Last year the Academy Awards took a step forward into actual American culture with its bold nomination of the song "Blame Canada" from South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut for Best Song. Bold, that is, until you realize they chose one of the weakest songs in the movie because it has the least swearing in it. Bold if you fail to take into account that South Park was just the most successful American musical since The Blues Brothers, drawing huge audiences and critical raves in spite of its communist, child-warping message that maybe the MPAA is full of crap. Kudos, Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences!
The Academy then promptly took a mind-bogglingly gigantic step back into its usual safe haven of bland, unpopular crap by opening the envelope and saying "... and the award for Best Inoffensive, Utterly Forgettable, Formulaic Song from a Disney Movie goes to.... a washed-up talentless hack with a Disney Corporation Song-o-Matic Auto-Soundtrack Generator™!" Which is exactly what we can expect more of this year.
The Predictable Oscar Travesty of the year will come every time Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon loses an award to some grotesque American spectacle. Don’t get me wrong, I enjoy a depressing, everybody-dies, brain-spattering gorefest of blood lust as much as the next person, but that doesn’t mean that Billy Elliot deserves an award. Or Gladiator, for that matter.
Actually, the P.O.T. has already happened in the form of the nominations. Gladiator managed to rack up 12 nominations, while Crouching Tiger settled for 10. Not a bad showing, except that Crouching Tiger is the only nominee for Best Picture without a single nomination for acting. You would think that after Roberto "Crazy Ed" Benigni’s spastic, Carrot-Top style acceptance speech, the Academy would welcome the calm dignity of Chow Yun Fat as a soothing counterpoint, but you would be wrong. The awards aren’t a white-Anglo-only club, of course; but Javier Bardem and Benecio del Toro at least speak a language that uses the same alphabet as the Academy voters.
Oh no! How could the voters possibly tell if the acting in Crouching Tiger was any good with that wacky Mandarin distracting them? Fat, Yeoh, and newcomer Zhang gave hands-down three of the best performances of the year, but managed to lose nominations to the likes of Julia "Look at my Hooters, Not at the Gaping Canyon I Call a Mouth" Roberts, Tom "Ten-Year Contract with the Awards Committee" Hanks, and Judi "Eight Minutes of Screen Time Per Award" Dench. In fact, Yeoh should kick Julia’s punk ass just on principle. They could make it a charity pay-per-view event.
Still, Crouching Tiger does have a chance at Best Director, if not at the Really Big Enchilada. With the Soderbergh vote nicely split between people who like thought-provoking, tough-questions drama and people who like formula-driven emotion manipulators with cleavage, the race comes down to just Ridley and Ang. (Daldry? You’re kidding, right?) And some members of the Academy might just feel guilty enough about passing over a superior movie and giving the real prize to the Bicep-Flexing Epic to hand over the directing statuette as Ang’s consolation prize.
But don’t hold your breath.
