Should The Avengers Be at the Oscars?

[JaredXE]

Loki's tricked Thor before with that whole clone thing. Yet, somehow he didn't think the Hulk was a big enough threat to use on him, even though he was counting on the Hulk to take down the entire superhero team. Plus he apparently decided to never get up and walk away at any point.

It's called the "This is why you suck" rant. Villains usually get one, it corresponds to their wildly out-of-control ego, and usually distracts the bad guy long enough for the good-guy to do something. And remember, Loki is a particularly verboise villain.

Everyone keeps pointing their guns at Bruce Banner, even after he just gets done telling them he put a gun in his mouth and the Hulk just spit the bullet out. That one really ground my gears.

Why do they point guns at the Hulk normally? Or any obviously impervious monster/robot/Chuthulu? Because that is all any of them can do, and they're scared. It's not a plot hole, just human nature.

If Bruce Banner's always mad, why isn't he always the Hulk. (face it, they wanted to give him something cool to say, but it doesn't make any sense)

Ok, that one I'll give you. It was just a cool line, and meant nothing. It also wasn't really a plot hole though.

How come Fury didn't dispatch any of those soldiers he's got all over the carrier with some experimental weapons Agent Coulson had? Even if they just had the one weapon, those elite soldiers would probably have been at least as helpful as the girl with a pistol and the guy with a bow.

Mostly because they were trying to keep the helicarrier from crashing? Sure, a number of people tried firing at Loki....they died. Also, there were multiple attacks going on, we never saw everything that was going on.

There's four, people can probably come up with more.

Those weren't plot-holes, please try again.

EDIT: Back to the original topic.....yeah, the Academy has never really been in-touch with reality. They routinely scoff at good and popular movies simply because they aren't in the category of "Art" as defined by 70+ year-old white men. Which is why I never watch them, because the Oscars aren't important, never were. I seriously am waiting for an actor/actress to decline an award simply because they don't give a rat's ass about recognition from out of touch seniors.

 

[mrjoe94]

My opinion? Why not? Much crappier films get nominated every year. It's gotten to the point where, now a days if the film says "Oscar nominee" in the trailer I skip it because that tells me it's either boring or 'artistic'.

 

[NvrPhazed]

Should the Avengers be at the Oscars? If by "at the Oscars" you mean "parking cars for Oscar attendees," then yes. There was nothing extraordinary about Avengers other than its length. Two plus hours of gravitas-crushing one liners, industry average special effects, and a plot with more holes in it than Dick Cheney's driver do not add up to anything even remotely Oscar-worthy.

Name 1 concrete plot-hole in The Avengers please.

Loki's tricked Thor before with that whole clone thing. Yet, somehow he didn't think the Hulk was a big enough threat to use on him, even though he was counting on the Hulk to take down the entire superhero team. Plus he apparently decided to never get up and walk away at any point.

Everyone keeps pointing their guns at Bruce Banner, even after he just gets done telling them he put a gun in his mouth and the Hulk just spit the bullet out. That one really ground my gears.

If Bruce Banner's always mad, why isn't he always the Hulk. (face it, they wanted to give him something cool to say, but it doesn't make any sense)

How come Fury didn't dispatch any of those soldiers he's got all over the carrier with some experimental weapons Agent Coulson had? Even if they just had the one weapon, those elite soldiers would probably have been at least as helpful as the girl with a pistol and the guy with a bow.

There's four, people can probably come up with more.

1)I'd like to see you try to make a clone of yourself after you got blasted through a window, and yes I think Loki wouldn't make a clone of himself for hulk because to HIM, Hulk doesn't even appear on HIS radar as something dangerous to him.

2)Believe me if the Hulk started to hulk out in front of me I would still try to shoot him for the vague chance that it will at least slow him down. That was a really stupid argument.

3)There are different levels of anger dude. Also hulk comes out because of his heart rate not his anger. So him being always angry would allow him to control his heart rate so it wont go up since his attitude gets left out of the equation.

4)There is something called a prototype. I don't know if you heard that concept before, but I guarantee you it exists.

 

[Jeff Gibson]

Should the Avengers be at the Oscars? If by "at the Oscars" you mean "parking cars for Oscar attendees," then yes. There was nothing extraordinary about Avengers other than its length. Two plus hours of gravitas-crushing one liners, industry average special effects, and a plot with more holes in it than Dick Cheney's driver do not add up to anything even remotely Oscar-worthy.

Name 1 concrete plot-hole in The Avengers please.

Loki's tricked Thor before with that whole clone thing. Yet, somehow he didn't think the Hulk was a big enough threat to use on him, even though he was counting on the Hulk to take down the entire superhero team. Plus he apparently decided to never get up and walk away at any point.

Everyone keeps pointing their guns at Bruce Banner, even after he just gets done telling them he put a gun in his mouth and the Hulk just spit the bullet out. That one really ground my gears.

If Bruce Banner's always mad, why isn't he always the Hulk. (face it, they wanted to give him something cool to say, but it doesn't make any sense)

How come Fury didn't dispatch any of those soldiers he's got all over the carrier with some experimental weapons Agent Coulson had? Even if they just had the one weapon, those elite soldiers would probably have been at least as helpful as the girl with a pistol and the guy with a bow.

There's four, people can probably come up with more.

Well, actually, those 'plot-holes' are rather easy to explain.

1. Regarding the Hulk vs. Loki thing, it's not like he had any time to set up some kind of trick like with Thor, Hulk pretty much snuck up on him. Also, Loki didn't seem to think walking away was an option by that point, that he'd 'come too far,' plus the fact that the Other pretty much spelled out for him that they'd make his life hell if he tried to back out.

2. The reason people keep pulling guns on Banner is because The Hulk fucking TERRIFIES them. Of course they won't be thinking straight.

3. The "I'm always angry" line actually make a good deal of sense. One of the defining characteristics of The Hulk is 'The madder he is, the stronger he is.' If he's just a little bit angry all the time, there's no noticeable change(apart from going from looking like Ed Norton to looking like Mark Ruffalo, apparently), but if he's always a bit angry, he's always a bit Hulk, so it becomes simpler to focus the epic-tier asskicking on a specific target.

4. The Destroyer Gun was a prototype, likely their only working super weapon, given they still hadn't figured quite out the Tesseract. Also, it seemed like it took a little while to get warmed up, and it looked kind of heavy and difficult to use, not really ready for a combat situation.

EDIT: Damn, you guys beat me to it.

 

[Tiamattt]

Several people already beat me to the "point out in full detail why irishda is wrong" race, so I'll just say this, irishda really needs to learn the difference between a plot hole and a nitpick.

 

[Pinkamena]

I don't feel it was good enough to be nominated for the Oscars. It was a fun, above average superhero movie, but not THAT good!

 

[Sylocat]

It makes me laugh to see people talking about whether a fantastic achievement like The Avengers is worthy of being placed in company with the kind of films that win Best Picture at the Oscars.

This is an awards ceremony that passed up The Social Network, Toy Story 3, Inception, True Grit and Black Swan to give the top award to The King's Speech, and the very next year awarded "Best Original Score" to a movie who had sampled half its score from other films (which ordinarily would be a disqualifying offense), and yet people think that they have artistic integrity to sacrifice?

Yeah, right. Even if The Avengers were just another mindless popcorn-blockbuster (which it isn't, not even close, no matter how much j-e-f-f-e-r-s so desperately wants to believe that grim-and-gritty-Batman-stuff is the only superhero material with any kind of artistic merit), it still would be qualified to join the ranks. As it is, with it being a genuinely fantastic movie, well, actually I almost don't want to see it win. It's too fucking good for the Oscars.

 

[Sovereignty]

Eh are the Oscars taken that seriously? It's all media hype anyway. I kind of put it in line with the US presidential election. It's not a true vote or an actual gauge of the "best".

It's a ridiculously small sample of people who's personal preferences easily influence the decisions. Add to it now the notion that the media and ratings side of it would possibly skew the results and well... Like I said, who cares?

The Avengers was awesome. Out of the movies I've seen this year it's gotta be up near the top. Though that's in my opinion. It was my sort of thing. Any award I offer it wouldn't really be valid to the majority of the world, it'd just be yet another random asshats opinion.



So my real question from this is, "Why do we still care if a movie wins an award?"

 

[Flatfrog]

If there's any award it deserves, it's Best Editing. I thought the final battle scene was an absolute masterclass in how to keep multiple action threads going. Compare with the hideous mess we see in most action movies (yes, Transformers, I'm mostly looking at you, but also Lucas) and it really is a work of genius. And yes, I'm aware that that's just as much down to the directing and the screenplay, but Editing is a nice way to sum it up - and that's an award that is mostly just thrown away because no one knows what good editing looks like anyway.

 

[RJ Dalton]

Good luck trying to get the academy to see it your way, Bob.

 

[him over there]

Oh please Bob get off your Genre ghetto moral high horse. There isn't one any more. Genre movies all but dominate the movie going scene. The Oscars is one of the last bastions of "traditional" and "classic" cinema left. If you don't like the opinions of the academy that's fine but you seem to be rocking a major persecution complex about this whole thing. Why do we care if The Avengers win best picture? If you think the Oscars are so biased why beg for their approval?

 

[maninahat]

The problem is that if we are going to argue "popularity with audiences" as a qualifier for Academy awards, does that open the doors to Transformer movies and the like? I'm sure Bob already preempted this question.

It's a question of discriminating tastes vs fairness. Would people take the Academy awards (even) less seriously if crappy genre movies end up beng nominated? What is the point of including the kind of films that no director/actor/industry professional regards as deserving of an oscar? And what if it did happen in the end? I'm concerned we'd end up seeing something like the Spike VGAs, where the most pandering, populist and big budget productions tend to win out against the smaller scale productions; the ones that typically depend on award nominations for public attention.

 

[Goofguy]

Who cares about the Oscars anyway? All it does is give the winning actors and directors a nice, new handle for the billing on their future projects. I don't need The Avengers to win some haughty awards to validate my opinion that it's a great movie.

 

[SnakeoilSage]

I don't care if The Avengers doesn't get an Oscar nod. The movie was FUN. Let the Academy pass it by if they want, it won't change how I feel about it.

SolveMedia: "it will pass"

 

[DemBones]

You hit the nail on the head already: if the Academy was going to honor a genre film it will likely be toward The Dark Knight Rises or The Hobbit. Many of the Academy members will not appreciate how genre-defining The Avengers was the same way comic fans do, regarding the scope of characters and shared continuity between multiple films. The Avengers is nearly universally adored but the Academy will look down on it for not being as personable or relatable to them, but they (not critics or fans, just the septuagenarian Academy members) will forget about it in 6 months.

Besides, despite the rule change because of The Dark Knight 4 years ago, the rule changes from the past year just amplify the Academy biases even more. It won't be enough if the majority of Academy members believe that The Avengers is one of the top ten films of the year, a significant portion have to pick it as the very best film of the year. I doubt that Robert Downey Jr. has enough friends in the Academy to vote for the film because they want him to come to the after party.

 

[peruvianskys]

There's a very simple reason for that: They're not very good films. They're mediocre, ho-hum adaptations of a great series of books that managed to get by on the sheer gargantuan amount of money that WB threw at it. But in their haste to mimic the LotR frenzy, they hired tedious directors to create dull and lifeless phantoms of the books and lost out on their chances for awards that should have been easy grabs.

Yeah...you can't actually say that the Harry Potter movies were good films. They were just popular. The editing, acting, directing, and writing are all absolutely mediocre.

What is it with the anti-intellectual attitude on this forum? The Academy Awards aren't pretentious - they just aren't designed to cater to people who would honestly place The Avengers above some of the actually well-directed, moving, important films that have come out this year so far. The Avengers was cool and I enjoyed it, but it didn't need to exist; it didn't have any value other than being awesome and appealing to fans. If we're going to turn the Academy Awards into a giant popularity contest instead of an actual examination of film as art, then why even have it? We can just give the award out to the highest IMDB rating for the year and call it good instead of actually calling on industry professionals and experts to pick a film that truly examines what it's like to be human in this day and age over one that examines what it looks like when the Hulk punches a space-caterpillar.

tl;dr - The Avengers was fun but it is, at its heart, a popcorn movie. And I for one hope that we don't sink so low as to throw out risky, passionate directors with real artistic sensibilities in order to glorify the popular culture's obsession with witty one-liners and simple, childish plots.

 

[SomebodyNowhere]

Avengers is the kind of movie that would and should win technical achievement awards, but I can't exactly say it is the kind of movie that should win an award like best picture. Even with the expanded list of contenders thing they've been doing the last few years to help add the occasional popcorn movie into the mix, I just can't see the Avengers-no matter how much I might enjoy it-getting thrown into next years best picture race.

 

[Nazgual]

Loki's tricked Thor before with that whole clone thing. Yet, somehow he didn't think the Hulk was a big enough threat to use on him, even though he was counting on the Hulk to take down the entire superhero team. Plus he apparently decided to never get up and walk away at any point.

Everyone keeps pointing their guns at Bruce Banner, even after he just gets done telling them he put a gun in his mouth and the Hulk just spit the bullet out. That one really ground my gears.

If Bruce Banner's always mad, why isn't he always the Hulk. (face it, they wanted to give him something cool to say, but it doesn't make any sense)

How come Fury didn't dispatch any of those soldiers he's got all over the carrier with some experimental weapons Agent Coulson had? Even if they just had the one weapon, those elite soldiers would probably have been at least as helpful as the girl with a pistol and the guy with a bow.

1) Loki didn't get much of a chance to see him coming.
2) Because he's shit scary and not everyone heard him say that. Only the main characters were in the room. It's easy to forget that the viewer can have more information than some of the characters.
3) He can control his emotions because as he demonstrated right after that line he learned how to bring out the Hulk at by his out accord and 'direct' his rage. When he transformed in the Heli-carrier attack he was pushed over the edge into direction-less rage. This is because he was already mad from the argument with the other avengers, the sudden attack on the ship would have got his heart pumping and he was likely injured when he fell through the floor.
4) It was an untested prototype. Plus he wasn't near an armoury, he was cornered in the flight deck.

 

[yellowhead]

I think if 'Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2' was nominated last year I would have said yes but that wasn't the case. It's clear that the Academy don't care about big elaborate projects that span multiple films and take years to assemble (no pun intended) but mildly entertaining escapism that last about 90 minutes and then you forget about it instantly ('The Artist', 'Slumdog Millionaire', 'Shakespeare in Love').It's for this reason that I think the Academy Awards are becoming more irrelevant.

They refuse to look at the big picture.

They don't care that thousands of people worked their asses off for over a decade to bring an amazing saga to the big screen with one cast of characters in the form of Harry Potter. They keep thinking that all that matters in terms of filmmaking is the lead actor. They barely even consider the hundreds of people who work on special effects or the writer/s and editors who make scenes memorable. For example in 'The King's Speech' it had a great lead performance but Tom Hooper's direction wasn't exactly noteworthy, yet he won the award for Best Director JUST because the Academy liked the film and he happened to be attached to it. The direction in 'The Social Network' was much better but without the great editing of the conversation sequences and the score it wouldn't have been as memorable.

It takes more than one person to make a movie.

Joss Whedon had to balance a huge cast from 4 previous franchises of different genres and tones into one cohesive experience and he pulled it off with flying colours.

I think if 'The Avengers' will be nominated for anything it will be the technical awards and if we're lucky it will be nominated for Best Screenplay. Just because 'The Avengers' could be the biggest box office success doesn't mean it should automatically win but it should be considered because it's an AMAZING MOVIE.

 

[teh_gunslinger]

I don't actually care one fig for the Oscars or the Avengers. But I'm confused as to why it's being called a phenomenon or an "it" event. I know 1 person who've seen it and she said it was pretty good. That's somewhat incongruous with the praise it get's here.

I think this is mostly that people want a movie they like to win. Hell, I wanted Moon to win but that has zero to do with the real world. Just because you like something doesn't make it good. And frankly, despite my love for Firefly and by extension Whedon, I very much doubt that this is a movie that rises above it's pulpy comic book origins.

I fucking love comic books (not the Avengers though) but it would be moronic of me to claim it's actually worth the time I spent on it. It's basically literary sugar. Hell, I enjoyed the GI Joe movie a ton, but I know it's a shit movie objectively. Pulp is highly entertaining but it's also devoid of substance.

Anyway, millions of fans does not a good movie make. Only popular. McDonalds surely aren't fine cuisine?