I've mentioned this before but one job I'm glad I don't have is assembling the "In Memoriam" segment for a show like tonight's Academy Awards. As noted in this article, you have to decide whose life will get noted and celebrated and whose won't…and then deal with the hurt the exclusions do to friends and family. I've heard there are those in the Academy who've suggested dispensing with the montage precisely because it slights those who can't be included.
The article says they have to whittle the list of "more than 100" down to "30 or so" so that's a lot of families who will be disappointed not to see a loved one mentioned. Someone also has to decide who's the "biggie" for the closing. I'm guessing Patrick Swayze, though I wouldn't be surprised by Natasha Richardson or Karl Malden. The biggest name who's passed away in the last twelve months would have to be Michael Jackson but I don't think he had enough of a movie career to close. There will reportedly be a special separate segment on John Hughes.
Having not been to the movies much lately, I don't have a huge interest in who goes home with Mr. Oscar. For what it's worth, the "buzz" I'm hearing is that a lot of people think The Hurt Locker deserves some big wins but probably won't get them. And usually when you hear that about a movie, it wins. I would also suspect there are voters who think the following: That a blockbuster like Avatar is not going to be significantly helped by winning Best Picture. It already has its "award" in its grosses, whereas The Hurt Locker has underperformed and is more deserving of that boost. Also, of course, James Cameron got his props for Titanic.
But it's also silly to try and predict what's on the voters' minds because for one thing, we don't really know who's voting and which films they've seen. There's also no data on how they vote…just what they vote for. I've made this analogy before but that never stops me. After a presidential election, we have a demographic breakdown of voters and we have exit polls and county-by-county vote totals so it's possible to infer a few things that were on voters' minds. After an Academy Award is handed out, we just know who won. We don't even know by how much they won. So theories like the one I just offered about The Hurt Locker are utterly speculative. For all we know, Sean Penn won Best Actor last year because half the voters flipped a coin and the other half thought they were voting for the guy who works in Vegas with Teller.
Enjoy the show. My TiVo thinks it'll be three hours but I've padded the recording time with an extra thirty minutes, just in case. Ten nominees for Best Picture will take a while.