With the 91st Academy Awards on the horizon, we take a shot at comparing the Oscar’s Best Picture nominees with college football programs.
College Football and Hollywood have long been linked together, with plenty of former stars on the gridiron moving on to acting careers, and plenty of biopics being made from the sport’s most fascinating stories and players.
This year’s Oscars have been shrouded in some controversy, with a revolving door of potential hosts, not completely unlike Alabama’s revolving door of assistant coaches, being linked to the gig only to turn it down. For the first time in 30 years, the Oscars will go on without a host.
This year, there’s eight nominees for Best Picture, a number that is of particular interest to college football fans. Ever since the decision was made to create a playoff system, many have been clamoring to move from four to eight teams to give more teams a shot.
The Academy doesn’t have a set number of nominees in mind each year, instead nominating the deserving films, a system in which college football could try to emulate. If there’s four teams worthy? Four-team playoff. Six? Six-team playoff. And so and so forth.
The arguments about inclusions will never end, however, as just like the Academy Awards there will always be a deserving team or film that is slighted. This year, that film was First Reformed, a harrowing Paul Schrader movie led by Ethan Hawke about a minister of a small church coming to grips with his tormented past and mounting concerns about global warming’s impact on the environment.
There’s no perfect system; everything is always subjective in some way. A team, or a movie, will always be overlooked despite its overall strength and body of work. That doesn’t mean that either aren’t a whole lot of fun, and it doesn’t mean that plenty of deserving teams and films aren’t given their just deserts.
With the Oscars on the horizon, I thought it would be fun to take a look at the eight Best Picture nominees, and compare them to college football teams and players. Let’s get started with the most obvious: