THE OSCAR ISSUE / HUFFINGTON / 02.10-17.13
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credibly Close, The Blind Side and The
Reader have in common? They’re all
Best Picture nominees from the past five
years that aren’t in your Netflix queue.)
But let’s face it. If it weren’t for
awards, our multiplexes would be
packed with brainless shoot-em-ups,
discount horror flicks, gross-out comedies and paint-by-numbers rom-coms.
It’s the promise of career-defining hardware that spurs executives to give Steven Spielberg $65 million to resurrect
the ghost of Abraham Lincoln, and Kathryn Bigelow $40 million to make an art
film about how we got bin Laden.
By now, I’ve become a little bit obsessed
with the Oscars. It probably started when
I began covering Vanity Fair’s legendary
Oscar party for the magazine’s website.
Dancing alongside the kids from Slumdog
Millionaire at 2 a.m., trying to make small
talk with Mickey Rourke when he suddenly chucked his empty drink into the
shrubbery — these things stick with you,
and help you remember that Hollywood
is just a town, full of kooky, needy people
just like any other. (OK, maybe a bit kookier than most, and a lot needier.)
This is all a long way of saying that this
issue isn’t your average cash-in-on-Oscarfever special edition. It’s a labor of love,
and it reflects the HuffPost team’s peculiar take on the Academy Awards: seductive yet infuriating, glamorous yet grubby,
essential yet ultimately meaningless.
Our cover story, by Mallika Rao, tackles
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about this issue
the eternal question: “How do we fix the
Oscars?” (My favorite suggestion comes
from my old V.F. colleague Henry Alford,
who would transform the Best Original
Song category through an inventive use of
ringtones.) Elsewhere, Mike Ryan interviews Quvenzhané Wallis, the youngest
Best Actress nominee ever, and asks if it
even makes sense for a girl her age to be
doing the press rounds. In our Voices section, documentarian Alex Gibney makes
a case against Zero Dark Thirty, and Tom
O’Neil and David Rothschild offer dueling
approaches to predicting the winners.
In these and other features, we’ve
tried to keep one eye on the real world
and another on the great Oscar fantasy
that even my dad can’t fully resist. Over
the summer, I took him to see “Beasts
of the Southern Wild,” and he loved it.
A few weeks later, he asked me how the
film was doing. “Well,” I told him, “it’ll
need some Oscar nominations to reach a
bigger audience.”
The next time we spoke, he said, “So
what do you think of Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Oscar chanc es?”
I was so stunned, I barely knew
how to respond, but I sure as hell
didn’t say, “Who cares?”
MICHAEL HOGAN