What you think of ‘Passion's’ chance for Oscar - Big Big Forums

Jolie Rouge · 12-22-2004, 01:42 AM

‘The Passion’ doesn't have a prayer
Don’t be surprised if Mel Gibson’s baby doesn't score an Oscar nod
COMMENTARY By Michael Ventre
MSNBC contributor
Updated: 4:32 p.m. ET Dec. 10, 2004

Mel Gibson’s “The Passion of the Christ” was an unexpected sensation, earning more than $370 million domestically. Rather than being put off by the subject matter and the subtitles, audiences turned movie-going into a religious experience. Church organizations attended en masse. Those of the Christian faith almost felt an obligation to buy tickets and witness the cinematic description of their savior’s suffering. Certainly, with a film that generated so much devotion, there has to be room among the five best picture nominees at this year’s Academy Awards.

Well, not exactly. “The Passion of the Christ” is unlikely to stir up the same enthusiasm at Oscar time that it did with audiences. Chances are Academy voters will be non-believers in this picture, regardless of their religious convictions.

Conspiracy theorists can take a seat

For those who feel the secular Hollywood elite will conspire to sabotage a religious-themed motion picture and deny it an honor it so richly deserves, they can save their breath. “Passion” will be ignored for practical reasons, not because of a bias toward the devout.

First off, we live in highly commercial times. Rare is the motion picture that is plucked out of obscurity and embraced by Academy voters without being accompanied by a good, old-fashioned marketing onslaught. In this case, Gibson has already declared he will not spend money to promote the film. Turning his back on the increasingly distasteful practice of trumpeting a movie for Oscar contention is a noble gesture.

But the downside is that every other picture in contention will be in full promotional mode between now and the voting deadline. And although the best picture landscape had appeared to be desolate only a few weeks ago, now it is somewhat more lush, with contenders that include “The Aviator,” “Finding Neverland,” “Million Dollar Baby,” “Sideways,” “The Sea Inside,” “Closer,” “Kinsey” and “Ray,” as well as warmly received longshots like “Spiderman 2,” “Friday Night Lights,” “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind,” “Kill Bill Vol. II,” “Shrek 2,” “The Bourne Supremacy” and “Fahrenheit 9/11.”

The phrase “timing is everything” also comes into play. There is a good reason studios release the films they deem most Oscar-worthy in December. Voters are human, they have short memories, and even if many of them happened to be impressed with “Passion” when it first unspooled on Ash Wednesday — February 25th — much of that buzz has long since disappeared, replaced by that of other films. “Passion” won’t even benefit from a timely DVD release, since that already happened way back on August 31st.

Reviews matter. One single notice means little. But if there is a collective drumbeat, an apparent consensus, then it creates a perception that the picture in question isn’t up to snuff artistically, a potentially lethal development where Oscar dreams are involved.

Generally, negative reviews of “The Passion of the Christ” seemed to outnumber the positive, or at least were so virulent as to overshadow the positive. Much of that sentiment came from Gibson’s decision to focus on the persecution of Christ rather than on his good deeds and kind words. A.O. Scott of The New York Times said the picture “is so relentlessly focused on the savagery of Jesus’ final hours that this film seems to arise less from love than from wrath, and to succeed more in assaulting the spirit than uplifting it.” David Denby of The New Yorker said “the movie Gibson has made from his personal obsessions is a sickening death trip, a grimly unilluminating procession of treachery, beatings, blood and agony.”

Relgious films have triumphed before

There certainly will be a faction among Christians who believe Hollywood is opposed to honoring anything with a religious theme. Those people are just not students of history

In 1953, “The Robe” received an Oscar nomination for Best Picture, as did Cecil B. DeMille’s “The Ten Commandments” in 1957. “Ben Hur,” subtitled “A Tale of the Christ,” was one of the most honored pictures in Hollywood history, winning 11 Academy Awards in 1960. More recently, in 1988, Martin Scorsese was nominated for Best Director for “The Last Temptation of Christ,” although that one rankled some of the fundamentalists for its controversial portrayal of Jesus as more of a flawed man than as the divine son of God.

In short, if a filmmaker can deliver the goods and tell a great story, the subject matter is almost irrelevant.

Then there is the charge leveled at “Passion” by some that it is anti-Semitic. Gibson’s portrayal of Jews and their participation in the death of Christ angered some in the Jewish community even before the picture was released. It didn’t help that Mel Gibson’s father, Hutton, is a Holocaust denier. While Mel Gibson told Diane Sawyer in an interview that he does not share his father’s views and called the Holocaust “an atrocity of monumental proportions,” he didn’t outright condemn his father’s inflammatory remarks, a fact that angered some Jewish leaders.

The depiction of Jews in “Passion” is a matter that obviously is open to individual interpretation. But with humans being human, it’s safe to say there might be some in the Academy voting body who did not take kindly to the way Jews were portrayed and will happily deny the film any recognition.

“The Passion of the Christ” succeeded mightily as a box-office sensation and as a catalyst for Christians and non-Christians alike to re-visit and re-examine the suffering of Jesus Christ. But that figures to be the extent of its appeal as far as the Academy is concerned.

www.msnbc.msn.com/id/6672037

ladybugbhb · 12-22-2004, 09:04 AM

i certainly wish it would, but i don't really get my hopes up. it is coming from hollywood voters isn't it?

YNKYH8R · 12-22-2004, 09:48 AM

I don't know.

I've only seen 2 1/2 of these movies.

flute · 12-22-2004, 10:17 AM

YNKY, love the siggy line!

I surely wish the Passion would win!

***buttrfli*** · 12-22-2004, 10:35 AM

I have only seen one of the movie choices (911)

I haven't seen Passion of the Christ.... don't know if I ever will.

schsa · 12-22-2004, 11:10 AM

His movie is too controversial. There will be other choices before the year is out and even if it is a high grossing movie that doesn't make it an Oscar winner. The movie made money because of the hype that went along with it. I think we should be looking elsewhere for the next Oscar winner.

YNKYH8R · 12-22-2004, 02:12 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by buttrfli

I have only seen one of the movie choices (911)

I haven't seen Passion of the Christ.... don't know if I ever will.

I saw 9/11. Passion I saw half of, not as bloody as is was cracked up to be. IMO.

adorkablex · 12-22-2004, 02:52 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by YNKYH8R

I saw 9/11. Passion I saw half of, not as bloody as is was cracked up to be. IMO.

I thought it was quite bloody. JMO. I'm not a very religious person but the movie made me cry. However I think Ray will take it. I haven't seen it yet but seems everyone I know who has says it's a GREAT movie. And that you forget its Jamie Foxx. That gives it the upper hand in my opinion.

Quote:

Originally Posted by ladybugbhb

i certainly wish it would, but i don't really get my hopes up. it is coming from hollywood voters isn't it?

I believe it's voted on by a group of their peers yes. But I don't think if it doesn't win it was because of liberal Hollywood.

Jolie Rouge · 12-22-2004, 03:21 PM

Anyone see this : "Hotel Rwanda"
Directed by Terry George
Starring Don Cheadle, Sophie Okonedo, Nick Nolte

Dec. 22, 2004 | In "Hotel Rwanda" it's a few days into the 1994 genocide in which the majority Hutu tribe would eventually slaughter nearly a million of their Tutsi countrymen with no interference from the West. Refugees have holed up at the Mille Collines luxury hotel in Kigali, Rwanda's capital, waiting for the international intervention forces they expect to protect them from the marauding Hutus. Colonel Oliver (Nick Nolte), who's in charge of the U.N. peacekeeping forces, greets the arriving international troops with relief that, in just a few seconds, turns to disgust.

Following Oliver into the hotel bar, the manager of the Mille Collines, Paul Rusesabagina (Don Cheadle), congratulates the colonel on how well he has protected the refugees while awaiting the international forces. What Paul doesn't know, and what Colonel Oliver has to break to him, is that the forces are there only to provide safe passage out of Rwanda for Europeans. They will do nothing to stop the slaughter or aid the Tutsis. The scene that follows between Cheadle and Nolte is so emotionally violent that it takes you a few seconds to register that you're hearing what you're hearing.

"You should spit in my face," says Colonel Oliver to Paul. "You're dirt. We think you're dirt, Paul ... The West, all the superpowers ... They think you're dirt. They think you're dung ... You're not even a n*****. You're African."

It's a shocking moment (did Nolte just tell Cheadle he's "not even a n****"?), one that punches out its meaning in the bold typeface style of a tabloid headline. There's nothing artful about it, and yet it contains the heart of this shattering movie.

A startlingly effective and upsetting political melodrama, "Hotel Rwanda" -- which is based on a true story and was directed by a Westerner, Irish filmmaker Terry George, who cowrote the film with Keir Pearson -- is out to rub the West's nose in its refusal to intercede in stopping the genocide. And George and Pearson want to deprive us of the subsequent easy out of conceding that we sure did act terribly toward the Tutsis. Every time we see a Hutu bringing a machete down on the body of a Tutsi (and it should be said here that the film, rated PG-13, depicts the slaughter by suggestion), the movie wants us to think, "We allowed this to happen."

If that makes "Hotel Rwanda" sound like a bullying or self-righteous movie, it isn't. In spirit and technique, it's close to the muckraking films that Warner Bros. turned out in the early '30s, hard-edged pictures like "I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang" that aimed to shake up audiences' sense of justice and moral outrage.

It's not a pure film. George, who directed the terrific "Some Mother's Son," about the group of IRA hunger strikers that included Bobby Sands, uses the techniques of suspense movies here to work you over. (I was shaking when I left the theater.) At moments, particularly in a sequence involving a confrontation between Hutu killers and U.N. soldiers conveying a group of refugees to safety, "Hotel Rwanda" comes close to the tension of the sequence in the first "Godfather" film in which Al Pacino's Michael first commits murder. You watch it with your heart slamming against your rib cage.

Cheadle's Paul, a Hutu who has three children with his smart, gutsy Tutsi wife, Tatiana (Sophie Okonedo, who makes you feel as if each horror she witnesses etches a line on her face), has learned the key to being a success in his job managing the Mille Collines. Through a combination of glad-handing and bribes, he flatters the military and political big shots who frequent the hotel, and makes sure the place has the food and booze it needs to keep its upscale customers happy.

Thawn · 12-22-2004, 11:15 PM

Gosh-none of the above.
Eternal Sunshine what a bore.

Jolie Rouge · 01-10-2005, 01:14 AM

'9/11,' 'Passion' Tops at People's Choice

PASADENA, Calif. (AP) - Two controversial films that defied the odds to earn millions at the box office joined a familiar green ogre to take top honors at the 31st Annual People's Choice Awards on Sunday.

The Michael Moore film ``Fahrenheit 9/11,'' which took a critical look at President Bush's actions after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, won the favorite movie award, while Mel Gibson's explicit ``The Passion of the Christ'' won in the favorite drama category.

Moore dedicated his win to the U.S. troops fighting overseas and said he was ``amazed'' that people voted his film their favorite. ``I love making movies and I'll take this as an invitation to make more 'Fahrenheit 9/11s,''' Moore said.

Gibson echoed Moore's appreciation, saying the award ``means a lot more to me this time than anything before.'' ``I depended on you and you were there,'' Gibson said. ``If it wasn't for you guys, we would have been dead in the water.''

The animated ``Shrek 2'' swept a number of categories, being named favorite comedy, favorite sequel and favorite animated movie. The character of Donkey in ``Shrek 2,'' voiced by Eddie Murphy, was named favorite animated movie star, while the Fairy Godmother, voiced by Jennifer Saunders, won in the favorite movie villain category.

Perennial favorites took many of the top awards, including many of this year's new categories. Julia Roberts and Johnny Depp won for favorite female and male movie star. Matt LeBlanc and Marg Helgenberger won for favorite male and female TV stars. ``Will & Grace,'' won for favorite TV comedy. ``CSI: Crime Scene Investigation'' was named favorite TV drama.

After votes cast via the Internet during the first hour of the live telecast were counted, ``Joey'' was named favorite new TV comedy, while ``Desperate Housewives'' won for favorite new TV drama.

The People's Choice Awards, hosted by Jason Alexander and Malcolm-Jamal Warner, were presented at the Pasadena Civic Auditorium and broadcast on CBS. The awards covered 38 film, television and music categories, including a number of new ones.

The nominations were determined by editors at Entertainment Weekly, the People's Choice production team and a panel of pop culture fans. Winners were determined by Internet voting.

The complete list of winners:

Motion picture: ``Fahrenheit 9/11''

Drama motion picture: ``The Passion of the Christ''

Comedy motion picture: ``Shrek 2''

Animated motion picture: ``Shrek 2''

Favorite sequel: ``Shrek 2''

Animated movie star: Donkey in ``Shrek 2'' (voiced by Eddie Murphy)

Movie villain: The Fairy Godmother in ``Shrek 2'' (voiced by Jennifer Saunders)

Favorite on-screen chemistry: Drew Barrymore and Adam Sandler in ``50 First Dates''

Female movie star: Julia Roberts

Male movie star: Johnny Depp

Female action movie star: Angelina Jolie

Male action movie star: Will Smith

Leading lady: Renee Zellweger

Leading man: Brad Pitt

Funny female star: Ellen DeGeneres

Funny male star: Jim Carrey

Television drama series: ``CSI: Crime Scene Investigation''

Television comedy series: ``Will & Grace''

New television comedy series: ``Joey''

New television drama series: ``Desperate Housewives''

Female television star: Marg Helgenberger

Male television star: Matt LeBlanc

Late night talk show host: David Letterman

Daytime talk show host: Ellen DeGeneres

Reality show - competition: ``American Idol''

Reality show - makeover: ``Extreme Makeover Home Edition''

Reality show - 24/7: ``Newlyweds: Nick & Jessica''

Crest fans favorite smile: Julia Roberts

Pantene fans favorite hair: Jennifer Garner

Cover Girl fans favorite look: Kate Hudson

Favorite group: U2

Female singer: Alicia Keys

Male singer: Usher

Favorite remake: ``The First Cut is the Deepest'' by Sheryl Crow

Favorite combined forces: ``Yeah'' by Usher/Lil Jon/Ludacris

Country group: Brooks & Dunn

Country female singer: Shania Twain

Country male singer: Tim McGraw

01/09/05 23:38

http://cnn.netscape.cnn.com/news/sto...96.htm&sc=1402