The 85th Academy Awards: Who Will Win & Who Should Win

This has been the most difficult Oscar season in recent memory for predicting who and which films will take home the coveted statues.  Gone are the days when a single film would emerge to sweep every major category, like The Silence Of The Lambs.  It seems these days the Academy has taken to spreading the wealth, as it were, among all the nominees.  Thanks in part to expanding the Best Picture category to include up to ten nominees, pictures are still able to garner many, even double digit nominations, as Lincoln and Life Of Pi have done this year, but don't expect either of them to win half of those.  And this year it seems the nominations have taken a step even farther away from those olden days, by the fact that the current frontrunner for Best Picture does not even have a major acting nomination or directing nomination to support it.  Last year The Artist, quite shockingly won Best Actor, Jean Dujardin stealing it from George Clooney, which made it feel as if the film had a mini-sweep, but by the time the Oscars were broadcast The Artist had become such a juggernaut it was inevitable.  Because of Argo's lack of nominations that cannot happen this year, even with support rising exponentially for the film from just about every major award circle.  That's why I wait until the last possible moment to share my predictions.  Maybe I shouldn't.  Maybe my first impressions way back in January when the nominations were announced shall prove more accurate.  Maybe I get caught up in the groundswell of media noise, and overlook an obvious choice staring me straight in the face, or one of those rare times the Academy bucks convention and actually surprises.  Those are the best moments, and though rare, are certainly moments that I hope for as I set in stone my picks for who will win and who should win at the 85th Academy Awards broadcast on Sunday, February 24th. 

Best Picture

Will Win

Should Win

Believe the hype on this one.  When a director wins his Guild's award and is not even nominated for an Oscar, you can be sure his film is poised to win the big prize on Oscar night.  And that's just one reason why Argo is one of the few sure things that should be on all Oscar pools.  Gosh darn it, the film might not have the best acting of the year, or the best direction of the year, or even the best writing of the year, but according to people IN THE INDUSTRY, it is clearly the best picture of the year.  Uh huh.  My disdain for the film is no secret, but at this point I almost feel it would be breaking tradition if the Academy ever crowned a film Best Picture that I thought deserved it.  No, instead I would give the award to Ang Lee's Life Of Pi.  No other film nominated this year excels on quite as many levels, or production values as Lee's adaptation of Yann Martel's book of the same name that has been called unfilmable.  Technically speaking, Life Of Pi has the best visual effects I have ever seen in any motion picture, and Lee embraces the 3-D technology in a way that nearly erases all doubt about the format.  For most of the film it is just lead actor Suraj Sharma, trapped on a boat with a CGI Bengal tiger, interacting with nothing tangible, and the film doesn't suffer in the slightest because of it.  Ang Lee takes a potentially polarizing idea, the existence and nature of God, and opens it up as a metaphor for the art of storytelling itself, reflecting on the relationship of a creator and his/her creation, which offers a safe haven for those who can't get beyond a literal bias against the film's subject matter.  Life Of Pi is a wonder to behold, and gave me one of the most moving cinematic experiences of my life.

Best Director

Will Win

Should Win



Historically the winner of the Director's Guild award has consistently been a predictor for who will win the Best Director Oscar.  But again, Ben Affleck is not nominated, which pretty much makes Steven Spielberg a lock to pick up his third trophy for his wonderful return to actual filmmaking with Lincoln.  For me, the greatness of Lincoln is inextricably linked with the performance of Daniel Day-Lewis, much more so than the film's direction, which, while flawlessly executed, does not elevate the film beyond its play-like feel.  I could watch Day-Lewis, and listen to him speak screenwriter Tony Kushner's words, all day long, but when it comes to the question of whether Spielberg's direction was the best example of the craft all year long, for me he comes up a tad short.  Ang Lee on the other hand, has throughout his career proven himself adept at genre hopping, and has always been the key factor in the greatness of all his films, even the ones that ultimately are not great themselves.  I cannot imagine any other director accomplishing what Lee does in Life Of Pi.  The film is such a massive production no matter how you look at it, seamlessly mixing animation and live action, using actual 3-D cameras, juggling the weighty, metaphysical issues explored in the novel with a consistent tone of childlike wonder, and timeless storytelling.  Life Of Pi is the best film Ang Lee has ever made, and he is the reason it excels on as many levels as it does.

Best Actor

Will Win

Should Win

I almost don't even care.  Daniel Day-Lewis was absolutely perfect as Lincoln.  The man is one of, if not the greatest actor alive today, and with every performance he gives, he literally transforms himself.  A win this year will give him more Best Actor trophies than any actor in film history, and he deserves it.  To watch Lincoln, is to see a master class in acting unfold before your eyes.  Day-Lewis projects more just sitting quietly in a creaky wooden chair, than most of his peers do in their most emotional scenes.  In real life he is very soft-spoken, shy almost, a vessel waiting to be inhabited by whoever he is playing next.  Expect him to acknowledge fellow nominee Joaquin Phoenix, who delivered, in my eyes, an even better performance as Freddie Quill, in Paul Thomas Anderson's The Master, a film criminally ignored by the Academy.  Quill is the performance of Phoenix's career, and I believe he deserves the Oscar for the simple reason that the character was created out of nothing, rather than an historical figure.  In Freddie Quill, Phoenix has created an iconic character, who ranks up there with the greatest in film history.  With The Master, Paul Thomas Anderson tackled serious issues like the nature of human identitiy, the cult of personality, and questions our potentially tenuous relationship to religion.  But he couldn't have done it without Phoenix, and his performance undergoes such an incredible range of emotion, and his investment is so deep inside Quill I have no idea how he could ever go back to just being Joaquin Phoenix again.

Best Actress

Will Win

Should Win



I can't do it.  I cannot type the words "Jennifer" and "Lawrence" and actually believe that the Academy will award her with the Best Actress trophy over everyone else that is nominated.  She seems to be the frontrunner, and for the life of me I cannot understand why.  I hope it is possible for the Academy to come to their senses and cast their votes for someone who truly deserves to win based on their performance.  That's why I think when it comes down to the wire, they will acknowledge Emmanuelle Riva's heartwrenching performance in Michael Haneke's Best Foreign Film favorite Amour, who plays a victim of several strokes, which leaves her basically catatonic, requiring around-the-clock care by her husband, a criminally ignored Jean-Louis Trintignant.  Both of them are living cinematic legends, albeit French, but if it's anything last year's Oscars showed, Hollywood has no fear of the French.  Riva is 85, quite interestingly will turn 86 on Oscar Sunday, and has starred previously in one of the most influential films ever made, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima, Mon Amour.  I suspect this will be too much for the Academy to overlook, even with their zeal to prematurely reward Lawrence.  But while Riva was certainly excellent and unforgettable in Amour, she did spend half the film in bed, much like Naomi Watts in The Impossible.  I would give the Oscar to Jessica Chastain, for the effortless way she became the glue that held together Kathryn Bigelow's fantastic docu-drama Zero Dark Thirty.  Spanning over ten years time, Chastain's was the only consistent face throughout, humanizing the pursuit of Osama Bin Laden without sentimentalizing it.  Without her strong performance the film could have easily appeared episodic.

Best Supporting Actor

Will Win

Should Win

Thirty-one years ago Robert De Niro won an Oscar for his performance in Raging Bull.  Thirty-six years ago Robert De Niro lost the Oscar for his performance in Taxi Driver.  Let me be the first person to say that Pat Solitano Sr., the father of Bradley Cooper's bi-polar character in Silver Linings Playbook, is nowhere near the same league as those former roles.  In fact, "raging bull" might be put to better use in describing De Niro's cinematic output over the last fifteen years, and "taxi driver" would be what any actor consistently putting out such dreck should be doing right now.  But not De Niro.  He's been campaigning hard for this win, dipping his hands in cement and crying in front of Katie Couric, all in aid of winning an award for a lesser version of the same stuff he's been doing in the Meet The Parents films.  If the Academy wants to acknowledge a cinematic legend they are in the wrong category.  Instead, the Oscar should go to Phillip Seymour Hoffman, for his portrayal of the Master in The Master.  Christoph Waltz and Tommy Lee Jones were both terrific in their respective roles, but Hoffman's presence was felt throughout Paul Thomas Anderson's film, as a cult leader whose phoniness peeks through his facade of moral and intellectual superiority, whenever he feels threatened. He played the perfect foil for Joaquin Phoenix's Freddie Quill.

Best Supporting Actress

Will Win

Should Win

Anne Hathaway sang the best song in Les Miserables, played a character who had to give up her child, and then died.  If you think she isn't going to win then you should be locked in a room with Helen Hunt while she speaks to you in her Boston accent.

Best Animated Film

Will Win

Should Win

There are really only two contestants in this race, Pixar's Brave and Disney's Wreck-It Ralph.  For the first time in the history of Pixar Animation Studios they have been bested.  Brave is not a bad film, but Wreck-It Ralph is a great one.  Through its endlessly inventive story and seamless integration of plot and character development, Wreck-It Ralph hearkens back to a Disney when screenplays actually mattered to them.  For all its posturing Brave failed in the very same places where Ralph excelled.  Although maybe Pixar will get the last laugh after all, since John Lasseter was an executive producer on Wreck-It Ralph.

Best Original Screenplay

Will Win

Should Win

If everyone is to get a prize, that leaves the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Quentin Tarantino.  When I think of his best films, the screenplay never jumps out as the most important reason.  To him screenplays are all dialogue, and blueprints for elaborate set pieces which he usually intends to draw out for as long as possible.  Django Unchained is no different, except perhaps that its dialogue is not quite as great as peak Tarantino; most of the greatness of its lines are in how Christoph Waltz and the other actors deliver them.  Historically the Best Original Screenplay award goes to the fringe film that is critically acclaimed, but which is not really Best Picture material.  Tarantino won this award for Pulp Fiction previously.  Wes Anderson is another director on the fringe of Hollywood, who gets tons of respect that never translates into Oscars.  Normally I would have jumped at the chance to give the award to his Moonrise Kingdom, the best film of his career, but this year Michael Haneke's Amour is just a whole lot better.  Haneke has made a career out of toying with his audience, and although Amour is easily his most accessible film, stopping the story to watch Jean-Louis Trintignant chase a pigeon around his apartment for about ten minutes, I would say, is still the sign of a film very much preoccupied with challenging conventions.  Amour is a perfect film, and every aspect of it contributes to its greatness.  But before there was anything else, there was the screenplay.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Will Win

Should Win

Quite simply, and ridiculously if you think about it, should Argo not win either Best Editing or Best Adapted Screenplay then Best Picture will remain its only award.  Some frontrunner.  So it is based on that alone, that I believe Argo will take Best Adapted Screenplay.  Does it deserve the award?  By no stretch of the imagination.  It was adapted from a newspaper article, which is pretty much one step above being adapted from an idea.  Without question the Oscar should go to Lincoln.  Adapted from a non-fiction book, Tony Kushner's screenplay is a thing of wonder, bursting with very literate nineteenth-century dialogue that crackles with poetry and intensity, sometimes with both in the same line.  And the way its crystal clear focus on the thirteenth amendment is so perfectly used to inform and develop Lincoln's character could be dissected and studied over the course of an entire semester of a university level screenwriting class.  Day-Lewis and Kushner are the real reasons for Lincoln's greatness.

The rest of the categories:

BEST FOREIGN FILM:

Will win: Amour

Should win: Amour

BEST COSTUME DESIGN:

Will win: Anna Karenina

Should win: Anna Karenina

BEST ORIGINAL SONG:

Will win: Skyfall

Should win: Skyfall

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE:

Will win: Life Of Pi

Should win: Life Of Pi

BEST DOCUMENTARY:

Will win: Searching For Sugar Man

Should win: I have not seen enough of the nominees

BEST DOCUMENTARY (SHORT):

Will win: Open Heart

Should win: I have not seen any of the nominees

BEST MAKEUP & HAIRSTYLING:

Will win: The Hobbit

Should win: The Hobbit

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN:

Will win: Les Miserables

Should win: Lincoln

BEST FILM EDITING:

Will win: Argo

Should win: Zero Dark Thirty

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY:

Will win: Life Of Pi

Should win: Life Of Pi

BEST SOUND EDITING:

Will win: Zero Dark Thirty

Should win: Zero Dark Thirty

BEST SOUND MIXING:

Will win: Les Miserables

Should win: Skyfall

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS:

Will win: Life Of Pi

Should win: Life Of Pi

BEST SHORT FILM (ANIMATED):

Will win: "Paperman"

Should win: "Fresh Guacamole"

BEST SHORT FILM (LIVE ACTION):

Will win: "Curfew"

Should win: I have not seen any of the nominees

Les Oscars Misérables



 

 

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 85^th 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..."

Argo F#ck Yourself: Why Ben Affleck's Film Needs To Stop Winning Awards

Somebody had to say it. 

Last week Argo won awards for best picture and best director from BAFTA, the British equivalent of the Oscars, bringing its haul so far this awards season to quite an impressive level.  Affleck also recently snagged the coveted DGA director's award, a usual predictor for who will win the Oscar.  Except in this case Affleck was not even nominated for the Oscar.  Were they wrong?  Was Affleck unfairly snubbed?  Not in the least.  Be warned that what follows contains spoilers, or as I prefer to call them, time-saving tips.  But with the Oscars only a week away, if you haven't seen Argo yet, you probably aren't going to.  And if you have, here is why it should not be your favorite film of the year:

Anyone who has seen Ben Affleck's inexplicably lauded third attempt behind the director's chair is quite familiar with the title of this article.  For those who haven't it is a line uttered by Alan Arkin, who plays the producer of a nonexistent film the CIA is using as a cover to extricate six diplomats stranded in Tehran, Iran, after the United States Embassy was seized by students and militants in support of the Iranian revolution in 1979.  Argo is the name of that non-existent film, and during a fundraising party Arkin is repeatedly pressured to reveal the meaning behind the title, and in a final exhaustive display he barks "Arrr go f#ck yourself" at the pesky reporter.  It's not terribly funny, but it produces the expected chuckle from audiences.  Unfortunately the line is repeated throughout the film, at least five more times, in a sad attempt to squeeze every last guffaw possible from an audience already bombarded with forced, manufactured drama; but more on that later.  There is a rule in comedy that says a line should never hang on longer than necessary, that it should never be overused.  Well Argo is not even a comedy.  And I bring this up as one of many examples throughout the film that betray its screenplay as stale, unimaginative writing.  Smart audiences will see right through the construct of this film, and heed the warnings that follow, to just stay home and read the Wikipedia article on the real life "Canadian Caper" that this film is based on; it's much more exciting.

Argo is a classic example of missed opportunities, combined with a tendency to take its audience for granted.  I believe Ben Affleck is genuine in his desire to make good films.  His humility at the Golden Globes this year, when he forgot to mention producers George Clooney and Grant Heslov, and dispatched his wife Jennifer Garner to mention them, was captured in a welcome and refreshing candid cutaway to his face, where he could be seen whispering their names under his breath, his eyes big and fixed on Garner.  For my money his first two films, Gone Baby Gone and The Town were not very good but they did hint at a flair for direction, with the latter being a slight improvement over the former.  No doubt when he set his sights on Argo, he saw it as his chance for Oscar glory, or at least the peniultimate step.  A recently declassified tale that touches on current hot-button issues such as Middle Eastern tension, United States foreign policy, terrorism, and U.S.-Iran relations, all wrapped up in a cleverly meta film-within-a-film conceit does seem a perfect recipe for award recognition, a self-reflexive social studies lesson from Hollywood's new golden boy.  It must have sounded perfect to him.  The only problem, however, was that the real life rescue took place largely without a hitch.  That means that dramatic moments would have to be created -- you know -- what Hollywood is supposed to do, but also be seamless and believable within the context of the situation.  Yes, the success of this film would rightly be determined by the screenplay; it needed to be airtight and spark with ingenuity.  Which is all the more saddening when you discover it is anything but, and a near-complete misfire.

There are two ways this film could have been approached.  The first could have been from the intimate perspective of the six diplomats.  See, after they had escaped the embassy they sought sanctuary in the home of the Canadian ambassador, and held-up there for months while unbeknownst to them thousands of miles away exfiltration expert Tony Mendez (Affleck) was concocting this far-fetched scheme to rescue them.  The ambassador had an Iranian housekeeper, whose allegiance the film actually hinted at building into an issue.  Six people are stuck in a house inside a hostile foreign country, as the hostility gradually infiltrates, creeping and insidious, and each diplomat begins to lose faith and trust in each other, wondering who will betray their identity, or who will be the first to crack under pressure.  Alfred Hitchcock would have directed the heck out of this conceit, him being a master of formalism, a master of tension in the most intimate places.  My mind reels at the possibilities.  Not that I expected Affleck to deliver anything close to the master's vision, but it does seem like an approach that should have been welcome to the table.

The other way would be to go completely over-the-top, with an explosive, action-packed popcorn flick, which presents its own challenges, and which would need to have a full commitment from all involved to push every last dramatic envelope.  Not surprisingly, Affleck opts for a strange, status quo mish-mash of both approaches, and winds up with a big film not about very big things, but with grand strokes of ambition and desperation that only paves the way for senselessness. 

The first hour suffers from an endless set-up.  A great device used by storytellers, especially screenwriters, is "in medias res," which is Latin for "in the middle of things," and which goes a long way towards involving the audience.  Every scene, and every plot point, has a beginning, a middle, and an end, even if all three are not expressly detailed.  The purpose of this is that if an audience is introduced in the midst of an already unfolding chain of events they will be more entertained, or engrossed, because at the same time they are trying to figure out what is coming, they are also trying to figure out what has come before, like a puzzle, where the story itself is in certain respects an equal to the intellect trying to decipher it.  Restlessness ensues when an audience feels it is smarter than the film, and constantly beginning scenes at, or even before their beginning, fans these flames.  In Tehran Affleck shows the entire storm on the embassy.  In the United States, Affleck shows Mendez attending some state department meetings, with close-ups of his face as the plan gestates, and then a few failed attempts at convincing his colleagues that the plan will work.  That is followed by a trip to Hollywood, where an entire fake film production is undertaken in a condensed fifteen minute segment that feels removed from the rest of the film.  Certainly audiences have no idea what goes into staging the production of a major motion picture, and as a side note, Argo commits the usual trespass of condescension in films like this, showing whatever it wants to, appealing to its own authority in the matter.  Normally this kind of thing occurs in a film that actually shows a film crew filming something, where the camera suddenly cuts away, becoming three or four different cameras, miraculously capturing the sound of six different people speaking.  That's not how it works.  And even if the scenes Argo chooses to show comprise the extent of what was necessary, it's all just a means to an end.  Obviously the film gets greenlit, and by this point I just wished they'd get to it already.  But Alan Arkin needs to justify his Best Supporting Actor nomination by chewing up some scenery, and "Arrr go f#ck yourself" needs to be introduced.  And the film needs to be opened up as much as possible to give the allure of covering a lot of ground, which Affleck covers without throwing up a single obstacle.

Once Mendez arrives in Tehran things start to heat up, but here is where screenwriter Chris Terrio goes to the other extreme, creating scenes of laughable drama, which Affleck directs with a completely straight face.  First Mendez must overcome doubts from the people he is trying to rescue.  It matters not to Affleck and Terrio that they just spun these wheels inside a government building about twenty minutes earlier; it's clear they believe that changing up the rhetoric is all that is necessary, from "this is the only option," to "trust me, I'm a human being with a family."  Hmmm, is there a chance the diplomats decide not to go through with the rescue?  Nope.  So, let's get on with it.  After convincing them he is the man for the job, much is built up around a "location scout" that will take place with Iranian government officials, which is just an excuse to get the "film crew" out in the open so that pictures can be taken of them, because, as Affleck continues to remind the audience throughout the film, the hostiles in the embassy are frantically taping together shredded images of diplomats for absolutely no discernable reason.  The location scout of course doesn't go off without a hitch, because of a photograph that one of them takes of a merchant in the town bazaar, causing a huge scene where the photographer is accused of taking it without permission.  Cut to the Canadian ambassador asking Mendez how they did?  Mendez just shakes his head.  And so should we.

About forty minutes from the end of this film, the actual rescue attempt gets underway.  The evening before, the U.S. government pulls the plug on the whole thing out of fear that if found out it would ruin their image.  Of course nobody thought of this image problem during the months of planning.  Mendez is crushed.  He returns to his hotel and smokes and drinks himself into a stupor until he realizes that this is something he must go through with, because gosh darnit, we're heading into the film's third act.  He calls his buddy in the government and tells him he is doing it anyway, forgetting of course that he does not even have the return plane tickets in his possession, prompting a far-fetched scene at the airport ticket counter where the registration agent tells Mendez that his tickets are not in the system, crosscut with Bryan Cranston back home screaming at people to "get Jimmy Carter on the phone," and then back to the airport where Mendez tells the agent to "check it again," because five seconds more is all that is needed when the United States government calls you up the night before and refuses to do something.  This did not happen in real life.  And neither did the film's final set piece, its most grevious abuse of dramatic license, where Iranian police figure the whole thing out (those pesky taped together photos again) and chase the plane down the runway, guns drawn while screaming over the air resistance, because you know, why bother telephoning the air traffic tower?  Argo f#ck yourself" indeed.

Perhaps you are reading this and feeling that I am being nitpicky, that all Hollywood films take dramatic license, and invent situations that never occured when dramatizing true events.  That is certainly true.  But regardless of whether the things that happen in Argo are true to real life or not, they still deserve a degree of credibility within the context of the story being told.  Affleck and Terrio had their work cut out for them, as Argo surely required some embellishment; but most of the time films adapted or inspired from true events actually have an event to begin with.  Below are two of the final paragraphs from the Wikipedia article about the "Canadian Caper" on which this film is based:

A mistake was made in dating the visas. Whoever prepared them was unaware that the Iranian year begins in late March. One of the Canadian embassy officers spotted the mistake while checking the documents. Fortunate to the inclusion of extra passports, Mendez was able to insert new visa stamps with dates based on the Iranian calendar.

As the weeks passed, the Americans read and played games, mainly cards and Scrabble, while Taylor made efforts to fly out non-essential personnel. Taylor sent others on fake errands to establish erratic patterns and to case airport procedures. Tension rose as suspicious telephone calls and other activity indicated that their concealment may have been discovered.

The first paragraph is the only instance of drama the real life caper afforded, and it is better than anything concocted by Affleck and Terrio.  But it requires some degree of intelligence to flesh out, on the part of the writer and director, and audience.  The second paragraph also hints at some dramatic avenues the filmmakers could have explored, with the diplomats leaving the house without the protection of Mendez, but it mostly speaks to what actually went on among the diplomats while waiting to be rescued.  They read books and played games.

The kernel of truth in this whole affair can be easily reduced to the time-tested stranger in a strange land set-up.  From there, a gripping, emotionally riveting film could have been constructed.  Argo did not need such huge, overreaching flourishes, and Affleck did not need to chase the story down the rabbit hole.  The film did not need to be larger than life.  Affleck could have played the Canadian ambassador, or the director of the embasy, and the film never had to leave Tehran.  Mendez could have arrived with his grand plan, but because there would have been so much time spent developing the characters and situations of the diplomats, the doubts at the efficiency of the rescue plan would have resonated more.  Affleck could have mined some real truths, building tension without betraying the story.  Instead everyone involved colluded to take a real life footnote in history and make it as fake as possible.  This fact is not in-and-of-itself enough to impeach Argo; its true offense is how obvious it is about it.  Their compromise, for the sake of pandering to the box office, and to The Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, is not one that anyone should be willing to accept.  Their intuition was right to not include Affleck among the honored Best Director nominees.  But this omission seems to be currently swept up in a backlash, where awards are piling up left and right in its favor.  It's a fact which leads me to believe either nobody is getting it, or that we are just living in a world with much lower cinematic expectations than I thought.

In that case, Argo f#ck ourselves.