Oscar Wouldn't Know a Great Sci-Fi Movie if it Kicked Him in the Ass

Although the awards themselves often seem a showcase of just how stale and stuffy Hollywood can often be, the Oscars still carry a great deal of weight among those who actually work in the film industry. And so it seems that each year the media trumpets the announcement of the nominees to no small amount of fanfare, setting off several weeks of prognosticating and hand wringing.
Perhaps the most interesting feature of this year’s crop is the lack of that true front runner. Dreamgirls, which had been seemingly crowned only weeks ago and then won the Best Picture Globe (worthless, I realize), garnered the most nominations with eight, but came away empty in virtually every major category. That number is also misleading because three of the eight nominations came in the Best Song category. The truth is Dreamgirls’ award season can be viewed as nothing less than a huge let down. That leaves Babel (7 noms), The Queen (6 noms) and The Departed (5 noms) as the odds-on favorites to pick up a great deal of the real hardware. But unlike in past years--Aviator, 11 noms, 5 wins in 2004; LotR: RotK, 11 noms, 11 wins in 2003; Gangs of New York, 10 Noms, a hilarious 0 wins in 2002--we didn’t see any films pick up a startling number of nominations, and we probably won’t see any real dominant films come awards night.

What we can see in this year’s nominees however, is a very strong bias on the part of voters for certain genres and against others. Some like political drama, historical drama, musicals and even crime films tend to do very well come Oscar time, hence the Academy chose The Queen, The Departed, Babel and Letters from Iwo Jima for their top prize.

They also tabbed Little Miss Sunshine, in something of a surprise. Road films are not typically a genre smiled upon by voters, but Sunshine has elements of family drama, and was hilarious in all the ways that voters like a film to be hilarious. In the run-up to the announcement of nominations, there has been a lot of chatter about how the Academy typically craps on comedies in general, so this nomination reeks of a pick made just to show how “hip” the Academy still is--“Don’t worry kids, we like funny movies too!” Just don’t be surprised if Little Miss Sunshine doesn’t come home with anything more than a Best Screenplay statue, and maybe one for the supporting nods.

But getting back to my original point, two films ended up garnering a bunch of nominations, but remain eerily absent from any of the major categories: Children of Men and Pan’s Labyrinth (rating at 91% and 96% respectively on Rotten Tomatoes). One can only wonder how films so universally lauded by critics could fare so poorly with the Academy, especially when compared to Babel, which won over only 69% of critics (the other nominees all come in over 90%).

Looking over the last couple of decades woth of Best Picture nominees it's easy to see that Oscar voters don't harbor any fondness for several genres, and both Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth fall squarely into those categories. Fantasy and science fiction have never been strong performers, and other than the Lord of the Rings films in '01, '02 and '03 you'd be hard pressed to place any Best Picture nominees from the last decade in either of those categories.

Making this all the more ridiculous is that voters are more than comfortable to hand out nominations in any number of categories--screenplay is always a favorite--to films that draw more heavily from generic conventions. Pan's Labyrinth received a total of six nominations, as many as The Queen and more than Martin Scorsese's opus. Children of Men received three of its own. In the case of Guillermo Del Toro's film, the number of nominations alone points to the film's overall quality as well as the regard that many had for it, yet somehow voters just weren't able to place it in either the Best Picture or Best Director races.

Obviously this isn't a new phenomenon, or one that should really surprise anyone, but this year the quality of films like Children of Men and Pan's Labyrinth have made the voters conservativism (if that's even the right word) all the more apparent. Here's hoping that each gets some love where it can, otherwise this might be another Oscar ceremony worth avoiding.