Tuesday, February 26, 2008

CELEBRITY BUCKET O' DUMB: Academy Voters

The Oscars are over and the winners have all been given their shiny trophies and Cody and I are not really that happy. Don't get me wrong as an employee of Paramount Vantage I was excited to see good films like There Will Be Blood and especially No Country For Old Men get the top prizes. It was some of the smaller awards that made me scratch my head and go-- huh? The major one that pissed Cody Dee and myself off collectively was the Visual Effects award. There were three films nominated in this category, Pirates of the Caribbean at World's End, Golden Compass and Transformers. Now in case you've been living under a rock somewhere in Boise, Idaho then you would be thinking, Transformers is just a kid's cartoon. In this instance you would be dead wrong, if the Academy members had gotten off their high horses to see Transformers they would have seen a film on the cutting edge of special effects.

Michael Bay will never ever deserve an Oscar for best picture or director but in this instance he and his visual effects team led by Scott Farrar and including Scott Benza, Russell Earl and John Frazier, actually more then earned the top prize. So who got the shiny naked golden man instead? The Golden Compass. Yes that controversial movie about athiests and those really terrible CGI polar bears. I mean the Polar Bears on the Coke commercials were more convincing. How could this be? Among the four of them they have worked on such awesome effects film such as Backdraft, Spider-Man, The Chronicles of Narnia, Spider-Man 2, Pearl Harbor, The Perfect Storm and Cocoon. We have always known the Oscar voters to be lazy sheeplike snobs and this is a direct example of this. Most of the time people who vote pick their friends. Or they let their kids pick who they like. I doubt many of them actually take it seriously. Golden Compass has Daniel Craig and Nicole Kidman and it's a controversial kids movie about religion. Transformers is a bang up action flick about robots that turn into cars and planes and it was directed by Mr. Explosion himself Michael Bay. Other than Steven Spielberg there is no pedigree to Transformers so voters avoided it. I doubt many of them have seen Golden Compass or Transformers. If they had perhaps they would have been able to make a more educated vote.Anyway on behalf of the Bucket I would like to present to all of the Academy Members who voted in the 2008 Oscars this Celebrity Bucket o' Dumb. You've earned it for years and years of bad voting. Like Shakespeare in Love beating Saving Private Ryan and Dame Judy getting an award for ten seconds as Queen Elizabeth and most importantly for giving an Visual Effects Oscar to a bunch of badly drawn polar bears.

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