Thu, February 26, 2004

As Oscar Sunday approaches, it becomes more and more clear that I will have to accept the reality of a Lord of the Rings movie winning Best Picture. I had hoped that the series' abysmal performance at the Oscars so far (something like 6 wins out of 30 nominations) could be relied upon as far as historical precedent, but I'm increasingly convinced that the Academy will seize this "last opportunity" to reward the series, the way it so often does with people like Jack Palance. It would be optimistic to believe that cooler heads will prevail, but such optimism – like the hope that anyone can defeat Bush in November – is very hard to maintain in such a cruel, cynical world. One would think that, after nearly a decade of declining Oscar results, I would have just given up on the whole thing. That the Academy Awards would have become insignificant and my attention, as well as the world's, would just focus on the Golden Globes, which is really a more entertaining show and saw fit to honor Syndey Bristow. I mean, if The English Patient can sweep an awards show – winning awards even for editing, which we can all agree is at least the one area in which that film did not excel – you know it's time to start shopping for a new awards show. However, Oscar is still king because it's still the most-watched and most-"respected" show of the season. (Plus, they brought back Billy Crystal; I'm not made of stone, people.) Also, like the Super Bowl, it's an opportunity to gather with friends. And, like the Super Bowl, some years you can get lucky and the game will be really good, and other years it's more about the gathering with friends.

For me, over the last two years, the gathering with friends part has taken on an added element, because I've channeled an inordinate amount of energy into masterminding my group's version of that Oscar party staple: the Oscar pool. (This year's inordinate amount of energy is to blame for the tardy Survivor column this week.) Most Oscar parties have one – everybody picks who they think will win each category (or at least the major ones) and then at the end of the night the results are tallied and someone is crowned King of Oscar: He (or She) Whose Academy Award Knowledge Cannot Be Exceeded. Usually it's Joe.

The history of our Oscar pool is rich and fascinating. (Well, at least it is to me, and the chances are that I won't have a chance to deliver a keynote at Sunday's party, so allow me to digress a little – it's not the first time. Plus, it's a handy explanation of where the hell I've been all week.) To begin at the beginning, I think we must start with Survivor. As I already said, every Oscar party since the start of time has had an Oscar pool – in fact, I hear Mel Gibson is working on a deeply personal and historically inaccurate movie about the first Oscar pool – so we've covered the very beginning. A few years back, when the second season of Survivor was airing, the good folks at Yahoo! TV decided to host a little game called Survivor Pick 'Em. Each week, you could visit the Yahoo! website and you'd have 100 points to divide among the remaining contestants of the game. After TribCon, your point total would be incremented by the amount of your 100 points that you had wagered on the contestant who was voted off that night. It was a fun little game, genius in its simplicity, and very entertaining unless someone in your group decided to cheat, which Andy did. The point is, it planted the seed of "there's a better way." Rather than checking one box next to the person you thought most likely to get eliminated, and tying your fate to that one selection pass/fail, you had the opportunity to spread out your wager. If it seemed like a tight race between two, you could put 50 points on each to distribute your risk. If somebody seemed sure to go, you could put all 100 on them for a chance to really get ahead in the game. Or you could cheat. Which Andy did.

Shortly thereafter, Arksie hosted an Oscar party at his place, and his Oscar pool reflected this new way of thinking. Instead of checking one box next to your favorite film in each category, you ranked them from 1 to 5, in order of how confident you were that they might win. At the end of the night, the player with the fewest accumulated points was the winner. (i.e., if you gave all 1's to all the winners, you came out on top.) This was a tremendous leap forward in Oscar pooling, but it presented two problems. One was that you were forced to parcel out your 15 points in the same way in each category. A 5, a 4, a 3, a 2, and a 1. Second, and most important, was that after each award was announced on TV, Joe – as the pool-keeper – was besieged with queries from the participants in attendance. Everyone immediately needed to be updated as to a) how they had ranked the winning film; b) which film they had picked to win; c) how many points they currently had; and d) whether they were winning. Joe spent his night furiously penciling in points on eight or ten ballot forms as soon as each award was announced, and the rest of us spent our night clamoring for updates and missing whatever was on TV during all the shouting of "What'd I put?"

I was inspired by Joe's rethinking of the traditional Oscar pool, but – as with any great innovation – I couldn't help thinking that there had to be a better way. As Andy and I walked to the car after that party, I uttered those fateful words: "Next year, you should host the Oscar party, and I should build some sort of computerized version of the pool so nobody has to spend his time tabulating results." (I'm big with the fateful words; I think I once said "Let's go to Vegas" on a chilly February evening and got us all into lots of trouble.)

So, the following year, the online Oscar pool debuted, and it was good. I decided to throw back to the Yahoo! Survivor game and give participants 10 points in each category to distribute however they pleased. Put all 10 on a "sure thing"; spread them out 2-2-2-2-2 for safety; whatever your pleasure. The wagers, along with all the information for each category, film, and nominee, were stored in a MySQL database online, and as each winner was announced on TV, I would update the database with the winner, and the system would automatically regenerate a leaderboard which displayed all the important information. You could see who was winning as well as how much each participant had gained from his/her wager on the winning nominee, plus the nominee that each had picked to win. And it was all updated instantaneously, thanks to the genius move of leveraging computers to do what they're good at: boring and repetitive math. Just for fun, I brought in a video projector and projected the leaderboard larger-than-life across one wall of Andy's apartment, so people needn't ask "who's winning?" – they could just look at the wall and get all their questions answered. And, since their votes were all stored in the database, they could keep their paper ballot in their lap in case they needed to review their wagers on a more specific level. Needless to say, it was a big hit, and an Oscar tradition in the making. Also needless to say, the whole project served as a playground/feeding frenzy for that most dangerous side of my personality. A side which, for want of a better term, we shall call "meticulous." (There's another popular term for this character trait, but given the recent Constitutional Amendment climate, I'm loath to use the term "anal" in any context.)

Opportunities abound for a person to get meticulous about administrating an Oscar pool like this one. First, there are the nominees. Nobody in their right mind cares about the individual names of people who are nominated for Best Sound Editing statuettes. You want to know (and vote for) the film, not the people. But for the raging pedant, those names are important. They're going to be announced on the broadcast, first of all, so you want your pool to look informed. Also, I believe that these people deserve some recognition as nominees for such a prestigious award, so I make it my business to keep their names associated with their nomination as much as possible. This not only means inputting all of those names, but also keeping them in the proper order. The Academy generally alphabetizes, but they have a few tricks up their sleeve. In categories like Art Direction, the machinery is exposed. Regardless of alphabet, the Art Direction nominee in each pair is listed before the Set Decoration nominee. But in more technical categories like Visual Effects and Sound Editing, the magic takes place behind the scenes. People are divided into two or three groups based on seniority and then alphabetized within those groups. So, I took it upon myself to build some intricate code to allow my system to maintain the same order listing that the Academy does. After all, my names will be projected in big letters on a wall at the same time ABC is displaying them on TV. I would look like a dope if mine were in a different order. And I would be unceremoniously ejected from the Oscar party, for sure. There's also a lot of meticulous work to be done managing the wagers themselves. For example (just one among many), last year in my pre-party testing, I noticed that it was possible to input more than 10 total points in a given category by accident. If someone took advantage of this, they might unfairly benefit from the mistake. So, I put together some code to go through and sum up all the votes, making sure that no Oscar pool participant had wagered more than 240 points overall, or more than 10 in any given category. I have a little screen that gets checked right before the show starts that has listings like "Joe Mulder, 240 points, clean."

Then, there's the idea of the tie-breaker. Should two participants end up with the same score at the end of the night, you need a way to determine the true winner. Usually, the Oscar pool tie-breaker is something like picking the number of awards that the winningest movie will win. Something blah like that. It needs to be a fairly arbitrary number so that it's just a guess, and it needs to be something that's variable over a wide enough range that everyone can have a separate choice (otherwise, you may need a tie-breaker tie-breaker). Enter the meticulous raging pedant! Last year, my tie-breaker was to guess the longest amount of time that would elapse between the presentation of two awards (in voting categories only; no lifetime achievements). I'm still very entertained by this tie-breaker, but it was kind of a hassle to keep up with, because I had to buy a stopwatch and then keep the thing running all night. Although it was a great way to focus my detail-oriented energy, it was a bit tedious and – most importantly – it added a few seconds to the time it took me to register each winner in the database. By about the fifth award, people were already so used to the giant computer leaderboard that if it took me more than four seconds to get the figures updated, there was an uproar. (How quickly we are spoiled; imagine poor Arksie trying to pencil in all his tallies in less than four seconds!) On the rare occasion when the category at the top of my scorecard (where I input the new winners) was not the next category announced, the extra time it took me to scroll to the right category nearly caused a riot. (And the order of categories is another example of my left brain running amok. I order the categories in each year's pool to match the order in which awards were presented the previous year. The Academy tends to switch up a few of them each time around, but this at least gets me close to following the order of the broadcast. This is helpful because it allows me to keep the most likely new categories toward the top of the scorecard for easy updating, but obviously it also indicates what a psycho I am.) Needless to say, this year's tie-breaker was designed to require significantly less maintenance work. In fact, I conceived of it on the way to the car after last year's party. (Apparently, I do a lot of my best thinking on the way to the car.) This time around, it will be a matter of guessing the greatest difference in age between two winners in the four acting categories. This number is a little less random – possible values range from 0 to 47 – but it's better in one key area: it involves boring math that the computer can do on its own. Plus, with 20 possible nominees to choose from, I think there will still be plenty of randomness.

Also, and this brings us back around to The Lord of the Rings, there is the paper ballot. As I said, it's important to me to get all the nominees' names listed, no matter what. Last year, designing the layout of the paper ballot took the better part of a long Saturday, prioritizing space between necessary information (titles of films, boxes for penciling in your vote) and information important only to me (the third guy nominated for Visual Effects on Spider-Man)*. Here, again, category order comes into play. You can't very well split a category's nominees over two columns of your paper ballot, unless you want to be tarred and feathered. In a world where you can order the categories however you want, this isn't a problem. You just move a "shorter" category into a column that's running over. However, I must maintain my category order for two reasons: one, I'm meticulous (duh); and two, this is the order that the computerized input form will keep, and it makes it a lot faster to just run down the list and input them in order. Last year, the lovely Karen was my assistant in this regard, reading off all the values as I typed them in. It was the closest I came to having sex that year, and – for a computer/database geek – almost as fun. (Oh, relax. She was still unmarried then.) So, the layout process is tedious and involved. Last year, I focused so much on getting the letterspacing right to fit the categories into their right columns that I completely left out a space for voters to write their names on the form! This year, I was expecting a fairly quick and easy update to last year's form. All I'd have to do is change the nominees and update the design. (I like to make each year's form look a little like that year's Oscar campaign and official poster, something which I started by accident in 1998.) Anyway, this year's ballot was considerably harder to lay out than it should have been, and I blame The Lord of the Rings. You see, the full title of this year's film is The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. Try squeezing that into your Oscar form eleven frickin' times! Not to mention that of course it's nominated in categories like Visual Effects and Sound Mixing which are already text-heavy because of their three- or four-person nominations. (Randall William Cook, get over yourself! Could you possibly have more letters in your name?) Right behind LOTR in the nomination count is Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and let's not forget this year's runaway length leader, Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, which also manages to show up in all of the technical categories. (Jerry Bruckheimer, a pox on your soul! Whatever happened to movie titles like The Rock?) When I finished laying out this year's ballot, not only were the Best Picture candidates pushed off the form, but so was the Directing category! I reduced the type size, shifted letters around, removed the word "and" from lists of multiple people on one nomination; nothing worked. Finally, reduced to a quivering, weeping blob, I reduced the type size of the sub-titles on these three films, and managed to cram it all onto one very busy page. (Very busy but eminently readable, I'll have you know. I'm quite proud of that.) And by now I'm sure you can understand how laughable the suggestion would be to just abbreviate it Pirates of the Caribbean. Come on! Who calls it that? Anyone who doesn't walk up to the box office and say, "One for Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl, please," doesn't deserve to be in that theatre! (This reminds me of the time I worked at a movie theatre and people kept calling The Bridges of Madison County "Bridges." Who are you people, "Variety"? If they wanted it to be called "Bridges," they would have called it Bridges for Christ's sake!)

So my question to you, Peter Jackson, Mr. Lord of the Lord of the Rings – just how long are movie titles going to get before we all join hands across America? (Thanks, Kevin James.) I remember when The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert was kind of a funny novelty. All those letters only get you up to Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black! I personally will be voting for Sweden's entry in this year's Foreign Language Film category: Evil. Short and sweet. Says it all. (Not to mention describing our president. Zing!)

Of course, this isn't my only reason for hating The Lord of the Rings. (Now I know that some of you – I can think of one in particular – love The Lord of the Rings. I remind you not to take things personally. Think about how poor Arksie feels most days he reads this site – he voted for Bush! I still love Arksie, and I still love you. You poor, misguided souls.) I certainly gave the series a chance. I was about as open-minded about LOTR as I've ever been about something I knew I would hate from the moment I heard about it. I wish I loved it. For someone who's fanatical about excessive DVD special features, the 19-disc set that New Line releases for each feature would really be thrilling, if only I could stomach the films. When I first heard about the series, filmed all-at-once as it was, then released over three consecutive holiday movie seasons, I was a little wary of such transparent manufacturing of a movie event. Nobody hyped Star Wars as the next Star Wars before it came out. It just caught on with its fans organically. But here, New Line was cynically focusing like a laser beam on a demographic of fanatical Star Wars nerds and telling them up to a year in advance that they would be obsessing over LOTR for three years, like it or not. But I admired Jackson et al for attempting to keep epic moviemaking alive. It's not all that easy to achieve in the postmodern age. When I went to see The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers I realized just how difficult it is to achieve. The movie was meandering and disjointed, trying too hard to be grand in scale to really achieve watchability or interest. Plus, it makes the mistake, as today's movies often do, of thinking that a lot of digital extras make a picture seem more epic. They just make it seem really, really fake. (More on this in the Devolutions column, see link.) When Mortensen is giving his Braveheart-esque rally-the-troops speech in the trailer for The Return of the King, there are digital extras as much as a mile and a half away who are supposedly being motivated by the speech. Whatever!

Although, I could probably forgive all that if the series didn't try to dress itself up as anything more than a kids' movie. For some reason, when a movie seems to believe it deserves an Oscar, it's harder for me to look at it objectively after that. It was the same way with The English Patient, which I ashamedly admit I kind of liked right after seeing it. A week later, all the crazy buzz about how "important" it was had killed that enjoyment and now I hate it with a fiery passion reserved for hating things like Julianne Moore, Michael Gross, and Hitler. It's the same with LOTR. (Well, without the initial kind of liking it part. I really tried to enjoy The Two Towers and it just didn't engage me at all. A few impressive filmmaking moments, although the Gollum business just doesn't wow me on the pants-crapping level it seems to touch most people. But overall, I just felt completely blah about the experience and I promise I really tried. And don't give me that whole "it exists as a trilogy" argument; I knew enough about the story to enjoy the second installment without watching the first, and it still bored me. Not to mention the fact that if you're going to make three separate films, they should each stand up on their own.) The films are fantastically successful at the box office. People love them. People buy the DVDs like crazy. There is no risk of the LOTR movies being forgotten in cultural history. But that doesn't mean they're Oscar material. "Popular" isn't the same as "good," and "fun" isn't the same as "important." This reasoning is, I think, why so far the series is 1-for-5 with Oscar wins, and has only come out ahead in the technical categories. Nobody can deny that the visual effects are impressive. (I deny that they're employed with any thought whatsoever, but they're still executed rather nicely.) Any other movie would be satisfied with that. There are plenty of big-budget wood nymph movies that don't get any Oscars at all. But LOTR must have more.

The nominations themselves probably wouldn't upset me that much if it weren't for the buzz around them. As much as I want to believe that the films will continue to be snubbed in the big categories like Best Director or Best Picture, it's a lot harder to maintain that optimism with "Entertainment Weekly" crowing about an LOTR sweep like it's as big a no-brainer as promoting The Passion of the Christ on the PAX network. (Actually, any movie should sell well there. An audience that buys Billy Ray Cyrus as a doctor has achieved a zen level of "suspension of disbelief.") I know that there are many things in life far more important to get upset about, but every time I read the "Entertainment Weekly" Oscar odds article, I find myself ranting, cursing, and screaming aloud at the insanity of it. Literally every category where they mention that LOTR might not win its nomination is referred to as an "upset." People! Even when a film sweeps the awards, it doesn't win every friggin' one! And "EW" acts like LOTR deserves to win for Best Makeup just because it's "destined" to win all the awards. It doesn't work that way. You (theoretically) win the awards for the categories in which you were truly the best that year. True, the sweep mentality sometimes takes over a bit, and that could certainly happen in some categories this year. But to predict in advance that a film will win a category based purely on that speculation is irresponsible. And yes I mean to draw a distinction between "responsible" and "irresponsible" entertainment fluff reporting. For some reason, probably because Star Wars nerds who never successfully talk about anything else all grow up to write for entertainment magazines, they are just blindly unaware of any possibility other than LOTR winning all 17 of its 11 nominations and Peter Jackson being crowned Perpetual King of the Known Universe. (And yes I'm aware of the irony of looking down my nose at Star Wars nerds who get whipped into a frenzy about LOTR when I am in fact getting whipped into a frenzy about them.)

So there it is. If it were up to me, Lost in Translation would top LOTR in every category. Bill Murray would get an Oscar and Sean Penn would get a bop on the head. And Shrek would turn over its statuette to Monsters, Inc. (My god, such injustice.) If on Sunday LOTR wins like crazy, and Sofia Coppola is forced to settle for just the Original Screenplay award, I'll be deeply disappointed. Not at all surprised, but deeply disappointed.

*(By the way, it was Anthony LaMolinara.)

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