Three Possible Reasons For Dreamgirls Oscar Snub

February 5th, 2007 in Awards, Movies, Oscars

In The Guardian’s review of Dreamgirls, Joe Queenan makes an interesting suggestion. Maybe the massive Best Picture Oscar snub dealt to the movie is actually a bit of tactical maneuvering on the Academy’s part. Think about this:

The Academy are understandably sick of the awards show immitators, stealing a little piece of the limelight in the Oscar run up, but they’re also a little concerned about the increasing importance of the Golden Globes. So, Quenan proposes…

… the Academy denied Dreamgirls a Best Picture nomination because it is determined to distinguish itself from the upstart Golden Globe awards, which recently named Dreamgirls the best film of the year. This continues last year’s trend, when the clever, manipulative but not especially memorable Crash won Best Picture even though everyone on the planet expected the Golden Globes choice, Brokeback Mountain, to win Best Picture because, unlike Crash, it was the Best Picture of the year. The Academy has apparently decided that if it merely rubberstamps the awards distributed a few months earlier by the Golden Globes, it will cease to have any reason to exist and people will stop watching the Oscars.

Not a bad shout, though it assumes a certain amount of paranoia on the Academy’s part. Could the Oscars really be that scared of the Golden Globes? The double G’s may be enjying an ever-increasing level of recognition, but they’re still just part of the Oscar lead-in, like the trailer before the main feature.

If not that, he suggests, it could also be the Academy having an adverse reaction to the heavy handed Dreamgirls publicity machine (an entire episode of Oprah dedicated to one film?) I wish this were true, but Dreamgirls isn’t the first film to lay it on thick in a bid for Oscar glory, and definitely won’t be the last.

The third - and most realistic - option is that Dreamgirls just isn’t very good. It’s not awful, and there are a few nice moments (Effie bouncing back, Beyonce’s “Listen” moment, Eddie Murphy’s performance), but it would be a travesty if a film with a deeply unoriginal narrative, that Disney reject “We Are Family” song and a half-arsed performance from Jamie Foxx won the Oscar for Best Picture.

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