Image Credit: Claudette Barius
Just about every year, brilliant movies are utterly ignored by the Oscars. The Searchers, Groundhog Day, Breathless, King Kong, Casino Royale, Touch of Evil, Caddyshack, Mean Streets, The Big Lebowski — the Academy has a long history of overlooking comedies, action movies, horror flicks, hard-boiled genre pics, artsy foreign films, and documentaries that aren’t about World War II. This year, we’ll be taking a closer look at films that were too small, too weird, or perhaps simply too awesome for the Academy Awards. These are the Non-Nominees.
The Film: Affectionately known as “Channing Tatum’s stripper movie,” the Steven Soderbergh film is about man at a crossroads: Does “Magic Mike” keep grinding his moneymaker to bank those singles he’s saving to start his own custom-furniture business, or, does mentoring a fresh face (Alex Pettyfer) for his shady boss (Matthew McConaughey) make him see that he’s losing more than he’s gained and hang up his G-string for good?
Why it Wasn’t Nominated: EW’s Owen Gleiberman gave the movie an A-, so we could pretend this had an actual chance to follow in The Full Monty‘s footsteps and garner a nod as one of the year’s Top 10 (or nine) best pictures. But even with Soderbergh’s name attached, no one wanted to take this film seriously. (Especially the people who paid to see it multiple times even though they thought there wasn’t enough stripping and that Cody Horn, as Tatum’s love interest, was way too wooden.) The real snub here is that McConaughey, who’s picked up supporting actor honors from the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics among others this awards season, didn’t score his first Oscar nomination for playing narcissistic club owner Dallas. The critics remember their summer raves for McConaughey’s commitment, but the buzz had faded by the time Academy members got to voting: Only one acting nomination this year came from a film with a U.S. release date before September, and that’s Beasts of the Southern Wild’s lead actress Quvenzhane Wallis. Another uphill battle: All supporting actor nominees this year have not only been nominated before, they’ve all won before. But perhaps the biggest mountain for McConaughey to climb was the idea that him playing a shirtless beefcake with a chill vibe and his eye on the prize (moving the revue from Tampa to Miami) wasn’t a stretch. (We didn’t penalize Alan Arkin for playing Argo‘s acerbic movie producer, did we?) READ FULL STORY »
