The Hurt Locker's victory: the centre cannot hold

"The irony of the lowest-grossing Best Picture winner of all time coming in a year when the Academy did everything it could (right down to a hopelessly baiting horror film montage) to shove the Oscar telecast toward populist appeal couldn’t be more delicious." — In Contention

That's the general tone of everyone's reaction to The Hurt Locker's win last night; smirking schadenfreude that the wicked blue giant that is Avatar has been brought to its knees. On the one hand, I couldn't be happier. I loved Bigelow's movie; I have long had it down as the film that could most benefit from having Oscar limelight fall its way. And I loved the sight of her with those two Oscars in her fists, biceps pumped, like she was ready to bench-press Wes Anderson. The best film won. So why did I wake up this morning with a sour taste in my mouth? It's not just the fact that I also loved Avatar. It's not just the weird out-of-body sensation that comes with realising that critics, of all people, dictated the winner. I think it has to do with my suspicion that Hollywood appears to have lost the ability to make the kind of big crowd-pleasing pictures that also win awards: consensus pics that attract both audiences and critics alike which you get to talk about with your parents at Christmas.

This year the entertainment industry woke up to a clear if troubling realization: the Oscars telecast exposed an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences in full-fledged identity crisis. Almost everything about the ceremony was big and commercial; almost everything about the winners was small and arty.

Say what you like about Crash, The Departed, No Country For Old Men and The Hurt Locker — and I think that The Hurt Locker is easily the best of that bunch — they are divisive winners, destined to remain unwatched by large swathes of the country. With their spatters of brain tissue and geysers of blood, they are not Oscar winners like your momma used to make. The Oscars have turned into a branch of the Independent Spirit awards.

In case you weren't keeping score, indies outpaced majors at last night's Oscars. The Hurt Locker was the 18th indie to win Best Oscar in past 30 years. The Independent Film & Television Alliance (IFTA) announced that indies collected 12 Academy Awards (excluding short films), compared to 9 for the major studios... Independent films receiving Oscars and, where applicable, IFTA members involved in production, finance or distribution, were: The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Precious: Based on the Novel 'Push' by Sapphire, El Secreto De Sus Ojos, The Cove, and The Young Victoria.

I'm not about to start taking sides in the whole studio-indie face-off right now, after many years studiously not being drawn into it. But the Academy Awards used to feel like Hollywood rewarding its own; these days it feels like the industry rewarding another industry that happens to live quite close by, and looks almost the same, but has nothing to do with the daily business that will occupy 90% of the people at that ceremony when they wake up this morning. Some will take this as a sign of how aesthetically bankrupt the Academy is. Plus ca change. The Avatar-Hurt Locker schism doesn't go away just because they flipped a coin. I miss being able to talk about the movies I like with people other than my immediate friends. The movies used to tie us together: Hollywood seems to be coming apart.

What ever happened to the good old-fashioned Oscar sweep? The last film to pull off a sweep of all top five categories — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Actress — was 1991’s Silence of the Lambs. This Sunday, on the other hand, will likely see as many winning films as there are nominees, with the acting trophies scattered to the four winds. Best Picture and Director used to go hand in hand nearly without fail, but they’ve been split off from one another four times since 1999. And the Best Actor and/or Actress Oscars used to follow Best Picture over 50 percent of the time; in the last decade only two Best Picture winners — Gladiator and Million Dollar Baby — have generated Oscar heat for their acting leads.

Welcome to the era of the Mr. Potato Head Oscars. Movies still sweep, of course, but only with a lot of help in the technical categories, as happened with both Titanic and the Lord of the Rings films — neither of which won any acting honors. The days when our Best Pictures used to be powered along by a single central performance (Nicholson in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, Brando in The Godfather, Keaton in Annie Hall) have all but ended.

The Academy has always liked to spread the wealth, of course, but this fragmentation testifies to a deeper economic shift in the movie industry. There are blockbusters and there are low-budget indies, but gone is the middle-class movie that used to provide the Academy with its prize winners: middle-brow, mid-priced “prestige” pics like Driving Miss Daisy, Amadeus, and Dances With Wolves, films that hymned the moral efficacy of a single individual. As one Disney producer recently remarked, "Everything in the middle is toast." This year, for instance, the typical Oscar movie was Clint Eastwood’s Invictus, which had barely finished shooting before it had been tagged and handicapped for Oscar glory, solely on the basis of its subject (Nelson Mandela) and its genre (Sports Underdog Movie). In fact, it turned out to be an undernourished piece of work, and though it grabbed two acting nominations, it was boxed out of Best Picture and Director by the gritty Iraq war drama The Hurt Locker, which cost just $16 million, and James Cameron’s special-effects epic Avatar, which cost upwards of $300 million: the indie and the blockbuster, exactly the two types of movie Spielberg predicted would inherit the earth.

In terms of their Oscar handicap, both of these films has what the other wants. Avatar has broken records at the box office, taking in over $2 billion worldwide, but it lacks the unanimous critical clout of The Hurt Locker, which stands to become the least profitable Best Picture winner of all time. The fact that James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow were once married to one another only serves to underline the point: These two complete one another. Combine the two and you’d have quite a picture. Combine the two, in fact, and you’d have precisely the kind of picture that used to sweep the Oscars.

My piece about the changing profile of Best Picture winners for New York magazine here