And The Oscar Goes To......

[kostgard]

I think Heath definitely would have been nominated, but I don't know if he would have won.

Johnny Depp created similar buzz with the first Pirates of the Caribbean movie (people amazed at what he did with the character), and he was nominated but did not win. They may have given it to Heath as a "make-up" award for not giving it to him for Brokeback (where he was amazing), but they also could have easily said "Eh, he's young and that's a comic book movie. He'll get another chance." The Academy has done stranger things.

[Deleted]

Well, we'll never know for sure unfortunately. It's just very sad that he only started getting awards after he died and he can't appreciate any of it now.

[SweetOblivion]

Danny Boyle won the DGA award. Only six times in the history of the Oscars has someone won the DGA award and not won the Oscar for Best Director, so it's looking good for him.

Again, I liked SM, but I think it should have gone to Gus Van Sant or David Fincher.

[Deleted]

I think Heath definitely would have been nominated, but I don't know if he would have won.

I definitely think he would have been nominated as well. He might not have won simply because of age. While the Academy seems to like awarding young actresses for both lead and supporting roles, they seem to have an aversion to awarding young men. One seems to have to pass the 35 year mark to be seen actually win the award, no matter how good the performance might be (I realize there have been exceptions but it seems that older men stand a better chance of winning). Had Heath been over 35 when he did Brokeback Mountain I think he would have won.

[Deleted]

I haven't seen all the movies/actors nominated, but based on what I have seen, I'm rooting for Slumdog Millionaire for best picture. For the acting awards, I'd be okay with any of the actors/actresses from Doubt. Yeah, it was a bit weak plot-wise, but I thought the acting was top notch.
I was definitely underwhelmed by Benjamin Button, so I'm hoping it doesn't win best picture.

[Deleted]

I'm rooting for SM as well; however, I'm not too thrilled at the stories coming out conveniently three weeks before the Oscars. Reportedly, some movie studios (*coughWeinsteincough*) are spreading bad stories regarding the child actors and the conditions on the set to sway voters away from the movie.

SM was a terrific movie. Deal with it haters!

Had Heath been over 35 when he did Brokeback Mountain I think he would have won.

If you are talking about the Best Actor category, how old was Adrien Brody when he won for The Pianist in 2002? I think he was either barely 30 or not 30 yet when he won. Perhaps he was the exception and not the rule, but he was the youngest ever to win in the Best Actor category.

[Deleted]

If you are talking about the Best Actor category, how old was Adrien Brody when he won for The Pianist in 2002? I think he was either barely 30 or not 30 yet when he won. Perhaps he was the exception and not the rule, but he was the youngest ever to win in the Best Actor category

I think he was 29, and, yes, I do think he was the exception (which is why I had noted there had been exceptions. I think Timothy Hutton won in the Supporting category at a very young age).

That the youngest Best Actor winner was 29 (which is young, but not as phenomenally young as the Best Actress winners who have won) does point to a bias towards older male winners, because the Academy seems to have no problem awarding 26-28 year old Best Actress winners on a more regular basis. I wouldn't be surprised if there have been younger Best Actress winners too (Hilary Swank? etc.). That Adrien Brody seems to have been the youngest at 29 or 30, and actually looks kind of old compared to some of the Best Actress winners who seem to have been in the mid-twenties range (why?) when they won their first awards seems to suggest to me that the Academy skews towards older for the Best Actor category for whatever reason.

If you're an actress who is not Kate Winslet and you're under 32 I think you stand a pretty good chance of winning the Best Actress statuette. However, if you're a guy and you're in that age range, I think you have to do something pretty amazing to win as I think Adrien Brody probably did. I mean, would a male actor under 30 ever win for the Shakespeare in Love performance that Gwyneth put out? (yeah, she was good, but I'm just saying). You practically have to turn out the performance of a lifetime, which I think Heath Ledger did, to win the Best Actor category at under 30. Perhaps male performers also face more competition so that also affects their chances. Ledger lost against Phillip Seymour Hoffman who is also a very good actor and turned out a very good performance, which is why there is no reason to feel bitter over Ledger losing. People could probably go on and on arguing the merits over which performance did better whereas I think the same can't be said for Cate vs. Gwyneth. I think the majority would put Cate ahead of Gwyneth, simply because of the difficulty of the material that Cate Blanchett had to deal with, though I'm sure somebody probably will point out that they didn't like Cate's performance (but I'm going by the majority).

As such, all things considered, I do think Hoffman had the advantage of age on his side. Stick two equally good performances side by side who are blowing away the rest of the competition at the same time, and I think the more prominently older man generally stands a better chance of winning in the Best Actor category.

[normadesmond]

Even Adrien Brody doesn't truly "break" the age rule. Do a Google search, and it turns out his rival nominees were:

Nicolas Cage - had already won Best Actor
Daniel Day Lewis - had already won Best Actor
Michael Caine - had already won two Oscars
Jack Nicholson - had already won three Oscars

They seem to have a very good memory for who's already won what, and how many times (which is why absolutely nobody seems to win a third acting Oscar till they're not young anymore). That surely must have helped Adrien Brody a lot, the fact that everyone else already had an Oscar, or three.

I don't think it's conscious bias or hostility, though. Or perving over starlets Woody Allen-style. I think what happens is this (this is a pretty convoluted but I'll try):

1. They always favor people they already know. It didn't hurt Marisa Tomei or Kate Winslet or Sean Penn that they're already multiple nominees and can count on Oscar voters to take a look at their work yet again.

2. Since they greatly favor people they know, that automatically helps veterans like Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, or slightly younger, Sean Penn. It's much harder for a young actor to "break" into the Oscar race unless it's some runaway hit like Good Will Hunting, which got Matt Damon the nod for his first big breakout role.

3. Veteran actresses don't have the same advantage as veteran actors. They would have it, except that the parts simply aren't there, so whereas Jack Nicholson keeps landing big roles in big movies, Jane Fonda (his exact contemporary) doesn't. Which is why Winslet got nominated for Titanic and DiCaprio didn't. People scratched their heads about it, but I don't think there was any great mystery. He was up against the same old stars - Nicholson, Duvall, Hoffman - who were famous in the 70s and still are famous today, and still get offered interesting scripts. Winslet didn't have the same "rivals" because women Robert Duvall's age who'd attained his level of success had ceased getting any good material years before. If they were still acting at all, it was in made-for-TV Lifetime movies.

4. Since they generally have to look much harder to scrape together five actress nominees, this encourages them to look long and hard at a movie like Whale Rider, for example, where the star is a young girl, not even an adult. This is why it's so much easier for a young girl, even a child or teen, to break into the Oscar race, than a boy. I am absolutely positive that if Whale Rider had been about a young boy instead of a young girl, the boy actor could have been just as good, or even better, than Keisha Castle-Hughes, and the Academy could have genuinely admired him just as much, but he wouldn't quite manage to make the final cut. He'd fall short.

5. The first person to win an Oscar for a foreign-language performance was Sophia Loren. The most recent was Marion Cotillard. Again, they have to look harder, take "the search" more seriously when selecting female nominees, because they often have very little to choose from among mainstream Hollywood films. It forces them to be more adventurous with the women than with the men.

The reason I don't think they're just being a bunch of Woody Allen-esque leches (though Woody must be a member, right?) is that if you take a look at Oscar's history, a lot of their favorite women were not exactly sex symbols. Meryl, Katharine Hepburn, Bette Davis, and Geraldine Page are the four most nominated women of all time. Of those, Streep is an unconventional beauty, Hepburn was too and moreover got most of her wins and noms after she wasn't young and beautiful anymore, Page and Davis weren't known as great beauties at all.

Emma Thompson in the 90s and Glenda Jackson in the 70s were two more of their favorite actresses, they kept throwing nominations at their way and Jackson, amazingly, won Best Actress twice. Google her picture. She's the opposite of glamorous and gorgeous, and she didn't even have many screen credits: shades of Hilary Swank!

Women as beautiful as Marilyn Monroe, Marlene Dietrich, Greta Garbo, Lauren Bacall, Rita Hayworth, Ava Gardner, or Michelle Pfeiffer, by contrast, never won at all, and Monroe and Hayworth were never even nominated.

This is why I think the voters aren't even consciously aware of what they're doing. They aren't being overtly prejudiced against younger actors so much as they're not taking the process seriously enough. It doesn't occur to them that there've been plenty of coming-of-age movies with boys just as worth nominating as Whale Rider, but they, the Academy, didn't make the effort to seek those movies out because they felt it wasn't necessary, they already had plenty of movies to choose from and weren't going to make that extra effort.

[Mugsy]

Ugh, I hate all the stupid politics of the nominating and the voting. "He deserves a third Oscar", "She's old and hasn't won yet", "He should have been nominated last year and wasn't, so let's nominate him this year whether he deserves it or not", "She's dead and will never be able to be nominated again so let's give her the Oscar", etc. etc. Why not just vote for a performance that's good, regardless of the person's track record of performances, nominations and wins?

It reminds me of a Winter Olympics a number of years ago when Elvis Stojko placed 4th. He had, by far, the best performance, but he was "new to the Olympics" so he hadn't "paid his dues" and "worked his way up to the podium". The hell? If someone is the best, they're the best. What does it matter if they came from nowhere and wowed everyone, or if they've been slogging away at it for years?

[bklynred]

Maybe I was in the wrong frame of mind when seeing The Reader, but there's no way IMO it should win Best Pic. I think of Slumdog and Milk, with Curious...Button as a dark horse when I think Best Picture (Frost/Nixon is the only nominee I haven't seen). Not to say Reader wasn't a decent movie, and Winslet prob will win for her specific role, but the movie overall just didn't move me.

I don't even remember seeing much marketing for Reader--other than the pre-Oscar push. Weinstein seems to excel in doing that for a lot of his movies. I just didn't think this movie stirred up the same kind of emotion as the others. Maybe there was there something I missed?