Although this
is only the second year I’ve taken to voice my complaints in writing, I've been reacting to the Oscars my entire life. Each person has their own reasons for
watching or not watching the award show extravaganza. Some watch it just to see how bright the
stars can shine. Others watch it out of
tradition. And still others probably
watch it just for the commercials, or to hear a funny acceptance speech. Is there anyone out there these days who
watches it to see which films actually get crowned the best of the year? Award show critics seem to be everywhere,
some even rank among those who watch religiously. Everybody has a problem with something. Many other awards, like the Grammys, have
been marginalized by the sheer wealth of material out there, and the patented
refusal among the people to actually believe that they truly speak for what is
the best. I think the Oscars maintain
the edge, because deep down, people in general look to them for direction, to
tell them what they should go see and what they might have missed. It’s why films get re-released after the nominations are read. It’s why
Best Picture winners make tons of money.
It’s because of their recognition, and not the other way around, as with
other award shows. The Academy Awards is
one of the last vestiges of recognition doled out as it should be. Is it perfect? Of course not. And that's why, every year, I seek to improve
them by pointing out where they went right, and more importantly, where they
went wrong. 2012 was a fantastic year
for motion pictures; a top ten list is nearly impossible to create. The Academy could have thrown darts at a wall
and come up with ten truly deserving nominees for Best Picture. And that’s probably why, upon first glance, I
applauded their selections. But further
perusal has surfaced many mistakes and omissions, moments from the last year
crying out for recognition that fell on deaf ears, and moments that never in
a million years should have been offered a first-class walk down the red
carpet. Here are my reactions to the
nominations for the 85th annual Academy Awards.
There is probably no more perfect example of the necessity
of a double-take than the evening’s most coveted category, Best Picture.
Best Picture
Argo
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Amour
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Not bad, right? There’s Ben Affleck’s inexplicably lauded career renaissance, Academy stalwarts and critical darlings Quentin Tarantino and Ang Lee, the patriotic Lincoln, the film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the Austrian film that won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the smash indie hit and socially relevant Beasts Of The Southern Wild. And even if you weren’t head over heels in love with Les Misérables, its inclusion was almost foretold as a matter of destiny. Is there anyone in the world who believed it would not be nominated, even as far back as when director Tom Hooper, fresh from his win for the glorified made-for-cable film King’s Speech, announced it would be his next film, and even as it currently holds a "rotten" designation among top critics at www.rottentomatoes.com? And Silver Linings Playbook, a comedy…A COMEDY?? Wow, critics have always said that comedies get no love from the Academy. Not this year apparently.
But what could possibly be missing? How about The Dark Knight Rises; the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy that pretty much revolutionized the superhero genre? After all The Return Of The King won the award, and I haven't met anyone who believes it's the best of Peter Jackson's trilogy. How about Cloud Atlas; the adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel that was considered unfilmable, that took three directors and almost as many hours to tell, crosscutting six different storylines and spanning hundreds of years? How about Moonrise Kingdom, the best film of Wes Anderson’s career, and the year’s most whimsical? How about End Of Watch, the film that practically revitalized, and legitimized, the found-footage genre? How about Skyfall, the best James Bond film since Goldfinger? And last but certainly not least, how about The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's thinly veiled examination of Scientology, which actually plays much better as a meditation on religion and identity, and which also gave Joaquin Phoenix the best performance of his career? But alas there can only be ten nominees. Ahem. I said there can only be TEN nominees. When I realized there were only nine, the second time I looked over the category, I made a cursory attempt to understand why; however, the Academy's endless rules and regulations bored me even before they confused me.
Actor in a Leading Role
Bradley Cooper - Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis - Lincoln
Hugh Jackman - Les Miserables
Joaquin Phoenix - The Master
Denzel Washington - Flight
Best Actor is easily the worst of all the categories, an absolute train wreck of bad choices and omissions. That French screen legend Jean-Louis Trintignant was not nominated for his performance in Amour, one of the most devastatingly honest films I've ever seen, especially when his co-star Emmanuelle Riva was nominated, is a travesty. Michael Haneke's film about the effect a series of strokes has on an elderly couple transcends its subject matter in ways that need to be seen to be believed. Only two people of the five deserve to be there; Joaquin Phoenix and Daniel Day-Lewis, for their complete and utter transformations into character. But Bradley Cooper? Please. Talk about riding a film's coattails. He was good, but mannered, his manic behavior tics refreshing at first, but which become all too quickly consumed by the developing plot. Hugh Jackman's inclusion is also a token gesture. I found his performance serviceable at best, but his repeated inability to translate the big expressions of song into the intimacy of cinema was far too distracting. And don't get me started on that vibratto. And Denzel Washington, one of Flight's two nods, is a complete joke. The usually reliable actor is left stranded by a rote and unimaginative screenplay, unable to rise above the checklist of expectations an alcoholic character carries with him. I would have recognized Richard Gere, as the hedge fund magnate trying to cover up a murder while going down with the economic ship, and who gives one of the best performances of his career, in Arbitrage. And I don't believe it off the table to consider Suraj Sharma from Life Of Pi, who quite effectively managed to hold his own, alone for over an hour, against computer generated animals and effects. And let's also not forget Matthew McConaughey, who basically obliterated any doubt about his talents as an actor with his slow burn-to-bonkers performance as avenging psychopath Killer Joe in William Friedkin's adaptation of Tracy Letts popular stage play of the same name.
Actress in a Leading Role
Jessica Chastain - Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence - Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva - Amour
Quvenzhané Wallis - Beasts of Southern Wild
Naomi Watts - The Impossible
Best Actress is probably the strongest of all the categories, strangely enough, since historically the dearth of good, strong female roles has been the bane of its existence. Of the nominees only one does not belong. Can you guess which one? A recurring motif for me this year is the extent to which Silver Linings Playbook has been nominated. The film is good, but hardly Oscar worthy. Quvenzhané Wallis, however, is a revelation as the six-year-old Hush Puppy in the indie sleeper Beasts Of The Southern Wild, a post-Katrina parable with shades of fantasy that Wallis manages to completely command with her presence. And Jessica Chastain continues her impressive streak as the glue that holds together Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow's riveting, compressed-time docudrama of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty. And while I might not have nominated Naomi Watts for her role in The Impossible, where she spent most of the time lying on a hospital bed, I can understand her inclusion here; she was absolutely riveting in the aftermath of the tsunami. Ironically, Emanuelle Riva also spent the majority of Amour lying in bed, but her performance, comprised of mostly vacant stares cut right through to the bone. Although I do sort of object to her inclusion at the omission of Trintignant. The only actress criminally left out of this group is Rachel Weisz, whose portrayal of Hester Collyer, in the deeply cinematic adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea ranks among the best performances of her career.
In similar fashion to their headlining counterparts, Best Supporting Actor is especially disastrous, while Best Supporting Actress is about as good as it can be. Alan Arkin's nomination for Argo and Robert De Niro's for Silver Linings Playbook is just ridiculous. Arkin is in the film for about ten minutes, has basically one good line, or so the screenwriter thinks, and absolutely no range of emotion to display. And Silver Linings Playbook is just one more stop on De Niro's coast through the latter part of his career. The man hasn't starred in a unequivocally good film in nearly twenty years; odds are he's bound to stumble across a good one sooner or later, there's no sense in rewarding him for it. His performance is hardly in the same league as Travis Bickle and a young Don Corleone, and the nomination is basically a smack in the face to those who were snubbed. If the Academy felt like honoring a veteran of film, they didn't have to look much farther than Christopher Walken in Seven Psychopaths, a razor-sharp comedy that for once, knows how to use the actor, and benefits tremendously from his signature line readings. Also, Michael Pena, who injected David Ayer's found-footage revelation, End Of Watch, with a humility that almost single-handedly elevated the film to an unprecedented emotional level. And Javier Bardem, whose portrayal of Raoul Silva in Skyfall transcended mere scenery chewing, crawling under the audience's skin as effortlessly as he appeared to crawl into the skin of one of the greatest Bond villains in the franchise's history. The other three actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Master, Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln, and Christopher Waltz for Django Unchained are spot on, as are four of the five actresses nominated in a supporting role, a bunch of woman along with Anne Hathaway, or so it will probably seem come Oscar night (the stars are aligning for her). Jackie Weaver from, yep, Silver Linings Playbook, is the only standout bad choice. Anybody could have played the part of Bradley Cooper's mom and De Niro's wife, and nothing would have been missed. How about in her place Samantha Barks, whose solo moment in Les Misérables as Eponine, singing "On My Own," was far better than anything put forth by any of the far more seasoned actors in that film, except for Hathaway. And how about Ann Dowd, whose portrayal of the fast food manager who gets a prank call that ultimately degenerates into a sexual assault in Compliance is perhaps the main reason that film was able to so deftly transcend its movie-of-the-week trappings, peeling away the layers of humanity to uncover the darkness and insecurity that lives inside us all.
The Best Screenplay awards, for original and adapted, usually mirror the Best Picture category, with a few exceptions of course, some good and some bad this year. I am glad that Wes Anderson got a nod for Moonrise Kingdom, far and away his best film, even though it is but a token, and has no chance of winning. Anderson is a consistenly solid independent filmmaker who has a slew of critically acclaimed films under his belt, yet he cannot seem to rise above the token writing nomination in the Academy's eyes. It's the same place Quentin Tarantino mired through most of his career. Unfortunately Flight, Argo, and Silver Linings Playbook are also nominated. Silver Linings isn't terrible I suppose, but it speaks to the Academy not really knowing what to look for in an Oscar-caliber screenplay. I sense that the film is merely rounding out all of the categories it is nominated in. It isn't going to win anything, but its inclusion over and over again robs much more talented people who much more deserved a recognition, even without an ultimate win. Flight and Argo, on the other hand, are horrendous choices. I've written about the problems of Flight here, and the problems of Argo here. The two films criminally ignored in these categories are Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master for the original category, and Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's massive tome, called unfilmable by many, for the adapted category.
The Best Director category also usually follows the Best Picture category, the most significant difference these days being which of the five best picture nominees are going to get snubbed, or in this year's case, which of the four. First off, I am shocked that Ben Affleck was snubbed. I had previously thought Argo to be a front-runner, but not giving it the support of a Best Director nomination does not bode well for its chances. Although Affleck's recent DGA win does bode well for it. But I agree with the decision. Argo, just like Affleck's first two films, hints at great things he might be able to achieve sometime in the future, but not until he can shake the image he has of a rube behind the camera. Beasts Of The Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin did a fantastic job, but his inclusion is a throwaway; he has no chance of winning, and certainly doesn't quite rank with the way snubbed Kathryn Bigelow elevated the docudrama to a level of high art with Zero Dark Thirty, or the way snubbed Paul Thomas Anderson showcased a master class of composition, speaking volumes with every single frame of The Master. Or even the marvelous way Christopher Nolan raised the bar on the superhero genre film with The Dark Knight Rises. But even if I don't agree, I can still understand the omissions of Anderson and Nolan; when there are so many Best Picture nominees there really is no excuse for shopping around, even if Silver Linings Playbook and Lincoln are far from the best examples of their director's work.
That of course wraps up the most popular categories, but there remains one or two still worth mentioning. I would love an opportunity to ask an Academy voter what exactly they look for when choosing a nominee for Best Editing. The editor has one of the hardest jobs of anyone in the film industry. Depending on the skill of the director, an editor might have thousands of miles of film dumped in their laps, and have to make a film out of it. In many cases the editing bench is actually where a film is made, as some directors just shoot massive amounts of coverage, many takes of scenes at many different angles, with the intent of actually making the film in the editing booth. The building of tension in suspense films, the visceral catharsis in action films, and the perfect timing of comedies are mostly achieved by a film's editor, and there is no room for error. Which is why it is so puzzling that Silver Linings Playbook managed to be one of the nominees with such a glaring editing mistake. At the one hour and forty-nine minute mark, after Cooper and Lawrence have danced their dance, Cooper walks off to speak to his ex-wife Nikki, and director O'Russell cuts back to Lawrence's face for a reaction at the precise moment that Cooper is but one or two steps away from Nikki. The camera lingers on Lawrence's devastated facial expression for a few seconds before cutting back to Cooper, who is even farther away from Nikki, and still walking. Unforgivable. Equally ridiculous is John Williams's annual nomination, this time for Lincoln. The man is a legend, no doubt, but he hasn't had a memorable score in years, and You Tube is full of examples of him cannibalizing himself, like this one. Lincoln is a great film, but the score is at the very bottom of the list of reasons why. Jonny Greenwood's score for The Master became a character in and of itself, and Tom Tykwer's (yes, the director), score for Cloud Atlas is one of the greatest classical scores ever written for a film. And Mark Mothersbaugh's whimsical score for Moonrise Kingdom was also ignored. It's clear the Academy has no idea how to nominate scores either. In both cases, editing and score, it seems they follow the philosophy of the major categories, that says if a film is nominated for best picture it must have the best of every category. And that is rarely the case, especially with more technical awards like these two. It might not be possible to make a great film with a horrible screenplay, but it is possible to have a bad film with a great score.
Despite my grumblings I'll still be there on Sunday February 24th to cheer on my favorites. Much of what's wrong with the Academy has no hope of being remedied. I've been criticizing the Best Score category for almost twenty years now, when Michael Nyman's score for The Piano, which was the voice of Holly Hunter's mute character, was not even nominated. I know it will never change. But for those who truly do hold onto the belief that the Oscars crown only the best year after year, me and people like me will always be a voice for snubbed, and against the unworthy.
As Jean Valjean might say, [insert vibratto] "Look down..."
Best Picture
Argo
Django Unchained
Les Miserables
Life of Pi
Amour
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Not bad, right? There’s Ben Affleck’s inexplicably lauded career renaissance, Academy stalwarts and critical darlings Quentin Tarantino and Ang Lee, the patriotic Lincoln, the film about the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, the Austrian film that won the Palme d’Or at last year’s Cannes Film Festival, and the smash indie hit and socially relevant Beasts Of The Southern Wild. And even if you weren’t head over heels in love with Les Misérables, its inclusion was almost foretold as a matter of destiny. Is there anyone in the world who believed it would not be nominated, even as far back as when director Tom Hooper, fresh from his win for the glorified made-for-cable film King’s Speech, announced it would be his next film, and even as it currently holds a "rotten" designation among top critics at www.rottentomatoes.com? And Silver Linings Playbook, a comedy…A COMEDY?? Wow, critics have always said that comedies get no love from the Academy. Not this year apparently.
But what could possibly be missing? How about The Dark Knight Rises; the conclusion to Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy that pretty much revolutionized the superhero genre? After all The Return Of The King won the award, and I haven't met anyone who believes it's the best of Peter Jackson's trilogy. How about Cloud Atlas; the adaptation of David Mitchell’s novel that was considered unfilmable, that took three directors and almost as many hours to tell, crosscutting six different storylines and spanning hundreds of years? How about Moonrise Kingdom, the best film of Wes Anderson’s career, and the year’s most whimsical? How about End Of Watch, the film that practically revitalized, and legitimized, the found-footage genre? How about Skyfall, the best James Bond film since Goldfinger? And last but certainly not least, how about The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson's thinly veiled examination of Scientology, which actually plays much better as a meditation on religion and identity, and which also gave Joaquin Phoenix the best performance of his career? But alas there can only be ten nominees. Ahem. I said there can only be TEN nominees. When I realized there were only nine, the second time I looked over the category, I made a cursory attempt to understand why; however, the Academy's endless rules and regulations bored me even before they confused me.
Actor in a Leading Role
Bradley Cooper - Silver Linings Playbook
Daniel Day-Lewis - Lincoln
Hugh Jackman - Les Miserables
Joaquin Phoenix - The Master
Denzel Washington - Flight
Best Actor is easily the worst of all the categories, an absolute train wreck of bad choices and omissions. That French screen legend Jean-Louis Trintignant was not nominated for his performance in Amour, one of the most devastatingly honest films I've ever seen, especially when his co-star Emmanuelle Riva was nominated, is a travesty. Michael Haneke's film about the effect a series of strokes has on an elderly couple transcends its subject matter in ways that need to be seen to be believed. Only two people of the five deserve to be there; Joaquin Phoenix and Daniel Day-Lewis, for their complete and utter transformations into character. But Bradley Cooper? Please. Talk about riding a film's coattails. He was good, but mannered, his manic behavior tics refreshing at first, but which become all too quickly consumed by the developing plot. Hugh Jackman's inclusion is also a token gesture. I found his performance serviceable at best, but his repeated inability to translate the big expressions of song into the intimacy of cinema was far too distracting. And don't get me started on that vibratto. And Denzel Washington, one of Flight's two nods, is a complete joke. The usually reliable actor is left stranded by a rote and unimaginative screenplay, unable to rise above the checklist of expectations an alcoholic character carries with him. I would have recognized Richard Gere, as the hedge fund magnate trying to cover up a murder while going down with the economic ship, and who gives one of the best performances of his career, in Arbitrage. And I don't believe it off the table to consider Suraj Sharma from Life Of Pi, who quite effectively managed to hold his own, alone for over an hour, against computer generated animals and effects. And let's also not forget Matthew McConaughey, who basically obliterated any doubt about his talents as an actor with his slow burn-to-bonkers performance as avenging psychopath Killer Joe in William Friedkin's adaptation of Tracy Letts popular stage play of the same name.
Actress in a Leading Role
Jessica Chastain - Zero Dark Thirty
Jennifer Lawrence - Silver Linings Playbook
Emmanuelle Riva - Amour
Quvenzhané Wallis - Beasts of Southern Wild
Naomi Watts - The Impossible
Best Actress is probably the strongest of all the categories, strangely enough, since historically the dearth of good, strong female roles has been the bane of its existence. Of the nominees only one does not belong. Can you guess which one? A recurring motif for me this year is the extent to which Silver Linings Playbook has been nominated. The film is good, but hardly Oscar worthy. Quvenzhané Wallis, however, is a revelation as the six-year-old Hush Puppy in the indie sleeper Beasts Of The Southern Wild, a post-Katrina parable with shades of fantasy that Wallis manages to completely command with her presence. And Jessica Chastain continues her impressive streak as the glue that holds together Mark Boal and Kathryn Bigelow's riveting, compressed-time docudrama of the hunt for Osama Bin Laden, Zero Dark Thirty. And while I might not have nominated Naomi Watts for her role in The Impossible, where she spent most of the time lying on a hospital bed, I can understand her inclusion here; she was absolutely riveting in the aftermath of the tsunami. Ironically, Emanuelle Riva also spent the majority of Amour lying in bed, but her performance, comprised of mostly vacant stares cut right through to the bone. Although I do sort of object to her inclusion at the omission of Trintignant. The only actress criminally left out of this group is Rachel Weisz, whose portrayal of Hester Collyer, in the deeply cinematic adaptation of Terence Rattigan's 1952 play The Deep Blue Sea ranks among the best performances of her career.
In similar fashion to their headlining counterparts, Best Supporting Actor is especially disastrous, while Best Supporting Actress is about as good as it can be. Alan Arkin's nomination for Argo and Robert De Niro's for Silver Linings Playbook is just ridiculous. Arkin is in the film for about ten minutes, has basically one good line, or so the screenwriter thinks, and absolutely no range of emotion to display. And Silver Linings Playbook is just one more stop on De Niro's coast through the latter part of his career. The man hasn't starred in a unequivocally good film in nearly twenty years; odds are he's bound to stumble across a good one sooner or later, there's no sense in rewarding him for it. His performance is hardly in the same league as Travis Bickle and a young Don Corleone, and the nomination is basically a smack in the face to those who were snubbed. If the Academy felt like honoring a veteran of film, they didn't have to look much farther than Christopher Walken in Seven Psychopaths, a razor-sharp comedy that for once, knows how to use the actor, and benefits tremendously from his signature line readings. Also, Michael Pena, who injected David Ayer's found-footage revelation, End Of Watch, with a humility that almost single-handedly elevated the film to an unprecedented emotional level. And Javier Bardem, whose portrayal of Raoul Silva in Skyfall transcended mere scenery chewing, crawling under the audience's skin as effortlessly as he appeared to crawl into the skin of one of the greatest Bond villains in the franchise's history. The other three actors, Philip Seymour Hoffman for The Master, Tommy Lee Jones for Lincoln, and Christopher Waltz for Django Unchained are spot on, as are four of the five actresses nominated in a supporting role, a bunch of woman along with Anne Hathaway, or so it will probably seem come Oscar night (the stars are aligning for her). Jackie Weaver from, yep, Silver Linings Playbook, is the only standout bad choice. Anybody could have played the part of Bradley Cooper's mom and De Niro's wife, and nothing would have been missed. How about in her place Samantha Barks, whose solo moment in Les Misérables as Eponine, singing "On My Own," was far better than anything put forth by any of the far more seasoned actors in that film, except for Hathaway. And how about Ann Dowd, whose portrayal of the fast food manager who gets a prank call that ultimately degenerates into a sexual assault in Compliance is perhaps the main reason that film was able to so deftly transcend its movie-of-the-week trappings, peeling away the layers of humanity to uncover the darkness and insecurity that lives inside us all.
The Best Screenplay awards, for original and adapted, usually mirror the Best Picture category, with a few exceptions of course, some good and some bad this year. I am glad that Wes Anderson got a nod for Moonrise Kingdom, far and away his best film, even though it is but a token, and has no chance of winning. Anderson is a consistenly solid independent filmmaker who has a slew of critically acclaimed films under his belt, yet he cannot seem to rise above the token writing nomination in the Academy's eyes. It's the same place Quentin Tarantino mired through most of his career. Unfortunately Flight, Argo, and Silver Linings Playbook are also nominated. Silver Linings isn't terrible I suppose, but it speaks to the Academy not really knowing what to look for in an Oscar-caliber screenplay. I sense that the film is merely rounding out all of the categories it is nominated in. It isn't going to win anything, but its inclusion over and over again robs much more talented people who much more deserved a recognition, even without an ultimate win. Flight and Argo, on the other hand, are horrendous choices. I've written about the problems of Flight here, and the problems of Argo here. The two films criminally ignored in these categories are Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master for the original category, and Cloud Atlas, David Mitchell's massive tome, called unfilmable by many, for the adapted category.
The Best Director category also usually follows the Best Picture category, the most significant difference these days being which of the five best picture nominees are going to get snubbed, or in this year's case, which of the four. First off, I am shocked that Ben Affleck was snubbed. I had previously thought Argo to be a front-runner, but not giving it the support of a Best Director nomination does not bode well for its chances. Although Affleck's recent DGA win does bode well for it. But I agree with the decision. Argo, just like Affleck's first two films, hints at great things he might be able to achieve sometime in the future, but not until he can shake the image he has of a rube behind the camera. Beasts Of The Southern Wild director Benh Zeitlin did a fantastic job, but his inclusion is a throwaway; he has no chance of winning, and certainly doesn't quite rank with the way snubbed Kathryn Bigelow elevated the docudrama to a level of high art with Zero Dark Thirty, or the way snubbed Paul Thomas Anderson showcased a master class of composition, speaking volumes with every single frame of The Master. Or even the marvelous way Christopher Nolan raised the bar on the superhero genre film with The Dark Knight Rises. But even if I don't agree, I can still understand the omissions of Anderson and Nolan; when there are so many Best Picture nominees there really is no excuse for shopping around, even if Silver Linings Playbook and Lincoln are far from the best examples of their director's work.
That of course wraps up the most popular categories, but there remains one or two still worth mentioning. I would love an opportunity to ask an Academy voter what exactly they look for when choosing a nominee for Best Editing. The editor has one of the hardest jobs of anyone in the film industry. Depending on the skill of the director, an editor might have thousands of miles of film dumped in their laps, and have to make a film out of it. In many cases the editing bench is actually where a film is made, as some directors just shoot massive amounts of coverage, many takes of scenes at many different angles, with the intent of actually making the film in the editing booth. The building of tension in suspense films, the visceral catharsis in action films, and the perfect timing of comedies are mostly achieved by a film's editor, and there is no room for error. Which is why it is so puzzling that Silver Linings Playbook managed to be one of the nominees with such a glaring editing mistake. At the one hour and forty-nine minute mark, after Cooper and Lawrence have danced their dance, Cooper walks off to speak to his ex-wife Nikki, and director O'Russell cuts back to Lawrence's face for a reaction at the precise moment that Cooper is but one or two steps away from Nikki. The camera lingers on Lawrence's devastated facial expression for a few seconds before cutting back to Cooper, who is even farther away from Nikki, and still walking. Unforgivable. Equally ridiculous is John Williams's annual nomination, this time for Lincoln. The man is a legend, no doubt, but he hasn't had a memorable score in years, and You Tube is full of examples of him cannibalizing himself, like this one. Lincoln is a great film, but the score is at the very bottom of the list of reasons why. Jonny Greenwood's score for The Master became a character in and of itself, and Tom Tykwer's (yes, the director), score for Cloud Atlas is one of the greatest classical scores ever written for a film. And Mark Mothersbaugh's whimsical score for Moonrise Kingdom was also ignored. It's clear the Academy has no idea how to nominate scores either. In both cases, editing and score, it seems they follow the philosophy of the major categories, that says if a film is nominated for best picture it must have the best of every category. And that is rarely the case, especially with more technical awards like these two. It might not be possible to make a great film with a horrible screenplay, but it is possible to have a bad film with a great score.
Despite my grumblings I'll still be there on Sunday February 24th to cheer on my favorites. Much of what's wrong with the Academy has no hope of being remedied. I've been criticizing the Best Score category for almost twenty years now, when Michael Nyman's score for The Piano, which was the voice of Holly Hunter's mute character, was not even nominated. I know it will never change. But for those who truly do hold onto the belief that the Oscars crown only the best year after year, me and people like me will always be a voice for snubbed, and against the unworthy.
As Jean Valjean might say, [insert vibratto] "Look down..."
No comments:
Post a Comment