The 54th Academy Awards

The only Oscars ceremony that had a specific effect on my life happened thirty years ago, when I was six years old. It was the 54th Academy Awards, and On Golden Pond was our local hero, having mostly been filmed about ten miles away from my house. Everybody I knew seemed to have at least a little connection to it somehow, or claimed to. At six years old, I didn't really understand what any of it meant, but I knew how much the adults seemed to care, and how special the moment seemed to them. The movie immediately became an indelible part of my life.

If that had been it, I'd look back on the 1982 Oscar ceremony with the sort of gauzy nostalgia that fills the movie. But Ernest Thompson won an Oscar that night for adapting his play into a screenplay, and I've known Ernest now for an amount of years neither of us will admit to, and worked with him on numerous local projects. We have really different aesthetics, and I love that — he's been at times the ideal teacher, editor, and director for me because he would never approach a story the way I do, and vice versa. He's intimidatingly smart and articulate, and so better than anybody I've ever met at steering me away from self-indulgent flourishes. (Ernest's commentary track on the anniversary edition DVD of On Golden Pond is a gem, and gives a good sense of his tell-it-like-it-is personality.)

Golden Pond is as close to a part of my DNA as a movie can be, and it's a film that is sacred to folks around here, because Squam Lake still looks quite a bit like it did in the movie, and plenty of people remember seeing Henry Fonda, Jane Fonda, Katharine Hepburn, and Dabney Coleman around town.

I hadn't paid much attention to what the other nominees were that year until recently. If I remembered anything, it was that Chariots of Fire won for Best Picture and Ernest beat Harold Pinter for Best Adapted Screenplay (Pinter's adaptation of The French Lieutenant's Woman verges on genius, finding cinematic/dramatic ways to replicate the novel's very novelistic complexities of narrative and structure, making an "unfilmable book" into a generally interesting film. I'm glad Ernest won, though.) But though 1981 was hardly an annus miribilis for cinema, there was some interesting work released that year. Among the movies not getting major notice from the Academy, there was Fassbinder's Lola and Lili Marleen; Blow Out; Coup de Torchon; Escape from New York; The Road Warrior; Mommie Dearest; Ms. 45; My Dinner with Andr矇; Pennies from Heaven; Polyester; Scanners; Thief; Time Bandits; and a bunch of horror movies: American Werewolf in London, The Evil Dead, Friday the 13th pt. 2, Halloween 2, The Howling, Wolfen, etc. (It was a good year for werewolves and slashers.)

The nominees for Best Picture were a fairly diverse lot: On Golden Pond, Chariots of Fire, Atlantic City, Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Reds. People are saying this year is a particularly nostalgic one for the Academy, but look at that list — the only movie on there that takes place in the present in Golden Pond!* That tends to be how the Best Picture nominees go. It's not easy to find a set of Best Picture nominees where the majority are concerned with present-day realism. (I'm not saying there should be. But to be surprised that the Oscars favor nostalgic or historical films is to be surprised that the Oscars are the Oscars.)

I have great love for the great mess that is Reds, but it wasn't until I looked at the various Oscar nominees and winners that I realized it came out in the same year as Ragtime, another politically-charged film about the early 20th century. While Maureen Stapleton won the Best Supporting Actress Oscar for playing Emma Goldman in Reds, the character of Emma Goldman was cut out of the film of Ragtime (though a scene with her is available as an extra feature on the DVD). I hope in the coming weeks to revisit both films and write about them a bit here.

For now, though, I just wanted to note that 30 years have passed since On Golden Pond was at the top of the world. For me, that fact alone presents plenty to get nostalgic about.


*Update: As Patrick Murtha points out in the comments, my memory of Atlantic City (which I haven't seen in at least a decade) is faulty. Though I remember it as set in the past, it's set in my past, not the movie's past. So I was wrong. Golden Pond and Atlantic City are both set in their own present, but both are certainly concerned with the past and nostalgia, so my larger point remains.

The Artist

I went to see The Artist yesterday, and since a friend this morning asked me some questions about it, I thought I'd take a moment here to record a few thoughts, and, more importantly, link to people who have more interesting things to say about it than I do.

It's a nice little movie.

I really have trouble coming up with more than that. Its clear frontrunner status in many categories going into the Oscars is a bit baffling, but not inexplicable. I can think of three major reasons it's such awards bait, and I'm sure there are more: 1.) it's different enough from other movies released last year to stand out from the crowd, but not different enough to alienate any crowd; 2.) if you know things about movies and you like movies, it makes you feel good for being you; 3.) Harvey Weinstein is distributing it, and Harvey Weinstein is one of the most successful people in the history of the motion picture industry at getting awards attention for his movies.

Also, it's a hard movie to hate. You could, like me, find it a pleasant enough entertainment that isn't a lot more, but it's perfectly inoffensive. Certainly, the hype and awards are annoying, especially if you step back and realize what a good year 2011 was for interesting films, but the hype and awards aren't the movie's fault. And there are good things in The Artist that can get obscured by frustration with the huge acclaim.

(What would I say are the best of the year? you ask. I haven't seen tons of 2011 films, so I wouldn't make an absolute Top 10 list, but here are 2011 features I got more from than The Artist, in alphabetical order:  Albert Nobbs; Attack the Block; Beginners; A Dangerous Method; Incendies; In Darkness; Rise of the Planet of the Apes; Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy; The Tree of Life; We Need to Talk About Kevin; Weekend -- and I'm probably forgetting a few. Oh, Hugo, which I actually wasn't very enthusiastic about, but definitely enjoyed more than The Artist. And Le Havre, which, again, I had problems with, but think is certainly more substantial than The Artist in lots of different ways.)

Ultimately, I'm with Jon at Films Worth Watching, who said, "its uniqueness, as I see it, is the fact that it’s a silent film in a non-silent era." His entire post is well worth reading. (And a commenter notes that the movie's charms are more apparent on a second viewing. Perhaps.)

In contrast to that negative opinion, there is the thoughtful, extremely positive view of the film offered by James Clark at Wonders in the Dark.

Richard Brody at The New Yorker has an interesting post on the Oscar contenders, with some insightful comments on The Artist.

Glenn Kenny and Glenn Whipp have a pro-and-con discussion of the movie at MSN.

Chuck Tryon's post at The Chutry Experiment on "Navigating Nostalgia" has some useful thoughts when considering why it is that Oscar voters so love movies like The Artist and Hugo.

Finally, don't forget that Oscar voters are primarily old, white, and male.

A Few Oscar Thoughts

Posting is likely to continue to be sparse-to-nonexistent here for at least another week, but that really shouldn't cause you any sadness, because you've got a whole big series of tubes out there to explore.  You'll survive without me for a little while longer, I'm sure.  I have faith in you, dear reader.

One of the things you should certainly read is the great Steve Shaviro's marvelous post about Kathryn Bigelow, who last night became, as y'all know by now, the first woman ever to win a Best Director Oscar.  I'm all for it, even if the whole situation, like The Hurt Locker itself, is complex in its meanings and implications.

The Oscar show itself was pretty awful, but that's part of the fun of watching.  Every year, we get to say, "Wow, it's even worse than last year!"  A decade or two from now, I expect it all to be broadcast via the future equivalent of the Wii and to require all presenters to make fart jokes.

I don't expect the Academy voters to nominate many of the films I tend to most like, nor do I expect the stuff I like among nominations to win much, so this year surprised me overall.  The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, and A Serious Man were all Best Picture nominees and all movies I like and respect quite a bit.  Were I an Academy member, I would have had trouble voting, because ranking those three films against each other seems pointless to me -- they're very different in their accomplishments.  I probably would have put The Hurt Locker as #1, simply because Tarrantino and the Coen Brothers have had moments of Oscar glory themselves, and it's nice to spread the wealth.

The only winners that deeply bothered me were Avatar for Cinematography and The Hurt Locker for Best Original Screenplay.  (I haven't seen enough of the Adapted Screenplay nominees yet to feel qualified to judge the results, though I bet once I've seen them all, I'll think In the Loop deserved it.  But we'll see.)  The Cinematography award for Avatar annoys the grumpy old man in me who thinks that when even a supporter admits that 70% of what is on screen was not the cinematographer's doing, then we're not talking about cinematography when we talk about what's beautiful and striking in that movie.  But I know that's just me clinging desperately to the idea that cinematography is about how the frame ends up looking, and is, ultimately, about light through a lens.  Oh well.  Get off my lawn!

Adapted Screenplay bothers me more, not because I hate The Hurt Locker (obviously), but because I see its script as good and solid, even worthy of nomination, but it's not a demonstration of truly exemplary or innovative writing -- certainly not when it's in a category that includes at least a few scripts that are exemplary and even innovative.  What was truly great about The Hurt Locker didn't have as much to do with its script as with its filming, performances, and editing.  So I'm perplexed.  It feels like the voters who chose Mark Boal's script did so because they really liked the movie overall, rather than because of the words on the page.  In comparison to something like Inglourious Basterds, where the writing is very much a central part of what makes the film successful, I just don't see what the voters saw.

I've now written more than I intended to about all this, so it's time for me to head off and work on the 1,000 things I need to get done...

Manohla Dargis on Women in Hollywood

Manohla Dargis may be my favorite mainstream film reviewer -- it's not just that she's got great perception of cinema as an artform of its own (too many reviewers treat movies like they're illustrated novels), but she's also an extraordinarily talented writer, one of the few film reviewers I'm happy to read simply for her sense of language and prose structure within the newspaper review form. Plenty of writers' expressive abilities have been deadened by the demands of writing multiple 800-1000-word reviews week after week, but Dargis still turns in more energetic and thoughtful reviews than not, and it's an impressive feat.

In a recent issue of the Times, Dargis wrote an essay about women in Hollywood. The commercial American film industry remains an astoundingly sexist enterprise, and the sexism is systemic, as Dargis shows. Even if you think you know how bad the situation is, the statistics are breathtaking:

Only a handful of female directors picked up their paychecks from one of the six major Hollywood studios and their remaining divisions this year: 20th Century Fox had “Jennifer’s Body” (Karyn Kusama) and “Alvin and the Chipmunks: The Squeakquel” (Betty Thomas), while Fox Searchlight had “Amelia” (Mira Nair), “Post Grad” (Vicky Jenson) and “Whip It” (Drew Barrymore). Anne Fletcher directed “The Proposal” for Disney, while the studio’s once-lustrous division, Miramax Films, continued on its death march without any help from female directors. Ms. Ephron’s “Julie & Julia” was released by Sony Pictures while the art-house division Sony Pictures Classics released “An Education” (Ms. Scherfig), “Coco Before Chanel” (Anne Fontaine) and “Sugar” (Anna Boden, directing with Ryan Fleck). Universal Pictures has Nancy Meyers’s “It’s Complicated”; its specialty unit Focus Features has no female directors.

Paramount Pictures and Warner Brothers Pictures, meanwhile, did not release a single film directed by a woman. Not one.

The Jezebel website has now published an interesting interview with Dargis about the essay and about the relationship between women and Hollywood. Her replies to the questions are sharp, succinct, and peppered with the wonderful vernacular vocabulary the Times never lets her use...

The only thing Hollywood is interested in money, and after that prestige. That's why they'll be interested in something like [Kathryn Bigelow's] The Hurt Locker. She's done so well critically that she can't be ignored.

Let's acknowledge that the Oscars are bullshit and we hate them. But they are important commercially... I've learned to never underestimate the academy's bad taste. Crash as best picture? What the fuck.

Some Harmless Fun

It's the time of year for me to be utterly torn -- torn by my knowledge that the Oscars are a ridiculous ritual and by my fascination with them. They are, as somebody (I don't remember who) once said, the Superbowl for gay people, and I have often dreamed of tailgating the ceremony whilst wearing my pink feather boa. (Or maybe Tayari Jones's coat. Except I think I somehow look like Rudy Giuliani in that picture.) And yet I also agree with a lot of what A.O. Scott said about them: "The Oscars themselves may be harmless fun, but the idea that they matter is as dangerous as it is ridiculous."

So I'm going to give up on matter for the moment, and instead indulge in harmless fun by offering unsolicited and utterly useless opinions on films I have seen and not seen. (Do note, though, that last year I lost on Oscar betting to Ms. McCarron.)

Here we go, with the help of the official list:

Actor: Consensus seems to be that Daniel Day-Lewis will win, and that seems deserved to me. Some people have carped that his acting was showy or external or something like that, but such criticisms seem to me to come from a limited view of what acting is and can be, the sort of view that privileges the most Method of Method Acting (bleccch) over everything else. Day-Lewis's performance made me think of Meyerhold's biomechanics and of some of Grotowski's ideas about acting. My other favorite male performance of the year was not nominated: Tony Leung Chiu Wai in Lust, Caution, a performance that is brilliant in exactly the opposite way that Day-Lewis's is: its power comes from Leung's restraint, from how much he is able to convey with a glance, from how masterfully he uses stillness and silence, and how stunning it is when he breaks the stillness and silence. I thought the movie itself fell flat, but his performance was entrancing.

Supporting Actor: I'm rooting for Hal Holbrook or Casey Affleck here. I didn't much like Into the Wild, but Holbrook did a lot with the little he was given. It's strange that Casey Affleck, who is pretty much the protagonist of Jesse James, was put forth in the supporting category, but that's probably how they thought he had the best shot to be noticed, given the number of attention-getting lead roles there were this year. He deserves the award for making an otherwise vapid movie at least somewhat interesting and for his flawlessly focused performance.

Actress: Of these films, I've only seen Away from Her, and Julie Christie, was, indeed, marvelous in a role that could easily have been sentimental. That it was not is a testament to Christie's performance, as well as the writing and editing of the film.

Supporting Actress: I want Cate Blanchett to win just because I'm annoyed that my favorite film of the year, I'm Not There, didn't get more nominations. Stupid Academy people! Bah!

Animated Feature: I only saw Persepolis, but I liked it quite a bit -- the animation was engaging from beginning to end, and the wonder of it, I thought, was that it made every frame of the film feel like a blank page, a place where any sort of movement might happen. That's the virtue of animation in general, but I've rarely encountered animated films that so vividly exploit this virtue.

Art Direction: Hmmm. I find this category completely uninspiring. I want to be excited at the idea of Sweeney Todd winning (will it? I don't know), but in retrospect, there's something too monotone to that movie's art direction for my taste -- I wanted it to be somehow both livelier and grittier. Or maybe I just think Across the Universe deserved to be here and I'm bitter. Yes, that's probably it. Stupid Academy people! Bah!

Cinematography: In some way or another, all of these films deserve to win (well, I haven't seen Atonement yet, but I'm feeling generous). My last choice would probably be Jesse James, because it felt too pleased with its own cinematography to me, and self-satisfaction annoys me. Which could just be a product of my own self-satisfaction. Still, it was a better movie visually than most of what was out there. I liked other aspects of No Country for Old Men better than the cinematography, but it was certainly excellent. There Will Be Blood would probably be my second choice in this category, because there was something organic and messy about the photography and lighting, and in the couple of moments when I wasn't thinking about how much I liked Daniel Day-Lewis's performance, I was thinking about the cinematography. But my choice for winner would be Diving Bell and the Butterfly, because I think cinematography is the film's greatest strength. There was a lot I didn't like about the movie after the first half hour, but cinematographically it's a masterpiece. The most deserving movie I know of for this category, though, isn't here: Zodiac. (See this American Cinematographer article for an explanation of some of what went into filming Zodiac.)

Costume Design: Across the Universe! Yay! If anything else wins, I will go to Fifth Avenue and burn all my boas in the street!

Directing: No Country stands out for me here, more so than in any other category, really. There Will Be Blood is just too much of a mess in its second half for me to find it deserving of this award, even though I generally found the mess fascinating. Anderson's great movie is still to come. No Country displayed some gutsy directorial choices, and felt to me like a summation and apotheosis of so many of the Coens's obsessions and proclivities that it stands out here for me.

Documentaries: I didn't see any of the nominated documentary features or shorts. I didn't get excited by documentaries in 2007 because, whether justifiably or not, I felt that most were the sorts of things you only needed to read a summary of and look at the poster for to know most of what you'd get from them. I'm prejudiced against documentaries in general, though, because for most subjects, I'd rather just read a book.

Editing: I kind of want Bourne Ultimatum to win here, even though it was my least favorite of the Bourne movies -- the editing kept the movie moving at such a pace that it was occasionally difficult to realize how limp the thing was at its core, and this, in its own weird way, is a triumph. No Country may deserve the award, too, because the Coens (pseudonymously) did their own editing; in some ways, though, I think of it as being an extension of their directing, which I've already said is the award I think they most deserve. The editing category is another one where I miss the presence of Zodiac -- I don't know if it's the movie I would have chosen for a winner, but it certainly belongs in this company.

Foreign Language Film: The absence of Four Months, Three Weeks, and Two Days here is so glaring that I have trouble taking this category seriously, which is a shame, because last year I thought the Foreign Language category was the strongest one in the lineup.

Makeup and Music: Not categories I have any opinion about, amazingly enough. Except I think there should be more music about makeup.

Best Picture: I'm Not There. And it's not.

Short Films: I have a weird prejudice against short films, a complete resistance to them.

Sound Editing: No Country is a good choice here, because it does what few American films do: eschews music. Well-placed music can be wonderful in a movie, of course, but I do wish American movies weren't so beholden to it. That No Country created as powerful an atmosphere and mood as it did is in no small part the result of the sound editing, and so it deserves, methinks, notice.

Sound Mixing: I am generally unqualified to judge all of the categories for the Oscar, but in this one I am particularly unqualified, knowing nothing whatsoever about sound mixing. If you're in desperate need of my opinion here (in which case you are desperate in ways I don't even want to imagine), then here it is: Sound mixing? I am in favor of it.

Visual Effects: Didn't see the films.

Writing (Adapted Screenplay): I think Away from Her deserves this one, though No Country will probably win. There were a number of things that made Away from Her as effective as it was, but the element that most impressed me was the writing -- Sarah Polley's script (PDF), based on Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" is masterfully understated -- what could have easily been a disease-of-the-week weepie became so much more through the intelligent and restrained construction of scenes.

Writing (Original Screenplay): This is a strange collection, and not a particularly strong one. (I'm Not There deserved this award, too.) The only worthwhile thing about Lars and the Real Girl is that it contains a sex doll as a main character and yet could have received a G rating. Otherwise, it's just about as insipid as the average Hallmark Hall of Fame movie.

Whew! That's enough bloviating for me for quite some time!