Harry Potter and the Deadly Dull Oscars

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 was a rousing finish to the movie franchise, but nominating it for Best Picture would have been stretching a point, I think.  It’s really half a movie.  Unlike The Return of the King or, to name a few fantasy-adventure movies from the past decade that should have been nominated and would have been if the Academy wasn’t hell-bent on making itself even more irrelevant by refusing to consider fantasy-adventures (not to mention comedies), which is to say, movies people want to see, Batman Begins and The Dark Knight Rises, and Spider-Man 2, it doesn’t stand on its own.  Those others, even though parts of a series, do.  And while Michael Gambon, Maggie Smith, Robbie Coltrane, Ralph Fiennes, and especially Alan Rickman gave wonderful supporting performances over the years, only Fiennes had much to do in Deathly Hallows 2 and that wasn’t all that much.  The series and its supporting cast deserved awards but the Academy would have had to invent a special category.  Of course that it didn’t think to do it is part of what’s gone so wrong with the Oscars.  Like I said, the Academy seems to have a prejudice against movies people like.  But the fact that they didn’t find a way to have Daniel Radcliffe, Emma Watson, and Rupert Grint stand together on stage last night is a pretty persuasive indicator that in ten or so years no one will be watching the Oscars.

Still, I wouldn’t make the case that Deathly Hallows 2 was “overlooked,” let alone “snubbed.”  On the other hand, don’t get me started on Captain America: The First Avenger, which I think was every bit as good a piece of moviemaking with as fine a lead performance (Chris Evans) and deserving a supporting actor (Tommy Lee Jones) as Moneyball and The Descendants.

That all said, here’s Marissa Piazzola over at Huffington Post making the case that Deathly Hallows Part 2 and the whole franchise deserved more Oscar love.

Comments

[lige]

What gets me is that "historical" movies such as "Gladiator" and "Braveheart", which are basically fantasies can win while more honest fantasies are kept out. Or did I just imagine "Gladiator" won the academy award?

[actor212]

Lige makes a pretty important point, one I was going to phrase a different way: Take Titanic, for example. Here's a movie that everyone saw.

Once.

15 years later, does anyone think it was the best picture of that year? For that matter, was it even the best picture of the week it was released (The Little Mermaid and Amistad)?

There's some warped thought in Hollywood that, unless a major fantasy picture makes bookoo dinero or involves some ur-archetypal plot, it's nonsense. Meanwhile, small stories that really ARE best pictures, pictures we'll see in ten or fifteen or thirty years and settle in for with a bucket of popcorn and the lights out, are somehow overlooked.

It's absolutely ludicrous.