Award Shows and Movie Review Goggles

This weekend, the film Moneyball comes out, starring Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill, about the amazing use of math and statistics in putting together a baseball team.  While this will inevitable be a dumbing down and over-dramatization of the book somewhat (oh yeah, based on a book, about math!), it is still being widely praised by critics as a fantastic film and one of the best of the year so far.  I am here to tell you that yes, this movie will likely be good, but don’t lose your minds over this movie come awards season.

Very often, a movie will get really well reviewed because of the presentation or the story, and the actors in it will be lavished with awards for their amazing work in it.  But if you take a step back and really watch the movie, you realize almost any actor could have been interchanged in the roles, and due to the direction and the writing, could have appeared to be an award-winning performance.  This phenomenon is what I will refer to as “Movie Review Goggles”, in which a well-reviewed movie should always have the principal actors nominated for awards.  I don’t think this is the case at all.  For awards like Best Actor in [Category] or Best Supporting Actor, it should be in movies where someone else could not have pulled off the performance that the actor gave.  Yup, these are very subjective standards, and that’s what reward shows are always about, but some subjective is better than others.

I don’t doubt that Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill do a great job in bring this story to the screen, but if they get nominated for Golden Globes I won’t be surprised, but I think they would be taking a chance from someone more deserving.  I didn’t say Oscars because they tend to draw from higher brow stuff, and I believe are already smart enough to avoid Movie Review Goggles.  I watched Troy last night, one of my favorite movies and favorite Brad Pitt movies, so I am well aware that he is able to phone it in and still come across as awesome.  Hopefully Moneyball isn’t on that level, but I doubt this will be one of the top 5 performances by Pitt in his career.  (If there is an outcry for me to list my top 5 I can do that in another post.)  And this very well might be one of the first dramatic movies Jonah Hill has done.  He’s done great movies like Superbad before, but that was him playing to type.  Seeing him not being the goofy friend or in a fish-out-of-water scenario (we’ll wait for The Sitter) will be a great change of pace, but I doubt he’ll kill it his first time out.

So to summarize, I would not be surprised to see Brad Pitt and/or Jonah Hill nominated for something later this year, but if they aren’t, please don’t lose your minds saying they were robbed.  And after seeing this movie this weekend, if I am completely wrong and these were some of the greatest performances of the year and they truly deserve a nomination, I’ll post a picture of me holding a sign saying just that.

John Hackert is a columnist and is a man of his word.