Bridesmaids was one of the highest-rated films of 2011, and a personal favourite, but I knew it was unlikely the comedy would get its due at the Oscars. The Academy is known for choosing dour period pieces, thoughtful period pieces and heartfelt period pieces in its Best Picture category, and typically eschews contemporary comedies. The last true comedy to score Best Picture was 1998’s Shakespeare in Love—an enjoyable period piece, but hardly a knee-slapper. That’s why there are annual calls to create a separate category for comedies—as they do at the Golden Globes—but the Academy has embraced seriousness like it’s a life jacket in a storm of competing awards shows.

So I had little hope that Bridesmaids would get a Best Picture nomination, and I was prepared to face its omission with dignity and composure. That is, until I heard The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close get called. Seriously, Academy?

It’s not like either film is bad. I actually liked The Help—both the book and the movie—but I liked them like I like potato chips and Kraft dinner. As far as cinematic nourishment goes, The Help is satisfying, but ultimately full of empty calories, and I know that I enjoyed it because a lifetime of rom-coms and female-targeted marketing initiatives have conditioned me to appreciate a certain level of schmaltz. And I must be honest: I still haven’t seen Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. The reviews were pretty bad, and during awards season I only screen films likely to be nominated for Oscars. Whoops.

But back to Bridesmaids, a true portrait of female friendships that never displayed the cattiness and bitchery that often plague movies about women (especially competing women). It actually reflected how girlfriends relate, and topped the box office even though its romantic plots were on the sidelines—which, incidentally, is where stories about women’s friendships are usually cast. As a contemporary woman, I found it supremely satisfying to witness fragments of myself and my real girlfriends on screen, but as much as the film appealed to my personal and political proclivities, it was more than a clever feminist affirmation—it was also a highly entertaining work of art. Bridesmaids has a 90% freshness rating on Rotten Tomatoes (The Help and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close have 76% and 48%, respectively), and when it was released, our theatre critic David Humphreys said it was “the funniest movie so far this year.”

The best cinema lifts us up—it both reflects our beliefs and asks us to reflect on them, and if it’s truly great, it carries us along without making us overtly aware that it has done so. We become so absorbed in its story that only after the film is over can we truly understand its impact.

That’s the kind of film Bridesmaids is, and I’m extremely disappointed and incredibly frustrated that I won’t get to witness it walking down the Oscar aisle on February 26.

Your thoughts, Mark?

Mark’s take:

I too had little hope that Bridesmaids would score a Best Picture nomination. However, the key factor in which we differ on this matter lies in my having had no desire to see Bridesmaids score a Best Picture nomination. I’ve seen the movie twice, and even after my second viewing, all I could think of was just how well Kristen Wiig and co-writer Annie Mumolo got away with disguising an overlong, run-of-the-mill comedy with a few structurally detached show-stopping gross-out skits.

The most commonly repeated phrase surrounding Bridesmaids’ theatrical release went something like this (and I’m paraphrasing here): “Finally, a raunchy comedy with talented leading role women!” Two things regarding statements such as these: 1) if equality for funny leading role actresses needs to be found in the type of stagey raunchiness in which a character has explosive diarrhea in the sink of a high-end bridal boutique, then surely there are far more worrisome problems running in Hollywood than meets the eye; 2) in so much as Bridesmaids forcibly parades its raunchy sketches and/or dialogue around relatively predictable “haven’t we’ve seen this all before?” type of material, doesn’t it almost come close to demeaning its own purported cause?

It seems to me that you and I saw two completely different films in Paul Feig’s Bridesmaids. What you felt as elation in having experienced a “highly entertaining, hilarious work of art”, I felt as disappointment in having sat through a somewhat boring and unevenly inspired work of gross-out pastiche. While it’s true that the Academy has had a long history of turning away Best Picture nominations to well-deserving full-blown comedies (the snubbing of Billy Wilder’s Some Like It Hot has to rank as the most egregious example of them all), Bridesmaids, and its inability to fill in this year’s vacant 10th slot, is not one of those occasions.