My Week With Oscar

So here we are as another year of Oscar comes to a close.  Another year of films that showcase an industry working at the height of its creativity, and another year of Oscar nominees that highlight the absolute best and most deserving of the bunch, right?  It would be difficult to find a list of nominees from any award show without flaw, but in the weeks following the Oscar announcements the press and bloggers are usually at their most vitriolic, as if they’ve been waiting eleven months to pull the word “snub” out of their lexicons just to throw it back at Tinsel Town.  On the morning of January 24^th the nominations were read for the 84^th Academy Awards, and unfortunately, while proving no exception, they are special in regards to several truly boneheaded and egregious choices that are important for the casual fan to recognize before taking a stroll down their hi-definition red carpets when the awards are televised on Sunday February 26^th.  After pondering the nominations, here are the main things that bother me.

A few years ago the Academy changed its rules regarding the category of Best Picture, increasing the number of nominees from five to ten titles, and this year, revising again to include anywhere FROM five to ten.  Sounding like a ploy to increase revenue, as more films would be able to make bank with the coveted “Nominated for Best Picture” tagline, the fact that each subsequent year has shown the category populated by five films that actually deserve the nod among some of the most inexplicable company, that theory seems well supported.  This year we have The Tree Of Life, Midnight In Paris, Hugo, The Artist, and The Descendants.  If only we could stop right there.  While we can casually disagree that those films are the five best of the year, they are at least drawn from the correct pool of acclaim.  The remaining nominees, padding out the category, include Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, an oversimplified, borderline offensive 9/11 tale, which, along with Spielberg’s maudlin War Horse, apparently does not have some of the best directing, writing, or lead acting of the year based on their omission from those categories, yet the Academy deems them both two of the nine best films of the year.  The Help is this year’s token 100-million-dollar-grossing nominee, aided by its social conscience, though also not up for screenplay or directing, even while adapted from a high-profile bestseller.  And finally, Moneyball, a Brad Pitt vehicle I found incredibly dull, but which most critics applauded, though I bet would not put in the same league as the first five films.

Of the lead acting categories, Best Actor is particularly noteworthy.  While I applaud the company of Gary Oldman, as stoic, steely-eyed spy Smiley in the underappreciated Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, among the equally deserving Clooney, and Dujardin, I have much disdain for the nomination of Demian Birchir, effective but stranded in Chris Weitz’s inert, manipulative movie-of-the-week about illegal immigration, A Better Life.  Nobody pats itself on the back better than Hollywood.  With a dearth of nominees, as is usually the case with Best Actress, Birchir’s inclusion could have been understandable, but in place of Michael Shannon’s devastating portrayal of undiagnosed schizophrenia in the SNUBBED Take Shelter, or Ryan Gosling’s career turns in both Drive and The Ides Of March, or Michael Fassbender’s brave performance as a sex addict in the SNUBBED Shame, it is inexcusable.  Brad Pitt’s nomination, lending support to Moneyball, is understandable, but similarly unjust at the expense of the others.  And what about SNUBBED Leonardo DiCaprio?  I’ll bet he thought this was his year, and it could have been had Eastwood not subjected a period piece about the FBI to his usual one-take, yearly rush job.  A great role is defined by the inability to see anyone else in his/her shoes; Moneyball fails that test.  If Brad Pitt had to be nominated it should have been for The Tree Of Life, where he was able to play against type as a domineering father, to great results.

The lead actress group is just as bad.  Unfortunately, most years prove so difficult for the Academy to actually choose five nominees; the silver lining being that the truly great performances usually do not go unrecognized.  That is not the case this year.  Michelle Williams and Rooney Mara are the only nominees that make sense.  As the titular character in The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Mara helped the film become a marked improvement over the Swedish version, and Williams's nomination as Marilyn Monroe was a forgone conclusion, regardless of how good the film turned out to be.  But Glenn Close, as Albert Nobbs, seems more a nod to the film’s statement on sexism than the rather unemotional performance should warrant.  And of course the token nomination of Meryl Streep, as Margaret Thatcher, either cements her reputation as the world’s greatest living actress, or just betrays the laziness of an Academy that would ignore how savaged The Iron Lady was by the critical mass.  And Viola Davis, while good in The Help, hardly delivered an Oscar caliber performance.  If I were choosing the nominees, I would not have overlooked Tilda Swinton’s perfect synchronicity with the tone of director Lynne Ramsay’s We Need To Talk About Kevin, the best film that will ever be made (I promise you) about a high school shooting.  And I would not have overlooked 2011 Cannes Film Festival’s Best Actress winner Kirsten Dunst, from Lars von Trier’s astounding Melancholia, whose physical transformation into depression eclipsed even the planet the film depicted being on a collision course with Earth.  And Jessica Chastain, with her banner year in four different films, while not being overlooked because of her nod as Supporting Actress in The Help, should have been recognized as a lead actress instead, either as Michael Shannon’s wife in Take Shelter, or, perhaps more appropriately, as Brad Pitt’s wife in The Tree Of Life, the film’s conscience, and graceful, emotional center.  She was not acting in The Help, she was emoting, a drama school final exam lost in a Hollywood soundstage, and the fact that she is up against Octavia Spencer, who fared much better with her much better role, is a slap in the face for what Chastain accomplished this year.

The Best Adapted Screenplay category is one of the worst offenders.  While the Academy saw fit to nominate Bridesmaids and Margin Call for original screenplay, over The Tree Of Life, which basically turned narrative exposition into poetry, much more befuddling here is the nominations of The Ides Of March and Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy in the adapted category, which happens to be the former film’s ONLY nomination.  This being the same year as Best Picture nominees The Help, Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, War Horse, and also the year Christopher Hampton adapted two books, a 600 page nonfictional account of the birth of psychoanalysis and a play called “The Talking Cure” to create SNUBBED A Dangerous Method, and of course The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, apparently the writing of all of them did not hold a candle to the writing of The Ides Of March or Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, yet neither of those two films had the writing caliber to be included as Best Picture nominees.  The issue is one of consistency.  How can a film be nominated for Best Picture, but not be nominated for lead acting, directing, OR writing?

Best Director is the only category the Academy got right.  Woody Allen from Midnight In Paris, Terrence Malick from The Tree Of Life, Alexander Payne from The Descendants, Michel Hazanavicius from The Artist, and Martin Scorsese from Hugo are the nominees, and if they sound familiar it is because they are the directors from the first five Best Picture nominees.

I won’t go into the lesser categories, except to make one comment:  it is about time the Academy starts taking the category of Best Original Score seriously, or drops it altogether.  Ever since 1993, when Michael Nyman was not even nominated for Jane Campion’s Best Picture nominee The Piano, the film about a mute woman who used her music to communicate, I have annually lambasted the Academy for their consistent ignorance with respect to composers.  This year we get two offerings from category stalwart John Williams, who after seeing just how many career nominations he has, you might think is either the greatest composer ever, or the only composer.  Nominated for just about everything he has ever done, Williams is worse than Meryl Streep, this year he takes two spots away from completely SNUBBED Alexandre Desplat, who along with scoring Best Picture nominees for the last two years, and last year’s winner The King’s Speech, this year has scored an impressive six features, including two current Best Picture nominees, The Ides Of March, and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close.  He also scored 2011's Harry Potter installment.  Yes, even Harry Potter, the franchise that previously received a nomination in this category…when John Williams composed the score for it.  Anyone who can tell the difference between Williams’s scores for War Horse and Adventures of Tintin, or anything he has done in the last fifteen years for that matter, feel free to comment.  It should be bad enough that each year the Academy just chooses Original Score nominees that ride the coattails of their film’s other nominations, but in a John Williams year, it seems even that tradition gets sidelined in favor of either hero worship, or a complete lack of confidence among the Academy in their ability to tell what constitutes a good score.

And so closes another year of chest clearing.  Now I can watch the Oscars with a clear head, and for what they actually are, not so much a recognition of talent and craftsmanship as a recognition of people and films Hollywood thinks the audience wants to see take a stroll down the red carpet.  Award shows, and the Oscars in particular, are supposed to let audiences know what films are good, not the other way around; I'm not sure at what point that changed.  But perhaps it is for the best, since an award show that lacks common sense and follow-through is undeniably easier to watch after a long day at the office than something that requires more emotional investment, like many of the films that were SNUBBED.  Hmmm, I guess that makes the Oscars a perfect reflection of Tinsel Town after all.