Rushfield Babylon

Oscar is a bird with wings that always finds a way to crap on your head.

You think you’ve put Oscar in a box where you can understand him, accept him, deal with him.  You say, okay…I understand it’s not about celebrating what’s actually the best film and film work of the year, but about celebrating a certain upper middle brow range of filmmaking, so that within those narrow confines, maybe the nominations will be kinda not that bad.  You make your peace with The Artist…you accept that Melancholia is never going to be the Academy’s cup of tea and you convince yourself that by its own standards, it might turn out okay.  And you close your eyes and hold your breath and make a bunch of predictions laced with a heavy dose of wishful thinking…

And Oscar dumps a bucket of rancid sewage water on your head.

I say all this as one wants Oscar to stand proud as the celebrante of the upper middle brow.  The Academy represents the establishment, and the last thing I want is the establishment trying to look cool and edgy and keep up with the Spirit awards.  That misguided sentiment is what leads them to name Crash Best Picture.  In the past few years they’ve taken these baby steps towards edginess by going out on wild limbs and giving the prize to The Hurt Locker and No Country for Old Men (neither of which were the best films of their year). But in the end those awards just felt awkward, like your drunk old uncle grabbing the mike and freestyling at his daughter’s wedding.  People can harrumph about King’s Speech getting the trophy all they want - but I am completely at peace with a choice like that; Oscar should be about awarding competently crafted schmaltzy prestige films with broad messages.  That is who they are at their best, so just go ahead and embrace that.

But in the end, they can’t even do that.  Looking at today’s nominations, who wouldn’t kill to go back to the Halcyon days of Kings Speech?  

Let’s start with the good(ish):

• Okay, they nominated Bridesmaids for Best Screenplay.  Hurrah, Oscar acknowledges comedy exists! (Not that there was a whole lot of comedy worth acknowledging.) (And no, Midnight in Paris does not count as a comedy.  Midnight in Paris is a comedy like a Pepcid AC commercial is a drama).

• It’s nice that Moneyball made the list.  That is precisely the sort of film they should be honoring and depressing that it was considered such a long shot.

• Good work for largely ignoring the hugely unimpressive Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and its hugely overhyped director David Fincher.

• Glad Gary Oldman slipped onto the Best Actor’s list. 

• Go Nick Nolte!

That covers the pleasant surprises. Now the horrible:

• Extremely Loud is like a grotesque parody of a Hollywood Message movie.  That this would make the best picture list is one of those choices that pretty much invalidates everything it stands beside.  All the other nominees will for the rest of their lives live with the stigma that they shared their nomination with this revolting piece of tragedy mongering.  It’s like being honored by the Fuhrer alongside Triumph of the Will.  Yes, you got a prize, but only if you can completely shut out the context.

• Melancholia and Young Adult. The two best movies of the year.  As noted above, I understand that these are never going to be Oscar’s favorites, but nothing? Kiki and Charlize created incredible original characters that completely defined these remarkable films.    In their places we get what in the best actress category? Two maudlin historical impersonations worthy of SNL sketches (Streep, Williams), one poor woman looking sad and walking down the street really slowly (Davis), one actress recreating note for note a character created by another actress (Mara) and one cross dressing performance in which an actress tries to play man as some bizarre elfin forest creature.    Kiki will yet have her day and I look forward to declining the nomination on her behalf when that day comes.  Do you think we’d accept a prize from fools like this?

• Overall, a huge leap backwards into sentimental schmaltz.  But not even good “Places in the Heart” sentimental schmaltz.  Just icky, saccharin grotesquerie.

• Two insane mistakes in the supporting categories: Jonah Hill and/or Max Von Sydow over Patton is nonsense.  Janet McTeer doing the most preposterous cross dressing role I’ve ever seen over Shailene Woodley is hideoous.

• The omissions due to absurd rules problems from the doc and foreign categories have been previously noted.  But the fact that Senna and The Skin I Live In were not eligible means that the entire categories are invalid.  There are a few too many amateur lawyers hanging around the Academy being little geniuses coming up with ways to tweak these rules to make them more “fair.” And it is all too predictable how every new change ends up making them less fair, less representative of what is great in cinema.  

All this puts in perspective the annual anti-Globes rants by half-witted industry shills like Nikki Finke. When they say the Globes are not “real awards” as though the Academy was chosen by the gods themselves to determine greatness in film.  Only someone as completely in the pocket of industry big wigs as Nikki (and a few others) could actually convince themselves they believe this and make the case that this bloated, overpaid, underworked band of moral pygmies and artistic cripples, who have done more to lower the dignity of the human condition is capable of determining the best of anything outside their own inflated egos.  

Complaining about the bad films that get nominated for the Academy Awards is like griping that if we lived in a country with a soul, Jack Kerouac would be elected President. But all the same, tomorrow’s nominations should be a historic low, taking the Academy back to the depths of the Ghandi era.    

But in the end, what matters most is not whether the Academy honors good films or bad films, but how well we, the Oscar pundits predict their idiocy.  Here then are my predictions for tomorrows nominations followed by my futile World Where the Good Reign alternate universe picks.  Note that where there are less than five in the deserved ranks, it is because there are less than five that I think are deserving.

BEST PICTURE
Prediction:
The Artist, Descedants, Hugo, Midnight in Paris, War Horse
Deserved:
Melancholia, Drive, Tinker, Tailor Soldier Spy, Young Adult, Descendants, Shame, Moneyball

DIRECTOR
Prediction:
Hazanavicius, Payne, Scorsese, Allen, Speilberg
Deserved:
Payne, Von Trier, Alfredson, McQueen, Reitman

ACTOR 
Prediction:
Clooney, DiCaprio, Dujardin, Pitt, Fassbender
Deserved:
Clooney, Pitt Fassbehder, Oldman, Harrelson 

ACTRESS 
Prediction:Streep, Williams, Davis, Stone, Dunst
Deserved: Dunst, Theron.  All other actresses should withdraw from consideration in the face of these performances

SUPPORTING ACTOR
Prediction:Plummer, Brooks, Nolte, Branaugh, Oswalt
Deserved:Nolte, Oswalt, Firth, Serkis,  Hurt

SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Prediction:Spencer, Woodley, McCarthy, Mulligan, Chastain
Deserved:Woodley, McCarthy, Mulligan…

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Prediction: Artist, Midnight in Paris, Beginners, Young Adult, Bridesmaids
Deserved: Young Adult, Bridesmaids, Melancholia,  Shame

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Prediction:Descendants, War Horse, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor, Girl with the Dragon
Deserved:Descendants, Moneyball, Tinker Tailor,  The Skin I Live In, 

Had the good fortune to see again The King of Comedy at the First Annual Wayne Federman International Film Festival, and was in awe of how well it stood up.  This was the first time I have seen it on the big screen since it came out in 1983 when I was in ninth grade.  At the time, thanks to the tutelage of our high school teacher, America’s premiere film scholar Jim Hosney, I was an annoying young fledgling film student diving in head first at anything that seemed appropriately dark and deep.  This was a period, in the early 80’s before the advent of the independent film movement and when most of the great directors of the previous decade were busy dramatically flaming out - Coppola with One From the Heart, Altman with Popeye, etc..  Most of the films that I loved from that I loved from that era have not lived to be classics, and when I see them now I am usually cringing recalling my schoolboy enthusiasm. Blade Runner and Once Upon a Time in America stand out as the two major exceptions, and the former, seeing it now, is clearly a flawed masterpiece, with its Big Philosophical Themes laid on, to adult ears, with a cement mixer.

And then there is The King of Comedy, which probably made it to more senior pages of my peers than any other film of our day.  It’s been over a decade since I even watched it and I think I was avoiding doing so for fear that another great memory of youth would be destroyed.  But not only was it as good as I recall it was better.  It was the rare movie that instead of wondering what I liked about it at the time, I wonder how much of what is going on in it I was even able to pick up on at age 14.

It’s almost impossible to picture a time when one talk show host ruled over America, with a rotating crowd of latter day borscht belters and there was nothing ironic or self-reflexive about it.  Carson was not a talk show about a talk show.  He was Carson.  And across the culture, he wasn’t mocked, he wasn’t parodied; he simply reigned.  This was before Letterman, before Larry Sanders…The only things I can even think of that poked fun of this form of our national living room were the and SCTV..both of which existed in the most obscure reaches of entertainment…Airing at 1 AM… Nowadays there is no talk show which is not ironic about itself; even Leno parodies talk show conventions. But pre-Letterman, that was unthinkable.  SNL certainly never even tried to lay a pinkie on Carson in that era.

The King of Comedy alone, went deep inside these conventions and paints this picture of an entirely corrupt, artificial world that is just as brutal today as it was in 1983 (or even 1973 when the script was written).  It also, decades before the Paris Hilton era, fortells the coming conflation of fame and infamy and how the bright spotlight of entertainment warps our values.    De Niro’s performance as Rupert Pupkin, the obsessed sociopathic aspiring comic is so good and unflinching, that thirty years later it is still hard to believe that De Niro is acting there, that Pupkin is not who he really is.  Even more than with Travis Bickle or Jake LaMotta, he disappears into this role without a trace.  The film was a massive flop when it came out and one really can see why.  De Niro’s performance does not give you an inch to feel for or empathize with Pupkin.  If you really stay with what he is about, Pupkin may be the most unnerving psychotic ever to grace the screen. Although for the first time watching it now, I caught how much his infamous comedy routine is, in fact, Pupkin telling the story of his horrible abused life in the only grotesque fashion he can find that allows him to deal with it - the language of entertainment.

Jerry Lewis’ performance as the talk show host, likewise, is incredible, almost unbelievable that he would commit so deeply to such a at once powerful and loathsome character, with no soft moment to redeem him at all.

In that American Masters documentary about Woody Allen, Scorsese remarks that Allen’s pristine and precious New York is so different from the New York he knows - the New York of Mean Streets - that it might as well be another planet.   King of Comedy marks the only time in his career when Scorsese ventured uptown to contemporary Manhattan, and his vision of it remains very interesting. The cinematic elements are very restrained in King; there are no montages, the camera is relatively unobtrusive as if imitating the style of a talk show.  But I noticed something in how he shot this world on this viewing. In almost every frame of the film - from the titles on - appears a flash of a bright almost scarlet red somewhere on the screen.  In Rupert’s tie, in curtains on the walls the color shows up over and over.  

The red was the color of power ties - and suspenders - of the day, but appearing over and over it takes on the character of Satan’s face appearing in the shadows in The Exorcist - it is like the flames of hell lapping at the cold, sterile world of midtown Manhattan.  Particularly, as Rupert favors it, it is as though he - the demented product of modern media is a representative of Satan. When he kidnaps Jerry, the metaphor is made more specific as he is clad in a Hawaiian shirt (above -middle row, right) decorated with what literally appears to be the flames of hell on it.

The metaphor reaches its pinnacle when redheaded Masha makes the kidnapped Jerry wear a sweater she has knitted for him in that particular shade of red.

After sneaking in and lapping at the edges of the world throughout the film, in the final shot, when Rupert takes the stage triumphant, the stage is bathed in a bright red light and Rupert emerges clad from head to toe in a bright red suit, Satan ascendant. 

If anyone has not seen this film - do whatever you have to do to find it immediately.  We are bombarded these days with statements about media.  Every Goddamn thing now is a statement about media.  But this is really the only one you need. On reviewing, it’s probably my favorite Scorsese film and rests forever in my all time top ten.  See it!  Now!

 of his best of 2011 list. 

It is not possible that he actually thinks Midnight in Paris is the best film of the year. That is not physically possible. He is either kissing up to Woody or stirring up trouble, or doing some kind of performance art, or kissing up to someone else.  All of the above I suspect.

Remember he was also the foreman of the Venice Jury that gave Somewhere the festival’s top prize.  

Otherwise, hat’s off to him for having the guts to offend people who aren’t Harvey Weinstein by doing a worst list.  And triple hats triple off to him for having the guts to put the critics’ fetish object, the stuporous Meek’s Landing on the list.

And I’ll even forgive the shameless putting Iron Lady and My Week With Marilyn on his runner-ups list for his having the courage NOT to put the film most beloved by Tarantino’s mindless minions, the film that most strives to be Tarantinoesque on his list - I speak of course of Drive.  Putting it on the “Nice Try” list strikes me as exactly perfect.