You Ever Notice...and What's the Deal...

[Drtooth]

I think that critics tend to think that only "serious" movies are worth nominating for Best Picture, that the best film of the year shouldn't really make you laugh. Of course, these are the same people who thought Crash was worthy of an award, so perhaps they aren't the best authorities on the subject.

I'm well versed in that one. Comedy is much harder than drama. Drama is simple. Kill someone and have someone cry over swelling music. It's almost Pavlovian a response. All you have to do is not ham it up and try way too hard that it turns into Narm, and you got a drama.

Comedy is so incredibly complicated. First off, it follows trends very hard. Observational humor is big on moment, then it falls to Offensiveness that's so over the top offensive that it's actually all in good fun... then that blows up and you got absurdist comedy. It's complicated. Look at Pop Culture reference humor. Those horrible Disaster Movie type crapfests completely ruined Pop Culture references. American Dad and Don't Trust the B in Apartment 23 brilliantly subverted that by referencing obscure pop culture. I'd like to see that more.

Personally, I love Cerebus Rollercoaster and action comedies. One of the reasons I love Up so much is that there's this huge, heartfelt, emotional sequence in the beginning a MILLION times more organic than any Oscar Bait film, which is followed directly by Carl grumpily in a poorly functioning chair lift. They just hit you with depressingly sad, and all of 2 seconds later, uproariously funny. THAT is brilliance.

 

[charlietheowl]

I'm well versed in that one. Comedy is much harder than drama. Drama is simple. Kill someone and have someone cry over swelling music. It's almost Pavlovian a response. All you have to do is not ham it up and try way too hard that it turns into Narm, and you got a drama.

I think comedy gets a bad rap because of movies like American Pie and other movies that just seem to be collections of sex jokes strung together, and then critics and other taste-makers give the genre a bad rap because of it. Granted, there are a lot of trash comedies out there, but there are a lot of trash dramas too. But comedy's just gotten a bad rap. No comedy has won Best Picture since Annie Hall in 1977. That's 36 years, and no one can say that there hasn't been a comedy worth it in that long a period.

 

[minor muppetz]

I wonder if the critics know that comedy is harder than drama.

And I'm not just talking about comedy films being overlooked for best picture. Comedies rarely appear in any categories, save best animated picture, best animated short, and best short (I never even hear about these live-action shorts). I used to watch the Oscar's every year, but haven't watched them much in the last decade (the 2012 Oscar's was different, because The Muppets got a nomination). The majority of nominated films are stuff I haven't seen or heard of.

It especially hurt in 2004 when Lord of the Rings 3 was not only nominated for 13 categories but won them all. I've never had a desire to see any of those movies, and at the time I worked as a movie theater usher and cleaning up after Lord of the Rings 3 was usually a nightmare (not the only cleaning-up nightmare, but probably one of the top 5). There were a lot of movies from that time that I really liked that I wished would have been nominated (Anger Management, Bruce Almighty, Elf) in some way.

 

[Drtooth]

I think the biggest fluke was one of the LOTR movies winning an Oscar. And it was considered the weakest of the trilogy too.

What I really hate is when the big artsy fartsy films win the technical awards. Sure, I have sympathy for the studio screwing them over and the company going pout of business, but there is NO call that Life of Pi R Squared should have won best effects over The Avengers. Let the fun blockbusters that people actually see get effects awards, as that's what they're best for. You animate a Tiger and a flashy colored whale and it wins an award over complete and utter destruction of a major city, a meticulously detailed mechanical suit, and an actually believable Hulk. Just the last bit deserves some recognition.

 

[minor muppetz]

I wonder if the academy should just dump the "best special effects" award. These days they always just use green screen, visual effects, digital erasing, and computer animation. Special effects seem to be too simple these days (even though I don't know how they work, and I'm sure much of the general public doesn't, either). It's been a long time since I last saw a movie that really got me wondering "how did they do that...?"

 

[D'Snowth]

I think they have a category for VISUAL effects, but yeah, most special effects are anything but in movies anymore... however, I think in some cases, if a movie is running overbudget, or they can't afford certain visual effects, they'll resort to old school methods to get the job done.

 

[Drtooth]

I wonder if the academy should just dump the "best special effects" award. These days they always just use green screen, visual effects, digital erasing, and computer animation. Special effects seem to be too simple these days (even though I don't know how they work, and I'm sure much of the general public doesn't, either). It's been a long time since I last saw a movie that really got me wondering "how did they do that...?"

Aw, come on. You're making CGI sound like something a third grader could do on an etch-a-sketch.

Listen. While CGI is a bane to puppetry and 2-D animation enthusiasts, it's NO WHERE near the cheap quick fix detractors make it out to be. Pacific Rim isn't losing a crapload of money because the monster and robot battles are cheap to produce.

Let's take a look at Iron Man's armor. Not an easy thing to recreate in real life. You can make a sort of working plastic suit, sure. You can have the face place lift and close with simple mechanics... but when there's that many fiddly bits that close together in a specific way, it becomes impossible to get a working one in real life.

The difference for me is, we have special effect awards that go to using CGI to green screen someone into a historical scene or make Benjamin Button look older or some crap like that vs. the HUGE amount of artists that make just Optimus Prime. Let's not forget all the massive design that goes into large robots/tech suits/monsters/aliens whatever.... and this is high quality (i.e. not Max from Blue Tax) CGI, so everything has to be perfectly detailed. As lame as the Transformers movies can be, I respect them on that level. There's more talent designing those Autobots and Decepticons than in the entire rest of the movie combined.

 

[CensoredAlso]

Aw, come on. You're making CGI sound like something a third grader could do on an etch-a-sketch.

I think it's more that we know it's CGI and therefore there's no real mystery anymore. In the days of practical effects you could wonder things like "how did the Muppets ride bicycles?" But nowadays, audiences know "Oh it's CGI" and that's the end of the mystery. And it's quickly become old hat.

CGI may take a great deal of skill but it never comes across that way. It's just too slick and perfect.

 

[AquaGGR]

You ever notice how most family movies are rated PG for "Rude humor"? That applies to like every CGI movie released in the past three years. Remember, Airplane and Monty Python and the Holy Grail were rated PG (though maybe that has to do with there being no PG-13 at the time)
The MPAA and the ESRB seem to be getting stricter with the ratings. G used to be the norm rating for family movies. What happened?

 

[minor muppetz]

Aw, come on. You're making CGI sound like something a third grader could do on an etch-a-sketch.

No, I know that a kid couldn't do it on an etch-a-sketch. And I couldn't do it well on my computer (at least not as well as they do it in the movies). But I'm sure it's simple to those who work in the business and have the money and technology (yeah, I'm thinking it's not as impressive, and then mentioning money is needed...).