Dana Stevens in Slate diagrams the Juno backlash. Stevens speaks for a lot of us here: "When Juno came out, I saw it as a flawed but fun indie, a film that, despite the screenplay's overreliance on grating banter, somehow snuck up on you by the end and made you like it." Since then, the damnded thing has been nominated for four major Academy Awards including Best Picture, come unnervingly close to doubling the box office take claimed by the second-biggest hit among the Best Picture nominees (No Country for Old Men), and inspired some big name critics to hail it as the best movie of the year. Granted, this reaction is insane, but how insane? And how much of one's dismay at those who are overpraising the picture should be directed at the movie itself? We've been here before: it wasn't that long ago that Little Miss Sunshine was praised for its stellar cast and surprising mix of world-beaten warmth and black humor, only to set off panic alarms in some quarters when it made a mint and garnered Oscar nominations. Both these films have been accused of playing out of their leagues, albeit by people who you might expect not to really care that much about the Oscars as a serious measure of artistic worth. At the same time, they stand accused of not being "indie" enough--they're unusual compared to most of the mainstream product, but they're also commercial comedies with big studio promotional money pushing them uphill.
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