"You don't like me. You really really don't like me," Albert Brooks said after not getting an Oscar nomination for Drive.
There are Oscar snubs and there are Oscar surprises. When Albert Brooks won four critics awards this year but failed to earn an Oscar nomination, it was clearly a snub. But, since he had failed to earn a SAG or BAFTA nomination, it wasn’t actually that much of a surprise to those of us who were paying attention. There are certain indicators that are more important than others when you’re trying to guess what the Academy will do. The Globes have long been the one the major media sources pay attention to. But SAG has always been a better barometer for acting and given that all nine Best Picture nominees were also Broadcast Film Critics Association nominees, it’s time people really paid more attention to the Critic’s Choice Awards.
So, I’m going to take a quick tour through the major categories and mention whether I think any of this year’s prominent non-nominees are worthy of either the term “snub” or “surprise.” So that’s Picture, Director, the four acting, the writing and Animated Film. I won’t be doing Best Foreign Film because it’s hampered by the idiotic Academy rules. True, of the Top 20 films all-time in awards points specifically for Foreign Film, five of them were nominated for the Oscar and failed to win (in descending points order: Farewell My Concubine, Raise the Red Lantern, Pan’s Labyrinth, Amores Perros, Ridicule) and for that the general membership can be blamed. But of those Top 20, 9 of them weren’t even nominated and 8 of those weren’t submitted, so blame the Academy rules (Four Months, Three Weeks and Two Days is the only film in the Top 20 submitted but not nominated).
A brief word on what I mean when I talk about points and when I talk about percentages. Points come from 11 sources: the six major critics groups (New York Film Critics, LA Film Critics, Boston Society of Film Critics, National Society of Film Critics, Chicago Film Critics and the National Board of Review) and the five major awards groups (the Oscar, the Golden Globes, the major guilds, the BAFTAs and the Broadcast Film Critics Association). Wins are worth double the points of a nomination and all critics awards are wins. Since there are far more groups than there used to be, I total up all the points in a category and figure out what percentage of the points someone / some film got. That allows for a better historical analysis.
