Trying to meet the Oscar deadline

While the notion of the previous post (competition amongst films providing us with a necessary prompt to debate what it best) is arguable, there is one aspect of the Academy Awards that is undeniable: movies that get nominated are ones that my wife and I get more motivated to see. And it's not merely a matter of adding them to the Netflix queue; we're talking about trying to view them prior to the telecast.
Rarely are we successful in seeing all the ones we'd want. It has happened that we've seen all the Best Picture nominees but not necessarily the ones for the performance categories (that aren't also up for the big prize). However, now that there's ten rather than five vying for that final Oscar of the night it becomes a nigh-impossible mission to get them all in during that month between when the nominees are announced and when the award ceremonies occur.

Take three weekends ago, for example. We got up Saturday morning and went to a showing of Avatar that started before noon. This is a movie that had been out since December and we were seeing it in mid-February. Realistically speaking, with the way it has been going it's entirely likely it will still be in theaters well into March (although perhaps not on as many IMAX screens) and beyond. We'd specifically skipped it back in January when we saw Up In the Air instead. So what was the urgency now? Well, after it was feted at the Golden Globes and with it being touted as one of the frontrunners, it's obvious that the only way to have any sort of genuine reaction (good or bad) if its name is read from the envelope on March 7 is to have seen it; the only way to know if one is delighted or enraged by that is to have viewed it and have some sort of informed opinion.

However, one needs some perspective on other contenders; it's not enough to merely suspect that others were better or worse than Avatar, and as such my wife had The Hurt Locker in the queue to get the DVD since before that was available. But it had not arrived (presumably because everyone else who has undertaken that same mission had it on their queues even earlier), so she took to extreme measures: she added a second queue in my name with only that film in it, and deleted almost everything out of the queue in her name except that single movie. (And of course, we then got two copies of it in the mail on the same day.)

Would she have gone to such measures if not for this theoretical deadline? Doubtful. We'd had months and months since many of these films were first in theaters during which time we had not made the effort to see them. In the cases of The Hurt Locker and Precious we had held genuine interest in attending a showing (based on positive reviews) but that had not manifested itself in motivating us to actually doing so in all that time. Of course, last year, with the wedding and all, tended to give us other priorities, so the only one of the nominees we saw prior to the calendar changing was District 9.

I'm not sure that the point of announcing the nominees is to spur people to hurry up and see these particular films or if that's merely a side effect, but to the extent that it does happen it seems like the AMPAS should have allowed more time now that there's ten in the running.

Some people still have lives--not us, obviously, but conceivably some people do.