I saw <30 first-run features last year, well down from my usual 50+.
Including not a single one of the final 5 up for best pic. (I MAY make an exception for “Benjamin Button” but I doubt it. Movies that take their concept from “Mork & Mindy” don’t do alot for me cinematically.) Let alone at 10-12 bucks a whack; I pay my own tickets.

The rest I wouldn’t watch if they were sent to me free “for my consideration.”
Frankly, most of them ought to be screened 24/7 at Gitmo for the detainees, but Amnesty International would probably conclude that waterboarding is more humane.

I point it out again, “Fireproof,” made by volunteers in a southern Baptist church in what Hollywood considers Backwater, USA outgrossed 3 of the 5 Oscar nominees, a fact which doesn’t consider the number of people who turned out to see it at free screenings. And they did it with a pick-up cast of mostly amateurs, on a budget of $500K – less than most studios spend for bagels and coffee for the conference room each year.

The Oscars used to be a small banquet. It’s headed there again. Personally, I think they’re angling to nail the 2AM Saturday timeslot for a live broadcast on BRAVO. Or maybe they can just compress nominations and awards, and mail out the statues every New Years’ to the lowest grossing – and most grossly depressing – pieces of indie-crapola diaper scrapings.

At this rate, and with no changes, that’ll be in 2010. 2011 at the outside.

The Academy must not like Chris Nolan.

I think I’ll boycott the Oscars this year, because of the Dark Knight snub. Based on principle.

Steve Mason,

Have you seen “Nothing But The Truth” yet? I just saw it tonight, and I’m curious about a conservative perspective. It has liberal connotations for sure, as any political movie will, but I felt like they explained both sides of the argument well.

What Hollywood has yet to come to grips with, is that in an age of 24 hour news channels, and information available instantly on the Internet, it’s no longer necessary to make the “message” movie. People have unlimited information available on any topic that interests them.

Look at the numbers for Milk (Gays) and Frost/Nixon (hard core liberals). Rather than shape public opinion, Hollywood is simply preaching to the choir with these narrowly focused boutique films. I’m really sorry Harvey Milk was killed, but that was thirty years ago and attitudes towards gays have shifted. The movie is twenty-five years too late. Sorry, but nobody cares.

Frost/Nixon -Please, Watergate has been done to death and people are savvy and politically astute enough to know that if Nixon were a Democrat, Woodward and Bernstein would be made the villains for asking the tough questions (sort of like Fox News is vilified by the left for daring to challenge the liberal line). Besides, who needs to watch two actors “imitating” Frost and Nixon, when one can watch the actual “real life” tapes themselves?

As an aside, I would have preferred to watch the “History” channel instead of the Oscars, but has anyone else noticed the sudden turn it’s taken to the far left? On the current financial crisis, Nancy Pelosi and the Democrats are all saints (really) bearing no responsibility for what’s happened (no mention of Barney Frank). And Lincoln was a homosexual, and really a racist, who had it in for the black man, etc. Though shall not ever speak positively of a Republican, even Abraham Lincoln. Talk about an agenda! What a sad turn for a once good channel.

ROGER:

And hey – would it be a great stretch to say that “WALL-E” was a message film? It certainly had a message, and yet it managed to be very entertaining.

Personally, I have no problem with movies having a message – on the contrary, I think that on the whole movies should have something at their core that make them more than a simple two-hour diversion – but at the same time it’s not always an easy thing to do well.

Yet more reason “WALL-E” should have won an award or two…

I think Hollywood and the world of movies and television is becoming a closed world. I think they’re making movies and TV shows targeted for their own insular little society- we on the outside don’t figure in their plans. There are obvious exceptions- Marvel Studios springs to mind- but by and large I don’t think Hollywood cares what I think- they will tell me what I am to like.

Conservative columnist Mark Steyn wrote an excellent piece on this same topic a few years back. I can’t find it on his site but it’s reproduced here:

http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-news/1576036/posts

Fortunato,

In what universe is Slumdog Millionaire “not a success”? It’s completely made it’s shooting budget back, has been consistently in the Top 10 of the box office for nearly a month, and is on track to make $100 million by the time awards season is over? Considering that the movie doesn’t have a SINGLE known Hollywood actor and is mostly in Hindi, it’s a smashing success. While I agree that for a majority of the film the phrase “feel good” doesn’t come to mind, it still remains an ultimately uplifting film. If anything, the movie is a dazzling technical masterpiece that at least attempts to present a different visual palette than the rather boring compositions you see in films like Frost/Nixon, Doubt, and sorry to say Gran Torino.

With prints and advertising for most major releases nearing $100M and budgets routinely soaring past $150M, I think the $100M box office number has been officially rendered meaningless as a benchmark of success. It would make infinitely more sense to count the number of tickets sold instead.

Umm…Timothy Hutton is “destroying his career with his views”? Or did you mean Lauren Hutton? Or E.F. Hutton?

Seriously, fool, at least get the NAMES right when you post idiots rants.

I would have preferred to watch the “History” channel instead of the Oscars, but has anyone else noticed the sudden turn it’s taken to the far left?

I noticed that about five or six years ago. It was on President’s Day, and The History Channel was doing an all-day thing with half-hour shows on each President. When they got to Carter, Carter was depicted as a guy who meant well with significant accomplishments (Iran was not his fault), and Reagan was depicted as a guy who accomplished little, was mean-spirited, and whose administration was absolutely plagued by scandal (the Oliver North thing was at least one-third of the show).

No more History Channel. I haven’t paid for a ‘full’ cable package since.

The Academy Awards are given by a bunch of pretentious narcissists who gather annually to try to deceive themselves into believing that their psuedo-intellectualism has depth and meaning. Unable to bear the light, they struggle in decadent darkness witha misguided belief that greater degradation is somehow a creative act because it hasn’t been done before. So they, devoid of real creative virtue, impotent when it comes to elevating the human condition, draw the blinds, close the doors, and shut off all the light and then proceed to tell each other how beautiful and desirable are their ugliness, weakness, and ignorance.

Over the course of my lifetime, I’ve watched Hollywood transform from a unifying and edifying community that upheld principles of liberty and virtue to one that prostitutes itself and undermines historically proven core values and virtues. Hollywood’s consituents are left with a hole in their souls that they desperately try to fill through activism; but their witless, empty hearts lead them to push even harder toward unrestrained licentiousness – thinking they would “feel better” if they could just cut loose the last vestiges of anchor and destroy the compelling compass and declarative rudders that proves them to be adrift.

Umm…shouldn’t the relevant question be whether the Best Picture nominees actually are, I dunno, the best pictures of the year? And if those best pictures aren’t grossing well, shouldn’t we ask 1) Whether they were advertised correctly and 2) Whether the problem is that the movie-going public has lousy taste?

I know you’re not, but if you were to ask me, I think the Oscars began to go “off the rails” or started to become irrelevant in 1998. That was the year when Shakespeare in Love–a movie I doubt I would even have a clue on the plot if not for the title–won over Saving Private Ryan. To me, that is the year the Oscars lost credibility.

There are other factors I think have more impact on why the televised Oscar audience is going down over the past few years than the gross revenues.

- A general realization that the Oscars are little more than Hollywood’s way of giving itself a pat on its collective back. Not exactly compelling.

- The availability of much more interesting programming on the other networks, cable, and even the internet (see credibility problem above)

- No one has to watch the Oscars any longer to see what the parts they care about: internet outlets provide the means for people to pull up only those parts that they care to see (for example, I only cared about Jon Stewart’s monologues from a few years back).

- There is also the effect of people who DVR the telecast and watch it later — I understand these are not even comprehended in the ratings numbers that get get published.

As a counter argument/theory to your lowest ratings prediction, though, I think that the current shape of the economy for so many people may keep them in front of the TV to watch the Oscars, since it is cheap to watch …

the dark knight should of have got nominated for best pic.

“If I want to send a message I’ll use Western Union.”

Actually, it was “If you want to send a message, call Western union.” by Samuel Goldwyn.

And The Town:
We’re not ccomplaining because movies we like didn’t get picked. We’re disgusted because they perenially pick movies NO ONE liked, outside of an insular cabal of tasteless leftists enamored of smearing feces on a wall and calling it art.

We’re disgusted because they perennially pick movies NO ONE liked, outside of an insular cabal of tasteless leftists enamored of smearing feces on a wall and calling it art.

Then just say it’s a bad movie and shouldn’t be nominated. There’s no need to turn this into some kind of reverse-snobbery BS.

I will not watch, and haven’t watched, for a long time. I cannot stand, watching these “stars”, pat each other on the back, preach their far-left agenda, and be so shallow, to stand up there and have praise heaped onto them, all because they remembered their lines!
Take Anthony Hopkins’ advice, “It’s just a job!”

If you can make any money off these blow-hard actors, do what I did…I gathered up all my Streisand CD’s and took them to a 2nd hand store, her spouting off at Bush and Republcans all the time, made me think, why am I supporting her career and giving her my hard earned money?

This is one time, I can truly say, I got something from nothing!

[...] Speaking of Hollywood getting things wrong, this New York Observer headline sums up my feelings on The Dark Knight snub; Big Hollywood expounds on the topic. [...]

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