“How will ‘Gone Girl’ do at Oscars?” That was the subject line of an e-mail I woke up to yesterday morning, sent by none other than industry awards blog Gold Derby. I should be used to seeing headlines like that, now that we’re knee-deep in awards season following the start of the fall film festival circuit, which began in Venice and continued on to Telluride and Toronto before arriving in New York this weekend.
And if I’m not already used to it, I should probably start, because now that October is only a couple days away, there really is no end in sight.
But still, it was an interesting e-mail to see sitting in my inbox. Since it was Sunday morning and there wasn’t much else to do, I took the bait and opened the article, which had been published shortly after 9:00 AM (PDT) Saturday morning, meaning it was just past 12:00 PM in New York, where Gone Girl opened the New York Film Festival no more than 18 hours prior.
And yet, here people were already picking the film apart not for its artistic merits or its ability to dazzle audiences, but for its chances at being an Academy Awards contender. But of course, Gold Derby wasn’t the only one asking the inevitable Oscar question. Scott Feinberg over at The Hollywood Reporter wrote a similar piece, entitled “David Fincher’s ‘Gone Girl’ Opens Fest, But Is It an Oscar Movie?”, which prompted The Playlist to tweet the following:
https://twitter.com/ThePlaylist/status/515921233410789376
Doing it wrong, indeed. Sure, the fall movie season (and, thus, awards season) began in earnest in Venice, where Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) premiered — and, like Gone Girl, was immediately put under the Oscar microscope — but we ought to bear in mind the Oscar nominations announcement is still three-and-a-half months away, the awards ceremony itself closer to five.
It’s gotten to the point now that, if a movie premieres any time between September 1 and December 31, the Internet community won’t afford it the opportunity to breathe in the marketplace or stand on its own merits for even a weekend before tearing it apart and determining how it will play with the Academy voting bwww. What’s more, the Oscar-worthiness of most films now is determined before they are even seen by the masses, which means weeks or months of prognosticating before truly knowing what a film has going for or against it.
Like predicting box office results, tracking the Oscar race can be fun, and it’s usually a pretty harmless game, but if the first question we ask when a new fall drama premieres is “How will it do at the Oscars?”, we risk doing one of two things (or both): creating a conversation that shouldn’t exist in the first place, or cheapening a film by ignoring its cultural value as both art and entertainment. But most of all, we’re shaping the narrative instead of letting it play out naturally.
All of this is binary thinking, requiring we label a movie “contender” or “pretender” and thus failing to acknowledge it doesn’t necessarily have to be either-or, it can also be neither. There are plenty of films that may be perfectly fine for what they are, but when we immediately screen them through an awards filter, we tend to voice our opinions louder than necessary. Noel Murray discussed this very thing over at The Dissolve in regards to courtroom drama The Judge, which opened in Toronto:
The groups of critics and movie buffs who are here to get a jump on this year’s Oscar fare tend to be especially harsh toward movies like The Judge that clearly aren’t going to factor heavily in the upcoming awards season.
He also mentions that The Judge “[i]s really only a bad movie by the standards of those expecting a good movie, if that makes any sense,” and it does. When we walk into a movie with our awards season goggles on and our checklist in tow of what is required for a film to be an “Oscar movie”, it’s pretty easy to dismiss or unfairly judge a film that doesn’t cater to our improperly framed expectations — especially if we wrongly conflate the Oscars with quality.
Unfortunately though, as Oliver Lyttelton discussed over at The Playlist, awards season has become a necessary evil, and we really have no choice but to acknowledge it once it’s upon us, and often even earlier. Hell, this very site began predictions for the upcoming Oscars back in March.
Discussing and debating the awards potential for films isn’t inherently bad — on the contrary, it often gives us an opportunity to talk about high-pedigree movies for a good bulk of the year — but my point is that often the conversation surrounding a movie begins (and sometimes ends) at its Oscar chances, which can deprive us of an opportunity to talk about the film itself.
So when the first question we ask is “How will ____ fare at the Oscars?”, it makes me yearn for a world where fall films aren’t immediately contenders or pretenders but instead works of art and entertainment, where we judge them for what they are, forget about what they aren’t, and don’t try to create a conversation about what they might be before giving them an opportunity to just be movies.
So while others are sizing up David Fincher’s latest in terms of how it might fare at the Oscars, I’m just happy I’ll finally be able to see my favorite director’s newest film. And if Gone Girl is anything like Fincher’s previous outings, I expect it’ll be a film worth dissecting for a while to come, not for its awards chances or lack thereof but for the themes it portrays and the narrative it presents — and really, that’s what the discussion should be about anyways.
Gone Girl opens nationwide Friday, October 3.
