Oscar Augury: 2008 Academy Awards Shaping Up as "Battle of the Laras"

It used to be that the Academy Awards and the New Hampshire primary came in early April or late March, but competition has driven the scheduling of both events forward. In a campaign season that has seen Oprah Winfrey hit the hustings in New Hampshire for Barack Obama, a consideration of the confluence of politics and entertainment is not outlandish. I talk not of the Michael Moore Sicko kind of soap-box grandstanding, or of Marlon Brando and Vanessa Redgrave using the Oscar awards ceremony as their own bully pulpits for political protests, but of the good old fashioned politics of winning an Academy Award.

Director Robert Altman (Honorary Oscar 2007) compared the awards season to the political primaries. In 1976, his Nashville won the "New York primary" (the New York Film Critics Circle) whereas One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest won the California primary (the Golden Globe). The New York Film Critics awards were more prestigious thirty years ago than they are now, but the Golden Globes -- despite their dubious reputation -- always carried more weight with the Oscar voters as the Globes were a dual-stage Tinseltown event involving both nominations and then the actual awarding of the golden trophies. Even in the days when the Globes were banned from network TV due to being rigged, the awards dinner was considered the best party in Hollywood, and thus carried a certain "oomph" that the New York Film Critics could not provide.

The plethora of awards that started to proliferate at the beginning of the new decade/century/millennium forced the Academy Awards to move up its own ceremony, much as the New Hampshire primary has crept up, in order to prevent would-be usurpers from stealing its thunder. The result is that the Academy Awards voters' choices increasingly resemble those that came before, whereas in the past, there was a deviation in both nominations and winners, as the longer season permitted Oscar voters to take their time, allowing dark horse candidates to flourish. That no longer is the case.