The Unfettered Critic – February 2018

We love the smell of popcorn in the winter. It reminds us of…entertainment award show time!

The year kicks-off with the televised Golden Globes ceremony in January. And then comes February, and the Superbowl of entertainment events: the Academy Awards! Except this year, the Winter Olympics threw a loose ski pole between the two shows, and knocked the Oscars ceremony into March! Oh the humanity!

How should we occupy ourselves during this interminable wait? You’d think that, based on the winners announced at the Globes, we could easily lay odds on whose names will be inside Oscar’s envelopes on March 4, when the 90th Academy Awards show finally airs.

Except…

The Globes’ winners don’t necessarily predict who’ll win an Oscar. Why would that be? For one thing, the voting pools are extremely different. Nearly 7,000 members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences vote for the Oscars, all from different parts of the industry: actors, writers, costume designers, and so forth. Yet fewer than 100 members of the Hollywood Foreign Press Association (HFPA) vote, all foreign entertainment reporters. Plus, the statistics get skewed more because each group includes categories that the other doesn’t. HFPA members split most of their nominations between Best Drama and Best Comedy/Musical. The Academy doesn’t make that distinction, although they do have categories for Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay—which HFPA doesn’t.

Still, the Globes ceremony often generates buzz for a film or actor that an Academy voter, up until that point, hadn’t considered. Prior to the Globes show, there’d been significant supporting actress Oscar-buzz for Laurie Metcalf (Lady Bird), who played the title character’s prickly, hard-working mother. But on Globes night, HFPA gave that award to Allison Janney, who plays a very different mother in her film, I, Tonya. Our guess is that the two ladies will be skating neck-and-neck on Oscar night.

Similarly, while Golden Globe dramatic actress winner Frances McDormand (Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri) was a likely candidate for an Oscar nomination, her lesser-known co-star Sam Rockwell likely wasn’t—until the HFPA presented him with its award for supporting actor. Now Oscar-voters certainly will take a closer look.

How does all this affect you? It doesn’t. Your only job is to see the movies you want to see, and then root-root-root for your favorites in March. Doing this can be a bit tricky in our area, where movies show up later—and disappear faster—than in larger cities. We’re glad we got to see the Winston Churchill pic Darkest Hour last week, because it’s already disappeared from Medford (Gary Oldman’s Globe win for dramatic actor was much deserved). And we’re still anxiously awaiting the arrival of The Post, Steven Spielberg’s latest, which won’t open here until after our deadline for this column—even though it didn’t win a single Globe (not even for Meryl Streep)!

So what were our favorites this year? We loved the coming-of-age story Lady Bird, which has moving performances from Metcalf and Saoirse Ronan, and a flawless script by writer/director Greta Gerwig. We equally love The Shape of Water, a dark, dreamy quasi-fairy tale from Guillermo del Toro (declared best director at the Globes). And we were totally enthralled by Molly’s Game, with its—as always—scintillatingly fast-paced script by Aaron Sorkin, who also directed. Sorkin received no love from the Globes on this film, but hopefully the Academy will rectify this omission come Oscar time.

Meanwhile, during that extra week, we’ll attempt to shift our anticipation to the Olympic figure skaters. But we’ll bet there’s not a Tonya in the bunch.

Photo courtesy of Fox Searchlight Pictures – Actress Sally Hawkins and the Amphibian Man in “The Shape of Water.”