Your Humble Blogger had this great idea for an Oscars game. Around Thanksgiving, when nobody knew anything, people would start bidding in what was more or less an auction for movies and performances. When the nominations came out, two months later, people who had successfully bid for the nominees would get cash, and we’d move on to another phase where people would trade shares of the nominated films. Nobody had enough the time and the interest to play, this year, which is too bad, since this really was a good year specifically for this kind of game. Not only were there a pretty good quantity of surprises (I expect the bidding on Mr. Giamatti would have been high) but there were a lot of longshots that would have been worth a few dimes (Mr. Moore and Mr. Gibson and their movies, perhaps, or Ms. Delpy, or Mr. Neeson or a few others) for a big payoff. Just to give you an idea, the one set of actual bids that came in had 13 bids for the four categories, 3 of which ultimately weren’t nominated, and that’s from the fellah with the inside knowledge. I think it would have been a pretty good combination of competitive bidding on favorites and wacky longshots.
Then the nominations came out. Well, it’s hard to tell what would have happened. I suspect that at the moment nominations came out, Sideways would have been the highest bid movie. Whoever had those shares might have unloaded them at a premium, or might now be holding wastepaper. I imagine whoever was holding Mr. Cheadle’s stock would have been happy for the nomination payoff, and might have had trouble unloading shares at any price, but who knows. I suspect that Ms. Linney’s stock would have gone up and down a bit, and same with Mr. Haden Church. Still, for all the annual conversation about how this year, anything could happen, in fact every category as usual has a runaway favorite (Million Dollar Baby, Mr. Eastwood, Ms. Swank, Mr. Freeman, Mr. Foxx and Ms. Blanchett) and a pretty clear distant second (The Aviator, Mr. Scorsese, Ms. Bening, Mr. Eastwood, Mr. Owen and Ms. Madsen) and three very unlikely longshots. That’s not much fun. The fun part is when nobody knows anything.
So, I suppose, I’m asking my Gentle Readers whether any of them are interested in a 2005 Oscar game. If so, let me know. Because—here’s the thing—we could start the day after the 2004 Oscars, and have people bidding for movies that won’t even be released for nine months (if at all). I’d have to write up some rules, in that case, so that there would be some payoffs along the way, but that shouldn’t be too hard. And really, do you actually want to wait and find out if The New World or Memoirs of a Geisha are any good before betting on them? Don’t you want a piece of Nathan Lane and Susan Stroman, just in case? And the decision about whether to bet on the Steven Spielberg Munich Olympics movie is way more fun if you don’t know whether it will ever actually be made. What about Ben Kingsley as Fagin? Johnny Depp as Willy Wonka? Not to mention Natalie Portman as Evey in V for Vendetta!
Thank you,
-Vardibidian.