Oscars

The audience was up from the 36.3 million who saw "Slumdog Millionaire" win best picture last year and 32 million -- Oscar's smallest audience on record -- in 2008, Nielsen said. The Oscars had just over 42 million watch in 2005, when "Million Dollar Baby" was the big winner.

The Oscar ratings fall in line with bigger audiences for awards shows in recent months. The Golden Globes were up 14 percent over the year before, and the performance-heavy Grammys up 36 percent, Nielsen said. The Emmys, the Tonys and the Miss America pageant all saw higher ratings.

Analysts say fewer chances for Americans to gather in front of the television set for communal events may help make these events more popular. With a poor economy, more people are staying home, too. The Internet may also help draw viewers; experts say many people are online while the shows are on, and they comment about them to friends.

Ratings for the New York market appeared unaffected by a business dispute between Cablevision and ABC's parent, Walt Disney Co.

ABC had been dropped by Cablevision for its 3.1 million subscribers in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut on Sunday, and the network was not restored until 13 minutes after the Academy Awards telecast began.

Still, New York ranked No. 13 among among the 56 biggest media markets in the country, Nielsen said. New York's overnight rating was 11 percent above the average for all of the big markets.

Although I have mixed feelings about "The Hurt Locker" itself, and about the cultural-psychological reasons for its ascendancy, Bigelow herself is a genuine and strange cinematic genius who has paid her dues several times over and richly deserves her moment of triumph. (Is "Hurt Locker" her best film? Probably not. Her second-best? Not even sure about that.) I wish producer-screenwriter Mark Boal hadn't complicated Bigelow's big moment on the stage of the Kodak Theatre by persistently tugging on her elbow, like a kid in a department store who needed to use the john. That was odd.

Did it take a grueling, ¿Quién es más macho? war thriller for a female director to win a pile of Oscars? I know there are counter-arguments -- mainly, there just haven't been that many Oscar-scale movies made by women -- but I kind of think, yeah, it did. This may have more to do with the Academy's recent preference for "serious," male-coded film genres than with simplistic sexual discrimination. Hollywood legend Joseph L. Mankiewicz won back-to-back writing and directing Oscars in 1950 and 1951 for "A Letter to Three Wives" and "All About Eve," but it's difficult to imagine such female-centric movies garnering those kinds of honors today.

Taking the longer view, this year's Oscar campaign and its conclusion offered some crucial flashes of insight into how the Academy works in the 21st century, which is a whole lot different from the way it used to work. Although this goes against nearly everything I believe about life on Planet Earth, I have concluded that Academy voters as a group are less cynical and calculated than I thought -- but also that there is a conflict or schism between the membership and the needs and desires of the Academy's leadership, or at least its image-management and P.R. teams.

I exchanged e-mails late on Sunday night with a critical colleague, one who'd made the same misguided assumptions that I had about the inevitable victory of "Avatar," notwithstanding the accolades heaped upon "Hurt Locker" by every critics' group and industry trade organization. Our fundamental error, we concluded, lay in believing that after several years of victories by mid-budget Indiewood pictures the Academy's collective thinking, and voting behavior, would at some point return to "normal." What we meant by normal, of course, was an ingrained institutional preference for big-budget spectacle. But that old normal is dead, and here's the new normal: Hollywood's central trade group doesn't like its own movies that much.

Allow me to quote an esteemed expert: "One thing that's become clear is that the film industry feels no confidence about the cultural significance of its own products. Hollywood's self-appointed division of self-importance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, passed up the chance to honor one of the most ambitious and successful films the American movie factories have ever made in order to hand out hardware to a mid-budget, semi-independent production made in Jordan without movie stars."

OK, the expert is not all that esteemed. It's me, and other than replacing "India" with "Jordan," that's taken verbatim from the article I wrote last year about the Oscar victory of "Slumdog Millionaire" and the shunning of "The Dark Knight." If anything, the contrast is even starker this time around. "Avatar" is, of course, a much bigger hit than TDK, and its use of motion-capture technology and 3-D clearly points toward the Hollywood future. "The Hurt Locker" is a genuine indie production, financed and made entirely outside the studio system, which grossed less than $15 million in the United States.

Comparing different eras of financial and cinematic history is rife with pitfalls, but that clearly makes "Hurt Locker" the lowest-grossing best-picture winner in Oscar history. (No. 2 is probably "The Last Emperor" from 1987, but when you adjust for inflation, Bernardo Bertolucci's costume drama made almost three times as much money as Bigelow's war epic.) It's delicious and strange and at least potentially ironic that this happened in the year when the Academy expanded the best-picture category from five to 10 nominees, in an evident effort to make the competition more commercial and more attractive to mainstream audiences.

Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw is that Academy members are voting with their hearts. Who'da thunk it? Maybe an earlier generation of Oscar voters was more persuaded by box-office numbers, mass popularity and marketing muscle -- or was simply more in tune with mass taste -- but they evidently don't give a damn about those things now. Personally, I'd have ranked a couple of other nominees above "Hurt Locker" -- definitely "A Serious Man," maybe "An Education" -- but it's an idiosyncratic film made by a genuine visionary. Even setting aside the history-making element of this vote (which was surely a consideration) it's a respectable choice.

Now, the Academy brass, especially its marketing mavens and the shepherds of its lucrative contract with ABC, may take a more jaundiced view of the membership's sudden attack of integrity and independence. Oscar's long relationship with the wider moviegoing public has always been tempestuous, but both as a television franchise and a touchstone of cultural relevance, the Academy Awards cannot afford to be seen as some elitist, out-of-touch coastal bastion of indieness. If we allowed ABC execs a free spin in the time machine, and a chance to replace the last four or five years' worth of Oscar-winners with movies heartland consumers actually paid to watch, they'd take it in a heartbeat.

Still, at least in terms of water-cooler controversy, this year's Oscars were largely successful. Mind you, the telecast was a misbegotten mishmash, and the toxic, unfunny repartee of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin made Hugh Jackman's 2009 song-and-dance numbers look like the height of showbiz professionalism. But viewership was up, reaching the best numbers since the "Crash on Brokeback Mountain" showdown of 2006, and the huge roster of nominated films yielded contradictory but complementary results: Multiple nominations for hugely popular films, and an underdog victory. A lifetime achievement award for Jeff "The Dude" Bridges (let's be honest; that's what it was), and shocking proof that Sandra Bullock is not just a human being but a funny, warm and generous-spirited one as well.

But the repercussions of "The Hurt Locker's" victory over "Avatar" go well beyond Kathryn Bigelow's historic breakthrough, and well beyond questions of which movie you or I like better, or which one made more money. It's another salvo in Hollywood's peculiar, long-running war against itself, a war unlikely to have any winners.

Never mind that her lack of visibility was less a conscious rejection of the expected niceties than a function of her demanding schedule; as she told the New York Times, "[I]t's like, guys, I also have this show called 'The Mo'Nique Show' where I tape six shows a week. I have twins who are 4, so I have babies, I have an amazing husband and a son who's 19. What I can participate in I'm more than happy to." Mo'Nique's decision to prioritize her ongoing work and family life over lobbying for an Oscar, choosing to let her performance in "Precious" speak for itself, was widely cast as a deliberate and vaguely hostile political statement, in ways that seemed meant to remind us that for all her talent and success, Mo'Nique is still a Hollywood outsider.

But there is another element of politics versus performance where Mo'Nique is concerned, which can be found in the next line of her speech: "I want to thank Miss Hattie McDaniel for enduring all that she had to, so that I would not have to. " It's worth considering that if McDaniel had wanted to launch a schmooze campaign for the Oscar she won in 1940, it would have been virtually impossible. She was barred from attending the "Gone With the Wind" premiere in Atlanta, because it would have been against Georgia law for her to sit in a theater with white people. She was not only the first African-American to win an Academy Award but the first to be allowed into the ceremony in anything but a serving capacity -- they stuck her at a table in the back. Although she was a talented singer and comedian, she won Hollywood's grudging respect by playing a maid named Mammy. And during her tearful acceptance speech (below), she said bluntly, "I sincerely hope I shall always be a credit to my race."

It's the kind of statement that makes a 21st-century white liberal like myself cringe; that she felt the need to say that underscores just how entrenched and accepted overt racism was at the time. But even though the laws and culture have changed substantially, and you'd be unlikely to hear an African-American actor prostrate herself before white peers and viewers quite so nakedly today, it's certainly not as though black people in Hollywood are no longer burdened with representing their entire race or working overtime to prove themselves.

In the 70 years between McDaniel's and Mo'Nique's wins, only three other black actresses -- Whoopi Goldberg, Halle Berry and Jennifer Hudson -- have taken home Oscars. Just one of those was for a leading role, and if you guessed that went to the only thin, light-skinned, button-nosed, biracial one of the bunch, you get a gold star. Four black men have won best actor -- three of those in the last 10 years -- and four have won best supporting. So that's 13 acting awards out of 328. In 82 years. This year also saw the second African-American to be nominated for best director and the first ever African-American screenwriter to win. In 82 years. Welcome to post-racial America.

But at least Mo'Nique won for a role in a film by and about black people, not for playing a sassy maid, right? Well, yes and no. It's fantastic to see black filmmakers recognized -- just as it's fantastic to see a woman win best director, even if it's for a distinctly testosteroney film -- but that hardly means we've transcended demeaning stereotypes. Don't get me wrong -- Mo'Nique did a marvelous job with the material. But that material was, in one critic's description, "an over-the-top political fantasy that works only because it demeans blacks, women and poor people" -- and Hollywood doesn't seem to have wrestled too hard with the question of why such movies are frequently crowd pleasers.

Consider the shocked reaction of umpteen reporters upon learning that the movie's star, Gabourey Sidibe, is nothing like Precious -- that she was, in fact, acting. Consider the clip they chose to show last night that featured Sidibe stealing a bucket of fried chicken, for crying out loud. Consider that four of the best picture nominees were widely criticized for their treatment of race -- "Precious" for all of the above; "District 9" for its arguably sketchy handling of an apartheid allegory and undeniably degrading depiction of human black Africans; "The Blind Side" and "Avatar" for being yet more iterations of a tired and condescending "white savior" narrative. That's not to say those films were wholly without merit or even necessarily undeserving of the praise, but when four of the year's most beloved movies contain problematic racial tropes, it's a bit premature to congratulate the Academy or ourselves for having come so far in the last 82 years. I mean, please, don't make me bring up "Crash."

So I was thrilled to hear Mo'Nique acknowledge the crap she took leading up to last night -- and the fact that her performance transcended it anyway -- right off the bat. I cheered again when she said to her husband and manager, "Thank you for showing me that sometimes you have to forgo doing what's popular in order to do what's right. Baby, you were so right." It wasn't about disrespecting her fellow nominees; it was about respecting herself and her work. It was about being there as a credit to her profession, not her race or her gender or her size or the sisterhood of hairy-legged comics in open marriages, or whatever else people want her to represent. It was about unapologetically standing up for herself and her performance in a way Hattie McDaniel never could have. It worked, and she earned it.

 

If the Oscars actually meant anything of consequence, last night's verdict would be tragic. But they don't, haven't ever, and this is example 753 (approximately, your results may vary) of why.

In essence: The one year the academy awards the plucky underdog "indie," it is the wrong "indie," in the wrong year.

But should we expect anything more? The Oscars are, as ever, a shabby high school popularity contest and a new, soon-to-be-forgotten head of student council has just been elected: Long live the King of the World. He wuz robbed by Tracy Flick.

 Erik Nelson is the director of the Harlan Ellison documentary "Dreams With Sharp Teeth," and the producer of Werner Herzog's Oscar-nominated "Encounters at the End of the World," along with other films and TV programs. 

"The Hurt Locker": Far superior to "The Deer Hunter"

It was a terrible program, but I'm happy about the awards. Politically speaking, supporting "The Hurt Locker" certainly beats the support given to an atrocity like "The Deer Hunter" or even the recognition given to "Hearts and Minds" that should have gone to "Winter Soldier" two years earlier or "In the Year of the Pig" six years earlier. The clear boost given to serious and relatively independent work over studio fluff is a decided improvement over the usual Academy taste.

Jonathan Rosenbaum is the longtime film critic for the Chicago Reader and the author of "Essential Cinema," "Movies as Politics," "Discovering Orson Welles" and other books.

 Indie film's coffin is lined with shiny Oscars

Last night's Oscars were so dull and out of step with the present that I could barely keep my eyes open. It took me back to my youth, when I could never stay awake watching them.

The opening number felt like a high school spoof of the Spirit Awards. Shouldn't a celebration of art and entertainment aim to contextualize all that is great about this Dream Factory? OK, if they can't figure out how to do that, I would be fine with several hours of crass puns like the song-and-dance intro promised -- but no. We get four hours of dullness instead. The fun of the show becomes critiquing all the mistakes.

There should be a semiotics class devoted to the moment when Kathryn Bigelow won best director. First Barbra Streisand hogged the spotlight by not announcing Bigelow's name but instead taking the moment for herself to announce that history had been made. And then the show's directors had the gall to play "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar" in the background?! I guess they wanted to show they had balls. She so deserved it, they knew she would win, and they come up with something "cute" and antiquated to comment on it? I may be an old white straight guy, but the show gave my group a bad name.

Most of all, the Oscars felt like a nightmare. 2010 will be remembered as the year the indie film infrastructure truly collapsed, yet -- again! -- indies took every possible award for which they were viable. The lack of a support structure or financial model for the majority of these films will be what prevents subsequent sweeps in the years ahead. Since the indie way produces superior creative work, you'd think Hollywood would make it a priority to find a way to keep indie films alive. Whether it be fair acquisition fees, accounting to encourage sustainable-equity investment, producer overhead deals, or just trust in their collaborators, it would be nice if something was left of the old ways to give hope for indie film's future. Instead, I can't help but suspect the Powers That Be must resign themselves to the fact that if they want studios to win Oscars again, they have to kill off indies completely. I think I heard the hammer hitting the nail of indie's coffin last night. Here's hoping I am not buried in it.

Ted Hope is the producer or executive producer of many films, including "Adventureland," "Friends With Money," "American Splendor" and "In the Bedroom." He blogs at Truly Free Film, where an earlier version of this post first appeared.

The Oscars' identity crisis

The show seemed incredibly misguided. They had an impressive opening production number from hosting pro Neil Patrick Harris ... and then didn't have him host. They tried pandering to a younger demographic by getting Kristen Stewart, Taylor Lautner, Miley Cyrus and Amanda Seyfried to show up ... and recite the same canned patter as presenters twice their age. They mounted a tribute to horror films ... filled with movies that stretch the definition of "horror," and with virtually no acknowledgment of the accomplished horror films of 2009. They rushed through the best song nominees without performances ... but made time for wholly mismatched dance numbers to the nominated scores. I spent the whole ceremony baffled by the producers' choices.

Josh Bell is an editor at Las Vegas Weekly.

The gawdy spectacle turns out to be ... discerning?

There was a kind of pseudo nightclub atmosphere, but the attempt at intimacy never works. Everyone's just a little too stiff. And the whole thing is undone by the eclecticism of trying to please so many different constituencies. But the willingness to give so many awards to "The Hurt Locker" made up for a lot. Not just best picture and director but also best sound and screenplay, almost bafflingly discerning. And I did love the merging of actual screenplays with the scenes described.

Molly Haskell is an author and critic. Her books include "From Reverence to Rape: The Treatment of Women in the Movies," "Frankly My Dear: 'Gone With the Wind' Revisited" and the memoir "Love and Other Infectious Diseases."

"Avatar" is a phenomenon, not a work of art

I’ve had a strong personal and critical affinity for Kathryn Bigelow since "Near Dark." Her kinetic, abstract and lyrical style of action filmmaking is something to behold.

I saw the second public performance at Toronto about 18 months ago, and I thought it was an intelligent, gripping, extraordinarily vivid style of filmmaking. I hope it encourages people to look at Bigelow's earlier work (and finally get good DVD transfers of "Near Dark," "Blue Steel" and "Strange Days.")

"Avatar" is a phenomenon, but it’s seriously flawed and problematic as a work of movie art, and it didn’t deserve to win the best director or best film prize. I have serious problems with it winning for best cinematography. Don’t get me wrong, I think Mauro Fiore is a very talented cinematographer who’s very good at capturing motion and activity. But so much of the visual design is a production of computer graphics, animation art and other hybrid technology, it’s a bit of a stretch to give the award for that.

The most appalling part, though, was the manner by which Roger Corman and Gordon Willis got seriously shortchanged, their contributions not properly acknowledged. Corman is a significant artist, a talented filmmaker in his own right, who is largely responsible for the careers of such varied and imposing directors as Francis Ford Coppola, Peter Bogdanovich, Jonathan Demme, Ron Howard, Jonathan Kaplan and John Sayles (those are the ones who immediately come to mind).

Willis shot Coppola’s "Godfather" trilogy and Woody Allen’s major artistic breakthroughs, "Annie Hall" and "Manhattan." It just seems wrong on so many levels to downplay their historical and cultural accomplishments, and not give them a chance to be heard or really even seen.

As happy as I was, to a point, about the awards, there was very little excitement or drama in the presentation; it had no real structure or identity, beginning, again, as a kind of ersatz Vegas dinner show and going downward. The writing was largely bloodless and stale; the television direction was also very uninspired. I was struck by how little energy was present.

Patrick Z. McGavin is a freelance critic and blogger.

But like every historic first, Bigelow's dual victory was both a stunning personal achievement and resonant metaphor. And not everybody's been thrilled.

Just a few weeks ago critic Martha P. Nochimson wrote an essay here that lambasted Bigelow as "the Transvestite of Directors … masquerading as the baddest boy on the block." And after last night's ceremony, journalist Farai Chideya promptly tweeted, "Among Bigelow's best-known films are three male ensemble casts: 'Hurt Locker,' 'Point Break,' 'K-19 the Widowmaker'. … kudos to cast and to filmmaker and to topic. Gender matrix not so much." So before we bust the pink champagne, perhaps we should ask: Does Bigelow's victory still count for the ladies?

I have a diploma with the word "film" on it, so let me take a crack here.

Of course it does. Are you freaking kidding me?

It's funny, I don't remember anybody trotting out drag queen metaphors when John Madden's "Shakespeare in Love" or Anthony Minghella's "The English Patient" won Oscars, despite their weepy, girly plots. For that matter, in all the conversation about the big battle of the exes between Bigelow and James Cameron, did anybody stop to chide Cameron for an entire career built on decidedly female-centric fare? "Aliens," "The Abyss," "Titanic" and "Avatar" might not be "You've Got Mail," but they're all lousy with strong leading ladies and maternal subtext. (If Cameron were a woman, many large, serious books would be written about the feminist iconography of his otherworldly oeuvre.) Why then are Bigelow's critics so quick to bag on her for doing what good filmmakers do -- making movies with a unique perspective, and an appeal outside of the director's own demographic? Do we really still think the length and breadth of female filmmaking is "Julie and Julia"? Dear God, please, no.

When I was in film school in the '80s, a time when professors still thought it was acceptable to comment on the weight and dating habits of girl students, there barely was any concept of women's cinema. In four years, I studied exactly one female director -- Leni Riefenstahl.

Fortunately, it was also a golden moment for young independent filmmakers, some of whom, miraculously, were not males. (Not all of them were white either -- go figure.) Patricia Rozema, Martha Coolidge and Mira Nair were just breaking out, but the women who electrified my little group of black-clad clove cigarette smokers were Penelope Spheeris and Kathryn Bigelow. Spheeris made rock 'n' roll documentaries and the cult hit "Suburbia"; Bigelow made a weird little vampire movie called "Near Dark." No hankies. No hugging. Kickass!

As the years went by and Bigelow went on to make tough little dramas like "Blue Steel" and "Point Break" -- as well as directing plenty of television cop shows. Her action-oriented style matured, but her style remained distinctive, consistent and always adrenalized. Does that make her a gender betrayer? I don't know, is "Precious" director Lee Daniels a chick for making a movie about a pregnant teenage girl and her mom? 

Yet Bigelow's win seems to raise a nagging question in certain heads: Why is it that when women finally get a big award winner, it's for a war picture instead of the kind of fare we so often wind up directing -- those warm Nancy Meyers/Nora Ephron relationship stories? Well, maybe the reason movies like "Mamma Mia!" don't snag the big prizes is as simple as the fact that they're just not that great. Does anybody complain that men are being artistically shut out from serious competition when they go ahead and make "X-Men"?

That's the thing that's both scary and fantastic about Bigelow's win; it says that maybe if we women are stuck making rom-coms and weepies, it's not the fault of the system but ourselves. Want more golden statues on the lady shelf? Then fight like hell to make better movies, whatever the subject matter. The last time a woman was nominated for a best director Oscar, it was Sofia Coppola for "Lost in Translation," a film that was piffling at best. (The only other two female nominees -- the indisputably great Jane Campion for "The Piano" and Lina Wertmüller for "Seven Beauties" -- had their work cut out for them against "Schindler's List" and "Rocky," respectively.) The problem with devaluing Bigelow's win as being merely a clever bit of cinematic cross-dressing is that it takes away from the fact that "The Hurt Locker" is a great film, full stop.

So it's no wonder that a groan went up from my couch when Bigelow's walkout music last night swelled to the strains of Helen Reddy's cheeseball anthem "I Am Woman." (What was the Academy's plan if Lee Daniels had won? Run DMC's "Proud to Be Black"?) See, everybody? Hollywood can recognize a woman! Let's give a hand for the little lady! 

Of course masculinity and femininity inform the stories we tell. "An Education" was the story of a girl. "The Hurt Locker" was the story of a man. "Avatar" was the story of a bunch of blue people in a tree. Filmmakers bring their own brand of life experience to the table; there isn't nor should there be an utterly gender-neutral perspective. But anyone who's seen "The Hurt Locker" and thinks that it's just some dude flick is selling its director far short. As a filmgoer who's been following her career for the last 23 years could tell you, it's a Kathryn Bigelow movie. It has her gritty style, her unmistakably dark humor, her gut-punching humanity.

Perhaps, then, it's a good thing the Oscars chose to remind the world last night that Bigelow is both a filmmaker and a female. I hope every film school chick in the world is cheering her triumph, because it represents a victory over sexist college professors and dumbass studio executives and every producer who thinks ladies should stick to baby comedies. It represents the door opening just a little wider for talented, accomplished women to tell the stories they want to tell, whether they're about sweeping romance or kooky comedy or blowing stuff up. There is no need to take away one iota of her accomplishment by suggesting Bigelow earned it by being a dude in a dude's genre. She got it by being Kathryn Bigelow -- a fierce, independent and utterly deserving filmmaker. She's not the king of the world. She is woman. Hear her roar.