The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is a notoriously unreliable judge of movies, which is only to be expected. Why would we trust the aggregated (but never publicly tallied) opinions of 6,000 or so film-business professionals over the exquisitely argued verdicts of critics or the hard data of the box office? Here then are some of our thoughts on the current Oscar season, its stakes, follies and meaning or lack thereof.
A.O. SCOTT: Sometimes the Academy does the right or the surprising thing, honoring 12 Years a Slave or The Hurt Locker or Slumdog Millionaire. More often its decisions vacillate between the predictable (The King’s Speech) and the embarrassing (Crash, Shakespeare in Love).
But the point isn’t really to select the best movies and performances of the year. The point is to put the American movie industry on glorious, ridiculous display, to provide an annual window into the psychology, sociology and political economy of Hollywood.
Photo: AFP/GABRIEL BOUYS
So on that high-minded note: What happened to Gone Girl, a major studio release (from 20th Century Fox) that got mostly good reviews, sold a lot of tickets and inspired endless post-spoiler think pieces? And what about Interstellar, a Paramount release, which survived a cycle of hype and backlash to bring in more than half a billion dollars worldwide?
The Imitation Game, Birdman and Selma all seem to be in better shape. So does Boyhood, a 12-year labor of love incubated far from Hollywood and released by a company (IFC Films) that has never been much of an Oscar player. Do we think it has a chance in the major categories? What would a Boyhood win mean?
Other than that, film critics like us, who proclaimed our love for that movie early and ardently, might not be able to complain about the Oscars for a while.
PHOTO: AFP / TIZIANA FABI
MANOHLA DARGIS: I think Boyhood may have a tough time with Academy voters partly for one of the very reasons that make it extraordinary: its seeming simplicity. It just may not feel big enough to the members, even with its nearly-three-hour running time. Its length may also seem like a long sit to some, especially when no one in it liberates Europe.
Every best-picture winner holds a mirror up to the Academy in some fashion, reflecting a narrative about the industry that the voters can embrace, whether it’s the liberal pieties of Crash or the triumphant union of art and technological change in The Artist. Fox Searchlight, which distributed 12 Years, apparently understood how its movie was speaking (or could speak) to voters. That’s why, I’m guessing, it ran ads that read “It’s Time” during the Oscar race, as in, it’s time for this sorry group of white people — for the first time in its long sorry history — to give its most public honor to this film or rather its monumental subject. I thought the ads were so outrageously obvious that they would hurt the movie, but I forgot that there’s no such thing as over-obvious when it comes to the Oscars.
Given the passionate argument about civil rights that has reignited in this country, I keep thinking that Selma might be the movie the Academy could eagerly embrace this year (it really, really likes black people, etc). That hunch is only bolstered by the recent assaults on the movie, including in a critical Washington Post opinion piece by Joseph A. Califano Jr, a former assistant to President Lyndon B Johnson. Selma, instead of, oh, I don’t know, The Theory of Everything, is apparently now a front-running threat and the movie to wage a stealth campaign against.
A.O.S: My least favorite genre of film writing may be the “What Film X gets wrong about Historical Topic Y” chin-scratcher, which generally shows little understanding of either movies or history. But such articles do serve a purpose during awards campaigns, smudging the narratives producers and publicists carefully lay down.
Hollywood likes a narrative that affirms its progressive values and political virtues: the story that ends happily with wins for The Hurt Locker or 12 Years a Slave. Another popular story is about how the Academy rewards popular success. (Gladiator and The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King are in this category.) There is also the story line — popular in recent years — that celebrates what might be called auto-cinephilia, or movie self-love. Three of the last five best picture winners were about showmanship: two of them (The Artist and Argo) specifically about movies and the other (The King’s Speech) about a different kind of performer overcoming obstacles. This year, Selma seems to fit into the first category, Gone Girl into the second and Birdman into the third.
Is this too tidy? Too cynical? The thing about the Oscars that drives journalists crazy is the way they, like “Hollywood” itself (as a mythical construct and an economic and creative entity), make it hard to distinguish idealism from cynicism.
In that regard, the Oscar race has been briefly upstaged this time by the drama surrounding The Interview and the Sony hack. I said “drama,” but I’m not sure what genre this story belongs to. Is it a geopolitical thriller? A backstage satire? A stoner farce? All of the above? Of course, Very Serious Issues have been raised — about privacy and corporate responsibility, about sexism and racism in Hollywood, about cyberterrorism and North Korea and Aaron Sorkin — but the whole thing transported us through an Interstellar-type wormhole, past all previously known event horizons of absurdity.
M.D: The Sony hack was the industry’s biggest spectacle, bigger than Noah, Exodus: Gods and Kings and Interstellar combined. A lot has come out, gossipy and otherwise, but given that we’re talking about that orgy of self-love called the Oscars, it’s worth pointing out that there was some movie love among the e-mailed screeds and bad spelling. I was happy to read that Sony employees don’t like Adam Sandler movies, that top players revere David Fincher and that at least some industry types freely name-drop Citizen Kane, Paddy Chayefsky, Cary Grant and Peter O’Toole alongside jokes about Michael Fassbender and penises.
Whether the missives were cynical or bottom-line driven, these nods to Hollywood history suggest that the industry hasn’t entirely succumbed to spreadsheet logic. The Oscars suggest the same because, while the awards are gold-plated onanism writ large and overly long, their very existence proves that the people who make movies have a sense of history, even if that only extends to their own legacies. It’s a banal truth that the industry is a crude, mercenary business, one that’s currently bingeing on superhero movies. Yet despite overwhelming evidence, it remains a human enterprise. The fact that it makes room for directors as different as Fincher, Ava DuVernay and Paul Thomas Anderson indicates that industry folks want to be remembered for more than being Sandler’s enablers.
This hopeful sentiment seems at odds with Mark Harris’ recent, thoughtful consideration of the art and industry on the Web site Grantland, in which he asserted that while some good movies get made, “a studio’s lineup is brands and franchises, and that’s it.” In contrast to the golden age’s ragmen turned moguls or the bottom-line generation who came later and yet somehow managed to bankroll dreams, Harris finds that “the modern studio chief loves business, success, replication and reliability.” No one expects this new mogul to offer a “cursory nod” toward “ideals that relate to content.” Given how titles like Marvel’s The Avengers crush the box office, this lament seems unassailable — though it’s complicated.
A.O.S: Back in 1935, the German aesthetician Rudolf Arnheim declared that critics should stop pretending film was an art and recognize it as, primarily, “an economic product.” Plus ca change! Which doesn’t necessarily mean that Harris is wrong. And even if he is, he’s just doing his job. His argument and the objections to it (articulated, for example, by David Poland in a blog post on Moviecitynews.com) have a ritual quality, but as we’ve been saying, ritual and tradition are what this season is all about.
The Interview business, nonetheless, feels like something new under the sun. The hack itself is a reminder of the radical insecurity of digital information, just as the simultaneous release of the film online and in independent theaters may be a harbinger of things to come. We have grown accustomed to the idea that entertainment will be available to us when we want it, on our phones or tablets or whatever. At the same time, we assume, naively, that our information is safe and that large corporations are super-vigilant when it comes to protecting their digital property. If Sony is so vulnerable, what about the rest of us?
Citizenfour, Laura Poitras’ scary documentary about Edward Snowden, provides an obvious, chilling answer. The rights to privacy and freedom of expression are invoked in that film, as they have been in the wake of the Sony hack, but the Snowden and the Sony revelations show just how complicated those ideas have become in the 21st century. A foreign government can hijack corporate data. Our own government can do the same with personal data. And more and more of the communication we think of as “ours” — our tweets and Facebook posts, our Google searches and on-demand video selections — takes place neither in privacy nor in the constitutionally protected public sphere but in corporate-owned-and-operated space.
I used to worry about being paranoid. Now I worry about not being paranoid enough.
M.D: That’s entertainment! If only we were still using film prints and, um, typewriters, none of this would have happened. One thing I do wonder about is what the hack means, if anything, to the forward march of digital cinema, including the distribution of movies via satellite and terrestrial networks. (For those who don’t follow such things: Most movies in the US are now shown digitally from hard drives, aka digital cinema packages, that are physically delivered to theaters.) The Web site of the National Association of Theater Owners notes, over-enthusiastically for my taste (“The Digital Transition: We’re Almost Done!”), that the digital conversion process is almost complete: “It appears that a perfect storm of events may bring about the end of film around the end of 2014 due to either a worldwide lack of film stock and/or the closing of processing labs.”
A.O.S: I’ve resisted this conclusion for a while, but I think it’s time to acknowledge that this whole Internet thing was a big mistake. What was wrong with printed newspapers, movies on celluloid, music on vinyl or handwritten messages tied to the feet of trained pigeons or whisked through pneumatic tubes?
Seriously, though: Am I wrong to detect an anti-technological theme in the air? The Oscar contenders set in the present bend away from innovation: Gone Girl is about two writers brought down by the death of print; Wild is about the authenticity of living off the grid; Birdman uses Raymond Carver and Broadway theater as weapons of resistance against the tyranny of the digitally enhanced blockbuster.
And there are so many period films. I recently went back to see Selma again and found myself fixated on the rotary-dial phones, boxy tape recorders and especially the radio console set into the kitchen wall of Dr and Mrs King’s home. And how about the marvelous whir and clatter of Christopher the computer in The Imitation Game? Or the old-school detective work of Doc Sportello in Inherent Vice, undertaken without a smartphone or a search engine? Even the futurism of Interstellar was tinged with nostalgia (and the picture itself was shot on film). Maybe one of the functions of movies, even as they inevitably embrace technological progress, is to keep some sense of the old ways alive, making Hollywood a kind of cultural Jurassic World.
M.D: The anxiety about technology and/or the nostalgia for an earlier age we see in some movies may speak, however unconsciously, to fears about commercial mainstream cinema’s slipping hold on the cultural imagination. When blogs and Twitter light up, sometimes very reasonably, sometimes less so, over the latest outrage stirred up by a show like Game of Thrones, it certainly seems that movies have ceded that hold to the small screen — at least until a Gone Girl hits. The concerns about the movies, their relevance and their big-screen future (some of which I share) also dovetail with the oft-repeated assertion that small screens, not large, have become the destination for serious, intelligent work like Lisa Cholodenko’s Olive Kitteridge, her superb HBO miniseries with Frances McDormand.
Should we be worried about American commercial cinema? Yes, no, maybe. What I do know is that many of us tend to talk about the movie industry as if it were a stand-alone entity, but Time Warner, for instance, owns both Warner Bros. and HBO. While some of Time Warner’s “product” still hits theaters first — including its mega-blockbusters, its franchises and an occasional miracle like Anderson’s Inherent Vice — some of its product is designated for small screens. Put another way, Warner Bros no longer has the art-house boutique Warner Independent Pictures (which released titles like Good Night, and Good Luck), but its parent company has HBO. So, have serious mainstream motion pictures disappeared, or have they been reconfigured, serialized and rerouted to smaller screens?
One other thing that seems clear is that not enough mainstream movies this year stirred up the kind of excitement that the HBO show True Detective did, as the current lineup of largely blah Oscar contenders suggests. The commercial movies that do excite audiences tend to be franchises that, when they connect with their audiences — as The Dark Knight, Harry Potter and The Hunger Games have — affirm that movies remain popular and populist. Again, should we be worried or should we acknowledge that the visual mediums now flow together so seamlessly into a single image stream that one day the Academy Awards may, like the Golden Globes, dole out prizes for small-screen achievements? Because, really — the best actress Oscar should go to McDormand.
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