Not the original, but Rico will see it anyway

Michael Cieply and Brooks Barnes have a column in The New York Times about the Oscars:

As True Grit shows signs of becoming the Oscar season’s first breakout hit, it is reviving a question that has long shadowed the Academy Awards: does the audience get a vote? Last weekend, True Grit, written and directed by Ethan and Joel Coen, shocked Hollywood by burning up the box office. The sober Western generated $24.4 million in North American theaters, just $1.3 million less than the holiday weekend’s No. 1 movie, the blatantly commercial Little Fockers. And True Grit dropped only two percent from the prior weekend, which was its first in theaters; drops of fifty percent are routine, and anything less than thirty percent is judged by the industry to be spectacular.
True Grit has also galloped far ahead of freshly released Oscar contenders like The King’s Speech, Black Swan and The Fighter. Within days, if trends hold, True Grit, based on a novel by Charles Portis and filmed by Paramount for just $38 million, will have accumulated about $95 million at the box office, according to analysts, pushing it past The Social Network, a heavily promoted best picture prospect that was released by Sony Pictures more than three months ago.
Strictly speaking, box-office results have no bearing on the Oscars, which are awarded on the basis of perceived merit by the 5,755 voting members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. And the Academy’s members— who last year chose the little-seen Hurt Locker as best picture at the expense of the blockbuster Avatar, among others— have shown themselves ever more willing to give their prizes to small, independent films and to those who make them, regardless of whether many moviegoers have actually seen them.
Yet box-office performance can exert a distinct pull on the awards process. It happened last year with The Blind Side, which collected only middling reviews but scored Oscar nominations after turning into a surprise hit, with almost $256 million in ticket sales following its late-November release by Warner Brothers. The Blind Side, about a Southern white woman who takes a troubled black high school football player under her wing, ultimately won the best actress Oscar for its star, Sandra Bullock.
“Politics and emotion come into play,” said Peter Sealey, a fifteen-year Academy member who once ran marketing and distribution operations for Columbia Pictures. Particularly in the best picture category, Mr. Sealey said, strong audience response creates a “buzz that can be manipulated” by the many strategists and marketers who work the awards circuit.
Academy officials are generally careful to avoid seeming to favor any particular Oscar contender. But they have made overt moves in the recent past to include more crowd pleasers in an effort to guarantee continuing interest in the annual awards broadcast on ABC. (This year’s ceremony is on 27 February; nominations will be announced on 25 January.) Most noticeably, the Academy last year doubled the field of best picture nominees to ten, hoping to open up room for blockbusters like The Blind Side and this year, perhaps, Toy Story 3, Inception or True Grit.
The ploy appeared to work: almost 42 million people watched the Oscars last year, a fifteen percent increase from the year before, according to Nielsen Media Research. While slicing and dicing ratings data is an inexact science at best, the inclusion of The Blind Side appeared to help the telecast in particular, with notable gains among older women, the same group that powered that film at the box office, and stronger than usual turnout in the Midwest and South.
True Grit is also selling well between the coasts. While it has performed best in a pair of theaters in Los Angeles and New York, its Top 20 markets have included Oklahoma City; Plano, Texas; and Olathe, Kansas, according to Rob Moore, Paramount’s vice chairman. He added that the relatively soft rating of True Grit— PG-13— had given it a major lift, but not so much with young viewers as with extended families who were coming to see the film in groups that included parents, grandparents, and teenagers. “Clearly you’re getting that middle-American, heartland audience that helped make The Blind Side,” Mr. Moore said.
For the Coens, True Grit is already a personal best. It has easily surpassed ticket sales for No Country for Old Men, their highest-grossing film, which took in $74.3 million after its release by Miramax Films in 2007, and went on to win the best picture Oscar. Asked if he had any idea why this version of True Grit (it was first filmed in 1969) had connected so strongly, Joel Coen said: “None at all.”
Joining the conversation a few minutes later, Ethan speculated that, after fifteen films, the mass audience had simply stopped avoiding them. “We just outwaited everybody,” he said.
More pragmatically, the brothers pointed out that True Grit, which received its PG-13 rating despite a heavy body count and graphic language, was more accessible to a younger audience than their R-rated pictures, which include Fargo and A Serious Man.
A softer rating, Joel said, was integral to their concept of the film, which is about a girl’s fight to avenge her father’s death. “We knew we wanted it to be a movie younger people could watch,” he said.
But True Grit was something of a laggard in this year’s awards race, at least, until the audience spoke. The major critics’ awards went to The Social Network. True Grit, meanwhile, received no Golden Globes nominations, and was overlooked in the nominations for a bellwether ensemble cast award from the Screen Actors Guild, though it features a pack of stars, including Jeff Bridges, Matt Damon, Josh Brolin, and a newcomer, Hailee Steinfeld.
While the Coens, known for arch humor and twisted plots in films like Blood Simple and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, have typically done well with both the critics and with a robust, web-based circuit of professional Oscar watchers, True Grit was quickly judged a miss by some of that crowd. Writing of True Grit for the website The Wrap, Steve Pond detected “a tonal battle going on here, as the film’s brilliantly persuasive doomy finality dissolves abruptly into a goofiness that undercuts the resonance the movie might otherwise have.” On the same day Jeffrey Wells, on the Hollywood Elsewhere website, called True Grit a “misfire”. Describing it as a “cold and mannered ‘art’ Western that matters not,” Mr. Wells added, “Every now and then the Coens, despite their immense talent and heavy-osity, drop the clay jug on the kitchen floor.”
David Poland, yet another awards watcher, was sufficiently impressed by both the movie and its performance to write on his Movie City News that True Grit had “muscled its way into the frontrunner slot” in the best picture race. The box office, Mr. Poland argued, is a “major influencer” in the awards process.
Mr. Moore of Paramount stopped short of making Oscar predictions. But he noted that only two Western dramas, Dances With Wolves and Unforgiven, had been major hits in the last twenty years. “And both won best picture,” he said.

Rico says that, of this list, he's already seen The King's Speech, Hurt Locker, The Blind Side, and O Brother, Where Art Thou?, didn't see Avatar, Toy Story 3, or Inception, hasn't decided about The Fighter, wouldn't see Little Fockers or Black Swan or The Social Network even if you paid him, but looks forward to seeing the new True Grit, without losing his love for the original.