Buzzing Oscar
Was there a time when who wins the Oscar mattered to people outside Hollywood?
The Academy Awards show has always mattered. Watching the movie stars is fun, and not just in an OH MY GOD! Whatever possessed her to make her wear THAT? way, and not just in a Who’s that with Jack this year and what does Anjelica think? way. There are fewer movie stars than there used to be, true. The Red Carpet gets tracked up by more TV actors, celebrities because they’re celebrities, and hangers on than actual movie stars, and even the movie stars aren’t so much stars as they are personalities. But it’s still a night of vicarious glamor and fame, of reveling in the incarnations of vague or explicit romantic and erotic longings and idealizations of self and beloved “other” etc etc etc.
And once the nominees are announced, you can’t help but develop a rooting interest based on who you’d like to see up on the stage, who you want to see lose and fake a good sport grin for the cameras, which of your personal favorites you hope will be judged deserving to validate your own good taste and judgment, how important it is to you to have “picked” the winners…But was there ever a time when the Oscars mattered as in the sense of something important having been decided…?
I didn’t think so.
There are always people who have money riding on the outcomes, and, by the way, who’s giving odds on Little Miss Sunshine? I’d like a piece of that action.
But here’s an AP story about the SAG Awards last night that treats them as important because of what predictive value that might have come Oscar night and treats the importance of their predictive value as mattering as if we all had money riding on what happens Oscar night.
This is the Academy Awards covered as if they’re a Presidential Election, and these days Presidential Elections are covered as if they are sports, and Sports are covered as if they are important because of the personalities involved and the amount of money being tossed around—in other words as if they were part of the movie industry as covered by Variety.
It’s all about winning and losing, whatever it is. We’re not allowed to enjoy Sports because they are just beautiful. We’re not allowed to be interested in politics because…well, the fate of the nation’s at stake. We’re not allowed to enjoy the Oscars because we like movies.
There are winners and there are losers, and the winners are the ones who make the money.
That’s what we’re allowed to be interested in.
The money.
Show us the money!
Ironic this year, with Little Miss Sunshine being nominated for Best Picture, since the main theme of the movie is an explicit rejection of the idea of dividing humanity into winners and losers.
At any rate, another Oscar season is upon us and once again I probably won’t have seen more than one of the major nominees by Oscar night.
As usual, this is mostly due to the blonde’s and my not being able to get out to the movies regularly. Hollywood doesn’t help us, now that only movies released in the late fall are going to get any of the major nominations. (Little Miss Sunshine is the exception that proves the rule because it surely benefited from coming out on DVD in early December.) We can’t even make it out to one movie a month. No way we’re going to be able to squeeze ten or twelve in between November and Oscar time.
But it’s also due to the fact that except for Little Miss Sunshine, which we just wanted to see for fun, there’s not a single one of the Best Movie Nominees that we’d have made the extra effort to see.
That’s not another way of saying “They don’t make ‘em like that anymore.” Movies made like that were always a rarity. It is a way of saying that Hollywood doesn’t make as many fun movies as it used to. It makes movies that are frivolous and amusing and are therefore fun in the sense of not being actually painful, although plenty of them are—anything that’s sold as a romantic comedy usually falls into this category. And it makes movies that are thrill rides and are fun the way an amusement park is fun—most anything sold as an action-adventure movie. And it makes movies that are funny and are fun because it’s fun to laugh—more and more of these are animated. Open Season had more laughs in any five minutes than RV had in all 90.
But they don’t make many that are fun just because they are well-made, well-written, full of laughs, chills, thrills, spills and surprises and feature real movie stars doing excellent work but obviously enjoying themselves. Fun movies don’t have to be epics. They don’t have to be works of art. But they need to be something more than filmed sitcoms or extended episodes of Law and Order. The Lord of the Rings movies were the last great recent example(s) I can think of. Spider-man 2. The Life Aquatic. The Incredibles. (What does it say that there’s a cartoon on the list?) Space Cowboys. Get Shorty. Three Kings. The Thomas Crown Affair. The Fugitive. Seabiscuit. Catch Me if You Can. Secondhand Lions. The Illusionist.
These are the kind of movies that make the habit of going to the movies rewarding. And being in the habit of going to the movies is how you find yourself sitting through and enjoying movies you wouldn’t have thought before you saw them would be up your alley.
Would work like this for me.
Blood Diamond looks like fun. I’d have liked to have seen that. If I’d enjoyed it, I might have said, That reminds me. Nevermind the silly accent. Leo is awful darn good. I wonder how he is in The Departed.
The Good Shepherd doesn’t look like a lot of fun, but I’d have gone to see Matt Damon doing something different and his performance might have made me think, I should see what else he’s capable of, and again I’d have wound up watching The Departed.
Yeah, I know, I should see The Departed anyway because Scorcese’s a great director. But Mahler was a great composer and Lucien Freud’s a great painter and Berlin is a great city.
I’m a Mozart, Monet, Paris kind of guy, if you get my drift.
Ok, give me some help here.
Which of the Oscar nominees do I need to rush out and see before February 25?
What was the last movie you saw that was fun?
Cross-posted at my place.
They usually call the summer the dumb season at the movies, but they should bookend it with the late fall/winter season too. Sure there’s bound to be something worthwhile floating around during the holidays, but it’s also the time when the studios foist their blurb-addicted beached whales, prestige pics, and Oscar hopefuls on an all-too-suspecting general public. Morning shows kick up the buzz, Variety and Entertainment Weekly strike up the band, and people debate the nominations like they are doctrine.
How is Leonardo in The Departed?
He’s fine. But he ain’t one-fifth of what Tony Leung was in (the original) Infernal Affairs. Neither is the movie itself. Scorsese might have been “a great director” long ago, now he’s just shrewd, calculating film historian desperate for affection from people he probably loathed 30 yrs ago.
Which of the nominees should you rush out and see? Certainly not Babel, which is just Paul Haggis’ Crash gone global, with three times the helium. The Queen is competent, a nice nuanced Helen Mirren performance, occasionally moving, all-too-obvious. Maybe Letters From Iwo Jima?
Just look at Best Actress: there’s the aforementioned Miss Mirren (who will win), Judi Dench, who has some nasty fun with her spinster history teacher in Notes On A Scandal, (pure Ken Russell camp), Kate Winslet (plenty of by-the-book yearning in another sick-soul-of suburbia movie) Penelope Cruz who holds her own in a softheaded movie by a former enfant terrible, and Meryl Steep who’s pretty good until the movie tries to “humanize” her with crocodile tears. Five performances, none of which come anywhere close to Laura Dern’s in Inland Empire a taxing, off-putting, genuinely experimental movie that no one’s seen.
With the exception of a few cinematography noms, and the doc mention for Iraq in Fragments, the Oscars is as usual, a bust. Hope that helped.