Great Acceptance Speeches: Julianne Moore, "Still Alice"

We asked Team Experience to share their favourite Oscar acceptance speeches as we countdown to Hollywood's High Holy Night. Here's new contributor Eurocheese...

If you were a Julianne Moore fan in the 2000s and the 2010s, you had learned to live with disappointment. After four nominations years, ending on a double nomination for the one-two punch of her performances in Far from Heaven and The Hours (2002), her momentum suddenly stalled. Her Golden Globe nomination for A Single Man (2009) didn’t translate to an Oscar nod, and when Best Picture nominee The Kids Are All Right (2010) began to break out, it was clear co-stars Annette Bening and Mark Ruffalo would be getting the lion's share of accolades. So why was an actress who had received so much acclaim coming up short?

There was was an inkling that she could still have a shot at major trophies when she received an Emmy for Game Change in 2012. Of course, as it often is with the Academy, it proved to be all about timing...

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All 95 Foreign Film Nominees This Century. Oscar & Box Office Trivia!

by Nathaniel R

Roma's great competition: Shoplifters, Never Look Away, Cold War, and Capernaum

Dear readers, I've been filled with existential despair this week. I'm not sure how to continue covering the Oscars next year if the Oscars are going to drain all the art out of it by denying all the categories that make cinema, cinema, and announcing them off air. I haven't quite formed my thoughts on this (I expect this upcoming Oscar night to be disastrous) for a complete post but while we still have the more movie-fan friendly categories to look forward to let's continue to talk about them!  We've done some research on how the foreign film category tends to fare in the US marketplace that we wanted to share. In addition to being a super high quality roster, this year's Foreign Film list has done well with audiences, too. 

Both Poland's Cold War  and Japan's Shoplifters have become genuine hits and will certainly outgross the long runs of the last few years worth of most talked about foreign flicks whether or not they were Oscar nominated like The Square, A Fantastic Woman , Elle, The Salesman, and The Handmaiden. In fact, in any year without Roma or each other in it, wouldn't Cold War or Shoplifters be winning this category with ease ?!? 

After the jump, let's take a look back at all 95 nominees this century and how well they fared at the box office. Plus lots of trivia just because trivia is fun and will ward off the despair...

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The Best of a Bad Lot: Oscar Winning Actresses in Bad Movies

by Seán McGovern

The shade of it all... the 1974 ceremony for the Best Actresses of 1973 (L-R from the bottom corner) Marsha Mason, Ellen Burstyn, Joanne Woodward, Glenda Jackson, Barbra Streisand

Christmas really brings out my contrarian side, and since it's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year (awards season), permit me to be a humbug. Those who truly appreciate the Oscars understand that sometimes it is about the politics and not the performance. Academy voters are not infallible, but we shouldn't underestimate their other important role in taking the cultural temperature to find out what and who was hot in cinema in any given year. Without getting into a discussion of who did and didn't deserve their award, there are definitely some great female performances honored in films that may otherwise not have been so deserving. Some potentially controversial opinions after the jump...

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Does Box Office Matter to Best Actress Hopefuls?

by Nathaniel R

Helen Mirren's The Queen was in many ways a completely standard win... a solid success before the nomination and an even bigger hit afterwardsDoes Box Office matter to Oscars? It does and it doesn't. And how much it matters varies from year to year and from category to category. It obviously matters, regardless, if you're either a flop or a big hit but anything inbetween (where most movies fall) is up for speculative debate.

For instance, just this year people have debated whether The Wife's box office take is strong enough for a Best Actress nomination for Glenn Glose (hint: it totally is... though winning will be harder) and whether it will matter that Roma won't really have that much of a theatrical presence (it might. it might not. The streaming only/mostly thing is relatively uncharted territory) or if the major success of A Star is Born will make a win possible for Lady Gaga (it won't hurt!)

For fun let's look at how much the Best Actress nominees films made before they were nominated for the past fifteen years and see what patterns emerge. The films in red won Best Actress Oscars.

BOX OFFICE RANK OF BEST ACTRESS FILMS
BEFORE THE NOMINATIONS (2003-2017)
AND WHERE THIS YEAR'S LEADING ACTRESSES CURRENTLY FIT...

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Oscar Myth-Busting: The Academy Doesn't Like Popular Films

by Nathaniel R

The 10 biggest hits of all time when adjusted for inflation. All but one of them was nominated for Best Picture and three of them won.

We hear it every year: "The Oscars only nominate films that no one has heard of!" Every year this untruth is spread by people who a) don't pay attention to movies and are thus not the target audience of the Oscars anyway and b) don't think things through before proclaiming them and c) haven't worked out that in our increasingly niche world MANY people haven't heard of tv shows, albums, movies, or plays that are of utmost importance to a whole other group of people.

Somehow this myth of "obscure taste" has sunk deep into the Academy's own mindset and they've bought in to it. This week's catastrophic announcement suggests that they've bought into this myth that they don't like popular things to the point of self-loathing. So, here's a quick bit of factual history to bust this myth once again. Our work is never done!

Box office history is harder to suss out prior to 1980 when box office reporting became a more regular occurrence. But most historical indications suggest that the nominees for Best Picture before then were often sizeable hits. Part of the divide that's happened in the past 38 years, which people are never honest about when they complain about Oscar's "relevancy," is that audiences became progressively less interested in human drama (Oscar's bread and butter from 1928 onward), which they mostly sought out on TV, and more interested in visual effects spectacle, cartoons, and mega-sequels. The former is an Oscar interest, the second one has its own category so they mostly ignore it, and the third is not an Oscar interest for which we are grateful because if you want the same things to win prizes every year, look to the Emmys!

So is there any kind of truth to the notion that Oscar doesn't like popular films and only embraces obscure ones? Let's look at the evidence from 1980 onwards...

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