Forget The Snubs: Jason Segel Shows Us How It's Done

By Steven Pate in Arts & Entertainment on Jan 25, 2012 10:20PM

A "snub" is what we call an opportunity to use the cognoscente's shortcomings to validate our own good taste. Be it an all-star team oversight, a literary short-list travesty or an awards show bungle, who doesn't appoint themselves expert enough to decry just how wrong the "so-called" experts are, from time to time? Yesterday's announcement of this year's Oscar nominations was that occasion for movie fans, but does anyone care enough to gripe?

Sure, there were snubs. Tilda Swinton, Michael Fassbender, Michael Shannon and (above all) Albert Brooks deserved acting nods. If we're going to have to get used to saying "Academy Award Nominee Jonah Hill" perhaps there should be more than five nominees, as for best picture. We're already on the record about the greatest snub of all and about our happiness for Plainfield's Melissa McCarthy. But it's not what was passed over that has us worried, but what was chosen.

We thoroughly enjoyed the most-nominated film, Hugo, and the critical front-runner, The Artist. But are sentimental, feel-good confections about the magic that the movie business used to have really what you want as standard bearers for what is great about cinema now? Movies have always looked to the past (the first best picture award was given to a 1927 depiction of World War I, after all), but of the nine nominees for best picture, only The Descendents can be said to have a truly contemporary setting. Even when they are not re-hashing, re-booting and re-treading old material, Hollywood is now so terrified of the future that its arty, non-franchise movies are all backwards-looking.

There are always underdogs to pull for, and doing so is a lot more fun than the doomed drudgery of picking winners. If there is a guiding principle we urge you to adopt in picking your Oscar rooting interest it is this: choose whoever is most likely to have a touching or memorable moment if they actually receive the award and have to give a speech. Michael Moore and Roberto Begnini are nobody's ideas of cinema deities, but who can forget their acceptance of the gold statues? If we could get just one acceptance speeches as gracious, sweet and funny as the one Jason Segel gave on receiving the Commedia Extraordinaire Award at the Chicago Film Critics Association Awards earlier this month, we promise to forget all about every one of those snubs.