“Who wants to kiss Abe’s Oscars?”
This post was originally pitched around the release of Lincoln, Steven Spielberg’s cinematic ode to that one They Might Be Giants album, and how its arrival heralds the unofficial beginning of Oscar-bait season. But Les Miserables shot that peg in the head, so to speak, and one-upped Lincoln with its musical misery trailer.
Either way: for the next few months, movie studios are going to pay millions of dollars, on top of the hundreds of millions they’ve already spent, to convince us and Academy voters that their films are subjectively better than other studios’ films. It’s depressing, really, but hey, *lights cigar* it’s Oscars season, baby. No matter how good they might be, both Les Mis and Lincoln look like they were made solely to win awards, as if no one at any point asked, “Does the world really need another Abraham Lincoln film?” No, it does not.
With all that in mind, here are 10 of cinema’s most obnoxious tropes that you see in Oscar-bait film after Oscar-bait film, with two entries dedicated solely to the most shameless award-whore movies in recent history. And neither is Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. Yeah, they’re that flagrant.
