Major props to the Oscars for acknowledging “12 Years a Slave” as the the Best Picture of 2013, reversing its recent trend of embracing less challenging fare like “Argo” and “The Artist.”
The top honor for this unflinching — and at times, hard to watch — look at America’s most shameful institution comes 74 years after “Gone With the Wind,” which romanticized slavery, became one of the academy’s most honored films ever.
The Best Picture win by “12 Years” — the first Best Picture winner directed by black man — wasn’t exactly a total surprise.
Like most of last night’s winners in the main categories, its victory was telegraphed in a series of earlier awards ceremonies that pretty much locked in all four of last night’s acting honorees by the end of January.
Just how close the vote could be between “12 Years a Slave” and the other frontrunner, “Gravity,” was clear when the Producers Guild of America awards announced that for the first time, there was a tie between the two of them.
A spokesperson for the Oscars vowed there wouldn’t be an unprecedented tie for the Best Picture Academy Award because of the complex preferential voting system it adopted four years ago.
When “Gravity” won the highly predictive Directors Guild of America award, there were widespread predictions that Oscar voters would split the two top awards — “12 Years a Slave” for Best Picture and “Gravity” for Best Director, Alfonso Cuarón.
That’s exactly what the British academy awards did two weeks ago. And I’m perfectly fine with the same split at the Oscars– the fifth so far this century. It’s the first time since 1949-1950 that there were back-to-back splits. “Argo” won Best Picture last year, at least partly because Ben Affleck was snubbed for a Best Director nomination, and the Best Director award went to Ang Lee for “Life of Pi.”
Like last year’s directorial winner, “Gravity” is a directorial tour de force, and a technical landmark. And it just happened to be the most popular of the nine nominees for Best Picture at the box office.
Ever since the academy expanded the Best Picture field four years, it’s had the odd effect of focusing attention on a smaller and smaller group of feature films.
While I can’t disagree with any of last night’s widely predicted acting winners it’s noteworthy that three of the four performances (the exception was Cate Blanchett in “Blue Jasmine”) were in Best Picture nominees.
It sure would have been nice to have one or two of the surprises that used to be routine on Oscar night.
