First of all: Simmer down everyone.
There. Now I’ve justified my headline. So.
“Nobody listened to me when I was 7 and I said Ordinary People over Raging Bull was f[**]ked up, now 34
years later and you’re STILL watching.” So tweeted the very entertaining
sometime political blogger known as Norbizness this morning, and truer words
were never quite spoken. I don’t wanna be coy about my age but in this case why
not; I’ll just say I was not inconsiderably older than Nor at the time and I
said the same thing and yes, it IS 34 years later. Should I be heartened or
disappointed by the fact that we—or maybe I should say YOU—can/do get so heated
up about stuff that matters in certain respects but in larger more arguably
significant respects matters not at all?
Even as I input this, the televisions soundtrack tells me of
all the “surprises” and “snubs.” Here, again, is another example of what my
colleague and pal Matt Zoller Seitz has called the reification of “Oscar”—okay,
he didn’t really call it that, I just decided to fancy up his observation.
Which is: that in this particular iteration of reaction to nominations or lacks
thereof, people are acting as if the convoluted process of eventually
conferring an award is down to an actual entity called “Oscar” that has a will
and a personality and resentments of its own. Hence the dearth of nominations
for “Selma” can be read as a monstrous manifestation of the institutionalized
racism of Hollywood, and the multiple noms for “American Sniper” (which do not, due to some oversight on the part of the forces of evil, include a Best
Director nod for Clint Eastwood) portend, in our country, a revival of the
fascism that Pauline Kael warned us of in her review of “Dirty Harry” back in
the day. Clearly, in 2017 either Jeb Bush or Bill Hader’s portrayal of the 120-plus-year-old
Adolph Hitler will be president, if this keeps up.
Look, I’m disappointed that “Selma,” a movie I greatly
admire, got so few Oscar nominations. I’m not alone here. Richard Brody, a
prophet of cinema for The New Yorker and someone whose voice and temperament is
as far removed from that of the average Oscar blogger’s as my voice and
temperament is from that of Kelly Clarkson’s, was agog on the Twitter machine:
“How in the world could ‘Selma’ not get nominations for—at least—screenplay,
actor…? What was the Academy watching (or not seeing)?” Agreed. And the
question as to what the Academy was or wasn’t seeing is an apt one, but not one
to which we are likely to ever get a truly satisfactory answer. Then there’s
“American Sniper,” a movie I also like (so does Richard, if I recall correctly).
It takes a certain kind of act of will to infer that the crop of nominations
places “Sniper” in direct aggressive opposition to “Selma.” But. But but but
but but. From this cinema lover’s perspective, there’s a real, or “real” enemy
to be fought here, as Sinead O’Conner would say: Rather TWO real enemies, two
“Ordinary People”s, only neither is as good as “Ordinary People.”
In the Best
Picture category—and bear with me a bit here, as I’m going to make some generic
categorizations that I may or may not fully subscribe to—we have: Three, count
‘em, three, daring and unusual films by well-established aesthetically
forward-facing directors. Those would be “Boyhood,” “The Grand Budapest Hotel,”
and “Birdman,” or as I really feel like calling it from this moment on, “The
Birdman.”
Then you have one excellent conventional picture from an artistically
respect-worthy Hollywood eminence-grise. That would be “Sniper.” You have the
daring “here I am” statement from a young tyro. That would be “Whiplash” and I
still say to hell with it. Then you have the historical drama that has the
bonus attraction of being an actual first-rate film from an actual emerging but
also fully-formed filmmaking talent (who also happens to be a woman of color).
That’s “Selma.”
And then you have the two fact-based British-scientists save
the world award bait movies. Worth noting that said bait hasn’t been NEARLY as
uniformly gobbled up as it has been in recent comparable years. That neither
“The Theory of Everything” nor “The Imitation Game” has been sailing through
the awards season picking up this that and the other thing should be cause for
some kind of world-weary celebration. Also: Nor can we say, at this stage of
the game, the thing that F. Murray Abraham’s character said about the G.I. folk
singer in “Inside Llewyn Davis,” that these films “connect with people.” They
haven’t gotten the zeitgeist traction that’s expected of such bait by this
point in time. But make no mistake: these motion pictures are menaces.
See what I did there? I exposed my own particular prejudices
(which of course I will defend as some things resembling “artistic principles”)
while at the same time raising a perhaps undue amount of alarm as to what I
might consider the dire consequences of what would happen should either of
these movies which I dislike should win the Best Picture Oscar. And yet.
“Crash” won a Best Picture Oscar. “The Artist” won a Best Picture Oscar.
G—damn “Ordinary People” won a Best Picture Oscar. And yet I woke up this
morning and had a healthy breakfast and some delicious coffee. And some time
soon, “Raging Bull” director Martin Scorsese is embarking to Asia to shoot a
film project he’s been trying/hoping to realize for several decades. Life is, in
many respects, good. And art does, in some respects, thrive.
“No Oscar nominations for Angelina, none for Aniston, but another
one for Streep, who knew,” Billy Bush, that Delphic Oracle, said at the opening
of today’s episode of “Access Hollywood.” He’s trying to keep his chin up
because of the gaps in HIS narrative. A little later, he reflected to Dave
Karger, “a surprise here, no Aniston,” and Dave concurred. Well, define
“surprise.” Aniston apparently gave a powerful, and ostensibly vanity-free performance
in a movie that you haven’t seen. Her not getting a Best Actress nomination is only a surprise within a circumscribed
bubble that decreed Aniston was due/likely to get a nomination. Nobody outside
that bubble has even seen the film. It’s in that respect that the Oscars have
become a rather peculiar “spectator” sport.
You know what’s a real snub?
The lack of an editing nomination for “Birdman,” a movie that flows as if it’s
one long shot, the result of…virtuosic post-production all around, actually.
That the technical achievement here isn’t being acknowledged is…well, you know
the word: INCONCEIVABLE. And yet.
“So much lack of diversity in the Oscar nominations,” the
political progressive Kit Hoover put it to Lorraine Toussaint of “Selma” just
now. To which Toussaint responded with exceptional grace and equanimity,
expressing/acknowledging what we all know to be true—e.g., that Ava DuVernay
SHOULD HAVE GOTTEN a damn Best Director nomination—but concluding, of the
film’s two nominations, “We’re on the map and we’re in the room.”
“’Selma’ Was Robbed, And Other Unforgivable Oscar Crimes,”
reads the headline of one nom roundup that’s popped up in my feed. Nothing
succeeds like overstatement, I guess; I’d like to say “can we agree that
‘crimes’ is maybe a bit much, even for headline English?” but I’m afraid a lot
of people would sincerely say “no” to that. So instead I’ll ask a question. Or
a few questions. Here goes: Who is it that is not to be forgiven? And how,
exactly, will this forgiveness be withheld? How about “we” all stop paying
attention to meaningless award shows? THAT will teach them, right? Who’s with
me?
Ha! I didn’t think so! We’ll take this up again right
before, and right after, the damn Oscars.
