I haven't seen the movie yet. In the meanwhile, here's another, rather different, slant:
http://nymag.com/daily/entertainment/2010/03/somebody_from_the_hurt_locker.htmlSomebody From The Hurt Locker
Probably Should Have Thanked Critics at the Oscars
By:
Bilge Ebiri The irony of
Variety firing its chief film critic, Todd McCarthy (
and announcing that they’re doing away with staff film reviews altogether), less than 24 hours after
The Hurt Locker ’s big night of Oscar glory was sadly lost on most people. You don’t need to have been paying much attention this past year to see that film critics have been taking hits left and right, and McCarthy’s dismissal is clearly just the latest chapter. (That nonsensical
Armond White–Greenberg kerfuffle, however, isn’t.) And they were probably not on the minds of
The Hurt Locker ’s team, who thanked everybody in their Oscar speeches except for, amazingly, the one group that proved key in their awards-season success.
Of course, thanking critics would be perverse in Hollywood. Because critics don’t matter. Nobody reads critics. Movies that critics like don’t make any money. That last part may be true, of course, since
The Hurt Locker didn’t make any money either. Apparently, the lowest-grossing film in Oscar history to win Best Picture, the one with no studio behind it, the one sporting one of the most disastrous releases ever, and the one made by a filmmaker whose previous height of awards glory was a Silver Raven at the Brussels International Festival of Fantasy Film in 1988, somehow managed to become an awards-season juggernaut because of … well, what? Magic? Sheer pluck and steely-eyed determination? The messianic hosannas of
Jeffrey Wells?
Some have credited word-of-mouth, but usually word-of-mouth translates to some kind of box office.
That it was a good movie certainly helped. But lots of good, even great, films came out during the year. No,
The Hurt Locker owes much of its Oscar success, frankly, to critics. The film came into the awards season trailing a litany of not just good, not just great, but practically levitational reviews — from
Richard Corliss of Time anointing it a “near-perfect war film” on the eve of its Venice Film Festival premiere (in September … 2008!) to
Scott Foundas of the Village Voice and L.A. Weekly calling it “the best American film since
Paul Thomas Anderson's
There Will Be Blood way back in June. (Our favorite was
A.O. Scott of the Times promising that “If The Hurt Locker isn’t the best action movie of the summer, I’ll blow up my car.”) Of course, that happens every year, with a film being canonized by critics and then falling apart at the box office and seeing its Oscar chances waste away; our beloved
Zodiac comes to mind.
What was different this year was that the accolades kept coming:
Roger Ebert had already deemed it a “leading contender for Academy Awards,” and by mid-December, the
Boston Society of Film Critics, the
New York Film Critics Circle, and the
Los Angeles Film Critics Association had all bestowed all their awards on
Locker and Bigelow, along with
scores of other organizations . Meanwhile, the film’s box office continued to disappear (it was gone from most cities by that point) and numerous other major, much-better-funded Oscar campaigns (
Nine, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, etc.) began to gear up. By that point, of course,
The Hurt Locker was already lapping the other films …
on the critics’ top-ten lists.
To be fair, movies that sweep critics’ awards don’t always win Best Picture. (We
speculated on that ourselves at one point.) That is, perhaps, the one area where the critics couldn’t help
The Hurt Locker out. And in this year of relentless critic-bashing, it may have been tempting to think that the Academy would deal them another blow by picking the box-office-busting
Avatar over the Little Movie That the Critics Like. So maybe there are two unspoken thank-yous in order now: the
Hurt Locker team should be thanking the critics, and the critics should be thanking the Academy.
