Word: besting
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...question, The Hurt Locker is a near perfect war film and an excellent choice for Best Picture. Bigelow's job wrangling this orphan project into shape, and her shot-by-shot mastery of the story, should be considered no less impressive than her swaggering hero's effectiveness in defusing bombs on Baghdad streets. The same goes for Mark Boal's winning screenplay, based on his reporting for a Playboy nonfiction piece about IED squads (which really should have put the script in the Best Adapted Screenplay category). (See pictures of James Cameron's special effects...
...Hurt Locker's Oscar haul had less to do with the movie's merits than with the Academy membership's make-up and mind-set. Remember, to win Best Picture you don't have to make the best picture; you have to make the picture that appeals to the voters, who are older, politically liberal and artistically conservative. Here's how those and other factors may have played in The Hurt Locker's favor - and doomed Avatar...
...movie, viewers are meant to be cheering for the deaths of the U.S. soldiers trying to occupy Pandora. It didn't help. The Oscar voters saw Avatar (if they did watch it) as just another genre film. No sci-fi movie has ever won Best Picture...
...people, like the typical Academy member, but every one of them is resistant to change or novelty. Anything new in movies seems less like progress and more like a renunciation of the artistic standards they were nurtured on. Consider that in 1942, the Academy gave its top awards, Best Picture and Director, to John Ford's How Green Was My Valley, a poignant evocation of a Welsh mining town. Fine, honorable, fully worthy. The film it beat: Citizen Kane. Who needs all those low-angle shots, the deep-focus cinematography, the oblique, multifaceted view of a powerful publisher? Those aren...
...Hollywood. The evening provided ample evidence that some categories were a popularity contest - not among the mass of viewers but the 5,000-plus Academy voters. They may as well have scrawled, "We like you, we really like you," on their ballots next to the boxes checked off for Best Actress Bullock (The Blind Side) and Best Actor Jeff Bridges (Crazy Heart). The victors' chief competition, Meryl Streep and Clooney, were two more examples of the haves: 16 Oscar nominations (but no win since 1983) for Streep, and radiant Clooneyness for George. What do you give...