Steve McQueen’s 12 Years a Slave won the top audience prize at the Toronto International Film Festival yesterday to the surprise of very few. The true story of Solomon Northup has garnered widespread acclaim from critics and audiences at the Toronto and Telluride film festivals, and has been already touted as a lock for this year’s Oscars by critics from coast to coast, with buzz also extending to star Chiwetel Ejiofor for Best Actor, as well as Michael Fassbender and Lupita Nyong’o in supporting categories.
Many critics and awards writers have gathered and polled themselves to discover that 12 Years a Slave sits at the top of their expert predictions chart – followed by two films that are still unseen (American Hustle and The Wolf of Wall Street) at number two and three. In the weeks since the film debuted at TIFF it is listed as the film to beat on countless awards sites as each writer stumbles over another to be the first to declare the winner for the Academy Awards next March.
Not to be left behind in all of the handicapping, Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan has simply declared the race over:
Should another film come along that’s capable of equaling ‘12 Years a Slave’, I’d be happy for my awards predictions to be proven wrong, but let’s get real: That isn’t going to happen. It’s the capstone to a remarkable year for black cinema that also includes success stories ‘Fruitvale Station’ and ‘The Butler’, and it could reign supreme in a night destined to make Oscar history, especially if McQueen becomes the first black filmmaker to take home Best Director. As I sat in the bar with that shattered writer tonight and we struggled to speak, I said, “A century from now, when they put together a montage about the history of movies? They’ll put the film we just saw in the first ten seconds of that montage.” He didn’t even question it; he just nodded, a lump rising in his throat. Normally, I’d feel like I was sticking my neck out to engage in that sort of hyperbole, but this is as easy a call as I’ve ever made. Beat that, kids.
The problem with speculation like this is that it doesn’t advance the narrative of what a great film 12 Years a Slave is, it’s just a small population of Oscar pundits racing each other to call it first. Zero Dark Thirty took a beating last year for not being everything writers like Kyle Buchanan promised it would be, and all the momentum it had disappeared within a matter of weeks while critics moved on to a newer movie. In two months, we could read the very same piece regarding David O. Russell’s American Hustle while 12 Years a Slave could end up as forgotten as Up in the Air was when it was declared a front-runner in September of 2009.
If Buchanan is trying to prevent that from occurring, his hyperbolic grand-standing will not help McQueen’s film be better received either. Most filmgoers won’t even get a crack at the contenders for another month, and by then their expectations will be have been so overblown that living up to the hype will be damn near impossible, leaving viewers (inevitably and understandably) disappointed.
The film’s quality gets lost in the horse race of handing out shiny trophies and then, after the first few ceremonies, audiences care less and less and then eventually, not at all.
Calling a race in early September only serves to shut down conversation about what this fall and winter’s films have to offer. The question of awards season shouldn’t be how many awards a film receives, but whether the movies themselves are of quality, or if the awards themselves even mean anything other than who ran the best p.r. campaign.
2 thoughts on “Vulture’s Kyle Buchanan Says Pack It In, The 2013 Oscar Race is Over”
Zero Dark Thirty was really given the shaft. Hindsight’s 20/20 and all and as we get further away from the end of the 2012 “Best of” frenzy and start moving towards 2013’s I get a better idea of what the year’s best movies actually were. Zero Dark Thirty is one that has stayed with me, far more than my original favorite Moonrise Kingdom has. And Don Hertzfeldt’s It’s Such a Beautiful Day, my pick for the greatest film of 2012 and an instant personal all-time favorite, went by completely unnoticed except by a few festival crowds and Hertzfeldt’s small cult fanbase.
Sorry if I’m rambling, but you’re right, it’s far too early in the game to say what’s going to take the Oscars. I haven’t seen 12 Years a Slave yet, but I am excited. However, we’ve also got Inside Llewyn Davis coming up, something that everybody has seemed to have forgotten. Which is strange given that it’s both the Coens first film in three years, and it would have taken the Palme d’or at Cannes if it weren’t for Blue is the Warmest Color (another 2013 film that has yet to be released that I can’t wait for).
What about Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom? We all know how much the Academy loves biopics of grand figures and this one has Idris Elba who’s become quite the name recently. Or August: Osage County which is a ways off in the end of December. Alexander Payne has Nebraska coming up too.
And while they’re not really Oscar contenders we’re still waiting on Escape From Tomorrow, Jim Jarmusch’s Only Lovers Left Alive, Spike Lee’s Oldboy, and The Secret Life of Walter Mitty.
It’s so hard to predict what we’ll still be talking about in ten years. I’m willing to bet Buchanan isn’t far off when he says 12 Years A Slave will be remembered fondly, given that already McQueen’s Hunger and Shame are showing themselves to be the most overlooked films of their respective years, but who’s to say Fruitvale Station will be as significant in 10 years (I doubt the cell phone motif is going to look good in a decade)? Will we have completely brushed The Wolf of Wall Street or American Hustle under the rug? Will Spring Breakers be looked at as the dawning of a new wave of American cinema? Only time will tell.
And nobody has even mentioned Upstream Color, Blue Jasmine, Pain & Gain, The Place Beyond the Pines, Before Midnight, Don Jon, The Act of Killing, Stories We Tell, The Bling Ring, Side Effects, Crystal Fairy, 20 Feet from Stardom, The World’s End, The Spectacular Now or Frances Ha.
My point is, we’re already at the point where we can look back at 2012 and start rethinking what truly was the best. What the hell are we going to be thinking about 2013 come February? What will we be thinking come 2023? It’s easy to get caught up in the hype, so let’s let time do it’s thing and enjoy all the great films we’ve got coming up right now.
It really is a shame how mid-year releases fall by the wayside year after year, despite the fact that most of them are just as good, if not better than their winter Oscar-bait counterparts.