Filmmakers make movies to tell stories, not to win awards. For the most part, anyway. Giving prizes to films is, at the end of the day, meaningless.
It’s like making a 10 best movies of the year list. Is there really any value in saying that Boyhood ranks 1 spot higher than, say, The Tale of the Princess Kaguya, or Under the Skin? The point of a best of list, like any awards ceremony, is to alert audiences to films that are worth one’s time to watch.
And yet every year critics and writers and bloggers spend our time making lists, compiling favorites, and talking about awards. Those of us that care deeply about the movies end up caring too much about such things than we have any right to do.
If there is an exception to this attitude of over-concern, a time when that care is itself rewarded slightly, it comes when prizes coincide with surprises. And I don’t mean surprises at the Oscars, when the “award certified picture that has been identified as the dark horse candidate” ends up winning over the “award certified picture that has been identified as the favorite.” That’s not a surprise. The fun of the Oscars is rooting for films that you like, it is not waiting to see something truly surprising occur. That is exceedingly rare for the big awards shows.
A surprise that merits the name is when the National Society of Film Critics chooses Goodbye to Language as its Best Picture of the year. Though the National Society of Film Critics tends to shirk the accepted wisdom of the awards season insiders, Godard’s 70-minute experimental 3-D film (a festival film, with a current worldwide box office total of $185,433) still represents an inspired, unexpected choice.
Goodbye to Language won the top honor after beating out Boyhood by 1 vote. Which shows, again, how irrelevant film awards really are. Boyhood is great. Goodbye to Language is (presumably) great. Is Goodbye to Language one vote better? That’s like saying that your amp is “one louder.”
It’s not like Boyhood was snubbed. It got those 24 votes for Best Picture after all, and Linklater won Best Director, too, in a landslide over Godard. But if there is a reason to be excited about this year’s award season, it is that the “award certified picture that has been identified as a the favorite” (Boyhood) is a small, original, independent, summer release. When something out of the ordinary is selected as the favorite, then out of the ordinary results just might arise.
