craftsmen.

This year, however, my hopes are high.  The two best studio films I saw this year, There Will Be Blood and No Country For Old Men, are tied for the most nominations.  They’re both made by directors whose bodies of work I greatly admire–Paul Thomas Anderson and The Coen brothers, respectively.  I think that The Diving Bell and The Butterfly was shorted by not getting a Best Picture nomination, but it’s not too often that Oscar gives nominations for direction, editing, screenplay and cinematography to a French-language film with no American stars.  I will grumble loudly though that it has not been nominated for Best Foreign Language  Film, and the same goes for 4 Months, 3 Weeks, 2 Days, from Romania and maybe the best film I’ve seen in the past couple years.  I’d also grumble about Juno, which I hated, but I’ve already blogged in detail about my severe negative feelings toward that film, and suffice to say I don’t think it should have been nominated for anything.

But because of the attention to the films by Anderson and the Coens, and because Julian Schnabel’s film was so oft-nominated, there is that off chance that Oscar will smile this year on what are actually the best films of the year.  Or, Atonement, made essentialy standard for award season, could pick up a bunch of awards and it could be business as usual.

However, if Daniel Day Lewis, and PT Anderson or Schnabel or Joel Coen, and Janusz Kaminski, and  There Will Be Blood manage to pick up awards, and for once Oscar gets it right, but no ceremony takes place, then the American public not being exposed to Oscar finally getting it right would be the biggest tragedy of the WGA strike.  And it would be a bad thing for the writers, because some great original films, the kind of stuff that opens the market for their spec scripts, will not have garnered the attention they deserve.