The Morning After...
If you’ve watched Tootsie, the very long acceptance speech from Renée Zellweger ultimately started to remind me of Michael Dorsey’s when he wants to reveal the truth about his identity and knows where he’s going but is very lost in getting there. As Renée is the co-star of Jerry Maguire, which is one of my all-time favorite movies, and gave a performance in Judy that shows her in utter command at very moment of a character who is clearly Judy in every moment and maybe Judy Garland in very few of them, and as she has had a career with quite a few bounces to it, some of them off the table and rolling around on the floor for a few years, I am deeply happy for her win. And as someone who was raving up every acting award, I sure do wish her speech had been less improvisational than Michael Dorsey’s.
Joaquin Phoenix’s speech also rambled. I’m not entirely sure what he was saying though I heard every word of it, and am intrigued the morning after to discover that it is a paean to veganism. I might have interpreted it differently. I was most interested to see if or how he would deal with the tragedy of his brother, another deeply gifted actor, and the quote from River Phoenix’s poem was a moment of few words and few details that said quite a bit.
Whether or not they wish to admit it, many of the people who write about Hollywood and the Oscars were strangely blind to the inevitability of the Parasite win for Best Picture. Many other times, we’re told how important the actor’s branch is, how it’s the largest in the Academy, how hard it is to win for Best Picture without having nominations for the actors, or for movies that are all about CGI and robots and spaceships to win. And yet, I saw very few columns looking at the tea leaves of the standing ovation that the cast of Parasite received at the SAG Awards. To be sure, that standing “O” had to battle the fact that there were no acting nominations for Parasite, but let’s give a think to something. How easy is is to judge acting by people speaking in another language? In a movie with a fairly large cast with good-size roles for half a dozen people and substantial above-the-title roles for none of them? And none of them people you’ve heard of. And no lack of really good roles for people we have heard of them. I do think it’s legitimate to ask which of the people who were nominated should have been kicked off the ballot in favor of the other thing you wish were nominated instead. All of this in mind, that standing ovation at SAG said a clear something about an enthusiasm for the movie which might not have easily manifested in individual nods.
And let’s call that a wrap,.
11:56 PM I am going to do a final wrap in the morning; have to start back to NYC bright and early and need my beauty sleep. But lots to talk about and more TK.
11:22 PM The Best Actor/Actress wins as expected, but those speeches. Well, more to come. Best Picture is at hand.
11:22 PM Wow, a half hour since my last post. Caught up in the magic as it all heads into the home stretch.
10:50 PM Contrast — from a new voice in scoring for Hollywood and only third female to win in a category to Elton John and Bernie Taupin winning after what Elton tells me in his acceptance speech is 53 years of banging the keys around together. Based on the performances tonight I’d give this one to the song from Harriet, but based on the work of a lifetime this one’s up there with Brad Pitt getting his first Oscar for acting a few decades into an acting career.
10:47 PM I’d also like to get on my soapbox about Marvel movies. On the whole, DC movies have better scores from better composers, and I simply don’t believe Marvel cares on the whole very much about the quality of the music in their movies. The score for Joker was good, very good. How many Marvel movies other than Black Panther, where Ryan Coogler was able to push thru a lot of stuff that Marvel movies aren’t known for, have anything better than ninety minutes of bombast. So, another happy-making moment for me as Hildur Gudnadottir takes home a prize.
10:45 PM & Joker joins the list of movies to have won at least one Oscar this evening.
10:43 PM Hildur Guðnadóttir is only the third woman to win in the Best Score category
10:42 PM And it was a great intro with Brie Larson, Gal Gadot and Sigourney Weaver on stage. And Joker soundtrack from a female composer, as they are slowly starting to make inroads into what has been a guy’s world of movie music composition.
10:41 PM More musical moments. I’d very much like for John Williams to win one more Academy Award. There might not be many more chances. But I also very much like the music for Marriage Story.
10:36 PM The music of the moment. A good performance by Elton John. A good night for Tiny Dancer, which appears in the musical moments montage and then in the very effective ABC promo for American Idol.
10:20 PM So much harder than twenty years ago to have a grand sweep of the Oscars. The award for Bombshell to go along with wins for Once Upon a Time..., Ford vs Ferrari — the people who vote take it seriously. There are the consultation prize wins for Screenplay or a supporting role sometimes, but it’s a good job of looking film-by-film at where the best in the business are dong their best.
10:15 PM I would not complain if every Oscar song performance were as good as the number from Harriet.
10:00 PM “I am Spartacus.” Tom Hanks did a great job with the promo for the Academy museum, and I loved the roast at Colin Jost getting snuck into it. The pictures I’ve seen of the 1000 seat movie theatre in the past week as they did a press tour — another of the occasional reasons to which I lived in LA. As a movie lover, being there with that theatre, being able to see movies at The Dome, at The Village, the one thing LA still has which we don’t have in New York is great single screen theatres, and the Academy museum is going to have a theatre that vastly out-punches the Moving Image or the Walter Reade or the Metrograph.
9:57 PM Amaaaaaazing. Ford vs Ferrari wins for Film Editing. It is so difficult to get me to sit in a movie theatre for two-and-a-half hours without once looking at my watch. The importance of film editing to that accomplishment cannot be understated. I am so happy to see that recognized with a gold statuette. I may have to look for a theatre that’s still screening this one, and give it a second viewing.
9:53 PM I’d have preferred the Cinematography award go to Once Upon a Time, but while I don’t much like 1917 I can’t complain to have Roger Deakins taking the award. I did like the presenter patter before this award. This is one of the categories where I didn’t see all the nominees, because, The Lighthouse. The Lighthouse won some awards yesterday at the Spirit Awards.
9:42 PM Was the segue planned? From the explosion of music and sound with Eminem to the sound awards? I’d love if both 1917 and Ford vs Ferrari are getting token awards here - 1917 because it winning just a token award would be just great, and Ford vs. Ferrari because it’s a great piece of audience pleasing filmmaking, and as Donald Sylvester said, James Mangold is worthy of being nominated for Best Director. Ford vs. Ferrari is a master class in directing. The editing - two-and-a-half hours and I never looked at my watch. The sound, The photography. The acting, none of which was recognized. So darn tootin’ happy that the movie can forever announce itself as an Oscar winner.
9:37 PM The montage of great musical moments was just great. Those are classic moments all, and also frightening ones to see Kevin Costner looking so much younger, Kevin Bacon looking so much younger, Leonardo DiCaprio looking so much younger. I know Titanic is twenty years ago, but I guess, yeah, once upon a time he looked that young, even younger in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape. And then Eminem just knocked it out of the park. After a batch of cringeworthy musical moments in this evening’s Oscars, the show hit it out of the park here. Just amazing.
9:36 PM Applause Worthy! Standing O from my hotel room.
9:24 PM But just to say you could have filled the entire list of acting winners with people from Marriage Story, with Adam Driver and Scarlett Johansson to go along with Laura. So many good supporting men that I’m not sure Ray Liotta or Alan Alda quite fit into the conversation but they’re darn good in Marriage Story. Wallace Shawn is better with a few minutes on screen in Marriage Story than a lot of other acting highlight reels. It’s an amazing cast top to bottom, given great lines to speak, sensitively directed, backed up with a wonderful under score from Randy Newman. It’s a great movie. So glad to see Laura Dern. And Noah Baumbach has done this twice. Fifteen years ago with The Squid and the Whale, which is also a bitterly brilliantly scripted movie with a cast that excels in every role.
9:22 PM My choice for Best Picture is Marriage Story, so I’m happy that Laura Dern got the Oscar she was expected to win for Best Supporting Actress, and she gave a helluva acceptance speech. For me the nicest moment of the evening so far, and she seemed to touch a lot of people in the room.
9:16 PM reviews of the documentary shorts from Peter Debruge ‘2020 Oscar-Nominated Short Films: Documentary’ Review – Variety
https://variety.com/2020/film/reviews/2020-oscar-nominated-short-films-documentary-review-1203497465/maz/
9:13 PM Netflix may not have a Best Picture this year, but has now proven it can get a win in the Best Feature Documentary category.
9:01 PM I’d have loved seeing the Costume Design award go to Once Upon a Time, too, but I think it was inevitable that Little Women wears going to win something, and this might be the best award it’s nominated for to accomplish that necessary.
9:00 PM But an hour in and already two bathroom break moments. I’m enjoying these presenter comments a lot more than the people blogging at The NY Times are.
8:57 PM Once they finally got round to presenting the Production Design award... there were a lot of good choices here, but Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood is the best. At least on the first time through the movie I lapped up every moment of the loving recreation of the past, from Hollywood Blvd. to the Bruin and Village in Westwood to the menace of the Spahn Ranch. That by itself not enough to make the movie hold up as well as I’d have liked on a second viewing, but it’s a brilliant job of finding the past in our present. Congratulations!
8:55PM Is there an award for Worst Patter by Presenters in an Oscar Ceremony?
8:46 PM Jo Jo Rabbit: The rare movie that I can’t say if I liked it or not. It was weird and different and tonally all over the place, and I loved all of that and I’m not sure it added up to anything more than confusion, and I’m not sure that it doesn’t.
8:42 PM I’d like to thank Bakeshop for supplying my Oscar desserts this year. But if the red velvet cupcake isn’t as good as R R Virdi told me his was...
8:41 PM The original screenplay category was not certain in a lot of the preview pieces. The question is whether Parasite’s victory is a consolation prize or an augur of things to come.
8:39 PM Keanu looks amazing.
8:33 PM Any chance next year that @johnpicacio could produce the Oscars?
8:31 PM I wish I needed to go the bathroom, because the Oscars have put in a bathroom break just thirty minutes into the festivities.
8:30 PM Now we are having a musical performance with no discernible reason for existing.
8:27 PM In a victory for writers everywhere who are deep into a series, Toy Story 4 just won an Academy Award. This movie was the little side story that becomes the novella that’s published as Book 7B of your long-running series. But in sf/fantasy we don’t generally give those things awards.
8:20 PM: The M&Ms commercial was to M&M commercials what the Holiday Mint M&Ms is to M&Ms. Sublime. The opening number and the “monologue” are like bringing rice cakes to your seat from the concession stand.
8:16 PM: Yay, Brad Pitt! Watch the Spahn Ranch sequence in Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood. It’s a master class in 5,329 things in making movies, and Brad Pitt is top among them.
8:14 PM A better idea is having a medley of clips for the acting nominees, rather than a clip accompanying the reading of each nominee’s name.
8:13 PM. In theory the pairing of Chris Rock and Steve Martin is a great idea. In practice I’m with Dave Itzkoff on The NY Times blog: That was an excellent argument to never have hosts again.
8:05 PM This mighty have been one of those numbers that plays better in the room than on the TV, but it’s done nothing for me on my TV.
8:03 PM Is it too early to say I’d rather be watching the cast of Cats performing a number?
7:53 PM American Factory was produced by the Obamas. If a Democrat wins in November, both President and Senate, I hope the new administration will pass legislation that was talked about twelve years ago which Obama decided against pushing. It’s called card check. You get 50% of the employees to sign a card asking for a union, you get a union without an election. Imagine if employers have to live in deathly fear at all times that a majority of employees will sign a card. Imagine it! Instead, we have a system where the cards have to be followed by an election, giving the employers more time to fire the union organizers, to hold mandatory meetings, to spend two months being nice and giving raises while making threat after threat after threat. A lot of what goes on in those two months is technically illegal, but it’s a lot cheaper to rehire an illegally fired employee with back pay two years later than to lose a union vote. With card check, you have to do better by your employees all day every day. I consider the failure of the Obama administration to push card check to be one of its biggest failings. You want to know the legislation to push for when you’re new —- the legislation that the opposition is spending the most time telling you is too divisive or too something something something.
7:42 PM I thought the year in movies was just fine. But whereas many years recently have had an abundance of good documentaries, this year was lacking. I didn’t see three of the nominated movies, and I didn’t like the two that I did see. Honeyland has beautiful photography, but held me at a distance for reasons I can’t 100% understand. Part of it, I believe, is that the documentarians were so lucky to hit on just the right year to make this movie for interesting happenings, and I might have liked more the version of the movie that was just about the main character of it without the miraculous conflict that animates the actual version. American Factory is a sad and depressing story about the state of unionization in America with fired employees and lying employers, and it doesn’t require or much benefit from or would be much different without the extra bonus that the employer in this instance is a Chinese-owned company. Why not have the same movie about a unionization drive with a US owned company, so many of which do all of the same things pulled from the tool kit of the same law firms that specializing in helping employers to squelch unionization drives.
7:39 PM As is often the case, I am not in thrall of the movies that are most buzzed about for Best Picture. Parasite was, like, fine. But it’s so far short of what the critical establishment says it is, and I’m so not into it. But I’d rather Parasite win than 1917, which takes a gimmick that isn’t terribly new to make a been-there-done-that movie. My own Top Ten list can be found here, and includes only four of the movies on the slate of nine Oscar nominees.
7:27 PM Settling in for a half hour of pre-Oscar chit-chat!
Showing posts with label Academy Awards. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Academy Awards. Show all posts
Sunday, February 9, 2020
Sunday, February 24, 2019
Oscars 2019
12:05 AM - And we'll call this a wrap for the Live Blog. I may have more to say about some of my favorite movies of 2018, but for the Oscars, it's a night. I know I've done better jobs on the live blog than this year, but since they eliminated around a half hour of Stuff, they eliminated a lot of the down time when I could pay less attention to what was on the screen, and more to my typing. I'll take that trade-off any day.
12:03 AM -- Best Actress. Prior to going for a repeat viewing of The Wife a couple of weeks ago, I don't believe I've ever gone back twice to a movie just to see a brilliant performance by an actress. I am deeply disappointed for Glenn Close. I might have a hard time separating out Olivia Colman's performance from my overall dislike for the movie she was in. But even allowing for that, I can't see Colman's performance as better than the third or fourth best in the category, because Melissa McCarthy is a knockout in Can You Ever Forgive Me, and as up and down as A Star Is Born is, it would almost certainly be down-er with anyone else in the lead role.
11:58 PM - Talking more about the Adapted Screenplay category. I didn't see Beale Street, but there are arguments to be made for all four of the nominees that I did see, while the Original category is full of weak links in stronger movies. Can You Ever Forgive Me takes an assortment of unlikeable characters -- even Jane Curtin as the literary agent isn't the most likable literary agent, which is scandalous, and makes us love their faults and imperfections. A Star is Born gets progressively weaker as it goes along, but at its best it takes a story that's decades old and makes it feel utterly contemporary, and it tackles issues of class differences that aren't required from the original movies. But the Screenplay category, both for awards and nominations, is often where the consolation prize is given, and it's a great place to give Spike Lee his first competitive Oscar. I'd put Spike Lee's career against that of Martin Scorsese. Neither has many Oscar statuettes. Both have done films that are highly variable in quality. I'm glad to see him with an Oscar to put on his shelf.
11:45 PM - I'm more upset with Green Book winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay than I am about its winning Best Picture. The Oscars will be the Oscars, and if anything they've gotten better and less Oscar-y over the course of my lifetime. Last night I saw Goodfellas at the Loews Jersey, with around 300 people in attendance to see a film that's some thirty years old. It lost Best Picture to Dances With Wolves. I doubt the Loews Jersey would program Dances With Wolves. If it did, I doubt 300 people would show up to see it. But the most notable thing about that year's Oscars isn't that Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture. The more enduring film loses often, and if you take a look at the Amazon rankings, it ain't like there aren't people still interested to buy a copy of the movie. What's noticeable is how Dances With Wolves swept so many of the smaller award, and once upon a time the Best Picture always racked up Oscar after Oscar. Now, it's much more common to see the spreading around of the statuettes as we saw this year with Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book and Black Panther all taking home multiples. But for Screenplay? The remake of Driving Miss Daisy wins for Screenplay? And yet, even there, my disappointment is tempered. This year's Adopted Screenplay category was full of contenders. The Original Screenplay category? Well, The Favourite wasn't winning. Vice? First Reformed and Roma are both better movies than they are screenplays. Roma's strengths weren't in its underwritten screenplay; I don't know that even the movie's fans would say the screenplay was its strength. And First Reformed is similarly flawed to Roma. There's just too much in both screenplays that we don't see on the screen. Without Ethan Hawke and the passion that the screenwriter also brought to his direction, First Reformed is a clumsy mess that flips its lid as it goes over the top in the ending, and Roma is full of contrivances and the under-explained in its screenplay. But. Still. Green Book, for Screenplay?
11:32 PM - Returning to earlier items... So I joked about Ludwig Goransson's ago, but quite well-meaningly. He's 34 years old. And winning an Oscar for Best Score at the age of 34 -- well, that takes some work. You don't get to score very many motion pictures fresh out of college. You've got to become known, apprentice, gain trust, have reputation enough that the music branch of the Academy will think of you as a possible Oscar winner. If we looked back over 90 years of Academy Awards, how many winners will we find who were younger? It's also a tribute to Ryan Coogler, to spot the talent in someone he meets at college, and have the confidence to give that person work. It's easy enough in to do in his debut movie Fruitvale Station, but then you have to be willing to stick with your man when the studio starts to say "Superhero movie, we need to have the score by the guy who does the loud obnoxious Superhero Movie music." Also worth noticing is the delicacy with which Goransson's scored the quite different Creed and Creed II, where the score requires a different touch, including playing the obligatory homage to Bill Conti's original and enduring themes from the first Rocky movie, which Goransson always does with skill and grace. Now, if Goransson would be willing to study just a little bit more at the knee of a John Williams and get even better, because Williams is getting on, Michael Giacchino isn't doing as much as he could be doing to assume the mantle, and we need people for that role.
11:15 PM - Green Book. Well!
11:03: We don’t always get what we want in life. Green Book won an Oscar for its screenplay, and Glenn Close did not win for The Wife. I shall have more to say on these things.
10:50 PM - Rami! I believe Bohemian Rhapsody is currently in the lead with four Oscars. Very good Nike ad. Roma is the only movie with a shot at overtaking Rhapsody.
10:45 PM - Already at Best Actor?!?!?
10:36 PM - after a few minutes of music from E.T., the bulk came from Superman: The Movie, the music over the funeral of Jonathan Kent, which brings tears to my eyes as an adult when I am lucky enough to see the film on the big screen. Fitting selection in a year when Margot Kidder is amongst thise whose lives were commemorated.
10:25 PM - Ludwig Goransson said “twelve years ago” in his acceptance speech. He doesn’t look old enough! Since I didn’t like any of the score nominees, I opted to root for Black Panther in this category, and am glad to have another win for the movie.
10:20: The Good. The Bad. And The Ugly. And having Green Book win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay is definitely in the Bad column.
10:09 PM - I quite liked how they non-introduced Shallow, just had Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper come on up and sing. Would have been better if theybalso used the occasion to reenact that famous piano number from The Fabulous Baker Boys, but, OK. And how have so many people been doing the “Star Was Robbed” thing. It’s a great first third of a movie that gets worse with each trimester. Really! It isn’t a great whole movie.
10:05 PM - quoting @kylebuchanan “Only 3 black women have won Oscars for anything other than acting. 2 of them just happened tonight.”
9:57 PM - First Man. Won an Oscar.
9:53 PM - American Idol ad is the first standout in a while. The cell service providers are dragging the whole thing down.
9:50 PM - Whatever happens with Roma as Best Picture, Netflix has three Oscars in hand tonight.
9:48 PM - “I can’t believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar.”
9:47PM -first time presenters have done two awards?
9:38 PM - Not so happy about Supporting Actor category. The winning performance could have been in the Best Actor category, and I just have a lot harder a time seeing Richard Grant or Adam Driver being swapped out for actors as good or better, while with Mahershala Ali, I can easily plug in three or five. Richard E. Grant first came to attention in the late 1980s with Withnail and I, which I didn’t see, and How To Get Ahead in Advertising, which sadly I did, an overpraised art film but Grant made an impression. He resonated more positively in Steve Martin’s LA Story, and over the past thirty years he’s been in everything and anything, genre-wise, that you could be in, a lesser known actor from the Mchael Caine school choice philosophy. But there’s nothing in that thirty years to hint at the offbeat power and brilliance of his performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me,, which is a tone perfect tone poem about a deeply imperfect man playing off an ewually imperfect character played by Melissa McCarthy. I reckon being nominated and getting to play the award circuit is for a Richard E. Grant somewhat its own reward, but an Oscar would be a bigger one. And Adam Driver is an actor of deep subtlety as seen also in movies like Paterson. So, here, two performances I much preferred to the one that won.
9:26 PM - from David Itzkoff in the New York Times — Trevor Noah reflects on his own life as “a young boy growing up in Wakanda,” and recounts the many people in his life who approach him by saying “Wakanda Forever.” “Even backstage, Mel Gibson came up to me like, ‘Wakanda forever.’ He said another word after that but the Wakanda part was nice.”
9:16 PM - I could’ve filled out half of a Ten Best list just with documentaries. Bathtubs Over Broadway, Three Identical Strangers. Science Fair. Filmworker. In addition to the the two I placed on.
12:03 AM -- Best Actress. Prior to going for a repeat viewing of The Wife a couple of weeks ago, I don't believe I've ever gone back twice to a movie just to see a brilliant performance by an actress. I am deeply disappointed for Glenn Close. I might have a hard time separating out Olivia Colman's performance from my overall dislike for the movie she was in. But even allowing for that, I can't see Colman's performance as better than the third or fourth best in the category, because Melissa McCarthy is a knockout in Can You Ever Forgive Me, and as up and down as A Star Is Born is, it would almost certainly be down-er with anyone else in the lead role.
11:58 PM - Talking more about the Adapted Screenplay category. I didn't see Beale Street, but there are arguments to be made for all four of the nominees that I did see, while the Original category is full of weak links in stronger movies. Can You Ever Forgive Me takes an assortment of unlikeable characters -- even Jane Curtin as the literary agent isn't the most likable literary agent, which is scandalous, and makes us love their faults and imperfections. A Star is Born gets progressively weaker as it goes along, but at its best it takes a story that's decades old and makes it feel utterly contemporary, and it tackles issues of class differences that aren't required from the original movies. But the Screenplay category, both for awards and nominations, is often where the consolation prize is given, and it's a great place to give Spike Lee his first competitive Oscar. I'd put Spike Lee's career against that of Martin Scorsese. Neither has many Oscar statuettes. Both have done films that are highly variable in quality. I'm glad to see him with an Oscar to put on his shelf.
11:45 PM - I'm more upset with Green Book winning an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay than I am about its winning Best Picture. The Oscars will be the Oscars, and if anything they've gotten better and less Oscar-y over the course of my lifetime. Last night I saw Goodfellas at the Loews Jersey, with around 300 people in attendance to see a film that's some thirty years old. It lost Best Picture to Dances With Wolves. I doubt the Loews Jersey would program Dances With Wolves. If it did, I doubt 300 people would show up to see it. But the most notable thing about that year's Oscars isn't that Dances With Wolves beat Goodfellas for Best Picture. The more enduring film loses often, and if you take a look at the Amazon rankings, it ain't like there aren't people still interested to buy a copy of the movie. What's noticeable is how Dances With Wolves swept so many of the smaller award, and once upon a time the Best Picture always racked up Oscar after Oscar. Now, it's much more common to see the spreading around of the statuettes as we saw this year with Roma, Bohemian Rhapsody, Green Book and Black Panther all taking home multiples. But for Screenplay? The remake of Driving Miss Daisy wins for Screenplay? And yet, even there, my disappointment is tempered. This year's Adopted Screenplay category was full of contenders. The Original Screenplay category? Well, The Favourite wasn't winning. Vice? First Reformed and Roma are both better movies than they are screenplays. Roma's strengths weren't in its underwritten screenplay; I don't know that even the movie's fans would say the screenplay was its strength. And First Reformed is similarly flawed to Roma. There's just too much in both screenplays that we don't see on the screen. Without Ethan Hawke and the passion that the screenwriter also brought to his direction, First Reformed is a clumsy mess that flips its lid as it goes over the top in the ending, and Roma is full of contrivances and the under-explained in its screenplay. But. Still. Green Book, for Screenplay?
11:32 PM - Returning to earlier items... So I joked about Ludwig Goransson's ago, but quite well-meaningly. He's 34 years old. And winning an Oscar for Best Score at the age of 34 -- well, that takes some work. You don't get to score very many motion pictures fresh out of college. You've got to become known, apprentice, gain trust, have reputation enough that the music branch of the Academy will think of you as a possible Oscar winner. If we looked back over 90 years of Academy Awards, how many winners will we find who were younger? It's also a tribute to Ryan Coogler, to spot the talent in someone he meets at college, and have the confidence to give that person work. It's easy enough in to do in his debut movie Fruitvale Station, but then you have to be willing to stick with your man when the studio starts to say "Superhero movie, we need to have the score by the guy who does the loud obnoxious Superhero Movie music." Also worth noticing is the delicacy with which Goransson's scored the quite different Creed and Creed II, where the score requires a different touch, including playing the obligatory homage to Bill Conti's original and enduring themes from the first Rocky movie, which Goransson always does with skill and grace. Now, if Goransson would be willing to study just a little bit more at the knee of a John Williams and get even better, because Williams is getting on, Michael Giacchino isn't doing as much as he could be doing to assume the mantle, and we need people for that role.
11:15 PM - Green Book. Well!
11:03: We don’t always get what we want in life. Green Book won an Oscar for its screenplay, and Glenn Close did not win for The Wife. I shall have more to say on these things.
10:50 PM - Rami! I believe Bohemian Rhapsody is currently in the lead with four Oscars. Very good Nike ad. Roma is the only movie with a shot at overtaking Rhapsody.
10:45 PM - Already at Best Actor?!?!?
10:36 PM - after a few minutes of music from E.T., the bulk came from Superman: The Movie, the music over the funeral of Jonathan Kent, which brings tears to my eyes as an adult when I am lucky enough to see the film on the big screen. Fitting selection in a year when Margot Kidder is amongst thise whose lives were commemorated.
10:25 PM - Ludwig Goransson said “twelve years ago” in his acceptance speech. He doesn’t look old enough! Since I didn’t like any of the score nominees, I opted to root for Black Panther in this category, and am glad to have another win for the movie.
10:20: The Good. The Bad. And The Ugly. And having Green Book win an Oscar for Best Original Screenplay is definitely in the Bad column.
10:09 PM - I quite liked how they non-introduced Shallow, just had Lady Gaga and Bradley Cooper come on up and sing. Would have been better if theybalso used the occasion to reenact that famous piano number from The Fabulous Baker Boys, but, OK. And how have so many people been doing the “Star Was Robbed” thing. It’s a great first third of a movie that gets worse with each trimester. Really! It isn’t a great whole movie.
10:05 PM - quoting @kylebuchanan “Only 3 black women have won Oscars for anything other than acting. 2 of them just happened tonight.”
9:57 PM - First Man. Won an Oscar.
9:53 PM - American Idol ad is the first standout in a while. The cell service providers are dragging the whole thing down.
9:50 PM - Whatever happens with Roma as Best Picture, Netflix has three Oscars in hand tonight.
9:48 PM - “I can’t believe a film about menstruation just won an Oscar.”
9:47PM -first time presenters have done two awards?
9:38 PM - Not so happy about Supporting Actor category. The winning performance could have been in the Best Actor category, and I just have a lot harder a time seeing Richard Grant or Adam Driver being swapped out for actors as good or better, while with Mahershala Ali, I can easily plug in three or five. Richard E. Grant first came to attention in the late 1980s with Withnail and I, which I didn’t see, and How To Get Ahead in Advertising, which sadly I did, an overpraised art film but Grant made an impression. He resonated more positively in Steve Martin’s LA Story, and over the past thirty years he’s been in everything and anything, genre-wise, that you could be in, a lesser known actor from the Mchael Caine school choice philosophy. But there’s nothing in that thirty years to hint at the offbeat power and brilliance of his performance in Can You Ever Forgive Me,, which is a tone perfect tone poem about a deeply imperfect man playing off an ewually imperfect character played by Melissa McCarthy. I reckon being nominated and getting to play the award circuit is for a Richard E. Grant somewhat its own reward, but an Oscar would be a bigger one. And Adam Driver is an actor of deep subtlety as seen also in movies like Paterson. So, here, two performances I much preferred to the one that won.
9:26 PM - from David Itzkoff in the New York Times — Trevor Noah reflects on his own life as “a young boy growing up in Wakanda,” and recounts the many people in his life who approach him by saying “Wakanda Forever.” “Even backstage, Mel Gibson came up to me like, ‘Wakanda forever.’ He said another word after that but the Wakanda part was nice.”
9:16 PM - I could’ve filled out half of a Ten Best list just with documentaries. Bathtubs Over Broadway, Three Identical Strangers. Science Fair. Filmworker. In addition to the the two I placed on.
9:12 PM - When Justin Chang says it for you, quote Justin: Foreign-language film winner Alfonso Cuarón, making the second of likely three appearances on stage tonight, has a lot of cinephilia to go around: This time he tips his hat to CITIZEN KANE, JAWS, THE GODFATHER and BREATHLESS and quotes Claude Chabrol.
9:09 PM - Black Panther didn’t make my Ten Best, but I find myself pulling for it because the films I liked more are often not contending. And it is the work of an actual filmmaker in Ryan Coogler who tried jard to bend the superhero movie to his vision, and crafted a film that wears the influence of other great films on jts sleeve, rather than other superhero movies. I am pretty much dead to the world of superhero movies at this point in time, but this has more staying power with me.
9:05 PM - Geek note, Ruth Carter was the Costume Designer for Joss Whedon’s Serenity.
8:53. Serena!
8:44 PM - Moving along so briskly, not a lot of dead time for blogging!
8:37 PM - Walmart ain’t my favorite place. McDonalds neither. But they step up to the plate with their Oscar ads.
8:27 PM - the guys are killing it with the tuxes this year😀👍😊😁👍😊
8:26 PM - Vice is not a good movie.
8:25 PM - and a great Rolex ad. Google did someg soecialir the Oscars, but seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey abused that way. Yikes! Ugggh!!
8:21 PM. That was a great Cadillac ad, and then gets followed by a very prosaic Verizon ad.
8:18 PM - But Free Solo also made my Top Ten, and I wish I had gotten back to see it in IMAX. Missing from the category is Three Identical Strangers.
8:16PM - What a great category. Minding The Gap, Free Solo, RBG all good. Me go for Minding the Gap.
8:10 PM - Regina King is favored to win, and Beale Street is the one film all over the awards season that I took a pass on. No dog in this hunt. I couldn’t have done worse seeing Beale Street over The Favourite, which I loathed.
8:08 PM Sparkly! Love the tux Chadwick Boseman is wearing.
8:04 PM An Oscar buffet fit fir a Queen
9:09 PM - Black Panther didn’t make my Ten Best, but I find myself pulling for it because the films I liked more are often not contending. And it is the work of an actual filmmaker in Ryan Coogler who tried jard to bend the superhero movie to his vision, and crafted a film that wears the influence of other great films on jts sleeve, rather than other superhero movies. I am pretty much dead to the world of superhero movies at this point in time, but this has more staying power with me.
9:05 PM - Geek note, Ruth Carter was the Costume Designer for Joss Whedon’s Serenity.
8:53. Serena!
8:44 PM - Moving along so briskly, not a lot of dead time for blogging!
8:37 PM - Walmart ain’t my favorite place. McDonalds neither. But they step up to the plate with their Oscar ads.
8:27 PM - the guys are killing it with the tuxes this year😀👍😊😁👍😊
8:26 PM - Vice is not a good movie.
8:25 PM - and a great Rolex ad. Google did someg soecialir the Oscars, but seeing 2001: A Space Odyssey abused that way. Yikes! Ugggh!!
8:21 PM. That was a great Cadillac ad, and then gets followed by a very prosaic Verizon ad.
8:18 PM - But Free Solo also made my Top Ten, and I wish I had gotten back to see it in IMAX. Missing from the category is Three Identical Strangers.
8:16PM - What a great category. Minding The Gap, Free Solo, RBG all good. Me go for Minding the Gap.
8:10 PM - Regina King is favored to win, and Beale Street is the one film all over the awards season that I took a pass on. No dog in this hunt. I couldn’t have done worse seeing Beale Street over The Favourite, which I loathed.
8:08 PM Sparkly! Love the tux Chadwick Boseman is wearing.
8:04 PM An Oscar buffet fit fir a Queen
Sunday, February 28, 2016
#OscarsSoWhite
Movies are the one, or at least the longest, constant in my life.
I can easily recall movie moments from my teenage years, even early in. I was twelve when I saw Star Wars, and know that I saw it in Monticello.
So Oscar night is always special to me, the High Holidays of my secular religion.
But this year has an off taste for me, part #OscarsSoWhite, discussed below, and part #OscarsSoTrite, which will be discussed in another post and/or within my live blog of this year's Oscar ceremony.
A year ago, I thought Selma was a worthy movie, kind of like how I felt about Gandhi when I saw that 33 years ago, and how I've felt about quite a few biopics over the years. With Selma nominated in the Best Picture category, with its elastic number of potential nominees, #OscarsSoWhite felt abstract to me.
But in 2015, two movies, Love and Mercy and Straight Outta Compton raised the bar for the genre of the musical biopic. Considering how many appreciably triter biopics have garnered award nominations, I'd like for both to be more prevalent on the Oscar ballot. But Love and Mercy didn't do great box office, got mixed critical reactions, has too many problems staking its claim on the ballot. I can't feel sorry for Love and Mercy.
But
1. What's the excuse for Straight Outta Compton?
2. Why am I making the argument for Straight Outta Compton, rather than for Creed instead of or in addition to?
The second question is the easier one, so I'll tackle that first.
Yes, Creed was another highlight of the 2015 Year in Cinema. It was a creatively driven resurrection of a series that was widely thought to have crucified itself. The resurrector was a black writer/director, Ryan Coogler. He oversaw top-notch creative efforts from a female director of photographer, a Swedish composer, and a brilliant young black actor, Michael B. Jordan. And with Creed, as with Straight Outta Compton, the nominations are #OscarsSoWhite.
And yet, in the history of the Academy Awards, how many seventh movies in a series have ever been nominated for Best Picture? To ask the question is to answer it, and it's an easy way to divert self-introspection.
The other categories where Creed could have been nominated have a cap on the number of nominees. Maryse Alberti did an exceptional job photographing Creed, but there are five strong nominees in that category. Even Carol, wildly overrated as it is, shines most in the technical categories like photography. If I really really had to choose I could find a nominee to boot out of the Director and Original Screenplay categories, but it would be a hard choice. I would prefer to see Creed in the Original Score category over Carol or Bridge of Spies. But whatever my own choices would be, there are choices like this which can be made, rationalized, justified. Any Oscars voter could too easily say "if only I had room for one more on the ballot, Creed would have been it." Again, self-introspection can be avoided.
But what''s the excuse for Straight Outta Compton in the Best Picture category, with two open slots?
1. It was #19 on the box office chart for 2015. If you look at the movies above it and provide basic screening tests like "no 7th movies in series" "no comic book movies" "no animated movies" "no 50 Shades" and feel that it would be really really nice if box office successes had some correlation with the Oscars, then Straight Outta Compton has to be your second or third choice, in a category with ten nominees.
2. It's a biopic. A genre that mints Oscar nominees. See Coal Miner's Daughter in the musical biopic category.
3. Is it good enough? It has an 88% critic's rating and a 93% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Revenant, a contender to win Best Picture, is worse in both categories.
4. Is it part of the National Conversation? Well, duh! The scene of the N.W.A. members being harassed by the police outside of the recording studio couldn't be more timely if it came with a carillon chiming the hour.
I loved the movie. Like Boyhood in 2014, it demonstrated that it's possible to have a film flirt with three hours and justify each and every minute. That's great directing by F. Gary Gray. Not that it should matter if I liked it or not. Every year I have to resign myself to the fact that some movie I don't like will be nominated for Academy Awards because it is so totally part of the National Conversation or so clearly a Critics Darling or the kind of movie that attracts award nominations like fruit flies to apple cider vinegar. Straight Outta Compton is, for all reasons noted above, the exact kind of movie that forces acquiescence to its presence on the ballot, regardless of one's personal opinions. And white as Hollywood might be, enough of Hollywood is capable of acknowledging that. Its omission from the elastic Best Picture category is ultimately much harder to justify than its presence would have been.
In a few instances, those questioning the omission can find a scapegoat. The Oscars take cues from the studios themselves. I have a subscription to the Los Angeles Times, which is a prime venue, especially in its "The Envelope" special sections that run frequently during the Oscar and Emmy award seasons, for award campaign advertisements. In spite of the excellent reviews it received and the strong box office reception it garnered, I feel that Straight Outta Compton could have received a stronger, more persistent, from the word "go" awards campaign than it did. But if the Oscar campaign for Straight Outta Compton was underwhelming, it reflects decisions made by the studio, which are likely influenced by the lack of diversity in the studio and/or by an acknowledgment of the realpolitik of putting money behind this movie in advertising to the older, whiter, "maler" constituency of Oscar voters. The scapegoat goes off with the sins, but ends up wandering right back to those wishing absolution.
So there are no good excuses. I'm a 51-year-old white dude, and I can see this. And so can many, many other people.
The creators of and the driving forces behind Straight Outta Compton might not have a chance at Best Picture, but there's reason to think (or at least hope) that their failure there might win a bigger prize in forcing change upon the film industry.
I can easily recall movie moments from my teenage years, even early in. I was twelve when I saw Star Wars, and know that I saw it in Monticello.
So Oscar night is always special to me, the High Holidays of my secular religion.
But this year has an off taste for me, part #OscarsSoWhite, discussed below, and part #OscarsSoTrite, which will be discussed in another post and/or within my live blog of this year's Oscar ceremony.
A year ago, I thought Selma was a worthy movie, kind of like how I felt about Gandhi when I saw that 33 years ago, and how I've felt about quite a few biopics over the years. With Selma nominated in the Best Picture category, with its elastic number of potential nominees, #OscarsSoWhite felt abstract to me.
But in 2015, two movies, Love and Mercy and Straight Outta Compton raised the bar for the genre of the musical biopic. Considering how many appreciably triter biopics have garnered award nominations, I'd like for both to be more prevalent on the Oscar ballot. But Love and Mercy didn't do great box office, got mixed critical reactions, has too many problems staking its claim on the ballot. I can't feel sorry for Love and Mercy.
But
1. What's the excuse for Straight Outta Compton?
2. Why am I making the argument for Straight Outta Compton, rather than for Creed instead of or in addition to?
The second question is the easier one, so I'll tackle that first.
Yes, Creed was another highlight of the 2015 Year in Cinema. It was a creatively driven resurrection of a series that was widely thought to have crucified itself. The resurrector was a black writer/director, Ryan Coogler. He oversaw top-notch creative efforts from a female director of photographer, a Swedish composer, and a brilliant young black actor, Michael B. Jordan. And with Creed, as with Straight Outta Compton, the nominations are #OscarsSoWhite.
And yet, in the history of the Academy Awards, how many seventh movies in a series have ever been nominated for Best Picture? To ask the question is to answer it, and it's an easy way to divert self-introspection.
The other categories where Creed could have been nominated have a cap on the number of nominees. Maryse Alberti did an exceptional job photographing Creed, but there are five strong nominees in that category. Even Carol, wildly overrated as it is, shines most in the technical categories like photography. If I really really had to choose I could find a nominee to boot out of the Director and Original Screenplay categories, but it would be a hard choice. I would prefer to see Creed in the Original Score category over Carol or Bridge of Spies. But whatever my own choices would be, there are choices like this which can be made, rationalized, justified. Any Oscars voter could too easily say "if only I had room for one more on the ballot, Creed would have been it." Again, self-introspection can be avoided.
But what''s the excuse for Straight Outta Compton in the Best Picture category, with two open slots?
1. It was #19 on the box office chart for 2015. If you look at the movies above it and provide basic screening tests like "no 7th movies in series" "no comic book movies" "no animated movies" "no 50 Shades" and feel that it would be really really nice if box office successes had some correlation with the Oscars, then Straight Outta Compton has to be your second or third choice, in a category with ten nominees.
2. It's a biopic. A genre that mints Oscar nominees. See Coal Miner's Daughter in the musical biopic category.
3. Is it good enough? It has an 88% critic's rating and a 93% audience rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The Revenant, a contender to win Best Picture, is worse in both categories.
4. Is it part of the National Conversation? Well, duh! The scene of the N.W.A. members being harassed by the police outside of the recording studio couldn't be more timely if it came with a carillon chiming the hour.
I loved the movie. Like Boyhood in 2014, it demonstrated that it's possible to have a film flirt with three hours and justify each and every minute. That's great directing by F. Gary Gray. Not that it should matter if I liked it or not. Every year I have to resign myself to the fact that some movie I don't like will be nominated for Academy Awards because it is so totally part of the National Conversation or so clearly a Critics Darling or the kind of movie that attracts award nominations like fruit flies to apple cider vinegar. Straight Outta Compton is, for all reasons noted above, the exact kind of movie that forces acquiescence to its presence on the ballot, regardless of one's personal opinions. And white as Hollywood might be, enough of Hollywood is capable of acknowledging that. Its omission from the elastic Best Picture category is ultimately much harder to justify than its presence would have been.
In a few instances, those questioning the omission can find a scapegoat. The Oscars take cues from the studios themselves. I have a subscription to the Los Angeles Times, which is a prime venue, especially in its "The Envelope" special sections that run frequently during the Oscar and Emmy award seasons, for award campaign advertisements. In spite of the excellent reviews it received and the strong box office reception it garnered, I feel that Straight Outta Compton could have received a stronger, more persistent, from the word "go" awards campaign than it did. But if the Oscar campaign for Straight Outta Compton was underwhelming, it reflects decisions made by the studio, which are likely influenced by the lack of diversity in the studio and/or by an acknowledgment of the realpolitik of putting money behind this movie in advertising to the older, whiter, "maler" constituency of Oscar voters. The scapegoat goes off with the sins, but ends up wandering right back to those wishing absolution.
So there are no good excuses. I'm a 51-year-old white dude, and I can see this. And so can many, many other people.
The creators of and the driving forces behind Straight Outta Compton might not have a chance at Best Picture, but there's reason to think (or at least hope) that their failure there might win a bigger prize in forcing change upon the film industry.
Sunday, February 26, 2012
The Pre Oscar -- Best Picture
I don't know how Bryce Moore manages with two kids to find time for more movie reviews than I do, but it's time to at least say something in preparation for Sunday's Oscar ceremony!
We have nine Best Picture nominees, I've seen all of them to some extent or another.
Let's say I won't be rooting for Hugo. I started to feel weary within ten or fifteen minutes of the film starting. I eventually woke up, decided sleeping was to be preferred, and ended up walking out. During the brief moments that I was awake, I could see that the movie was brilliantly made from a production design standpoint or a music standpoint or in any and many fashions you could say. But the story was just boring, I didn't care about the kid, I didn't want to see a peon to motion picture history or preservation.
I also left The Help. I hadn't read the book, I read the first page or so and recoiled at the very thought of it. Trying to watch the movie cold reminded me of what it must have been like to try and watch Sorceror's Stone without having started in on the Harry Potter series. It was dramatically inert, I didn't care about the main character or any character just from what was on the screen. The buzz is that this will mean I will not properly appreciate the virtues of the actresses most likely to win in both leading and supporting characters. Pardon the pun, but there's no Help for for that.
I did kind of like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I thought it rang true in a lot of important ways, in the relationship between the mother and child, in the child's reaction to what happened on 9/11. It's not "real" after that, it's a movie. But I was bothered a lot more by the unreality of having World War I stop for ten minutes so a British and German soldier could take care of War Horse than I was by anything in Extremely Loud. If the Best Picture race were between the two of these pictures, I'd put the horse out to some incredibly close pasture and be done with it. Not that War Horse doesn't have some virtues as well, but its mawkishness and manipulativeness was far more apparent in my eyes.
I don't know what to say about Tree of Life. I saw it. I stayed awake, pretty much. But it's not a movie. It's a tone poem or an elegy or something but it isn't a movie. I'm sure whatever it is, it's a very good example of whatever. But I like to see a movie when I go to the movies.
Of the above films, Extremely Loud and War Horse are the only ones that I was in any rush to see. I only went to The Help at all because it was a free screening months after it opened, I waited weeks to see Tree of Life. Hugo was part of a double feature with the rather disappointing Young Adult. By and large, I was right to have been disinterested.
Similarly, I saw The Artist pretty much only because I had an opportunity to see it as part of a last minute add on to the Variety Screening Series. And this was entirely disposable and missable as well. It's not a bad movie. But it's such a trifle that I don't entirely see the point of it. The most interesting part of it to me was correctly noticing that part of it was filmed in the Bradbury Building, which might be best known for being used in Blade Runner. The ornate staircase looked a lot different here, but it's one distinct piece of staircase. It pains me to think that this amusing little trifle is thought to be the leading contender for Best Picture. Really?
Extremely Loud might be preposterous in some ways in some eyes, but I at least see it as a legitimate attempt to go near the events of 9/11, and where it approaches them most directly to do so in real vibrant ways that speak -- accurately in the eyes of someone in NYC on the day -- to some of the actual emotion of the events.
If I'm not rooting for The Artist...
well, I'm not rooting for Moneyball. Brad Pitt is awfully good in the movie, Jonah Hill is awfully good in the movie, there are some good performances lurking elsewhere, like Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Oaklands As manager Art Howe. The last third or maybe last half of the move was actually pretty darned good. The problem here is just that the first chunk of the movie isn't really that good. It's too slow to get going. Not rooting for it, but of the nine nominees this is in the half that I at least don't mind seeing in the running.
Midnight in Paris, this is a great movie, but like The Artist I think it's a little too trifling for me to really want to pull for it in the Best Picture category. Still, it's an awfully good movie, Woody Allen's best movie in perhaps 20 years, his first really good one maybe since Crimes and Misdemeanors. If you haven't fallen in love with the idea of Paris before, it's hard not after the opening montage of the city photographed with its best side in every frame, in every shot, in every glimmer of light. The script is tight, witty, the contemporary relationships feel real, and I'm willing then to consider that the historical parts of it are as real as the contemporary. Whether they are or not, I don't know, but I'm willing to go along for the ride. It's hard in some ways to say why this movie charmed me so thoroughly where The Artist does not. Maybe it's because The Artist competes with my memories of Mel Brooks' Silent Movie? Maybe it's because there's some edge and ambivalence to the relationships in Midnight in Paris, while there's never any real doubt what will happen in The Artist, if you've seen a lot of movies The Artist has one of those scripts that you can write from memory of other films. I certainly couldn't fill in the blanks from my own experience on the literary experiences of Paris through the ages.
Ultimately, and rather surprisingly in light of my past experience with the director, my hands down favorite pick for Best Picture from the films that were nominated is The Descendants. I don't think I've ever liked an Alexander Payne film quite as much as his most fervent admirers. Sideways was experienced by me in the same way as Hugo, a film better suited for napping than for viewing. Election wasn't bad, but I'd call it Enhlenhectenh because it's kind of enh and not really great. And somehow or other, this director I've never really warmed to managed to come up with a brilliant picture. He's helped tons by George Clooney. Clooney has been so good if not better in so many movies, but he gives his best performance yet in this picture. It's quiet, subtle, yet incredibly forceful. There's no sign of star power or glamor when he's trying to deal with the daughters he doesn't really know. It might be the only movie set in Hawaii that makes me want to visit, because it doesn't just stay on the touristy beaches. It reveals the islands as actual places where real people eat, meet, work. Shows me a place I could actually walk around in and visit and experience in ways beyond worrying about whether I'd gotten all the right spots with my sunscreen. The script presents characters that movie experience tells us are to be experienced in particular ways, and then if gives us an entirely different experience, often in subtle, well-crafted scenes that put the craft and unique experience of cinema to use. There's the confrontation scene between George Clooney and Matthew Lillard, the gangly guy from the Scream movies, who's something entirely different here. Grown into almost middle age in his face but not quite in his life experiences, holding his own with George Clooney at his best. There are a lot of great scenes in this movie, but to me the one that still holds in my mind's eye a few months after seeing the movie is toward the end. Clooney's in-law has come to say goodbye to his dying daughter. The hospital scene is rife with tension between the two, the son-in-law who's never been good enough for the daughter, the son-in-law who knows he's never been good enough in his father-in-law's eyes. Experience suggests that we go either into some kind of full throttle final argument or to some wonderful scene of last-minute reconciliation. We get neither. Clooney and the camera quietly leave the hospital room with nothing fully resolved, and we peek in at the father and we peek in on Clooney's face. There's no resolution at all to the relationship between the characters, but we see that everything the father's ever said has been said out of real love and care for his daughter, who means more than anything to him, that it might be misguided but never out of malice and spite. And we see in Clooney's face that he might never have enjoyed his father-in-law, but that he'd managed to come to grips over time with his place in the relationship. There's no love, there's no hate, there's a lesson passed along to Clooney's daughter and to us, quietly, gently, but with clarity, it's somehow the quiet ringing of a loud clarion call.
If I could swap out some of the movies I liked less for others I liked more...
Bridesmaids. Comedy done right, uproariously side-splittingly funny. This isn't easy to do.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. About as good a popcorn movie as you can put together. Director Brad Bird, known for animated movies such as Iron Giant and The Incredibles, manages to do live action action with the fluidity of animation, and does it without giving the film the CGI anything goes look and feel that makes some of today's films look artificial.
Margin Call. It has a nomination in the screenplay category, deservedly. I'd settle for that if it weren't that there are so many appreciably worse movies in the 9 contending for Best Picture that this one should be in the mix for the main prize.
We have nine Best Picture nominees, I've seen all of them to some extent or another.
Let's say I won't be rooting for Hugo. I started to feel weary within ten or fifteen minutes of the film starting. I eventually woke up, decided sleeping was to be preferred, and ended up walking out. During the brief moments that I was awake, I could see that the movie was brilliantly made from a production design standpoint or a music standpoint or in any and many fashions you could say. But the story was just boring, I didn't care about the kid, I didn't want to see a peon to motion picture history or preservation.
I also left The Help. I hadn't read the book, I read the first page or so and recoiled at the very thought of it. Trying to watch the movie cold reminded me of what it must have been like to try and watch Sorceror's Stone without having started in on the Harry Potter series. It was dramatically inert, I didn't care about the main character or any character just from what was on the screen. The buzz is that this will mean I will not properly appreciate the virtues of the actresses most likely to win in both leading and supporting characters. Pardon the pun, but there's no Help for for that.
I did kind of like Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close. I thought it rang true in a lot of important ways, in the relationship between the mother and child, in the child's reaction to what happened on 9/11. It's not "real" after that, it's a movie. But I was bothered a lot more by the unreality of having World War I stop for ten minutes so a British and German soldier could take care of War Horse than I was by anything in Extremely Loud. If the Best Picture race were between the two of these pictures, I'd put the horse out to some incredibly close pasture and be done with it. Not that War Horse doesn't have some virtues as well, but its mawkishness and manipulativeness was far more apparent in my eyes.
I don't know what to say about Tree of Life. I saw it. I stayed awake, pretty much. But it's not a movie. It's a tone poem or an elegy or something but it isn't a movie. I'm sure whatever it is, it's a very good example of whatever. But I like to see a movie when I go to the movies.
Of the above films, Extremely Loud and War Horse are the only ones that I was in any rush to see. I only went to The Help at all because it was a free screening months after it opened, I waited weeks to see Tree of Life. Hugo was part of a double feature with the rather disappointing Young Adult. By and large, I was right to have been disinterested.
Similarly, I saw The Artist pretty much only because I had an opportunity to see it as part of a last minute add on to the Variety Screening Series. And this was entirely disposable and missable as well. It's not a bad movie. But it's such a trifle that I don't entirely see the point of it. The most interesting part of it to me was correctly noticing that part of it was filmed in the Bradbury Building, which might be best known for being used in Blade Runner. The ornate staircase looked a lot different here, but it's one distinct piece of staircase. It pains me to think that this amusing little trifle is thought to be the leading contender for Best Picture. Really?
Extremely Loud might be preposterous in some ways in some eyes, but I at least see it as a legitimate attempt to go near the events of 9/11, and where it approaches them most directly to do so in real vibrant ways that speak -- accurately in the eyes of someone in NYC on the day -- to some of the actual emotion of the events.
If I'm not rooting for The Artist...
well, I'm not rooting for Moneyball. Brad Pitt is awfully good in the movie, Jonah Hill is awfully good in the movie, there are some good performances lurking elsewhere, like Philip Seymour Hoffman as the Oaklands As manager Art Howe. The last third or maybe last half of the move was actually pretty darned good. The problem here is just that the first chunk of the movie isn't really that good. It's too slow to get going. Not rooting for it, but of the nine nominees this is in the half that I at least don't mind seeing in the running.
Midnight in Paris, this is a great movie, but like The Artist I think it's a little too trifling for me to really want to pull for it in the Best Picture category. Still, it's an awfully good movie, Woody Allen's best movie in perhaps 20 years, his first really good one maybe since Crimes and Misdemeanors. If you haven't fallen in love with the idea of Paris before, it's hard not after the opening montage of the city photographed with its best side in every frame, in every shot, in every glimmer of light. The script is tight, witty, the contemporary relationships feel real, and I'm willing then to consider that the historical parts of it are as real as the contemporary. Whether they are or not, I don't know, but I'm willing to go along for the ride. It's hard in some ways to say why this movie charmed me so thoroughly where The Artist does not. Maybe it's because The Artist competes with my memories of Mel Brooks' Silent Movie? Maybe it's because there's some edge and ambivalence to the relationships in Midnight in Paris, while there's never any real doubt what will happen in The Artist, if you've seen a lot of movies The Artist has one of those scripts that you can write from memory of other films. I certainly couldn't fill in the blanks from my own experience on the literary experiences of Paris through the ages.
Ultimately, and rather surprisingly in light of my past experience with the director, my hands down favorite pick for Best Picture from the films that were nominated is The Descendants. I don't think I've ever liked an Alexander Payne film quite as much as his most fervent admirers. Sideways was experienced by me in the same way as Hugo, a film better suited for napping than for viewing. Election wasn't bad, but I'd call it Enhlenhectenh because it's kind of enh and not really great. And somehow or other, this director I've never really warmed to managed to come up with a brilliant picture. He's helped tons by George Clooney. Clooney has been so good if not better in so many movies, but he gives his best performance yet in this picture. It's quiet, subtle, yet incredibly forceful. There's no sign of star power or glamor when he's trying to deal with the daughters he doesn't really know. It might be the only movie set in Hawaii that makes me want to visit, because it doesn't just stay on the touristy beaches. It reveals the islands as actual places where real people eat, meet, work. Shows me a place I could actually walk around in and visit and experience in ways beyond worrying about whether I'd gotten all the right spots with my sunscreen. The script presents characters that movie experience tells us are to be experienced in particular ways, and then if gives us an entirely different experience, often in subtle, well-crafted scenes that put the craft and unique experience of cinema to use. There's the confrontation scene between George Clooney and Matthew Lillard, the gangly guy from the Scream movies, who's something entirely different here. Grown into almost middle age in his face but not quite in his life experiences, holding his own with George Clooney at his best. There are a lot of great scenes in this movie, but to me the one that still holds in my mind's eye a few months after seeing the movie is toward the end. Clooney's in-law has come to say goodbye to his dying daughter. The hospital scene is rife with tension between the two, the son-in-law who's never been good enough for the daughter, the son-in-law who knows he's never been good enough in his father-in-law's eyes. Experience suggests that we go either into some kind of full throttle final argument or to some wonderful scene of last-minute reconciliation. We get neither. Clooney and the camera quietly leave the hospital room with nothing fully resolved, and we peek in at the father and we peek in on Clooney's face. There's no resolution at all to the relationship between the characters, but we see that everything the father's ever said has been said out of real love and care for his daughter, who means more than anything to him, that it might be misguided but never out of malice and spite. And we see in Clooney's face that he might never have enjoyed his father-in-law, but that he'd managed to come to grips over time with his place in the relationship. There's no love, there's no hate, there's a lesson passed along to Clooney's daughter and to us, quietly, gently, but with clarity, it's somehow the quiet ringing of a loud clarion call.
If I could swap out some of the movies I liked less for others I liked more...
Bridesmaids. Comedy done right, uproariously side-splittingly funny. This isn't easy to do.
Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. About as good a popcorn movie as you can put together. Director Brad Bird, known for animated movies such as Iron Giant and The Incredibles, manages to do live action action with the fluidity of animation, and does it without giving the film the CGI anything goes look and feel that makes some of today's films look artificial.
Margin Call. It has a nomination in the screenplay category, deservedly. I'd settle for that if it weren't that there are so many appreciably worse movies in the 9 contending for Best Picture that this one should be in the mix for the main prize.
Sunday, February 22, 2009
The Good The Bad & The Ugly
Midnight Eastern. This was a very good Oscar telecast. Not perfect. Curtain over screen doesn't want to open, the Heath Ledger and Memoriam things. But awfully danged good. 3:30 from beginning to the end of the credit roll, which is not bad at all for an Oscar telecast. They did it tight while recognizing that the telecast isn't long and boring because of the acceptance speeches which the producers have no control over and which thus must be kept to 30 seconds max but rather because of the things they do have control over. So Jerry Lewis didn't have the longest Hersholt presentation, perhaps sometimes they've actually gone on too long. The acting awards were presented in a new and different way that lasted no much longer than if they had given that same time to the usual 30 second film clip, but this seemed much nicer and more affecting, in part because actors many of them don't lack for ego and this allowed them all to have it indulged for a few seconds. Which made them happier. Which made the show more interesting. One production number did not work, but one worked very well. They played to Hugh Jackman's strengths, but didn't give him much to do. Maybe that's a good thing. When you've got so much star power do you need to have a host appearing every so often to do a little host stuff just for the sake of having a host? It doesn't hurt that you'll know from reading the pre-show and seeing the winners that I was by and large happy with them. This makes the evening more pleasant for me than when some movie I hate is rolling up the statuettes. Though a good telecast like this would certainly make even that evening a more enjoyable one. So a good evening. Jai Ho! Jai Ho! Jai Ho! The Brillig Blogger, signing off. WIll watch some of the press room and party happenings on E, try and finish my Washington Post, and the work day is just ten short hours away.
11:55. It Is Written. Slumdog Millionaire. Color me happy.
11:50. I love the way they're doing the Best Picture montage. As you know from my film reviews a good movie makes you reflect on other good movies. I think of other special experiences in that theatre, that actor, even that score as the lush one for Defiance reminds me of The Village. They're getting that across in this montage, and it's wonderful.
11:43. If memory serves Sean Penn and Robert De Niro were in We're No Angels. A worthy win in a category with some rich competition. Penn's performance is I think better than the film itself. Gus Van Sant previously helped Matt Damon and Ben Affleck to an Oscar for best screenplay in Good Will Hunting, so this is the 2nd time he's done the trick for one of his screenwriters. Which is not too shabby. They're cutting less to Van Sant than to the screenwriter Dustin Lance Black who seems really moved to be watching this take place. Other audience note, the pleasure Dev Patel seems to be taking in simply being in the crowd for this evening. He's only 18, and here he is in the front rows of the Oscars watching life's rich pageant march by in front of him. I'm glad he's enjoying it. These moments are very very special.
11:32. And I am so very glad to have Kate Winslet winning for The Reader. It's a very good performance full of ambiguity, and it's nice to see the film winning a statue, which may help keep people seeing it for many years to come on 30 days of Oscar on TMC.
11:31. Nicole Kidman is looking a little too white; the dress blends into her skin. She and Mickey Rourke should go out afterward.
11:23. There's a very nice J. C. Penney in Queens Center mall, one of the biggest in the country. I like Penneys because they have sections with shirts, and sections with pants, so if you want to buy a pair of pants you can go to the pants section. At Macy's they have the this-designer boutique and the that-designer boutique and the other-designer boutique, and you have to go wandering all over from boutique to boutique to find a pair of pants. I don't like that idea very much. Could you imagine if your supermarket had the Kraft aisle and the Nestle aisle and the Procter & Gamble aisle and you had to wander all of them and remember which food conglomerate made that brand of shampoo or mustard that you really liked?
11:22. Danny Boyle forgot to include the name of the person who choreographed the dance in the credits? None of us are perfect, but talk about oversights. Anna Paquin may not have mentioned Charlaine Harris in accepting her Golden Globe. People make omissions.
11:15. I don't mind having a person sing during the In Memorium section. I do mind having the memorials floating hither and yon and back and forth on the screen so that some of the images and names are shrunken onto a fraction of the screen and you feel as if you need to walk up two inches from the screen and press your eyes against the glass to read the name. If Khan could see how hard it was to see Ricardo Montalban during the montage, he would certainly exhibit some Wrath.
11:07. Departures? Did that play in New York City? At least it wasn't The Class. Though for the record my eldest brother who is a media specialist in a Ct. public school liked The Class very much and disagreed most strenuously with my review of it, posted on blog yesterday.
11:03. If I'd known how many nice Coke commercials there were going to be, maybe I would've had a caffeine free diet instead of the Whole Foods Root Beer. Too late, though. Before I saw Taken last night, there was a wonderful Coke commercial in the theatre that updates the Mean Joe Green giving the kid the jersey ad in a most pleasant and delightful way.
11:01. Jai Ho! Jai Ho! Jai Ho! It was a nice production #, and another nice win. Did I tell you how I think the end dance in Slumdog Millionaire is perhaps the best dance number to end a movie in over twenty years, since I saw Dirty Dancing? Oh, I did. Just seven minutes ago? You're sure? Oh, well, some things bear repeating.
10:54. A. R. Rahman wins for Slumdog. No problems here. I love the dance # at the end of the movie. It's the best way to exit a theatre since Baby was taken out of her corner by Johnny Castle at the end of Dirty Dancing. (Of course, in both cases one should actually not exit until after staying for the end credits, so maybe these endings are the best way to prepare for watching the end credits.)
10:44 & the one movie I know him from I don't think they even showed in the surprisingly short montage. In years past it seems to me the winner of the Jean Hersholt Humanitarian Award has benefited from a much longer and lavish and more clip-filled introduction than this.
10:41. Eddie Murphy. Good choice to present this award. Will anyone under 20 recognize him when he isn't wearing his fat suit from Norbit or hiding behind Donkey? I'm neutral on the subject of Jerry Lewis, because I've just not seen very many of his movies. The only one I could point to offhand that I know I've seen is Scorcese's The King of Comedy.
10:37. I'd seen this Tide Total Care commercial for the first time a few nights ago, maybe while I was watching Friday Night Lights. It's a very very good commercial. I still have a large portion of a very big Costco-size Tide to work my way thru, however, so I won't be buying another detergent, Total Care of Wheaties Care or any other care, any time soon.
10:35. Slumdog wins for editing. Not a tough category. Slumdog is a heckuva good piece of filmmaking, and the editing is a huge part of that. Watching a 2nd time and focusing more on the cutting of the chase sequence from the airport, you appreciate just how good the cutting on this movie is.
10:31. Slumdog Millionaire wins for Sound Mixing. Watching the clips I realize how tough a category this is. Wall-E has its merits, Wanted, Dark Knight. Now thinking cynically, if you cut to Josh Brolin and Robert Downey Jr. looking sadly contemplative as Heath Ledger's family speaks, is it on behalf of Heath Ledger, or on behalf of having to run against him this year? On behalf of Heath, I'm sure. But this decision not to try and find people who'd actually worked with him is still nagging at me.
10:27. Benjamin Button wins for Visual Effects. This, art direction, makeup. Such great art in the service of such mediocrity. Salieri salutes you.
10:22. Great commercial for Jimmy Kimmel Live. Five stars. Also five stars for this sentence from a Washington Post article on texting: "There is a cost when people multitask -- "a kind of a mental brownout," said Meyer, the professor at the University of Michigan. If a teenager is reading Shakespeare when a text message interrupts, "Hamlet's going to fade in and out in a ghostly fog." Go Blue!
10:15. Man on Wire wins for Best Documentary. Sadly, to me a better concept than it was a picture. Though since it's the only one of the films I've seen I guess I can't complain. And the acceptance speech with magic and balancing acts is much better than the movie. If you want to see a good documentary, add My Architect to your Netflix queue.
10:11. So even though Heath Ledger was widely considered a shoo-in, his family is as far back on nominee Siberia as the winner for animated short... It's touching to see the expressions on people's faces during the acceptance speech, but to me also something missing because they're largely showing all of the celebrities they've been showing. Were there any people in the auditorium who might have worked with Heath Ledger for whom the moment might have meant something even more than it meant to Robert Downey Jr. and Josh Brolin? This is a miscue to me.
9:59. Ryan Reynolds, Sandra Bullock, The Proposal. June 12. Looks good. The Maytag Repairman was once played by Gordon Jump, who played Chief of Police Tinkler in Soap, which is one of my favorite TV shows of all time. 30 years ago he was in WKRP.
9:57. The musical WAS back. Until this production #. If only they'd added a 4th couple, and had Rob Lowe and Cinderella singing next to Zac and Vanessa from HSM.
9:53. Actually I went to the frig to start in on one of my special Oscar treats, a can of 365 Brand Root Beer from Whole Foods, which is very good and deserves the high ranking it got in a NY Times root beer review article last year. & now do I watch this production #, or read more Washington Post. I guess I'll watch the production # so I know why all the jaws will be dropped in the morning.
9:47. Even with the thrust stage, the winner for Live Action Short still has to get to the stage from nominee seating Siberia. If only one of them could sing and dance, could have filled in for Anne Hathaway in the opening.... Hmmmmmm.... And yet another commercial break. A lot of those recently. Back to the Washington Post on my Kindle.
9:35. Nice Coke commercial, glad to have a Cinematography win for Slumdog.
9:17. No surprise, really, for Benjamin Button to win for Art Direction. But I'd rather it hadn't. During the commercial break I started reading what looks like a really good article in the Washington Post about the path of a Guantanamo detainee from prison to suicide bomber in Iraq. You may need to register to read, but feel free to click here.
9:01. And no complaints on Slumdog Millionaire. Modest preference here for me for The Reader, but Slumdog is a very good movie. A very good movie.
8:54 Maybe I'd have seen Happy go Lucky if I'd known it had a shout-out to Roger Penrose, another client of my UK agent John Richard Parker at the Zeno Agency. Is John watching at 2AM Greenwich time to know that Roger Penrose has just gotten a shout-out on the Oscar telecast? This was a tough category for me without a real favorite, so I may as well be glad that Milk has won an Oscar. In Bruges wasn't likely to win, Joshua. Really, honest. So let's be very glad for Dustin Lance Black.
8:52. 30 years ago would anyone have known what "blinking cursor on a blank screen" meant, and yet the actual sketch is being done with something that sounds a lot mre like a typewriter...
8:47. I'm happy with the win for Penelope Cruz. I can't believe I'm typing this, but as I posted earlier in the day it's a nice recognition for Woody Allen's best film in years for a role that was revelatory to me. I'm liking the first 20 minutes.
8:43. Eva Marie Saint was a clue in today's NY Times crossword puzzle. Did they know?
8:23 while they interview Richard Jenkins, I wonder if the Rocky Mountain Chocolate Factory in the entryway to the theater is open, and if there are candy apples for all who successfully complete the red carpet circuit. I mean, if I could get free popcorn and soda from HBO at the True Blood premiere, can't an Oscar attendee get a candy apple?
8:20 PM EST. A nice accounting montage to greet the men with the winning envelopes. Meryl and Penelope look pretty swell.
the pre-Oscar
Having now seen The Class and Frozen River, I've seen pretty much an Oscar nommed movie I'm intending to see and blogged accordingly. Best Picture is less than a day away. It's time to talk some about the nominations and go on record before the envelopes are opened.
I've seen "only" 85ish movies that opened in 2008, but that does include virtually every feature-length film with an Oscar nomination, except I think a total of 4 noms for these 4 films: The Duchess; Hellboy 2; Happy-go-Lucky; and The Visitor. I walked out on Kung Fu Panda. Some films I may have been more awake for than others. Some of the films I might have skipped if not for the Variety Screening Series. I'm pretty certain I'd have skipped The Wrestler, and I may have caught The Reader only reluctantly after the nominations were announced. I'm so glad Melissa Leo got a Best Actress nom for Frozen River, giving me an excuse to see a movie I'd missed, instead of Kristen Scott Thomas in I Loved You So Long which I'd quite happily missed and am glad not to have felt any obligation to see.
My best films of 2008: Stop Loss, The Dark Knight, Tropic Thunder, Rachel Getting Married, Wanted, Tell No One, Slumdog Millionaire, The Reader and Defiance. Vicky Cristina Barcelona was Woody Allen's best movie in years but I'm not sure good enough to be 10th on my ten best. I really enjoyed Eagle Eye and Role Models as well.
So of the films contending for Best Picture, the conventional wisdom has the battle between Benjamin Button and Slumdog, and Slumdog will almost certainly win. The voters pay attention to box office, and Benjaminin Button has faded badly even with the benefit of all of its Oscar noms while Slumdog has been thriving. I've seen Slumdog twice myself, I liked it equally as much the second time around, and I won't complain if it wins.
But I do wish more consideration were being given to The Reader. I mentioned when I blogged on it how there were layers apparent a week after the movie that hadn't been when I saw it, and that sense has only grown. Think Lynndie England. Her existence: working cashier at IGA and nights in a chicken processing factory. Joining the US Army Reserve is a way to better herself, to serve her country, to do good and do right. She ends up doing horrible things at Abu Ghraib, court-martialled, in jail, almost certainly as a result of policies that came down from much higher levels than herself. Well, that's somewhat like the character Kate Winslet is playing in The Reader. When she's on trial for her role as a concentration camp guard who watched while hundreds of her charges died in a fire in the waning days of WWII, she asks the judge what he would have done when the Nazis came looking for people and she left her job at Siemen's (a German department store) to join. The Reader makes you think. It brings you face to face with unpleasant thoughts. It deserves its Best Picture nomination, Kate Winslet is hugely deserving of hers for Best Actress, and you should see it.
And then there's Benjamin Button, that doesn't deserve much Oscar l0ve at all; and Frost/Nixon and Milk which deserve to go at it in Best Actor and offer merits beyond, but which don't make my Best of 2008 list. You can dig into mu archives for December and January to read more. Let's just say for Best Actor that I'm glad not to have to choose between Frank Langella and Sean Penn, who both do brilliant work. Wisdom says the Oscar goes to Mickey Rourke for The Wrestler, and I hope not. Best Actress is also a hard category to make a selection in. I may have enjoyed Angelina Jolie more in Wanted than in Changeling, and Meryl Streep in Doubt does good work but not so good as to deserve another trophy for it. But Anne Hathaway is brilliant in Rachel Getting Married, Melissa Leo brilliant in Frozen River, and Kate Winslet brilliant in The Reader. I reckon I'll root for Winslet just because I'd like the movie to pick up a prominent win to help get more people to see it, and if that happens it will pain me more on Anne Hathaway's account than Melissa Leo's. What a wonderful category full of great performances.
Best Supporting Actor is another category full of great performances. I wasn't so fond of Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, a movie I didn't like much. The fact that he is nominated frustrates me some. Shannon's performance is another demonstration of the power of playing retard, doing "the full retard" as Robert Downey Jr. calls it in his wonderful turn in the hilarous Tropic Thunder. So why isn't there some actor somewhere who hasn't realized his path to an Oscar nomination lay in playing the role of Lou Arrendale in the film version of Elizabeth Moon's THE SPEED OF DARK. Why hasn't this been filmed, or at least come a lot closer than it has? My business is going very well right now, but this film thing with The Speed of Dark is one of my ongoing frustrations, and having Michael Shannon nominated for his awful overacting full retard performance in this movie stabs at me, kind of like the way Captain Kirk stabs at Khan. Josh Brolin does good work in this category as well, and Phillip Seymour Hoffman does good work so often that it's hard to feel extra love for his performance in Doubt, though it is very very good. I'm not as fond of the choices for Supporting Actress, but at least for me the most revelatory was Penelope Cruz's in Vicky Cristina Barcelona. She has no chance of winning, but here's an actress I didn't mind at all after spending years minding her in just about everything, in the best Woody Allen movie in goodness knows how long.
Can we give Best Director to Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire please? Ron Howard does very well with Frost/Nixon but not well enough to overcome the weakness of the play. Benjamin Bad-don! Gus Van Sant doesn't deserve a nominati0n for Milk. Stephen Daldy deserves for The Reader, but as much as I like that movie Slumdog Millionaire is a great piece of filmmaking.
Bolt not so good, Kung Fu Panda worse, Wall-E wins by default even though it's not as good as the hooplah about it. I'd like to get rid of this category.
The Dark Knight should win for Art Direction, though Changelings is also good. But I suspect Benjamin Bad-don will take this category. Cinematography is harder to get a handle on. I think I'd select Dark Knight but Slumdog deserves serious consideration, and realistically so do the other nominees. I rarely have any favorite for Costume Direction, but this year I'm pulling hard for a win for a movie I didn't like, in Revolutionary Road.
Having just seen a second time, I can vouch that Slumdog Millionaire is a great piece of filmmaking so let's give it an Oscar for Editing! I don't care about make-up or song, but score offers a great piece of film music in The Defiance and an offbeat and different approach in Slumdog.
I'm not a real expert on Sound Stuff, but I'm glad to see two offbeat nominations for Wanted. Wouldn't it be nice for that massively fun movie to be an Academy Award Winner for Sound Editing or Sound Mixing?
Visual Effects: Dark Knight!
Adapted Screenplay is a tough call between The Reader and Slumdog. Here I'd rather see The Reader win, because it cuts a lot deeper. For Original Screenplay, In Bruges, but only by process of elimination. The script is the weaker part of Frozen River. Wall-E I don't like so much and the screenplay fails badly on some character motivation issues. The screenplay for Milk deserves some of the blame for the film's odd choices in when to go Hollywood bio-pic cliche and when not. Happy-go-lucky is from a director I don't care for very much for a film I have no desire to see. But, if Sean Penn isn't going to win for Best Actor, and if I'm going to think it would be nifty for Wanted to win an award just because, then I ought to want Milk to win an award just because, too. Except deep down I don't think it has the best screenplay, or the best editing or costume design or director. And Josh Brolin won't win against Heath Ledger. So I'll go back up to Best Actor and start rooting hard for Sean Penn over Frank Langella.
Well, good or bad as the broadcast may be, I always love my Oscar night.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)