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THE BEST PICTURE RACE: JUNO WON'T BE NOMINATED

Buzz says Yes but our writer Tom Houseman thinks Juno won't make the Best Picture shortlist...

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By Tom Houseman

Call me a curmudgeonly old man, but at the ripe age of 20, I’m starting to get pretty darn jaded, especially when it comes to the Oscars. Anytime I see a small independent film with dreams of getting nominated for Best Picture, I shake my head and tell it to get its head out of the clouds. Then I yell at those pesky kids to get off my darn lawn.

So here comes this movie, Juno, directed by that Jason Reitman fellow, written by some woman with a funny name that makes me think of deviled eggs, and starring a young girl who I vaguely remember having done extremely unnatural things to Patrick Wilson’s testicles at some point. All the hippies at the film festivals raved about it and it’s gotten stellar reviews. So you’re telling me that you think this movie about a pregnant teenager planning on giving her baby up for adoption is going to get nominated for Best Picture? Well if you believe that, then there’s a nice bridge in Brooklyn that you might be interested in purchasing from me.

Seriously though, I doubted the buzz around Juno from day one, and I’ve never stopped being highly suspicious of it. It made it onto my shortlist for about seven seconds after the National Board of Review announced their list, and that was only because I couldn’t find anything else to put instead. Then the critics started drooling over There Will Be Blood, and Juno quickly got pushed to the edge. I have two spots open on my Best Picture list right now (Atonement, Sweeney Todd, and No Country for Old Men have nominations sewn up in my opinion) and several movies vying for them. Juno is one of them, but it’s losing to There Will Be Blood and The Kite Runner, and is right behind Charlie Wilson’s War for runner-up, neck and neck with Michael Clayton and The Diving Bell and the Butterfly.

Now some of you might be thinking I’m crazy for not having Juno on my list, but I have plenty of good reasons why I don’t. First of all, much of the Academy actually is curmudgeonly old men, and I don’t see them falling over themselves to nominate this movie. They will be confused by the slang and won’t connect with the protagonist at all. And if the Academy doesn’t connect, it will be hard for it to be nominated. And when was the last time a film specifically about a teenager or child (i.e. not The Sixth Sense or The Dead Poets Society where the adult was the real focus of the story) was nominated for Best Picture? It was E.T. twenty-five years ago. So I ask you this: is Juno the next E.T., and will it be received as such by the Academy?

Now I know the first argument you’re going to make to me, because I made it to myself during that seven second period when Juno was on my list. What about Little Miss Sunshine? That was an indie festival hit that got a Best Picture nomination. Well, I have several points to make about that. Little Miss Sunshine was a summer release and a box-office hit. It had a ton of time to build support, which indie films tend to need, and it had a success story to ride. Juno will need to find lots of immediate support from the Academy and hit the box-office for it to get enough attention for a Best Picture nomination. Little Miss Sunshine should be considered an anomaly, an exception to the rule, rather than the start of a new trend to nominate quirky indie comedies.

Of course, anything is possible, and the outpouring of critical support for Diablo Cody’s screenplay certainly helps, as does the support of the NBR and the Golden Globes. It’s sitting at the same place that Little Miss Sunshine was this time last year in terms of precursor support, maybe slightly behind when it comes to critics’ circles, but it got a screenplay nomination that LMS missed out on at the Globes. So what, you might ask, does Juno have to do for me to predict it as a Best Picture nominee? Basically, it has to do everything Little Miss Sunshine did. That means nominations for the PGA Best Picture, the DGA Best Director, the WGA Best Screenplay, and the SAG Best Ensemble.

Is that too much to ask? Not for an indie film that’s a tough sell as it is. In addition, if it doesn’t make at least $30 million before the nominations, it will be at a disadvantage. Little Miss Sunshine made almost $60 million, albeit over a much larger period of time. So if the guild nominations start piling up for Juno, then I will be willing to admit that it has what it takes to get nominated for Best Picture. Until then, I will concede it a Best Actress nomination and a Best Original Screenplay Oscar, but nothing else. Hopefully that will be enough to satisfy this year’s “little movie that could” that probably won’t.

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