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Academy Award Collusion?

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combatentropy

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Is there some kind of pressure within the Academy to give several awards to one movie?

It makes sense that the Best Picture would also deserve Best Director, or Best Actor, or Best Screenplay. I'm suspicious about how often it also gets more technical awards like Best Sound.

I think the awards, if completely fair, would be more distributed. Like some random movie that didn't have that great of acting happened to have great sound.
 
Every member gets to vote in every category, yes? I suspect that a lot of people feel they can't break down a movie to the constituent levels as defined by the Academy, so simply tick what they thought was the best film overall as that particualr aspect contributed to making it good, rather than as a standalone achievement.

I think sound is a prime example of something lost in the overall experience while visual things, like costume and VFX are easier to see in the abstract.
 
I'm an AMPAS member and I voted. Committees nominate, the whole Academy votes on the winner, except in certain fields that require you watch everything in that category first. I can't remember the exact breakdown, but I recall that I couldn't vote in the short doc. and narrative category, the feature doc category, and the Foreign Language category, but I could vote for all the others as a member. Something like that (I don't have the ballot in front of me.)

To be more clear, we're encouraged to watch everything before general voting, but for certain smaller categories, the winners are voted by select members in a committee.

There is no collusion that causes one movie to sweep the categories -- honestly, that's just luck or chance. The fact that all AMPAS members vote on the winners obviously means that we're not all experts in each category -- it feels a bit odd as a cinematographer that I get to vote on the Best Actor or Screenplay, for example, but hey, I guess I'm entitled to an opinion...

You have to factor that in a tight race in a category, some may win by a small margin due to votes being split rather closely.

The psychology of the Academy voter varies from person to person -- some may want to "spread the wealth" so to speak while another may want to load one movie with a lot of acclaim, but generally we just vote for what we think is best in each category and sometimes that causes a sweep and other times, it causes different movies to win with no real sweep. No collusion, no discussing it among ourselves or with others really. We generally see these movies on our own and we vote on our own.
 
Man, It made NO sense to me that Slumdog won for sound mixing. Absolutely no sense. Wall-E was 100% sound mixing, it was simply brilliant. They were robbed.

This really blows my mind too, how the best picture wins so many other awards it doesn't seem to deserve. Like editing? Or cinematography? Mr. Mullen, maybe you can comment on why Slumdog was cinematically superior to films like Button or Knight, who seem to clearly have been better? I guess it's a matter of opinion.

It also seems that politics have a lot to do with the Academy winners. If Sean Penn hadn't won, the Academy would've been called homophobes? Just like Crash a few years ago. If it hadn't won, the Academy was racist... So they're obligated to vote for the more controversial films.
 
Jonathan Stevenson said:
It also seems that politics have a lot to do with the Academy winners. If Sean Penn hadn't won, the Academy would've been called homophobes? Just like Crash a few years ago. If it hadn't won, the Academy was racist... So they're obligated to vote for the more controversial films.
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no one's going to call hollywood homophobic lol. while the acceptance speeches might have been political (to be expected) I don't think the decisions were. Penn's performance was awesome and right up there with Rourke's. Crash... well, I can't explain that one :)
 
I voted for Sean Penn because I thought he gave a great performance, not because I'm trying to be politically correct. And I voted for "The Dark Knight" for Best Cinematography but I was hardly surprised that "Slumdog Millionaire" won -- even the ASC award went to that movie and a lot of ASC members were very excited by Anthony Dod Mantle's work. I voted for "Wall-E" for Sound Mixing. But I'm a cinematographer, not a sound mixer nor an actor.

There isn't some big conspiracy, collusion, whatever -- most of us Academy members see these movies on our own and we fill out the ballot at home alone.

You guys read WAY too much into something as silly as an award, which is not much more than a popularity contest. The nominations mean a lot more -- who wins it is a matter of how the votes broke down (two movies can easily split the votes and allow a third to win), and the whims of Academy members at the time they filled in the ballot. Don't think that there was some great collective thought that went into some sort of "message" they wanted to send the public -- if that happens, it's accidental, due to a number of people coming to the same conclusions at the same time.

As for explaining the merits of "Slumdog" to a non-believer, I'm not going to try, it's a bit like explaining jazz to someone who says they don't like jazz and wants to know why they should like jazz -- what's the point? I can talk about the energy of the camera movements, the musicality of the movie, the colors, etc. but if you don't see that, you don't see that.
 
I think both Anthony Dod Mantle and Danny Boyle share a gritty realist background combined with a bit of a punk aesthetic which is less about polish & more about energy and vibrancy - maybe not everyone's cup of tea & maybe an approach not traditionally rewarded by the Academy but even if you don't rate these guys as film makers doesn't it at least make a nice change that a different type of film has won this year??
 
David Mullen ASC said:
As for explaining the merits of "Slumdog" to a non-believer, I'm not going to try, it's a bit like explaining jazz to someone who says they don't like jazz and wants to know why they should like jazz -- what's the point? I can talk about the energy of the camera movements, the musicality of the movie, the colors, etc. but if you don't see that, you don't see that.
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Thank you. I understand that completely. I guess when I think of a Cinematography award, I think of a technical achievement, such as shooting on IMAX. I never really thought of it as an artistic award, but now I see what you're referring to.

It's funny that you say there's no conspiracy, and I'm sure you're totally right. I guess conspiracies and evil plots are just so much more interesting that we all want to believe there's something "else" going on. :matrix:
 
Impagliazzo said:
Well, a crappy lit set in the hands of a pseudo-DP shot on Imax becomes instantly good?

:mellow:
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No no no no.... You've got me all wrong. All I was saying is that, in my head, I had always imagined that category as highlighting a technical achievement, even though I wholly believe that cinematography is an art form. So to see Slumdog win over Button or Dark Knight felt weird to me. But the way Mr. Mullen referred to jazz simply reminded me that in the end, cinematography is about expression, not gadgets.
 
I thought Slumdog Millionaire was brilliant. That scene when the kid meets amitabh Bachchan covered in poo is hilarious.

The fact that a large part of it was digital would have made me think it would have been supported here a lot more.
 
Jonathan Stevenson said:
I guess when I think of a Cinematography award, I think of a technical achievement... I never really thought of it as an artistic award
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We all occasionally wish we could "unsay" certain things *wink* :)
 
Alex MacLean said:
I agree. I was shocked to see Slumdog any technical awards to be honest.
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For me personally Slumdog was really good all round, it deserved the awards.

The Dark Knight just had the best sound I have heard in a while. :w00t: The mixing and actual sound creation was just great. The soundtrack was also really great too.
 
Alex MacLean said:
yeah, I agree slumdog is a good film, its just too bad the awards weren't a little more evenly distributed this year.
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Each to his own. :sarcasm:

But I personally don't feel awards should be handed out willy nilly. If one film deserves all 5, 8, or 10 awards then it should win them.
 
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