Well, guess what: It is time for the 2024 Academy Awards. The ceremony is this Sunday night and all the stars will be out. There are some good movies up for the top prize, too. Barbie and Oppenheimer rode the wave of summer heat into the main category. Anatomy of a Fall and its good dog are in there. American Fiction is cool because it was written and directed by a blogger I used to love reading. Paul Giamatti carried The Holdovers there and I’m kinda hoping he wins just to see what burger joint he brings this trophy to. Killers of the Flower Moon and Maestro and Past Lives and Poor Things round out the Best Picture category, which is a fun thing to say because those movies have very little in common beyond the magic of cinema. Solid list, really. Not too much to complain about.
But…
… and just hear me out here…
… what if we just gave the 2024 Best Picture Oscar to the 2001 Steven Soderbergh heist film Ocean’s Eleven?
What if we did that? It is something that merits consideration. Probably. Maybe. I am going to write about it either way, so you might as well just roll with it. There’s a reason Cord Jefferson went from blogger to Oscar-nominated filmmaker and I’m still firing off my little rants in these boxes. I feel okay about it, mostly.
Here we go.
The Case For Giving The 2024 Best Picture Oscar To The 2001 Heist Movie Ocean’s Eleven
My case here rests upon three pillars…
PILLAR ONE: Ocean’s Eleven is a blast. Just two hours of George Clooney and his celebrity friends wearing tuxedos and robbing casinos owned by Andy Garcia, who is also in a tuxedo. Julia Roberts is in there too and she’s just great. I’ve probably seen this movie 40 times and I would watch it again right now if I stumbled upon it on some basic cable channel that usually shows basketball games or drunken housewives shouting at each other. I should check, actually. There’s almost always a 40-50 chance it’s on somewhere.
Seriously, though. Remember how good this movie is? Don’t focus on the sequels, which are also mostly fine but not the point. Just think about the original. And think about the thing where Clooney and Soderbergh made Out of Sight a few years earlier, which is probably an even better little heist movie than this one. Giving them this belated Oscar might convince them to get back to that, to making fun little breezy heist movies where every character says the coolest thing anyone has ever said every time they open their mouth. We need a few more of those. It could work.
PILLAR TWO: It would be really funny. Just picture like Jack Nicholson strolling out there at age 86 to a raucous seven-minute standing ovation with his sunglasses on inside the ballroom and then he opens the envelope and announces that the award is going to a movie that came out 23 years ago. Think about the chaos that would ensue in that moment, immediately, and then in the days after. Think about the pretzels people would twist themselves into to fire off increasingly deranged takes. I bet we could get some maniac to blame it on the skyrocketing cost of groceries. Some opinion columnist who makes like $400k to write the most bozo blogs you’ve ever seen will probably submit something with a headline like “What The Ocean’s Eleven Win At The Oscars Says About The Youth Vote In The 2032 Election.”
It’ll be chaos. We deserve that. A little harmless fun for all of us.
PILLAR THREE: None of the current nominees feature Don Cheadle as an explosives expert. That’s important, too.
But this brings us to…
The Case Against Giving The 2024 Best Picture Oscar To The 2001 Heist Movie Ocean’s Eleven
Three pillars once again…
PILLAR ONE: It is probably not fair to the people who made the very good movies that got nominated this year to give the trophy to a movie that came out before Jenna Ortega was even born.
PILLAR TWO: People would probably end up getting very mad at me when they realize I’m the one who suggested it in the first place.
PILLAR THREE: If we’re just flinging open the door and making any movie ever made eligible for the Best Picture Oscar, we should probably just give this year’s award to Bottoms, if only for the potential of a Marshawn Lynch acceptance speech.
VERDICT
I don’t know, man. I actually did this exact same article three years ago but I suggested we give the Best Oscar award to the 2018 ensemble comedy Game Night. You figure it out!