BEVERLY HILLS, Calif. — The nominations come early and fast out here. Reporters munched bagels in the queue at 5:20 a.m. on Thursday, and the announcement, aided by a countdown clock, went off at 5:38 a.m. Ten minutes later we were all thrown clear to write our articles and figure out What It Meant.
Nominations are not victories, but they create an abundance of tea leaves with which to divine the intentions of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And what’s particularly clear this season is that the Academy will reward excellence, no matter if it comes from a big studio or a small independent. Sure, the big studio movie “The Dark Knight” came up short, but that probably had less to do with who made it and how much it brought in than with a third act that left some moviegoers and Academy members cold and confused.
This year’s Top 5 were studio and indie, big and little, broad and very specific. The string that pulls them together is not where the films came from in terms of backing, but where they come from artistically. Each of the films selected for a best-picture nomination — “Slumdog Millionaire,” “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button,” “Frost/Nixon,” “Milk” and “The Reader” — represents the auteur ideal, in which a director is bankrolled and left pretty much alone. It is no coincidence that these five films were created by directors who also received best-director nominations.
“People always parse these things as indie versus studio, but it’s not like that anymore,” said James Schamus, head of Focus Features, a specialty division at Universal Pictures, which landed in the money with “Milk.”
“Our movie is a great big movie produced by a smaller indie division, so what is it really?” he said. “It’s just a great movie that tells an epic story from a director who knows how to tell one. It’s not that Hollywood has some kind of cult around directors, but they have an expectation that Academy films will have artistic legitimacy.”
Big stars plus big concept abetted by brute-force marketing dollars, a formula that lasted for decades, no longer seems to yield automatic awards results. Yes, Brad Pitt and “Benjamin Button” were nominated, but for the moment the leader in the best-picture race seems to be “Slumdog Millionaire,” which features actors you wouldn’t know if they showed up on your doorstep.
The Academy seems less influenced by the tastes of the mass audience or even the notices kicked up by critics. “The Reader,” which Harvey Weinstein pushed into consideration because he had a hunch, was among the five because Holocaust-theme movies always seem to catch the Academy’s eye and because it represents a very specific idea — in this instance, by the director Stephen Daldry — of how a narrative should unfold on screen. Mr. Daldry has made three movies and has three best-director nominations.
The Oscars used to be a de facto marketing arm of the studios. First held in 1929, the event was intended to put legs under studio product. That relationship held, give or take, even as the event grew into a globe-spanning behemoth, the awards show that furthered many careers and even more fashion trends.
But in the mid-1990s, movies conceived far from the studio lot began to appear in the Final 5 and sometimes even win. And by 2005, the best-picture category was dominated by independents and small studio divisions created to compete with them. “Crash” came out of nowhere to win, and things have not seemed the same since.
“Slumdog Millionaire” is a film that was orphaned by Warner Brothers and picked up by Fox Searchlight. “The Reader” was produced by the Weinstein Company, formed after the Weinstein brothers walked away from their studio relationship at Disney, and “Milk” came from Focus Features, an indie that shares ownership with NBC Universal but goes its own way.
True enough, those movies were joined by remarkable studio fare: “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button” from Paramount and “Frost/Nixon,” from Universal. But even studio movies meant to compete at the Oscars now work from a playbook that was written by the success of various outsiders.
The independent aesthetic has come to all but rule the Oscars — last year featured a shoot-out between the Coen brothers and Paul Thomas Anderson, the kind of auteurs who would not park in a reserved spot on the lot if you gave it to them. Popular tastes have not changed, but the Academy’s tendencies certainly have.
My colleague Michael Cieply, who has been watching the Academy for decades, explained the change this way on the Carpetbagger blog on Thursday (carpetbagger.blogs.nytimes.com):
“The morning’s Oscar nominations sent a powerful message about the Academy membership: the strict admissions policies enforced over the last five years have now pushed it past a tipping point. The roughly 5,800 members, once a Los Angeles-oriented and commercially minded bunch, are now more filmic and more foreign. The many nominees over the last few years for indie-style films and international fare are now Oscar voters. That surely helped push ‘The Reader,’ with British roots, past ‘The Dark Knight,’ which is pure Hollywood.”
Just in case no one got the point, teeny little movies with little-known stars showed up in major categories. Richard Jenkins, an everyman character guy, was quietly brilliant in “The Visitor” and is now competing with Mr. Pitt for best actor. And Melissa Leo was nominated for best actress for “Frozen River,” which was made for a budget that wouldn’t renovate the carriage house of a studio boss. Courtney Hunt, the director-producer-writer (and probably craft services cook) of the film, was stunned to find her movie — she received an original screenplay nomination — in among the giants.
“It is such a great thing, that you can walk around with your story, get your little money together and make a film and then end up there being counted along with all the big shots,” Ms. Hunt said by phone from upstate New York. “I can’t think of any other industry, or any other country, where that seems possible.”
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