Oscar the Slouch: A Pundit Reacts
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.
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