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The Oscars 2011: How real are the reality-based Best Picture nominees?
Oscar has always loved films based on true stories – 100 out of 485 Best Picture nominees since 1927 would qualify – but never more than this year. Four of the 10 features on the Best Picture slate are based on real characters and events: “The King’s Speech,” “The Fighter,” “The Social Network,” and “127 Hours.”
Eavesdrop on departing moviegoers and you will inevitably hear, “I’d love to know what really happened.” Here are some facts behind the “true-life” stories contending for this year’s Best Picture Academy Award.
Why do we love them so much?
The time is ripe for reality-based fiction, says Jason Hewitt, founder of Films in Motion in Baton Rouge, La. Reality television has fed what he calls people’s voyeuristic impulses. “People love to see what other people can do and compare themselves to the lives of others,” he says.
The explosion of sophisticated special effects has left a void for the viewer, he notes. “People can’t relate to the perils or jeopardy of a big, noisy super-hero film,” he says. To make a meaningful connection, the film experience must return to a human level. “True stories bring back that sense of human scale,” Mr. Hewitt says. And it doesn’t hurt that they are often far less expensive to make than the effects-heavy blockbusters, he adds.
Of course, many of these films add a healthy dose of narrative padding. One wry observer, who had lived through the events depicted in “Lawrence of Arabia,” quipped, “The only real thing in the movie is the sand and the camels.”
Nonetheless, people love to know that a tale is essentially true, says author and therapist Debbie Mandel. During a recession and with the world falling into chaos, “Moviegoers are looking for movie therapy: How did the protagonist overcome a handicap, physical, emotional, or spiritual? If he or she can do it, then so can I,” she writes in an e-mail.
This year’s spread of true-life tales matches only two others in scale. In 1934, the Academy nominated 12 films for Best Picture, of which four were based on real events in the lives of Cleopatra, poets Robert & Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Rothschild family, and Pancho Villa.
1941 was the year of ”Citizen Kane,” a film loosely based on newspaper publisher William Randolph Hearst – who tried to suppress it. That year saw three other reality-based films on the list of 10 Best Picture nominees:
- “Sergeant York,” a biographical film based on the life of Alvin York, the most-decorated American soldier of World War I.
- “One Foot in Heaven,” based on the autobiography of a minister and his family.
- “Blossoms in the Dust,” a Depression-era film starring Greer Garson as Edna Gladney, who worked to destigmatize adoption and children born out of wedlock.
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