Richard Roeper Makes a Very Good Oscar Nominations Point
There’s no shortage, as usual, of exasperated critics this morning in the wake of the announcement of nominees for the 84th Academy Awards. Our quick first favorite is the rant from the eminently qualified Richard Roeper.
He starts off his look a this year’s Oscar snubs with an always welcome Shawshank Redemption reference, followed by a salient media observation:
Amazing, but these guys still think the best way to announce the Oscar nominations is to hold a press conference at 5:30 a.m. Pacific time in order to get maximum coverage from the morning chat shows.
Roeper is absolutely right. The idea of forcing journalists on the west coast to haul out in the middle of the night for Wilshire Boulevard only makes sense if the bird-system everyone was using to communicate these days was still the carrier pidgeon rather than Twitter. It’s high time to ditch this antiquated sunrise tradition; with social media and the 24-hour news cycle, the nominations could be announced at a much more reasonable PT time, without any collateral PR damage.
For the record, the biggest snubs this year for Roeper are Shame‘s Michael Fassbender, Albert Brooks not getting a Best Supporting Actor nod for Drive and Tilda Swinton (We Need to Talk About Kevin) being overlooked in the Best Actress category.
[AMPAS headquarters photo courtesy Oscars.org]
