Talking Movie Awards 2011

[YoninahAliza]

I think who's being nominated in the technical categories is interesting, because often they are the best of the best in their field. However, it's important to realize that the voters for the technical awards are very homogeneous. People are making a big hullabaloo about the Academy being mostly old white men, well look no further than the demographics for those wings of the Academy. All those fields are very much a boys club. For example, no woman has never even been nominated in the Best Cinematographer category. The acting portion of the Academy has much greater diversity than the rest of the Academy.

Yes but in these categories the diversity is because of gender. I imagine that if they were to get rid of the Best Actor and Best Actress categories and just do one category for best overall performance then 9 times out of 10 a man would win over a women. At some film festivals or awards shows they only have one category which men and women are nominated in. And a lot of the time's women don't do so well.

Also, the acting categories isn't really diverse. The Academy likes to think they are diverse but they really aren't. I mean how many time's has an African American women been nominated for Best Actress??? Ten times. And how many time's has an African American women won??? Once. That doesn't scream diversity to me.

As I've said before I have a love/hate relationship with the industry and with the Academy. I really love aspects of the it but other time's it can be really heartbreaking to see how little has been accomplished in terms of gender equality and diversity. But I have hope that things will change.

 

[blueorchid]

Well, I meant that the acting categories were diverse relative to the technical categories, especially in terms of age and race. You can say that ten black actresses have been nominated for Best Actress, but then only one black person has ever been nominated for Best Cinematography, two have been nominated for Best Director, and one has been nominated for Best Editing (in 1969! ) Those awards are just as important as the acting ones in those fields. The acting categories really are more diverse than many of the others and honestly, it doesn't surprise me.

Although, it's important to keep in mind that not every member of the Academy has even been nominated for an Academy Award.

 

[YoninahAliza]

That's true, Blueorchid, I suppose the acting category is a little bit diverse but not by much. And not really by my standards of what I would call diversity.

Also, here is an interesting article on what gender, age, and ethnicity the voters are. I think it's easy to see why the awards lack diversity because most of the voters are older males. And unfortunately some of those men probably only vote for films that they can relate to which is a shame because then it leaves out so many stories that aren't being awarded but deserve accolades.

It's probably obvious to anyone who's ever watched the Oscars and constantly exclaimed, "What the f*&k?!" when the most boring, mediocre piece of crap cleans up in every category, but now a new study has confirmed that the people who decide the winners of the coveted movie industry awards are strikingly Caucasian and mostly male.

The research, done by the Los Angeles Times, confirmed the identities of about 5,100 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (about 89 percent of the academy's membership), and they found that 94 percent of them are white and 77 percent are male. Jeez. Only two percent of academy voters are black and Hispanic. This shouldn't come as a total surprise, since the industry overall tends to be overwhelming dominated by white guys, but the Academy says it's working to diversify its ranks. Yeah, I'm sure there are a ton of hot movie deals and great roles for women and minorities about to magically appear.

Jezebel.com

Also, I'm curious, but I don't really know anything about how people become members of the Academy. Or is it like a secret process? haha...

 

[mint condish]

I just want to say that I saw Project Nim, and I wasn't impressed.
I was very excited to see the film and I thought the whole thing came out so average.
Instead of learning anything about the actual monkey, or learning things about life and the world, I get to watch a bunch of infighting between 2 or 3 people who wanted this monkey for themselves. This film nerd said it was a 'metaphor' for how we can be 'animalistic in conflict' or some bullcrap, but come on, the film sucked. Remember how it would introduce each person by showing them sitting in a dark room, or something Oh my god. Laughable.

When I saw that RottenTomatoes had generated a 98% grade for the film I was so disgusted. People will give a good grade to any documentary because it's a "doc" and then sit back and pat themselves on the back.

Seriously -- what was so great about that movie?! It was so mediocre and televisionish to me. I was so vindicated when the Oscars didn't care about it.

 

[saann]

^Rottentomatoes is actually not very reliable since it only divides between worth seeing/not worth seeing.. so some movies seem better than their reviews say and some seem worse than they actually are

Those 98% could have easily just been reviews saying it's a decent movie, not necessarily that it's great.. and the 98% could easily just be grading it 3 stars out of 5

 

[blueorchid]

I just want to say that I saw Project Nim, and I wasn't impressed.
I was very excited to see the film and I thought the whole thing came out so average.
Instead of learning anything about the actual monkey, or learning things about life and the world, I get to watch a bunch of infighting between 2 or 3 people who wanted this monkey for themselves. This film nerd said it was a 'metaphor' for how we can be 'animalistic in conflict' or some bullcrap, but come on, the film sucked. Remember how it would introduce each person by showing them sitting in a dark room, or something Oh my god. Laughable.

When I saw that RottenTomatoes had generated a 98% grade for the film I was so disgusted. People will give a good grade to any documentary because it's a "doc" and then sit back and pat themselves on the back.

Seriously -- what was so great about that movie?! It was so mediocre and televisionish to me. I was so vindicated when the Oscars didn't care about it.

Interesting. I was curious about Nim Chimpsky lol: I still crack up at that name) because I took a linguistics class where we had to watch some documentary about animals learning language which had Nim in it along with a bunch of other animals. So, I kind of thought that Being Nim would be just a more in depth version of that documentary, interesting to learn that it's not though.

 

[MyNameIs]

Also, the acting categories isn't really diverse. The Academy likes to think they are diverse but they really aren't. I mean how many time's has an African American women been nominated for Best Actress??? Ten times. And how many time's has an African American women won??? Once. That doesn't scream diversity to me.

See those kind of statements, while not inaccurate, are really frustrating and misleading. During that period you're talking about, how many times have a black actress been snubbed? And I don't mean snubbed in someone's subjective opinion, but snubbed as in, she gave good performance, got great reviews, popped up in some precursor awards throughout the season and then been a no-show at the Academy? The only one I can think of in the last ten years is Thandie Newton for Crash. She won BAFTA for Best Supporting Actress, but didn't get an Oscar nomination. But even her situation is kind of strange because she was pretty much a no show at all American awards (and probably won BAFTA because they always go for Brits). Other than that, at least since 2000, Academy seems to be very open to nominating/awarding black actors/actresses.

The problem is not that Academy is not 'diverse', whatever that means, since Academy Awards are meant to reward best in film regardless of what color, nationality, ethnicity it comes from. The problem, if there is on, comes from the fact that there aren't that many good movies being released where minority actors can really showcase their talent. This is not just a problem for black actors, it's a problem for all but white men in their 30s-50s and white women in their 20s-40s. Everyone who's not in either of those groups is pretty much screwed as far as snagging a good role. So given who gets those good roles, it's only natural that those would be usually the people who end up with Oscar nominations/wins.

 

[*Bianca*]

Instead of learning anything about the actual monkey, or learning things about life and the world, I get to watch a bunch of infighting between 2 or 3 people who wanted this monkey for themselves. This film nerd said it was a 'metaphor' for how we can be 'animalistic in conflict' or some bullcrap, but come on, the film sucked.

Nim was a chimpanzee, not a monkey.

If you are expecting to learn about chimps in an educational way, then, yes, you're going to be disapointed. This film is about the project, and all the players involved, not just Nim (although he is obviously the subject). It's a cautionary story, and the film reveals far more about human arrogance, than it does chimpanzees.

I found the story so tragic; my heart was breaking throughout. The 'project' and its ramifiations were cruel. Humans no longer wanted to deal with Nim (because - gasp! - he's actually a wild animal), and he couldn't socialise or function with other chimps. Where did he belong? He was not quite human, but not quite a chimp. I found that notion terribly sad.

I think if you generally like Werner Herzog and Errol Morris, you'll probably like this one. In some ways it reminds me of Grizzly Man, in that there are no delusions about the wildness of the animal from the filmmaker's view.

Seriously -- what was so great about that movie?! It was so mediocre and televisionish to me. I was so vindicated when the Oscars didn't care about it.

The Oscars did include Project Nim in their selection of the best 15 documenatry films. But it (wrongfully so, IMO) didn't make it into the top 5 nominations.

^Rottentomatoes is actually not very reliable since it only divides between worth seeing/not worth seeing.. so some movies seem better than their reviews say and some seem worse than they actually are

Those 98% could have easily just been reviews saying it's a decent movie, not necessarily that it's great.. and the 98% could easily just be grading it 3 stars out of 5

Metacritic is more accurate.
It takes into the account of the grading/stars given by the reviewer.

In which case, Project Nim has a score of 83.