Rumor has it that the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences actually may honor some movies at this year’s Oscar ceremony. Movies, as opposed to, you know, films.
Movies are those big, loud, colorful things that play on many cineplex big screens every month in front of hundreds of thousands of rapt Americans who have paid 10 bucks a pop for the privilege. Films, on the other hand, may star some of the people we see in movies, but they are smaller, often darker and almost always much less fun.
They are often exquisite and, in the past few years, have won all the big Oscars despite few people ever seeing them. Even after it won best picture last year, “No Country for Old Men” wasn’t exactly occupying a wall at the local Blockbuster.
But this year, we have been led to believe, things may be different.
Five years after Peter Jackson’s “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King” swept the Oscars, the academy may have recovered enough from its anti-epic backlash to re-embrace its heritage — entertainment. Big movies, popular movies, movies like “Mary Poppins” and “Jaws,” and “The Towering Inferno,” “Ben Hur” and “Titanic,” all managed to win Oscars despite being popcorn-selling crowd pleasers.
There have been a lot of good, old-fashioned movies this year, including a Superhero Summer (“The Dark Knight,” “Iron Man,” “Hancock” and even “Get Smart”) and the return of both the 1940s comedy in “Ghost Town” and the all-out epic with “Australia.” Already there are signs that the academy is not unmoved. There is an active Oscar campaign generating buzz for “The Dark Knight” and not just for Heath Ledger but for best picture.
Bond girl a possibility
Likewise “Iron Man,” which stars sentimental favorite and Golden Globe nominee Robert Downey Jr., whose rational insanity propelled “Tropic Thunder” out of the standard Ben- Stiller-film slot into cultural, and Oscar, conversations.
This year, it probably would be too much to ask for a nod for Daniel Craig’s icily complicated James Bond, but what about his co-star Olga Kurylenko, who actually brings some acting to her “Bond Girl” turn in “Quantum of Solace?”
Of course, many of the films on the oddsmakers’ “best” lists aren’t even out yet, but they seem less darkly tragic than some of the last-minute heavy-hitters from years past, such as “There Will Be Blood,” “Letters From Iwo Jima” or even “Brokeback Mountain.” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” portrays a doomed sort of love — he ages backward, she forward — but it stars Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, individuals so personally luminous that one imagines special lenses were required.
Likewise, “Revolutionary Road” may excavate the stifling impact of suburban life, and marriage, in the ’50s, but it reunites Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio and doesn’t seem to involve a serial killer.
“Gran Torino” is this year’s annual late release from Clint Eastwood, and with Eastwood also playing the lead — a Korean War veteran out to reform his teenage Hmong neighbor — the odds of critical and box-office acclaim are doubled. Between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Meryl Streep, “Doubt” may have enough heat to overcome its intellectual pedigree and make real money. “Seven Pounds” is no nomination shoo-in, but it gives us Will Smith, the world’s most popular movie star, who is already a two- time nominee. He is his own stealth weapon.
Small films have a shot
Which isn’t to say this year’s Oscars will be a battle of the blockbusters. There are still plenty of fine small, or smallish, films in the running — “Milk,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Frozen River,” “Wendy and Lucy,” “Rachel Getting Married” — and there’s even the return of Mickey Rourke in “The Wrestler.” They all fall into what has become the traditional awards template — heart-wrenching, fraught, moments of black despair. But with Pixar lobbying for “Wall•E” as a best picture (as opposed to best animated picture) nominee, it could be a surprisingly rich and varied race this year.
