I keep in regular contact with a couple of degenerate gamblers that put their money on everything from Presidential Elections to Movie Awards.
Last week, one of said degenerates (let's call him Vinnie Gambler) wrote to me about why The King's Speech will not win the Academy Award for Best Picture later this month. Note, that this article was written before TKS won the DGA this past weekend. In other words... gambling is well, gambling. So instead of taking this article at its word, take it instead as a cautionary tale.
Social Network is Still the Favourite to Win Best Picture
Prior to this past weekend, The Social Network was the clear favourite in the race for the Best Picture Oscar, having won not just the Golden Globes, but far more importantly, the overwhelming majority of the critics associations’ awards. More critics listed The Social Network as their number one film of the year than any other movie, by a long shot.
But as Oscar-watchers out there are well aware, a couple of big events have occurred in the past couple of days that have vaulted The King’s Speech to the top of the heap, at least in the eyes of the Oscar prognosticators. The first was the surprise win of The King’s Speech in the Producers Guild Awards this past Saturday. The second was the release of the actual Oscar nominations on Tuesday morning, which revealed The King’s Speech as the film with the most nominations (12), and The Social Network a distant third at 8 nominations. Over at Gurus of Gold Predictions, not one, not two, but ALL of the professional awards pundits have moved The King’s Speech to their number one slots, given the “momentum” of the film.
But is this so-called momentum real or is it fleeting? What is the true significance of these two events? Let’s take a look:
Guild Awards
There’s no question that the guild awards, taken together, provide the most predictive power of the eventually winner of the Oscar. But taken by itself, the PGA’s predictive power is mediocre. Since its inception in 1989, it has correctly picked only 14 out of 21 best picture winners, or 67%. In the last ten years that rate has decreased to 60%. Not exactly a staggering percentage.
But past success or failure is not necessarily an indication of future success or failure. Perhaps producers, as a group, just have a fundamentally different set of tastes than film critics (an assertion not supported by historical evidence), and The King’s Speech won the award because the majority of PGA voters felt, simply, that it was the best movie of the year.
But could there be another reason? Let’s assume for a moment that producers have similar tastes to that of film critics. So then why would they vote for a film they didn’t think was as good? One possible reason is that Scott Rudin, the producer of The Social Network, already won the same award three years ago for No Country For Old Men, and the majority of producers decided that it would be fairer to give the award to someone else this time. I call this the “Spread the Wealth” effect, and most Oscar prognosticators are well aware of it, and it happens almost every year. It was the reason Meryl Streep lost to Sandra Bullock last year. And most famously, it was the reason why Adrien Brody won in 2002 for The Pianist even though the performances from pretty much every other actor nominated were superior – because each of his competitors had already won an Oscar before.
So here is a hypothesis: producers as a group have tastes not that different from critics, and the majority felt The Social Network was indeed the best film of the year. But they knew that Scott Rudin had already won a PGA award, and thought that maybe someone else deserved to get an award for a change. If this kind of thing happens routinely at the Oscars, why would it not happen at the guild awards?
Furthermore, Scott Rudin has a reputation as being a bit of a megalomaniac. According to Wikipedia, Kevin Spacey’s abusive producer character in Swimming With Sharks is possibly based on him, which might have influenced some PGA members to vote against The Social Network. But if this particular bias does exist, is unlikely to affect general Academy voters since they don’t care about who the producers of a film are. (Who does?)
Number of nominations
While there is a correlation between the best picture winner and the number of nominations it has, that correlation only works up to a point. After a exceeding a certain threshold of nominations (around 5), a film has just a good a chance of winning as the film with the most nominations. In the last ten years, the film with the most outright nomination only won best picture three times (Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, Gladiator, and Chicago). Twice it was tied for most nominations with another film and five times it lost to a film with fewer nominations.
But again, the past doesn’t necessarily say that much about the future. So let’s actually take a look at which four nominations The King’s Speech received that The Social Network did not. They are:
Best Supporting Actor (Geoffrey Rush)
Best Supporting Actress (Helena Bonham Carter)
Art Direction
Costume Design
In every other category, The Social Network also received a nomination (with the exception of writing, where it was nominated in the adapted screenplay category instead original screenplay).
Most Oscar pundits would generally agree that if a film does not receive a nomination in a category for which it is clearly qualified, then it indicates that the academy didn’t like the film as much as its competitors, and its chances of taking home best picture are reduced. But if a film receives no nomination in a category in which no one is expecting a nomination, then its chances are not affected.
Looking at Art and Costume design, one can see that period pieces or fantasy films have an inherent advantage over contemporary films, by virtue of their settings and characters. Thus it is reasonable to expect nominations for The King’s Speech in these categories, and reasonable to expect no nominations for The Social Network. Similarly, you would expect a Best Supporting Actress nod for The King’s Speech because movie actually had one. Whereas, in The Social Network, the closest role that could described as a supporting actress role was the character played by Rooney Mara, and she hardly had any screen time at all.
So what does it really say about The Social Network’s chances that it wasn’t nominated in these three categories? I would argue that it doesn’t say anything. The best supporting actor category is the only category where one could reasonably argue that a snub was indicative of something larger. But the fact is that there wasn’t a whole lot of praise or buzz surrounding Andrew Garfield’s performance to begin with. Add to that the fact that he’s a relative unknown, and one can see that he was an underdog to begin with.
So what do these two supposed momentum events tell us? Likely nothing. The Social Network is still the overwhelming critical favourite this year – a fundamental fact that cannot be ignored. Add the DGA award, which will almost certainly go to David Fincher, and The Social Network will be in an even better position. Nonetheless, this weekend’s SAG awards results will provide a much clearer picture of whether The King’s Speech actually has the support of academy voters. If The Social Network wins best ensemble cast, then it will be a lock for best picture. If The King’s Speech wins, then the race will truly be a tossup.
