All About Awards Show Season

It’s hard to believe now, but for a stretch of just over ten years, there were anywhere from ten to 12 nominees in the Oscar category for Best Picture. However, after Casablanca won the award in 1943 – a movie some believe is the best film to ever snag the honor – the Academy pared it down to the now familiar number of five.

In the decades since, major and minor trends have emerged with regards to what kinds of movies Academy voters tend to prefer in anointing their annual gang of five. Here now is a look at how this year’s nominees for Best Picture compare to some of those that have come before.

No Country for Old Men – Rated R for Violence:
In 1971 and 1972, The French Connection and The Godfather became the first movies with an R rating to win Best Picture. Now here we are again, with the Coen Brothers’ bloody masterpiece looking like the odds-on favorite to follow in the footsteps of 2006 high-body-count winner The Departed.  But this is not your father’s movie violence, and as such connects to the bloodiest previous Best Picture winners – 1991’s The Silence of the Lambs, 1995’s Braveheart and 2000’s Gladiator.

Juno star Ellen Page.
© Fox Searchlight

Juno – Pregnant with Pathos:
In the midst of the Academy’s ongoing fondness for R-rated fare, it’s become harder than ever for comedies to sneak into the pack. This decade, only Lost in Translation,   Little Miss Sunshine and this charmer from fast rising talent Jason Reitman have made the cut, and there’s good reason for that. All are comedy-dramas, not simply comedies, pinning their hearty laughs to very serious topics such as contemporary alienation, family dysfunction and teenage pregnancy. We live in complicated times, and – for better or worse – the comedies deemed worthy of Best Picture (Life Is Beautiful, Four Weddings and a Funeral, etc.) must have some sort of undercurrent of seriousness.

George Clooney in Michael Clayton.
© Warner Bros. Pictures

Michael Clayton – Beginner’s Luck:
Every once in a while, a first-time writer-director breaks through the ranks with a Best Picture nominee, and each time it is a cause for genuine celebration. Frank Darabont did it in 1994 with The Shawshank Redemption; Sam Mendes wowed the Academy with eventual 1999 champ American Beauty; and now it is the turn of Tony Gilroy, who honed his thriller writing skills via the pulse pounding trilogy of Jason Bourne films.  It’s always tough for a first-timer to break through  to the top honor, however – even Orson Welles, whose first movie Citizen Kane was nominated for Best Picture in 1941, lost the Oscar that year to How Green Was My Valley.

Daniel Day-Lewis as oilman Daniel Plainview. © Paramount Vantage

There Will Be Blood – Individual Glory:
It’s not a biopic, but in recent Oscar history terms, it might as well be. Like Jamie Foxx in Ray (2004), Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote (2005) and Helen Mirren in The Queen (2006), Daniel Day-Lewis has won every individual acting honor under the sun for his portrayal of driven oilman Daniel Plainview, en route to a de facto Academy Award night triumph. And yet, once again, the film itself is unlikely to take home the trophy for Best Picture. Given that this successive series of performances is one of the most impressive strings in Oscar history, an 0-for-4 Best Picture showing would be the basis for one heck of a golden statuette trivia footnote.

Knightley and McAvoy star in Atonement. © Focus Features

Atonement – Covering All the Bases:
Like Paul Thomas Anderson’s There Will Be Blood, Joe Wright’s film is a period piece and based on a novel, in this case by Ian McEwan. But when you add in that fact that it’s British-made, involves World War II, features former Oscar winner Vanessa Redgrave, mixes a heavy dose of unrequited love into its romantic plotting and has show-stopping five and a half minute uninterrupted tracking shot, it all adds up to unstoppable Oscar consideration.  As a result, Atonement was able to outdistance such critical favorites as Ratatouille and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly for the fifth and final Best Picture slot.

Of course, in terms of what actual result is announced for the category this year at the Kodak Theater, there is another intermittent trend that some are hoping will resurface, that of the major upset. Should Juno take it over No Country for Old Men, it will rank right up there with other such recent end runs as Crash over Brokeback Mountain (2005), Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan (1998) and Ordinary People over Raging Bull (1980).