TEN FINAL THOUGHTS ON THE 84TH ACADEMY AWARDS

Jessica Chastain, a much nicer subject for contemplation than the awards themselves

“A fucking low-budget silent black and white film wins best picture, and everyone's like, 'UGH, how annoyingly predictable.'” —Bastard Keith

There was always something a little off about the Oscars this year, and nothing more so than that The Artist, which is, as my good friend Bastard Keith observed in the above quote, a fucking low-budget silent black and white film, being the anointed Best Picture winner. Since the beginning of the awards season. Which started in fucking September this year. Whether or not the movie was good, this decision was made a long time ago, and has little apparently to do with The Artist as a movie.

When you get down to it, this year's whole Oscars had nothing to do with 2011 in movies. The true theme of the year, to me, was well- and intelligently-done genre filmmaking. My favorite for the year, Attack The Block, was that. Rise of the Planet of the Apes, was that. Drive was that. Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy. Moneyball (which is a sports movie.) Relax the quality standards a little bit, and Fast Five qualifies (it was certainly wildly entertaining and brought off with great skill), as does The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, a marvel of technique and polish, which obfuscated its manifestly stupid story. Relax the “genre” qualification and you can make a case for Midnight In Paris as SF. Of those, only Midnight In Paris ever had a chance of winning an Oscar (which it did, for Woody's terrific original screenplay.)

For non-genre pieces, there was the gorgeous (and, naturally, doomed in terms of wins) The Tree Of Life. And the splendidly observed drama The Descendants. And David Cronenberg pulling one of those Scorsese Age of Innocence “hey, I'm going to make a period drama that's just fucking seething with intensity, except mine's going to have BDSM in it” acts with A Dangerous Method. And Shame (oh, Shame . . .) And Martha Marcy May Marlene. And Take Shelter. Of these, The Descendants was the Midnight In Paris, as above, winning only for Adapted Screenplay.

With all those movies, across a spectrum with “worthy of an Oscar nomination or two for some particularly notable aspect” on one end and “legitimately great” on the other, the three most talked-about movies of the year were The Artist (more talked about than seen), Hugo (same), and The Help (widely talked about and widely seen; The Artist and Hugo combined did about a third of The Help's business.) The Artist and Hugo were both about really interesting things (actually the same interesting thing: the early days of movies) and didn't hold up to close critical scrutiny, which is kind of fitting actually, since they're both more about loving the movies than thinking too hard about them (though, in Hugo's case, Martin Scorsese is, it goes without saying, someone who also thinks very hard about movies.) And The Help is a fucking disaster, but it's an extremely well-acted disaster that raised the profile of two wonderful actresses, Octavia Spencer and Viola Davis. Yet, those three pictures dominated the Oscar race and all the discussion thereof. And they're set almost completely apart from any of the other movies listed above. (Ed. Note: do not bring Midnight In Paris into this. I know I wrote about all three of them in the same post a few months ago, but Midnight In Paris is notably apart, not only for being a Woody Allen movie, but also for being set in the present and coming firmly down on the side of “living in the now” rather than romanticizing or overly dwelling on the past.)

The Oscar show itself was fucking weird. Here's what I learned, took away from it, observed, and so forth:

1—Billy Crystal sucked. It wasn't just that he didn't have a single funny joke all night. It's not even that he alternated between a kind of listless plodding and laughing at his own terrible jokes (when he wasn't outright fucking them up) . . . all right, fuck it, the blackface really did not go over well. I know he was famous for his Sammy Davis Jr. impersonation (thirty fucking years ago . . .) but seriously, dude? It's fucking 2012. If you really wanted to relive your youth, Billy, why couldn't you have just told Jessica Chastain or somebody “you look MAH-velous”? Take your blackface and shove it up your ass, if there's any room in there with your head.

2—Viola Davis . . . wow. It's hard to remember an actor who was that much of a favorite, I mean universally considered a lock, not win. There she was on the red carpet beforehand, in her own hair, talking about the speech she had prepared. She had to be fucking certain she was going to win. And then she didn't. It's important to remember that this was not a deliberate slap in the face, or a rebuke for overconfidence, or a reminder of her place. It was a bunch of dumbasses who don't think about their votes (I had a real eye-opener of a conversation with a SAG actor I know about voting in the guild awards recently. The individual in question had seen a grand total of one of the nominated movies and proceeded to simply check off that movie in all categories. I've had it confirmed for me by someone else who Knows Things that Oscar voting in the categories where you don't have to prove you've seen all the movies is exactly the same) voting for Meryl Streep instead. And not even out of outright racism. I think it's just name recognition. But goddamn do I feel bad for Viola Davis. I fucking felt like I'd been punched in the stomach and it wasn't even me. And I didn't even fucking like the movie. Ugh.

3—The blog Big Hollywood officially has to shut down now. There is no way a sane person can accuse Hollywood of liberal bias on a night with blackface routines, people winning Oscars for playing Margaret Thatcher, and the entire motherfucking night was about the fucking past.

4—It's not all bad. Those dudes who won for editing Girl With The Dragon Tattoo were awesome; they got up there and started talking and then they got scared with all the people looking at them and instead of doing something embarrassing they acknowledged that they were nervous and couldn't think of anything to say and took off. I liked those guys. As I did the high-off-their-motherfucking-asses dudes who won for Animated Short. They were just like “faaaaaaar fucking out, we're at the Oscars, dude, and we're kind of gay except maybe we're just high as tits, even we're too high to tell!”

5—In a related note, I liked that Robert Richardson got up on stage and was awesome for fifteen seconds and then just tipped the fuck out, even though—awesome as Hugo looked, and as much as RR was responsible for that—it's just not right that Tree Of Life didn't take that. The whole movie in Tree Of Life, even the parts when you're not supposed to, you're like “Wow, this is some excellent cinematography.” With Hugo a lot of it's the FX, the production design, Marty, Thelma, but with Tree Of Life it's just Terry Malick telling Emmanuel Lubezki “I want it to look like this,” Emmanuel Lubezki going, “Sure thing, sir . . . okay, how's this?” then Malick going, “Perfect. Thanks.” and then Lubezki going, “You're welcome.” Still, if you're going to lose to someone, it might as well be Robert Richardson.

6—Christopher Plummer was awesome. And now we no longer have to be like “why the fuck hasn't Christopher Plummer won an Oscar yet?” and retroactively try to give him one for Star Trek VI (a fine piece of cinema.)

7—Alexander Payne's (credited) co-authors on the Descendants script doing that brief sight gag about Angelina Jolie's dress was the second funniest thing that happened all night. Chris Rock's entirely-too-brief bit introducing Animated Feature was the funniest. Twitter erupted with people going “PLEASE, CHRIS, STAY AND HOST THE REST OF THE SHOW!” the second he was gone. Both had an air of “I do not give a fuck” that was extremely welcome.

8—I am extremely happy that A Separation broke the unfortunate streak of “if you've heard of it, it won't win” in the Best Foreign category. A Separation is a legitimately great movie, and its director, Ashgar Farhadi, gave what if you were paying attention was a pretty ballsy speech, with all kinds of “fuck you” signifiers to the Iranian ruling regime, while having nothing but love for the people themselves. Because, ya know, they may not have nuclear weapons but they do throw directors in jail. If it comes down to it, some country should give Farhadi auteur asylum (France is good like that, then he can have lunch with Abbas Kiarostami sometimes) so he can keep making movies because damn. A Separation is really, really, really fucking good, and I'm really glad it won.

9—Whoever was mixing the sound needs to be bashed repeatedly in the nuts with a cricket bat and given a refresher course in not fucking ruining three-quarters of the evening with that digital gurgling and that horrible harsh ring the main microphone had whenever anyone talked into it. Just about the only time all night when that fucker wasn't feeding back at a frequency that probably ordered every dog in America to activate plan Alpha and kill us all was when it cut out in the middle of the Documentary Feature guys being excited. Which was a total dick move, because they totally cut it out on purpose to keep those guys from talking. I mean, seriously, everyone saw it and knew exactly what you were doing, fuckface in the control room. You didn't fool anyone.

10—Did I mention how fucking terrible Billy Crystal was? He was AWFUL. Even the one notorious David Letterman year wasn't this bad, because aside from the infamous “Uma, Oprah” thing that Dave didn't let die, the rest of the night he was funny. The only funny thing Billy did all night was kiss George Clooney, and Clooney was the one who sold that bit. But, thankfully, Billy may have sucked but he didn't suck for long: it was one of the quickest-feeling Oscar shows I can remember, and apparently only ran long by 20 minutes. So there's that.

But yeah, I'm ready to be done with all this shit. Only 10 of my 20 picks were right, and the only award all night that really bugged me was Viola Davis losing. I sincerely hope that this is the last time Billy Crystal is invited back, as well as the last time Viola Davis has to get kicked in the ass like that. And may I never the rest of my days see such a disconnect between what actually happened in movies in a given year and what Oscar thinks happened in a given year. People need to start playing with the Harvey Weinstein playbook. It's not his fault that he has the magic formula, but monopolies inhibit progress. The Oscars, having taken this trip back through the looking glass, would best be served by moving on. And with that, so shall I.

GOD SAVE FU MANCHU, MORIARTY, AND DRACULA

xkcd, reminding us that even goatse is going to get the fucking  "remember when" treatment

Any number of movie writers have already given forth their “2011 is the year of nostalgia” thinkpieces, so rather than either pile on or write one of those dumb attention whoring “those other movie writers are retards” posts I'm going to tell y'all why it's natural at this point in the great human experiment that the past be on people's minds, and why the three foremost examples in what is now fashionable in some circles to call the “nostalgia porn” genre aren't really nostalgic.

As to that first point, shit's changing. From the Arab Spring to the Occupied Autumn, the great lurching shift toward a fully 21st century reality is underway in many parts of the world, right on schedule. A hundred years ago it was Europe going bugfuck and going “YO IT'S TIME FOR WORLD WAR ONE, BYETCHES,” two hundred years ago it was Napoleon flexing his nuts and acting like such a dick everyone thought he was shorter than he was because overcompensation was the only possible explanation. Hopefully this time around we can avoid as many people getting killed. But, anyway, major shifts that change everything frequently happen right at the beginning of the second decade of the century. And, when Everything Changes Forever, it's only natural that people start looking back at the world that was, and because the future is uncertain and—to some—scary, a certain glow of fondness is going to illuminate those looks back.

These aren't the only times when people look to the past, of course, but times like these there's more in the noosphere than usual, to the point where it's the prevailing theme in American cinema this year. Three pictures come to mind along with the subject, all very well received, all factoring heavily in awards-season speculation. They are:


Midnight In Paris (dir. Woody Allen)

I absolutely loved this movie, in spite of the one—not insignificant—flaw of Rachel McAdams being such an asshole it's almost like she's a revenge character. All she does the whole picture is, along with her mother, bust Owen Wilson's balls without motivation and to operatic excess. While she's intended to be a function of Owen Wilson's dissatisfaction with the venal, ignorant modern world (and while she seems totally unrealistic, someone—a relative, though I won't say which one—actually did say something as shitty to me once as Rachel McAdams does when she shushes Owen Wilson because Michael Sheen is talking) Woody kind of overdoes it with her, to the point where you're like, “If she really thought Owen Wilson was such a choad, why'd she get engaged to him?” His motivation's a little easier to understand; weak and shallow though it makes dudes look, there's an awful lot of mean dumbness we'll accept from someone as good-looking as she is. Yeah, go ahead, roll your eyes. Truth is truth. Anyway, enough of that shit, let's get on with the 90% of Midnight In Paris that totally fucking rocks:

Owen Wilson plays a successful screenwriter who's trying to write a novel, and somehow manages to convince his asshole fiancee (Rachel McAdams, see above) to come to Paris with him while he works on it. She keeps dragging him around to tourist-y shit, often with her “friend” whom she's (a little too) obviously fucking (Michael Sheen, in the greatest portrayal of that guy who dominates every conversation with his copious and frequently inaccurate triviata on any given subject OF ALL TIME). So one night Owen Wilson's out walking the streets while Rachel McAdams is doing something to make the audience hate her, and he has a seat to catch his breath and have one of those “holy fuck I'm in Paris” moments when, as a clock strikes midnight, a 1920s car pulls up and F. Scott Fitzgerald offers him a ride. Fuck. Yes.

Woody does some of the best work he's ever done with the 20s sequences, capturing both the allure and the parts about it where you're like “uhhh . . . yeah, not so much” (i.e. keeping Zelda Fitzgerald from jumping into the Seine every five minutes.) Owen Wilson's open-minded, open-hearted, open-mouthed wanderings through this vividly rendered world rubs off after not much time at all, and it's tempting to just quote the whole thing, but if you haven't seen it yet that's not fair, and anyway, isn't the point. Nor is the fact that the guy who plays Hemingway is fucking amaaaaaaaaaaaazing (Corey Stoll. Remember that name.)

What is, is a scene right at the end of the second act, where Woody (skip to the next paragraph if you haven't seen it yet) gets his Inception on and goes for a fantasy dreamworld within a dreamworld, taking Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard, with whom he's fallen in some pretty apparently genuine love, to her favorite time in history, La Belle Époque. By this point in the movie I was enjoying Woody's little fluffy ode to every college freshman's first time machine destination and admiring the craft behind it, but once Owen Wilson and Marion Cotillard hit Belle Époque and kick it with Toulouse-Lautrec, Degas, and Gauguin and the three of them start talking about how the Renaissance must have been the best time to be alive I went “ohhhhhh shit . . . bravo, Woody. Bravo.”

Cuz if anyone's earned the right to be a little nostalgic, it's Woody. Between everybody busting his balls about how his movies aren't funny anymore (which they've been doing literally almost as long as I've been alive; he made that joke himself in Stardust Memories, which came out the month before I turned 2) and his well-documented and controversial marital habits—not to mention the fact that he's 76 now—you could hardly blame Woody for being like, “Man, remember the past? Wasn't it better, without all the ball-busting?” But no, he looks back, sees that it's awesome, and still comes firmly down on the side of “Live in the moment. Resist nostalgia. Now is all you really have.” I could hug Woody for that, if I wasn't worried that he'd break. The picture ends perfectly. If anything was going to be his highest grossing picture of all time, it should be one this good.

Sticking with New York filmmakers, next up:


Hugo (dir. Martin Scorsese)

I've documented my dislike of most 3D movies, and my position about it being more a commercial than artistic innovation, a number of times. That being said, I'd be a fucking idiot if I didn't trust that Martin Scorsese would do something worthwhile with it. Not everything he's directed has been good, but you know if you see his name on something, you know his burning passion for cinema is going to show through, and there's going to be at least one thing in the movie where you're like “damn, okay, I haven't seen that before.” Even something like The Color Of Money, which he admitted to making (fittingly enough) for the money, still has something (The Color Of Money itself, in the right mood, is awesome.)

Hugo, as one would hope from Marty S., has by far—it's really not even close—the greatest 3D visuals to date. (Speaking of things I've said a number of times but can't say enough, fuck Avatar right under its blue fucking tail.) Marty and production designers Dante Ferretti and Francesca Lo Schiavo create a magical storybook Paris through which DP Robert Richardson's camera zooms, swoops, and hides right on the other side of a wall or window peaking in. There are some of the most gorgeous blues I've ever seen. It's got every last bit of visual grandeur $150 million can buy, and a bunch extra that you can only get when your director fucking means it, and Marty S. fucking means it.

The story, adapted from the Caldecott-medal winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret, is, on one level, about a boy named Hugo who lives in a train station who gradually befriends an elderly man who turns out to be pioneering filmmaker George Méliès. On another level, it's about the transformative power of movies, and how they're the stuff dreams are made of. On a lower but no less important level, it's about trust, friendship, purpose, and love. All things I'm totally on board with.

Only problem is, Hugo's got about an hour and a half of story stretched out over about two hours and ten minutes. The distension of the running time is largely due to the fact that Hugo and Méliès go through the motions of being, respectively, a mute and an evil old bastard for about a half hour, when in fact Hugo has plenty to say (kid's a borderline genius) and Méliès is a really nice guy who's a little down on his luck. The problem with the beginning being so interminable is that at no point in any of it are we given any insight into why Hugo can't just talk to the old guy and why Méliès is such a prick to the kid. Then, all of a sudden, as if the first half hour of the movie didn't exist, boom, we have the actual story. From there, the story is . . . okay. I feel slightly like an asshole bitching about it because the movie's heart is in a very good place, and a certain amount of simplicity and heavy-handedness can be written off to Marty aiming the picture at kids. But withholding the reasons to care about the main character and the character who ends up being the picture's moral center for over a quarter of its running time keeps Hugo from being a complete success.

That said, Hugo's absolutely worth seeing, and worth seeing on a big screen in 3D, because you absolutely positively for real reals haven't ever seen nothing like this. Even if it fails as narrative it succeeds absolutely in being a lecture on cinematic epistemology with professor Scorsese. In making a picture in digital 3D about the very earliest silent movies, Marty telescopes the entire history of cinema into one movie, a linkage made all the more explicit with some shockingly brilliant post-converted footage from Méliès' own films, which simply and beautifully makes the point that one movie is every movie. Even if Marty doesn't make little kids want to run out and see a bunch of silent movies, he makes a pretty good case that the little fuckers are shitheads for not wanting to.

Even the fact that the writing drove me insane but I loved everything else ends up being a testament to the power of the director and crew of a movie. Also, if you told me that Marty S. had pulled you aside and said, “Look, if you repeat this I'll deny it but this whole fucking picture is a massive memetic experiment to program little kids so that they become devotees of the theory that the director, not the screenwriter, is the true author of a movie, and a number of things you as an adult don't get but that are going to be little semiotic time bombs for anyone under 12 that result inevitably with their ability to write 500 page exegeses of G.W. Pabst, F.W. Murnau, and D.W. Griffith by the time they're 15,” I'd slap my forehead and go, “IT ALL SEEMS SO CLEAR NOW.” Plenty of people I trust and respect were transported by Hugo. Something about it kept me at arm's length the whole night. I thought it was a little clunky, though I can't front on its sincerity. C'est la vie.

Speaking of French, our last picture:


The Artist (dir. Michel Hazanavicius)

Now, this, my friends, is what the fuck I'm talkin' about. It deals with a lot of the same themes as Hugo—silent cinema and the appreciation thereof, most prominently—and also has a scene-stealing dog (much like the two pictures themselves, I suspect one will either prefer the alternation between stoic contemplation and feverish, sloppy pursuit of the dog from Hugo or the zany mugging and pluckiness of the dog in The Artist; both dogs are microcosms of their respective movies.) And they're formal mirror images of each other: Hugo used all the modern technology money can buy to pay homage to the earliest movies, where The Artist uses the visual style and techniques of 20s and 30s cinema to tell the always-relevant (especially today) story about how time marches on, and marches past whoever can't keep up.

With a couple notable (and stunning) exceptions, The Artist is done totally straight as a late-period silent movie. Its protagonist, George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), is a massive star in 1927 Hollywood, with charisma for days, and broad mugging for weeks. After the opening of his latest hit picture, George literally bumps into a young woman named Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo, whose beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe), who, as it turns out, is an aspiring actress. And does quite well, seeing as how her beauty and radiance are beyond the scope of mortal language to describe. IT'S AS IF YOU'D NEED TO FILM HER TO GET THE POINT ACROSS.

Good thing The Artist is a movie, then, that's what I'm saying. The story gets going once sound is introduced, as muckety-muck John Goodman and a bunch of the standard evil white guys in suits you get hanging around any movie company (though John Goodman is, as his name implies when you bifurcate it, one of the good ones) inform George that it's either start talkin' or start walkin'. George, pissed, bankrolls his own epic silent melodrama, that ends up opening the same say as Peppy's latest. You know which one wins and which one goes down in flames. I ain't gotta spoil it.

The movie doesn't end there, though. It continues through a bunch of capital M Melodrama to an ending that's at once triumphant, wistful, and even a bit sad. But every second of it hums with a love of movies and an uncanny skill in recreating the cinema of early Hollywood. It succeeds in a way a picture like Far From Heaven (which I, by the way, really liked) doesn't in managing to make the recreation more than an academic exercise; The Artist actually is a “you'll laugh, you'll cry” movie exactly like the ones to which it pays homage. The dance sequences are killer, the leads are perfect in both look and demeanor, and the dog is just the best.

As much as it would appear, in a thousand different ways, like The Artist is the most nostalgic of the three, when Jean Dujardin's smiled his last smile, Bérénice Bejo is done being like “there isn't another actress alive who could have done this as perfectly as I just did. Bask” and the dog has pulled his last pratfall, The Artist is really a movie about the importance of adapting to changing times. The inability to do so nearly breaks George. It is, of course, still very much about respecting the past—Peppy's efforts to pay respect to those who've come before verge on saintly—but since the embodiment of the importance of that respect also fits flawlessly with the modern age, it's clear that the message is not to live in the past, merely to just remember, every now and then, how awesome it was.


Since I clearly have a lot of work to do founding this religion based on Bérénice Bejo (and since she's Hazanavicius' wife, keeping one step ahead of his jealous wrath if he thinks I'm crushing on her too hard) it would probably help to define nostalgia, and why none of these pictures succumb to the temptations thereof. There's a difference between looking back and being like, “Yeah, that was nice,” and yearning painfully to live in the past. Midnight In Paris looked like it was going to be the latter before Woody, at the perfect moment and in the perfect way, revealed nope. He even has Owen Wilson (did I mention he was terrific in that? I probably should: he was terrific in that) quote Faulkner's famous line “The past ain't dead. It ain't even past” in a context that suggests that the past not being past is a sign that it's always with us in our memories, but that life is lived in the world itself, not in our heads. Hugo isn't nostalgia, it's a history lesson about the primacy of film conversation. And The Artist, the sneakiest of the three, employs about as many nostalgia-inciting elements as there are stars in the sky to tell a story about changing with the times.

So, if in the Year of Nostalgia, none of the most “nostalgic” movies really are that thing, what are they? Three movies that came out the same year as each other; a year where people have been tending to reflect on the past a bit, to be sure, but a meditation on a thing is not the same as the thing itself, just as depiction is not endorsement. Even if my enjoyment was variable with the three movies under question, all deserve better than to be dismissed with one adjective, most especially if it doesn't apply.