Why is Variety - in the form of two leading bloggers on the .com page - selling the absurd notion that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is chasing Slummy's tail closely?
It is my considered opinion that both Frost/Nixon and Milk have much stronger constituencies than Button at this point.
Is it really as simple as "the movie with the most nominations must be #2?"
While Bart is selling Benjamin Button coming up from behind, Anne Thompson is selling Milk splitting Slummy and the alleged #2, Button.
Are we really this desperate to create a race (and perhaps, sell more ads) when we all have a very good sense of where things really are?
And what kind of crap is this? "This year the directors to a remarkable degree, have “final cut” over the Oscar race."
You mean... if one group out of all the others who have already gone the same way goes some other way, the race is back on... and studios better start spending on ads that won't move the bar much again?
Looking at the facts of the last decade of DGA votes, there have been 3 situations where DGA went with a director whose film did not win best picture. In 2 of those cases, the director won the Oscar in a split and the film lost. In 1, both the film and the director lost. And in 1 additional "off" example, the film won and the director did not.
2008 - The Coens - No Country
2007 - Marty Scorsese - The Departed
2006 - Ang Lee - Brokeback Mountain
2005 - Clint Eastwood - Million $ Baby
2004 - Peter Jackson - Rings
2003 - Rob Marshall - Chicago
2002 - Ron Howard - A Beautiful Mind
2001 - Ang Lee, Crouching Tiger
2000 - Sam Mendes, American Beauty
1999 - Spielberg, Saving Private Ryan
The thing is, by the end of January/early February, the die is usually cast. How many times in those 10 years did DGA wins seem more a comfirmation than a "final cut?" Scorsese could have won without The Departed winning. He was the focus of that year's strongest push.
Anyone else?
Not really? No Country, M$B, Rings 3, Beautiful Mind, and American Beauty were all machines by this part of the season... much as Slumdog now seems like a machine.
Of the four "surprise" DGA-to-Oscar occurances, you're looking at hard-charging underdogs Crash, The Pianist, and Shakespeare in Love. The fourth event of this was a real toss-up year with Soderbergh nominated twice, Ang Lee with a foreign language film, a squeezed in light comedy, and the biggest hit, Gladiator. An odd year.
Does anyone (aside from Variety) really see a hard charging underdog or a toss-up kind of year coming?
I'm sure that many journalists would love to spend a week analyzing a Danny Boyle loss at DGA. But I don't seem them getting their wish.
But if they do... look back at history. Whenever DGA seems to be telling us something surprsing, it seems to turn out that we are being misled.
Read the complete post at http://www.mcnblogs.com/thehotblog/archives/2009/01/hmmm_2.html