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| Why Dreamgirls Fell (and other knee-jerk Oscar reactions) |
by David Cornelius
It turns out the Oscars did have a few surprises for us after all.
When this year’s batch of Academy Award nominations were announced early this morning, pretty much everyone was expecting the most predictable line-up in years. The announcement ceremony seemed a moot point before it even began. Shows what we know, right?
The biggest surprise of all was the absence of “Dreamgirls” in the Best Picture, Director, and even Screenplay categories. The film - dubbed a front-runner a solid year before it even hit the multiplexes - still managed to walk away with the most nominations, eight in all, which must make the shun sting all the more. Worse, three of those eight nods come in one category: Best Song. Take away that category, and “Dreamgirls” falls under “Babel” (seven nods), “The Queen,” and “Pan’s Labyrinth” (six each) to become something of an also-ran.
So what happened? How did “Dreamgirls” go from being a sure thing a few months back to the Academy’s biggest snub?
Well, for starters, the movie actually opened. It’s one thing to coast along on pre-release hype; it’s another to keep the hype going once tickets are finally on sale. (Just ask the guys who made “Snakes on a Plane.”) Once people got a chance to see the thing, they discovered it was at best a very-good-but-not-brilliant piece of entertainment and at worst an overexposed snooze. As of this writing, the EFC/HBS staff is evenly split with two four-star reviews, two three-stars, and two two-stars. This reception is about on par with the critical community as a whole: at Rotten Tomatoes, the film currently nabs 80% approval, with an average review rating of 7.3/10. Which is to say, plenty of people like it, but they don’t like it like it.
The general public seems to like it like it a bit more than us critics, or so it was said. Reports were flying left and right about preview audiences bursting into applause throughout the film - I should know, I was there for one such event - and those reports continued to spill over into the movie’s early limited run. “Dreamgirls” is a crowd-pleaser, the word on the street told us, and the Academy sure likes a crowd-pleaser.
But if it’s such a crowd-pleaser, where’s the box office take to show for it? Since opening wide last Christmas, the movie has done decently enough, pulling in enough cash to consistently rank close to the top - but not at the top itself. That spot belonged instead to “Night at the Museum,” the family fantasy comedy that was still selling out shows weeks after its opening, to the tune of $200 million and growing still.
Does the key to the “Night” success and the “Dreamgirls” shrug lie in the release dates? Consider: “Night” opened on 40 kajillion screens the Friday before Christmas, thus enjoying not only the holiday, but the entire holiday weekend, plus any momentum a strong opening weekend might provide for the coming weeks. “Dreamgirls,” meanwhile, had a staggered opening that kicked off with a DreamWorks/Paramount scheme to revive the old “road show” format - charge moviegoers twenty bucks a head for reserved seating in posh New York and L.A. theaters. Turns out nobody likes to pay twenty bucks a head for movie tickets, even if they live in New York or L.A. And then the movie opened nationwide (in regular theaters at regular prices) on Christmas Day - a Monday. Sure, it enjoyed a decent opening day, but then people had to go back to work, and then they figured they could just buy the soundtrack instead and save their ticket money so they could take the kids to see Ben Stiller again. Widening the film’s release did bring in a little extra money each time, but not nearly enough to consider the film an all-out hit.
Did DreamWorks and Paramount bungle the release? Absolutely. The sure-fire hit sputtered, and the Academy always has a keen eye out for sure-fire hits that sputter. (I’m looking at you, “Cinderella Man.”) With the Golden Globes potentially losing its influence on the Oscar race (“Dreamgirls” won for Best Comedy/Musical, but by that time, most of the Oscar ballots had already been mailed back to be counted) and with “Dreamgirls” failing to make waves in most of the critic groups’ awards, the musical that would be The One To Beat fell flat. Go figure.
Other surprises:
- Leonardo DiCaprio got the Best Actor nomination everyone was expecting, but for “Blood Diamond,” not “The Departed.” This means Martin Scorsese’s movie, which is now a very viable front-runner for Best Picture and (could it finally be?) Best Director, has only one acting nod: Mark Wahlberg in the Supporting Actor category. For a movie whose very strength is its ensemble cast, this seems a bit off.
- Warner’s plan to rush “Letters From Iwo Jima” into release to make up for the lack of buzz regarding “Flags of Our Fathers” paid off despite many folks thinking it wouldn’t. The film received four nominations - Picture, Director, Original Screenplay, and Sound Editing (where, interestingly enough, it’s up against “Flags”). That’s not enough to make the picture a solid contender for anything at this point, but it’s enough to translate to a box office jump for the dark horse, which, last I checked, was pretty much all the Oscars were about in the first place.
- “Borat,” the movie everybody who is not me seemed to love, was given a nod for Best Adapted Screenplay. Considering the film is only “adapted” in terms of using a character from a TV show, and considering how much of the film consists of interviewees not reading from a script, “Borat” earns this year’s role as most head-scratchiest writing nominee.
- Three Best Song nominations for “Dreamgirls?” Really? I didn’t even know that movie had three original songs in it. Thanks, Beyoncé, for stealing Chris Cornell’s “Casino Royale” thunder.
- With “Arthur and the Invisibles” deemed ineligible for the Best Animated Feature category, the list of contenders shrunk under the cut-off line in which five movies can get nominated. As such, only three got the call: “Cars,” “Happy Feet,” and “Monster House.” As much as I love both “Monster House” and the underrated “Cars,” and as happy I am to see the overrated “A Scanner Darkly” get snubbed, one gets the impression that the Academy is going by box office receipts only when making these lists.
- We now live in a world in which an Adam Sandler movie has been nominated for an Academy Award. Granted, it’s for Best Makeup, but that only makes it worse: did you see the sloppy work done in turning Sandler into Fat Sandler and then into Old Sandler? “Apocolypto” I can understand. “Pan’s Labyrinth,” absolutely. But “Click?” Really?
And finally: Salma Hayek is simply adorable and must announce the nominees every year. Just so we can once more hear all about “Best Foreign Film Language.”
What are your thoughts on this year’s nominees? Check out the full list, then click back to give your two cents in the forums!
link directly to this feature at http://hollywoodbitchslap.com/feature.php?feature=2058
originally posted: 01/23/07 14:33:22
last updated: 01/28/07 18:38:47
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