My sense is that the Academy's selections this year will ultimately 'mean' very little. Why? Oscar season is no longer the rite of passage it once was for genuinely great films like Gone With The Wind, On the Waterfront, or Lawrence of Arabia. Instead, today's Academy Awards have devolved into just another marketing tool for 'indie' films nobody's seen. The tipping point in this process probably came in 1998, when Miramax's low-budget Shakespeare in Love stunned the industry by beating out Steven Spielberg's "Saving Private Ryan" for Best Picture. Oscar season hasn't been the same since.
Nonetheless, a new trend is developing in what 'indie' films the Academy honors. This year, the Academy is hot for left-leaning, 'social issue' films: North Country (sexual harassment), The Constant Gardener (evil pharmaceutical companies), Good Night, and Good Luck (evil Republican Senators), Syriana ('it's all about oil'), Brokeback Mountain (gay cowboys), Munich (the 'cycle of violence'), Transamerica (sex change operations), etc.
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