Complaining: Oscar Bait

A lot of the examples listed come off as complaining and hype backlash. There's not even a YMMV tag listed up. Any way we can fix this?

We could make this objective. Define Oscar Bait as movies that use tropes X, Y and Z and list movies that use many of those tropes.

Cleaning all those, "painfully obvious" comments and other natter would help a lot.

Also, the part with spoofs are clear and objective examples.

It might be worth splitting into Actual Oscar Bait and Oscar Bait Spoof (though with less confusingly-similar titles).

Isn't the whole point that these are painfully obvious? How do we take the complaining out of something that is itself a complaint?

Bump.

Oscar Bait, or at least most, are generally cranked out as an attempt to win as many awards as possible by hitting all the "right" dramatic buttons. If the text gets a bit cynical or snarky at points, that seems justified to me. It just needs to not extend into whining about how X is Oscar Bait and thus is terrible, or Y is a soulless sellout and other such nonsense.

Basically, we should keep the snark and sarcasm at affable levels and cut it where it delves into fanboy rage. Otherwise, seems fine.

edited 11th Jun '12 5:36:34 PM by LostHero

I think Oscar Bait at least partially explains the existence of award snubs. In the perfect world, the best movies will get all of the awards (rightly I add). Except, Oscar Bait movies cause award snubs and some angry fans (Boo indeed) and some movies are interpreted for the awards they did/didn't win. Vindicated by History might happen, but patience is lacking and might be And You Thought It Would Fail, Deader Than Disco, or Acclaimed Flop instead. Also, description is a Wall of Text and nothing has yet come out of this.

edited 6th Jul '12 12:52:06 AM by spacemarine50

The obvious criteria to apply here would be to list films that are outside the norm for an actor (especially a comedic one making a dark and serious film) or jarring elements in single films (the ending more than anything) that were most likely made to aim for the Oscars. However, the wiki has difficulty keeping up careful norms; Adaptation Decay was intended to be about things lost in adaptation due to medium differences, but soon came to be used for any bad adaptation.

One statement I'm not sure about is

• DO NOT make your film science fiction or fantasy. Don't include lots of action or fighting, either, because the Oscar judges hate exciting things. To them, fantasy and sci-fi movies are nothing but fluff, no matter how well-made they are.

I think it's more to do with Hollywood than the awards; most of the fantasy and science-fiction that comes out of it is fluff, or at least focused on horror/thriller/visuals rather than true Speculative Fiction. Besides, some Oscar-winners of that category are listed on that very page.

Above all, we need to keep judgements out. I'm surprised it hasn't attracted any Natter. I don't consider The Shawshank Redemption "one of the all-time greatest films".

I'm not sure if this is me overreacting or something, but I'm all in favor of just curating this to only include In-universe examples. Many of the actual examples just reek of having a Holier Than Thou attitude and its to much of a Snark Bait magnet, even if we do a cleanup.

I'd really rather not cut examples, as that's usually a last resort. It's a permanent solution to a temporary problem. Just cut the stuff that makes the brass uncomfortable. The rest isn't that bad.

Clocking.

This looks more like a job for standard cleanup-that-doesn't-require-consensus. Think we could ship it over to the relevant Special Efforts thread? Doesn't seem like there's any repair action needed here.

I agree, basically.