THE WORLD HAS MOVED ON… CATCH UP!
I have a quick question for the (dwindling number of) people who keep insisting that Academy members will never recognize a film about a group of nerds squabbling over which one of them deserves credit for creating a Web site: a decade ago, would you have believed that they would recognize films about hobbits, a female boxer, gangsters, a serial killer, Indian slumchildren, or the war in Iraq? The reality is that there is no “Oscar-type” of movie anymore. It is no longer good enough to make a movie that simply checks off the boxes of things that pull at the heartstrings of voters — period pieces, costume dramas, Holocaust movies, etc. The Academy has never been younger, hipper, more diverse (in terms of age and race/ethnicity), or more in-tune with critics than they have been over the past decade. Sure, some members are still living in the past and susceptible to pure and simple emotional manipulation — they’re the ones responsible for nominating something like “The Blind Side” (2009) every once in a blue moon — but, at the end of the day, today’s members respond to quality, above all else, no matter what packaging it comes in.
Photo: Jesse Eisenberg in “The Social Network.” Credit: Columbia.