It’s the Oscars on Sunday! Excited? No, us neither! It’s basically a big smug party that we’ll never be invited to.
But it could be worse. We could be Nicolas Chartier. As a producer of The Hurt Locker, the Oscars were supposed to be Nicolas Chartier’s moment of glory – when his little film could finally beat the odds and be recognised as the cinematic masterpiece that it is. He’d get to hold the Oscar high above his head, express his gratitude to millions of people and then go off to a glitzy afterparty where he could spend hour after hour trying to look down Kate Winslet‘s top.
But that’s not to be. You see, Nicolas Chartier has become the first ever Oscar nominee to be banned from the ceremony, and all because he wrote a silly email that slagged off Avatar. Whoops.
You don’t have to be too much of a genius to work out what’ll happen at Sunday’s Oscars. First, a bunch of millionaires will canter up and down a red carpet in impractical eveningwear, stopping only to tell Ryan Seacrest how blessed they feel. Then Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin will open the show by delivering some creaky patter in the vain hope that they’ll be able to replicate their chemistry from That Meryl Streep Film That They Were Both In But Nobody Watched. And then, approximately 18 hours after the whole thing started, the Best Picture Oscar will be handed out.
And it’ll be won by either Avatar or The Hurt Locker. The two films couldn’t be more different, though. One was made on the cheap, the other cost an offensively large amount of money. One is about real events happening in the real world, the other is about a silly blue Jesus with magical hair. One is the most successful movie ever made, the other was seen by about three people, each of whom all wear sandals for a living. And one will be represented by its full spectrum of producers at the Oscars, but the other one won’t.
That’s because Hurt Locker producer Nicolas Chartier has been banned from attending the Oscars, all because he emailed some people asking them to vote for The Hurt Locker. The Miami Herald reports:
The decision comes on the heels of Chartier sending an e-mail message to a group of colleagues that included academy members asking them to choose “The Hurt Locker” for best picture and “not the $500-million film” – a clear reference to “Avatar.” The message was deemed in violation of the academy’s ban against creating a negative impression of a rival nominee.
Well we hope Nicolas Chartier has learnt his lesson – soliciting for Oscar votes is fundamentally wrong. Unless, you know, you’re buying up endless amounts of space in trade magazines for a For Your Consideration campaign so desperate-looking that you may as well just staple a wad of cash to each ad and be done with it. That’s OK. But not emailing. No.
Oh, we kid. Nicolas Chartier has been banned from the Oscars because he was mean about Avatar. Which probably means we’ll never get an invitation to the Oscars either. But never mind – at least we know that Nicolas Chartier will be watching The Oscars in the same way we will on Sunday – at home, crying. To be fair, he’ll be crying because he was banned and we’ll be crying because somewhere down the line our lives went wrong and now we have to watch the poxy Oscars every bloody year. But that’s more or less the same thing, right?
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