February 19, 2008

The SAG Missive Crisis

I was not in favor of WGA going out on strike when it did. I felt it was premature and poorly timed. Nothing about the settlement has changed my perspective on that. I feel that the AMPTP gave WGA almost exactly what they were always willing to give up. And WGA, by striking, gave AMPTP an extra gift that they may not have had to give AMPTP… force majeur and an excuse for in-house “layoffs.”

Truth is, we will never know for sure whether the strike was necessary. The contract WGA got, and DGA before them, is fine. It was not a great step forward… but it was not a step backwards either. The elephant in the room remains the $100 million-plus a year in DVD residuals in the life of this contract that came off the table and more than paid for any concession that AMPTP made, at least in the life of this contract. And the house cleaning opportunity made this 100 day strike a likely money maker for most AMPTP members.

That said… the growing wave of pre-contract civil war at SAG is making the WGA guys look like a bunch of unmitigated geniuses.

There are three fronts in the war.
1. We Don’t Want Another Strike This Year
2. SAG vs AFTRA
3. Qualified Voting

The biggest problem facing SAG leadership right now is trying to separate the three issues… a problem made harder by questions of who might be lurking behind some of the maneuvers. But first, a brief primer on the three fronts.

1. We Don’t Want Another Strike This Year
This is where I am willing, at least until proven otherwise, to give Clooney, DeNiro, Hanks, and Streep the benefit of the doubt in this situation. They took out this ad in Variety:

The does not speak to any of the major issues facing the Guild, internally or as a part of the AMPTP negotiation. It simply asks that there be forward motion.

One of the problems, again, with this situation is that the Guild’s internal issues – which may be much more dangerous than the AMPTP – have the most political members of the Guild wanting to open those issues to debate in the same period as the AMPTP contract is being negotiated. Why? Because that is the time when membership is most likely be willing to listen to the debate over these issues.

Having had the chance to speak to Clooney about the WGA strike in November, he was pretty confident that the town would be shut down until the end of summer. That is not the case. And I am completely willing to believe that he simply wanted to take a position that the tone that precipitated the WGA strike should not overtake SAG.

However, there are a few problems with this ad.

A) Three of the four signers have not-insignificant lives as producers of films and television, not just actors. Streep seems the odd person out in this group and I am not sure what the story with that is, but Clooney, Hanks, and DeNiro can all be reasonably questioned about motive as regards their work as producers. Perhaps the answer is that they are not motivated by that at all. Like I say, I’d like to think the best of all three men. But they opened themselves up to the charge by being in such a small group of signers while producing enough product annually to disallow anyone from shrugging off accusations by calling them “vanity producers.”

B) Why do a public ad? My answer, in their defense, is that the media has no obligation – or history – of running people’s words unencumbered of the editor’s and reporter’s ideas. And I doubt any of them wanted to bolster Press Release Nikki. (But Hanks and Clooney did sign a letter to the LAT Op-Ed section, effectively going public without an ad.)

On the other hand, it is not unfair to worry that a public display of powerful SAG members telling the SAG leadership what to do this way – whether there have or have not been private meetings in the past – weakens SAG’s negotiating position.

And the backlash, which has been going on since the ad ran, is not insignificant. It is a rather arrogant act for four people at the top of the food chain to buy ad space to tell the union leadership how to conduct union business… even though I agree with the sentiment! But was that ad really inclusive of the rest of membership, many of whom are in agreement? It has the earmarks of an e-mail written in ALL CAPS by your boss.

C) Within a day of the ad running in the trades, rumors that former SAG leaders Melissa Gilbert and Mike Farrell were leading this campaign, even though their fingerprints were not on it in any apparent way. Soon thereafter, this alleged e-mail was printed on SAGWatchdog.com (emphases added by the website):

Click Here For The Letter Via Pop-Up

Of course, all SAG members have the inherent right to back whatever position they like. But the highly contentious era of Gilbert/Farrell takes the fight right back to #2…

2. SAG vs AFTRA

It was Melissa Gilbert’s SAG leadership group that last pushed for and failed to achieve a merger with AFTRA. Also supporting that effort publicly were Clooney and Hanks.

On February 2, AFTRA decided to split off in their negotiations with AMPTP, a working arrangement that had been in place since 1981, and to negotiate for AFTRA alone, earlier than SAG anticipated starting their negotiations.

How big a problem is this?

Well, the first problem is that an AFTRA deal being done before a SAG deal would not only undermine SAG negotiations, but would theoretically end the threat of a SAG strike by putting a substantial number of actors back to work under AFTRA contracts… contracts which would obviously be pursued vigorously for new projects by producers looking to avoid the threat of a SAG strike.

SAG has 120,000 members to AFTRA’s 70,000. SAG contracts reportedly generate 90% of the overall income for actors. Yet, the deal, known as Phase One, set up a 50/50 position in negotiations between the two unions.

The problem is magnified significantly by some serious contract creep by AFTRA, slowly but steadily expanding their jurisdiction to cover television shows (and one movie, so far) that have traditionally been under SAG’s jurisdiction. The area of greatest incursion has been cable television programming. The rule in the past was that scripted dramatic and comedy shows were under SAG with AFTRA covering news, live programs, talk shows, radio, etc.

AFTRA, according to a variety of sources, is offering contracts to producers that are more attractive to producers, offering significant breaks on residuals, health and welfare payments, day-to-day working rules, etc, on shows that would traditionally not be under AFTRA’s jurisdiction at all. In fact, AFTRA covered no scripted series on cable until 2001. And now they are in full out competition with SAG for deals.

Moreover, the argument from AFTRA leadership seems to be that they are doing SAG members a favor by doing inferior deals with producers because with the growth of original cable programming, SAG’s demands would keep too many players out of the game.

But how can a union maintain its standards if their actors can be hired for less (about 50% of SAG’s membership are also AFTRA members and can work shows under either union’s contract) simply by producers doing the deal with one union instead of the other? If SAG members can work under AFTRA deals on cable and AFTRA cuts more generous deals, why would any producer work with SAG?

Ironically, we just went through a strike where the union tried a similar tactic, giving competitive advantage to companies that would sign a deal with WGA, to crack AMPTP. The strike didn’t go on long enough for it to have a major impact. But if the strike was six months longer, is there a Leno writer, for instance, who would not have agreed to go to work for Letterman if it meant they could go back to work? Loyalty is one thing… money is another.

The bottom line is that AFTRA has become a real threat to SAG. They haven’t crack network television yet and maybe they never will. But on Basic Cable, there is no reason or suggestion of any other intent keeping AFTRA from taking over the entire arena, as long as SAG allows it, passively or not. Basic Cable is a growing market while Network Television continues to slide. More and more actors will, if things continue as they are, will pay the price for AFTRA’s continuing incursion.

The troubles of SAG’s membership are almost all in the middle class. The 65% that barely works or doesn’t work are suffering, but are beyond direct help by the union. A small percentage of actors make enough money and wield enough power for the union’s help to be unneeded in most things. (This would, of course, change without a strong union.) And that 30% or so in the middle… they are suffering. $10,000, $20,000, $30,000 a year in residuals and payments to Health & Welfare to qualify for insurance are a bread & butter issue in that group. And AFTRA seems to be taking enough extra ounces of flesh to hurt some badly already.

3. Qualified Voting

Throw another head spinner into the mix and you have a real hootenanny.

The basic notion here is that two-thirds of SAG members don’t work or earn under $1000 a year and that this majority has too much power, as voters, over the lives of the third of the membership (more like 15%, really, as the $7500 a year threshold is only 20%) that are really “working actors.” Therefore, they should not be allowed to vote on “major contracts.”

There is also the perception, as there was leading up to the WGA strike, that out of work union members are significantly more interested in striking than working members. I do believe that to be true in the WGA situation… but I also know that the Negotiating Committee that recommended the strike when they did was full of busy writers and no one tricked them into making the recommendation, so the logic doesn’t really follow.

On the flip side, others argue that people who qualified for SAG membership are actors, whether fresh off the boat and of long standing and it is at the core of the idea of having a union that they all have a vote.

There is no indication that Clooney or Hanks (who signed a letter that ran in the LA Times) or DeNiro or Streep (who didn’t) are involved with the Qualified Voting movement. There is no indication that Gilbert or Farrell are behind Qualified Voting.

SO…

That is the three-headed monster.

The odd irony is that, unlike WGA, the AMPTP is really the least of SAG’s problems. With WGA and DGA signed, the historic use of two unions as the foundation for the third will continue, fairly or otherwise. Of course, SAG will have many details that are uniquely their own. And they will be negotiated pretty quickly unless true insanity somehow prevails. (This is the same position I took regarding the WGA strike as soon as the DGA deal closed. There were and are good points and bad points to the deal, but it is not a terribly unique deal historically.)

The Qualified Membership issue is really a non-starter. As other have pointed out, it would require a constitutional amendment, which would require a full vote of the union, which would ask people to vote against their right to vote. Not happening.

The AFTRA thing is, it seems, a real threat. And only SAG can police its future.

But right now, it all feels like chaos… and I don’t know who that could benefit… other than Hollywood's Original One Woman Strike Queen.

Posted by poland at 06:44 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 13, 2008

Keep Your @(&$*ing Chocolate Out Of My Mutha@&(#&(ing Peanut Butter!

I just keep wrestling with this ...

How do Traditional Media and New Media match up? Just what in God's name is going on in the battle? Is anyone winning?

Every once in a while, I have an epiphany. And this is the one this month ...

Traditional Media is already well into its unfortunate morphing into New Media and, in the process, is failing both its traditions and its future.

I'm not saying that many on TM will not come out of the tailspin and find endless innovative ways of using the prestige of the past to dominate the future. The New York Times and The Wall Street Journal have already been leading the way in that regard. But right now, it's pretty iffy.

The circumstance that inspired this bubble to burst in my mind was reading, ongoingly, Brookes Barnes' attempts to cover the film industry and, by unavoidable extension, the television industry in the New York Times. Clearly the guy is bright and capable of doing what Traditional Media has always done, none better than the NYT. He gathers facts from strong sources, stronger than almost anyone because of the cachet of the NYT.

But Barnes is the first reporter on the movie beat to really start in the era of the blog. For Sharon Waxman and Laura Holson, unfortunately tasked with the melding of forms, they were way over their heads and it was truly a disaster. Both came onto the beat as solid reporters. But in the desperation to find footing against New Media, they jointly screwed up a majority of their stories, either by overreaching, underreaching, or sheer arrogance. All that said, that's in the past now.

Barnes came to the table as a fresh, younger face, presumably more in touch with how things in New Media worked and thus, offering a hope for a better transition. But sure enough, his coverage has gotten worse and worse and worse as he thinks he knows more and more and more.

This is not a syndrome unfamiliar in the entertainment media. But here is where I see a shift ... in the New York Times, your opinion as a reporter could shape a story, but your opinion remained subtext. It didn't really matter whether you were right or wrong because the facts led every story. Nowadays, inspired in all the wrong ways by the New Media boom, stories are led by and headlined by a lot more opinion.

Now ... that could be interesting too.

A carefully edited Nikki Finke, forced to separate the gossip from the fact, would be a very valuable player at any media outlet. People connect to opinions and are endlessly intrigued by gossip. I see nothing wrong with the New York Times or any Traditional Media having a serious opinion component. But that is when the idea of Church & State becomes absolutely critical.

We have seen it more clearly and dramatically illustrated during the WGA strike than any other time in memory. The rather simple facts gave way to opinion in almost every outlet there was, Traditional or New. Traditional Media caught the sickness of minutiae obsession, as Nikki Finke romanced The Writers with intimate, often accurate detail, all spun against the AMPTP with reckless pith, and got the kind of attention that Traditional Media writers have been missing for years. So much of the coverage turned into a call & response with her.

The problem? She was reporting bowel movements. And worse, when Her Masters' Voices on the studio side, where she normally is fed every gossip item she runs, whispered in her ear, she ran those comments with the same energy with which she ran the "good guys" case. As a result, there were no fewer than four admonishments by the WGA in the course of the strike not to pay attention to her rantings.

But people did pay attention. And Traditional Media responded to her, usually as the unnamed driver of stories, and most often took the opposing AMPTP side.

But here is the problem for the TMers... the spirit of blogging, exposing who they really are and how they really feel is nasty, dangerous stuff for them. You have to wonder whether they can ever go back now that the genie is out of the bottle.

Not every journalist is a born debater... or creative writer, for that matter. Not every journalist is built to write a blog.

And what Traditional Media should understand better than anyone on the web and doesn't seem to understand at all ... there is a basic law of diminishing returns on the web. The more a paper turns into a series of mediocre blogs by minor personalities, the closer to the end of that paper we get.

Just ask Nick Denton, who humiliatingly has been forced to return to heavy lifting for Gawker Media as the harsh reality of Blogging As Business caught up with him and his business, who has learned that niche really is niche. So will Traditional Media. (After I wrote the foundation of this piece, on Sunday night, Defamer I, Mark Lisanti, announced his exit and word is that Denton is looking for a "name" blogger from outside of the Gawker Media family to replace him ... a first time, desperate act.)

The scariest stat of last week, to me, was that Jerry Yang is worth about $2.2 billion ... a little more than a third of what Mark Cuban walked away with for the basically irrelevant Broadcast.com, bought by AOL all those years ago. The guy isn't poor, but he is not anywhere near the top of the Bubble List.

This is a lesson that the film industry is also in danger of being on the wrong side of as we watch the evolution of The Ownership Era of film and television. People continue to get distracted by the methods of delivery when the big lurking monster is the creation of a short tail in pursuit of the long tail.

But I digress ...

It's incredibly difficult for anyone to concede the turf that they feel they have created. It is hard for those of us who have been self-defining for a decade or less. It is even harder for Traditional Media where decades and centuries of competition within the ranks of the tried and true has left fat, happy infrastructures that cannot see a way to compete that doesn't involve budget cuts rather that the building of a broader base of ideas.

It may be - it will be - that the budget cuts still have to happen. But creative thinking means making more with what you have while these big companies are struggling not to lose what they have.

I have this conversation with young filmmakers all the time, who see the numbers on Hollywood films and gag with fury over the waste. "How can they spend all that money?" "Give me that money and I can make 200 movies!" Etc.

But they are wrong. Because the infrastructure overpowers almost everyone who gets sucked into it, whether it's the intimate infrastructure of blogging that leads to unquenchable ego or the massive structure of TM outlets.

In a time of change, people and businesses must come to understand the necessity to risk real change.

It becomes even harder when you are a paper like the Los Angeles Times. The paper has struggled mightily with failed attempts to become internet players. They made a mistake that set them back more than five years by putting up a pay wall for a couple of years. They have hired wannabe hipsters like Joel Stein, who have added nothing but derision to the paper. They have tried out a panoply of internet writers who have failed, one after the other, to offer a voice that the public or the industry has connected with on a level recognizable by the standards of newspaper columnists of the past.

As it turns out, on the entertainment side, research has shown that the only recognizable name on their entire roster is Patrick Goldstein ... a guy who has wined and dined his way out of anything close to relevance in his once-a-week coverage of the industry. I mean, nice guy (even if he hates my guts for daring to criticize him a few times a year), but ... over. Building on Patrick's name is building on sand. He couldn't find the progressive side of an industry argument with a seeing eye CEO. He makes Peter "Internet ... We Don't Need No Stinkin' Internet" Bart look like an edgy thinker these days, with just two speeds left in his arsenal ... kiss or kill. And more and more, even kill starts with a kiss somewhere.

But what's a paper to do? This guy is THE recognizable name they have left on that beat according to their own research. But every month they continue with him a THE name, they fall further and further behind.

And the guy still gets respect. There is an awards season story that he forced into being a near-exclusive just recently. It's classic ... a show of power and desperate weakness all at once. We are in the era of the fight being about delivering the best product, not muscling publicists into exclusivity. And what does the publicist get for giving up the exclusive ... a kiss-ass profile when people are suspicious of kiss-ass profiles as opposed to a half dozen more real pieces with many multiples of readership (at least a dozen).

Don't think I am not sympathetic to the chafing. MCN, five years in, has become part of The Entertainment Media Establishment. However important we are or are not, we have established a place at the table. And in that maturity, as with other media outlets, we develop ego and expectation and a sense of what slotting is "fair" or "unfair." We also have a different sense of what is or isn't important. Things we fought for just a few years ago are now uninteresting.

I see colleagues, a few steps behind in that specific way (that does not speak to quality or inherent value), going through many of the steps I have taken myself, often years ago. I see that sense of mistrust or frustration or anger at the system that has mostly passed out of my life's work, replaced by different forms of mistrust, frustration, and anger. As I am on the bubble of the Baby Boomer and Generation X, so I am on the bubble of Traditional Media and New Media.

The way that a generation of journalists just slightly older than me - and some, my age and younger - see the progression of a career is markedly different than my view. For them, the goal is to be a part of the establishment, preferably at an outlet that does not embarrass them with its conformity ... but hell, conformity can be fun too if you are working for a big company and get all the perks that entails.

Maybe it's that I never wanted to be a journalist that makes me such an oddball in this group. But my idea of fun has never been finding the biggest job at the biggest place possible. When I find this work compelling, it is because of the work, not the ego of where it has been published and how it has been received. When I "compete," it is as much with the vastly more powerful and funded New York Times as well as with the kid from Wisconsin who just started his site last summer and is making embarrassingly cogent arguments.

New Media has to put up or shut up every single day.

On one level, I think this is true of most Traditional Media as well ... which is what makes them all (well, most of them) so nutty about The Web. "Who are you to judge? --- What if you're right?" It's a horror show for someone whose sense of climbing the mountain was that once you got near the top, only your boss could push you off ... and getting to the top meant that you were already a pretty damned good politician.

But it is all too easy to get caught in the trap of wanting to keep what you have and not quite being able to accept that while some of what you have can be kept safe, the biggest prize, your reputation, is in play every single day, 24 hours a day, in ways you never realized from the comfort of your Traditional Media fantasy.

This is being found to be the case in many New Media circles also ... mostly the well-funded ones ... or once well-funded ones. And in the process, many of the child prodigies of the blogging world are suffering from a lack of Traditional Media visionaries who understand what these people, know how they must be used, and are capable of taking advantage of them at a price. (This is not to say that some of the potential stars of Mixed Media are not problem children who have already started burning bridges.)

Take Karina Longworth,
for instance. She has been a celebrity of the web movie world for years now. There are many things on which we disagree and I don't think she likes me or my work much, but regardless, she is a media icon waiting to happen. But it's not going to happen on a website. She needs a weekly slot in Entertainment Weekly where people can groove on her 50s glasses and geek goth chic and her sharpest tongue in a clear, simple form week after week after week. I mean, Joel Stein ... are you fucking kidding? Karina competing day after day, story for story with every frickin' blogger out there is a waste of what she can be.

On the flip side, the only way we are going to see productive work out of Patrick Goldstein anytime before retirement is if the Tribune Co puts a golden gun to his head and makes him start blogging so he can deliver something other than shopworn, lunched out, careful, lame crap once a week from his whipped bully pulpit. I believe that Patrick could get down and boogie with the best of the web. But sitting on his down-feather-cushioned ass is not an answer.

And by the way ... Tribune has a killer asset in Claudia Eller, whose abusive, personal shot-taking column was killed off by the LA Times years ago because of the heat it caused and really should be reconsidered in the Blog Era. Want to put Nikki Finke in her place with a real reporter who knows where a lot of bodies are buried? I mean, the balls on Claudia spinning Nina Jacobson's exit from Disney into a birthing room beat-down by Dick Cook still looms as a spectacularly surreal moment in recent e-media history. But on a blog ... home run stuff! Let's see that knife in Claudia's hand!

Flip again ... Kim Masters should never be allowed any piece that takes less than a month to develop. She's great when she has all the pieces and gets her spurs on and puts the whole thing together. But as a daily reporter, she is one of the easy gets for publicists who use "on the record" talent to spin webs.

Why? She's Old School. It's a different brain activity, just like writing movies and writing sitcoms is not the same, just as writing plays and novels is not the same. It's not an insult to say someone is good at one thing and shite at another. It is the nature of the beast.

And so it is at the New York Times, where Brooks Barnes isn't smart enough to know what he doesn't know and the "new journalism" means a lot more editorializing inside of what are offered as news pieces.

This is the battleground, publicly and privately.

Journalism is NOT giving readers what they want. But a big part of a newspaper might well be just that. And it is time that we all recognize that.

Transition and fear of loss has made most of us reactive ... which is not a position of power. We must learn to act with focus and bravery and conviction again.

With due respect, I read the New York Times to learn the facts that I may not know, not to find out what Brooks Barnes thinks. And I read Nikki Finke to learn how she's spinning, not because I am going to find journalistic facts.

Moving on ...

Posted by poland at 07:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

February 01, 2008

The Races - Presiential & Oscar

There is a tendency towards self-loathing in our industry, whether entertainment journalism or the various areas of the film business. After all, they are only movies ... right?

But the basic notions of human behavior apply to all endeavors, whether they seem more or less trivial. Rich oil men can be as self-absorbed and disappointed with the world as movie stars. The publicists at the White House have pretty much the same job to do as the personal and studio corporate publicists, albeit with very different stakes. And the wide range of coverage in the movie world, from gossip to hard news, is reflected in the Washington Press Corps, who deal with personality as often as policy these days.

And so, reading more coverage of the last few weeks of electioneering and the internal arguments in the Clinton and Obama campaigns, I also recognize the desperation on the part of journalists to put a bow on it ASAP. Things are redefined week by week, yet every week, there is a search for "The Answer."

What it really reminded me of, in my bi-focalled myopia of these last few months, was how the Oscar season presents itself.

When it comes to covering that beat I have, over the years, found that my informed intuition has always bested my logical analysis. After five years of fairly close analysis, I have found myself learning that the season comes in a series of waves, not any major event ... including that the quality of movies is only one factor amongst many equals.

The connection back to politics is that the election, before the primaries started, was about Hillary and Barack on one side and a throng of voices that were essentially disconnected from the Bush Administration on the other. The line I believed in, for worse, was that Hillary was too widely disliked to win the big election against a personable, popularity-tested Republican who would not be weighed down by the Bush years. But she was also too smart, experienced at politicking, and well funded to be kept from the nomination. I think, from my experience of chatting about it with people and reading endlessly on the subject for a year, that my opinion was, at least in principle, fairly widely held by centrists who were not selling either party's line.

As for Obama, the feeling seemed strong that he too was desperately vulnerable as too young, too inexperienced, and too Black.

But something has changed. And it's not the facts. Clinton and Obama have not become any smarter or dumber. Hillary's release of a tear showed vulnerability ... but it also pushed some further away, believing at the gut level that it was a manipulation as strongly felt as the "vast right wing conspiracy." Good Guy Obama was being watched not shaking Hillary's hand at Bush's final State of the Union address. But these are narrow variations.

What has changed is the belief that one is safe believing in Obama ... or McCain, for that matter.

We are still a long way from the nominations in both parties and there is a lot of water built up behind the dam, waiting to barrel under the bridge. But you can feel the change out there as Obama shifts from being the underdog who might be a future president to being the frontrunner and Clinton actually benefiting in a clear way from suddenly playing the underdog. The problem for Clinton, which is a boost for Obama, is that many people will never believe in her as an underdog, which makes the alternative increasingly attractive.

Back to the Oscars ...

6000 people voting for their favorite in a field narrowed by the structure of the system and the limitations of the group's values.

The reason that the Oscars, which almost never pick the best film of the year - even among American features - remains so iconic is that they always seem to pick a movie that People really like. It would be unfair to say that they always pick the easy movie. They don't. But when the dust settles, the never seem to pick a movie that isn't well liked by the mainstream.

And as we wander through the process each year, awards fortunes rise and fall on an odd combination of expectations and commitment and profile and acceptability ... just like in the election cycle.

Being "The Frontrunner" has been trouble for a lot of candidates in both arenas. What we see in the awards game is that a front-runner that has large, rippling muscles can survive all comers. Lord of The Rings 3, Titanic, Forrest Gump, and Chicago are all recent examples. The one big front-runner shock in recent memory was Saving Private Ryan, which was taken down by a feel-good showbiz movie that was able to sell voters the idea that Ryan was really just that opening battle sequence and that he rest wasn't as special. It isn't really true. But it worked and with six months of distance between SPR and the hot-at-the-time Shakespeare In Love, the heart got what the heart wanted.

Being the underdog is no great shakes either. Getting the nomination has to be enough for most films that are out there fighting for position. This year, Juno is in much the same place that Little Miss Sunshine was last year. It has four Independent Spirit Award noms and will win three, losing only in Director to Julian Schnabel or Todd Haynes. And then, it will likely win the consolation prize Screenplay award on Sunday night ... unless Tony Gilroy is given that consolation prize.

The structure of the race is different as the two sides in the Presidential race square off after narrowing the field, but again, the principles hold.

Weinstein/Swartz/Lundberg were masters of narrowing a field that hadn't been narrowed. Every year, we were told - and most of the media dutifully reported - that the race had come down to two titles, one invariably the Weinsteins'. Of course, this was almost always a lie. But as noted above, in the case of Ryan vs Shakespeare, narrowing the field changed the battle
and made an unwinnable fight amongst five films a winnable fight between two.

The Obama wave of the moment is driven as much by endorsements as by actual results in the primaries. But why are the endorsers finally coming out of the closet for Obama? Because they now believe he can win and also now believe that he is the best chance of the Democratic Party to win in November.

Endorsements in the Oscar universe come from critics groups of every level of actual critical thinking. NY and LA split on No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood ... but then the realization that both films could be nominated if the focus narrowed led to wins for
Blood in other groups, and in the end, National Society of Film Critics. This meant that Blood was endorsed as a vote that would not be wasted ... it was worthy. And a critics' movie got in ... even though No Country was already "The Critics Movie."

In the election cycle, Clinton, as a woman, and Obama, as a Black, were both coming in as agents of change. And we will have the first non-white-male presidential nominee for the two major parties in American history, no matter what happens. Wow. But they both couldn't run as agents of change. So Hillary emphasized their difference ... that she had, on paper, more experience than Barack.

There Will Be Blood didn't shy away from its artiness, pushing buzz phrases, "I have a competition in me" and "I drink your milkshake" that push it way over the top for many voters. Meanwhile, No Country For Old Men stuck with "Friendo" as their most extreme beat and used box office power and the longer history of the Coens as Oscar racers to be the arty mainstreamer.

Meanwhile, nominee Atonement has shifted its feel in ads, pushing the lushness of the images while using more modern music in spots to make it more accessible.

And Michael Clayton is the natural winner of this year's race, but while the laid back strategy has worked in tandem with the quality of the film to get them this far, they haven't gotten the endorsements from the critics or quite the box office that No Country has gotten, so it needs to present itself somehow ... and doesn't seem anxious to do so. It could be the John McCain of the awards season, but so far, it feels more like Mitt Romney ... good looking, presidential, and just a little too undefined to grab the reins.

Atonement is the John Edwards, good looking and appealing, but just not taken seriously enough to win.

And while some would say that Juno's pregnant teen makes it the Edwards, it is really the Dennis Kucinich... the smart, funny underdog that looks a little odd dressing up like the grown-ups at the party but has a really attention grabbing young woman centerstage.

That makes There Will Be Blood the Mike Huckabee of the race ... a little crazy, kinda exciting ... and not winning.

So No Country, slow, steady, popular, a veteran, carrying some weight but showing some flexibility ... the McCain.

And there is no Obama out there this year, in awards season. There were hopes for The Obama in Sweeney Todd, Charlie Wilson's War, American Gangster, and maybe a couple others ... but none had the mighty charisma that was needed. (In the case of Gangster, the sin of the movie was visited on the Denzel ... talk about a role that demanded a nomination but was hamstrung by the white guy who spent the movie bringing and trying to bring the black man down.)

Like the political campaigns, analyzing what went right or wrong after each primary, the awards consultants do the same. Like the polling ... that so often turns out to be wrong, both worlds are the same. Like the emotional resignation that comes just hours after the sugar high of hope, both worlds are the same.

And the pundits - so many pundits - do their best to analyze and oversimplify and to "be right." But it's never as simple as "it's the movie" and it's never more complex than the movie. Like a tear shed can turn Mrs. Clinton from a robot into one of us for a week or two, so a couple of critics awards make There Will Be Blood a serious Best Picture candidate or a fast start at the box office actually makes Juno into the Little Miss Sunshine of this season. The timing of these moments, which both can and cannot be controlled, are critical to their success. Neither would far well with the relentless four month push of No Country or the tortoise run of Michael Clayton. And Atonement? There simply was no place else for that constituency to go in the "primaries." Had Focus' Lust, Caution or their Eastern Promises been more successful or played in the second case as more of a "women's movie," the studio's candidate may well have been different.

In years like last year, people wonder how a The Departed ends up winning. And we can break down the pieces. But it isn't ever "the mood of the country" or "the inevitable choice" or even "the best movie" (though I love that film). It is all the little pieces floating around and the pliable nature of the public and the reality we most often forget, that you don't need 51% of the votes to win, just more than any other candidate.

When this is all over, if No Country wins, watch for the stories about how the dark movies are taking over the Oscars because of Iraq ... and laugh at them. Literally hundreds of movies didn't even make it into the primaries. And some, but not all, of the finalists were really in the race to the end.

And in that end, there is just one winner. There is a President. And there is a Best Picture. And that is where the journey really is different, as the former's journey is really just beginning ... and the latter's is one for history.

Posted by poland at 09:46 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)