Though many will feign prescience in the wake of Dreamgirls' shocking Best Picture and Director shutout (like, say, Hollywood Elsewhere's Jeff Wells, who's passing off his dubious reaction to the film's status as a front-runner as incontrovertible proof that he knew all along it was a non-starter - which is bullshit given its heavyweight presence all through the awards season), there's not a soul in the prognosticating pool that saw it coming. It is a snub without precedent. Off the top of my head, only Amistad missing Picture and Director comes close, but no one really loved Spielberg's uneven history lesson. A lot of people loved Dreamgirls. Academy audiences responded to it warmly. Unlike Amistad, Cold Mountain, The Producers, Ali, Road to Perdition, Black Hawk Down, Vanilla Sky, Primary Colors, Evita, The Crucible and so many other woulda-beens, it delivered on the studio hype. (To be clear, I love Ali, Black Hawk Down, Primary Colors and most of The Crucible, but they were in one sense or another beyond the grasp of the rank-and-file Academy member.) And it was racking up nominations from every guild save for the WGA, which was expected since Dreamworks never made a case for the subtle structural brilliance of Condon's adaptation. For a film that did deliver in a way that Academy voters should've been able to appreciate, maybe The Talented Mr. Ripley is an appropriate comparison, but its awards hopes were dashed by Harvey's not-a-heart-attack; no one could ever accuse Dreamworks of not pushing the hell out of Dreamgirls.
So this is definitely a first. Looking over the last decade as awards campaigns have evolved, I suppose the lesson is that it's never good to enter the season - which now absurdly begins in fucking August - as the consensus front-runner. It didn't work for Munich, The Aviator, Mystic River, Gangs of New York, Traffic and The Green Mile, and it may very well have worn down voters' enthusiasm for Dreamgirls by the time January rolled around.
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