Post by politicidal on Aug 15, 2017 18:11:25 GMT
Below is the first bit from a discussion between him and a fellow editor at Vulture.com named Kyle Buchanan;the rest of their conversation is in the link. This weekend, I sat through two films which fit the image of what one could call an "Oscar-Bait" movie. They were The Promise and In Dubious Battle. Neither are pretty good movies (the first is the better one though) on their own terms.
Now while I get Harris' concerns that using the phrase seems like a slight against filmmakers and actors' real intentions, I kept getting this nagging feeling where I could almost sense the calculation behind the camera. Between both movies, I could hear voices saying "there's the money shot" "oh we're getting a nod for best cinematography baby" or "we're gonna get a lot of positive buzz for adapting this book".
TEXT:
"...Mark Harris: Here we are at the dawn of a new Oscar season — well, dawn for me, but you’ve been walking this beat, checking out contenders, and taking the temperature of voters since before Labor Day. And I already have something to rant about. A few days ago I complained on Twitter about the prevalence of one of my least-favorite phrases of awards-season skepticism: “Oscar bait.” I called it “a terrible term that takes our sideline fixation (meaning, who’s gonna win) and tries to recast it as a defining motive for artists … Can it describe how some films are marketed? Sure. But when you use it to peacock your contempt, it’s just a way of not seeing a movie.”
I’ll revise that here: I think “Oscar bait” is a way of taking a whole set of aesthetic objections to a movie, which may or may not be legitimate, and turning them into an accusation about what was in the hearts and minds of the people who made the movies. That’s what I reject. Yes, there’s no question that publicity campaigns are often created in order to position a movie as an awards-season contender. But that’s about the packaging and pushing of the movie. When people start using it to describe content, I think what they’re really objecting to is something else."
