Critical Mass

Oscars more about glitzy show itself than films

Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Ellar Coltrane star in Boyhood.
Lorelei Linklater, Ethan Hawke and Ellar Coltrane star in Boyhood.

Tonight people in Hollywood will give each other trophies and make speeches expressing their gratitude to the many people who helped them achieve whatever the statuette they hold in their hands symbolizes. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences' annual awards presentation is one of the few communal experiences left to us, one of the rituals of obligation that knits this large and diverse nation together. Like the Super Bowl, it is a secular rite that's less important for the winners and losers it identifies than for the fact of its existence.

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David Oyelowo plays Martin Luther King Jr. in Selma.

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Eddie Redmayne plays Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything.

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Michael Keaton stars as Riggan in Birdman.

It doesn't really have much to do with the movies it purports to honor -- and market. Many of the people who tune in haven't seen more than one or two of the films represented by the nominees. We watch for the celebrities, their clothes, their gaffes and their occasional moments of humanizing grace. We want to gawk and laugh and feel superior to the little people on our screens; to their inane and enviable lives.

I always feel a little odd writing about the Oscars because the ceremony has little to do with film criticism. It's true Oscars are awarded to "the best" this or that, but I hardly ever agree with the academy's choices. Few sentient viewers, whether they see a lot of films or not, believe Oscar is an infallible judge of quality. If you have identified what you think is the "best" picture of 2014, it's doubtful you will be swayed by the academy's vote.

The academy did a good job this year (as it does almost every year) in identifying a certain kind of "quality" movie -- the sort of middlebrow movie that aspires to art while remaining accessible and reassuring to a mass audience. Had not Paramount bungled the promotional campaign (in part because they thought Christopher Nolan's Interstellar was going to be their big Oscar movie), Selma would be the odds-on favorite for Best Picture.

Though smart money seems to be leaning toward Boyhood and Birdman, there's still a chance Selma could win the big award. It's serious and uplifting; it's the sort of movie show people could feel good voting for. Even though Paramount made it relatively difficult for voters to see -- for example, the traditional "For Your Consideration" DVD screeners didn't go out to academy members until late in the process -- enough voters were aware of the film and its reputation for it to secure a Best Picture nomination.

That final voting for Oscar didn't conclude until Feb. 17 might have helped Selma's chances, especially since there has been quite a bit of criticism levied at the overwhelmingly white (94 percent), overwhelmingly male (76 percent) AMPAS's failure to nominate people who don't look like the faces they see in the mirror. White actors and actresses went 20 for 20 in the acting nominations; Selma director Ava DuVernay, a black woman, wasn't nominated for best director.

One might imagine the backlash might have given some voters the opportunity to reconsider Selma, but at least according to the smartest money, that doesn't seem to be the case. On Jan. 15 -- the day the nominations were announced -- Las Vegas listed Boyhood as a 2-to-5 favorite for Best Picture while Birdman was listed at 18-1 behind The Imitation Game (7-1) and The Grand Budapest Hotel (9-1). Selma followed at 20-1, The Theory of Everything was at 30-1, Whiplash 60-1 and American Sniper was at 75-1.

But as of last Sunday, most of the British online bookmakers had Birdman as a very slight favorite over Boyhood. No other film had better than 50-to-1 odds, and Selma was the longest shot at 150-to-1.

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Most people don't have unrealistic expectations for the Oscars. They understand that they're watching an exercise in boosterism. At the same time, taken as a whole, the Oscar class might say something about where we stand as a society, what's keeping us up at night, what is invading our dreams.

Whether it wins or not, Richard Linklater's Boyhood is likely to be one of the best remembered films of 2014 because of its clever form and its generally dry-eyed evocation of what feels like real life -- to the point that some wags have dubbed it Borehood. Though Linklater is among my favorite directors and I admire the film, I can't say it's one of my favorites (it's only fair that I disclose that I reviewed it from an online streaming link, which hardly seems the best way to watch any movie). Filming a core group of actors over a period of years is something Linklater has done before; the only difference is that he's boiled down a long arc into a single film. Boyhood is nice, but while it pierced the hearts of a lot of writers whose work I respect, it glanced off me. Only a flesh wound.

Birdman is a movie by a director whose work I've followed closely. I've been in the tank for Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu since his first film, Amores Perros, and I think a lot of the criticism of his later movies (21 Grams, Babel and Biutiful) has been specious and wrongheaded. Yet Birdman is his least satisfying film as far as I'm concerned, though it says some deeply interesting things about what it means to be an artist. I don't care for the ambiguous ending and for some of the literal-minded special effects. On the other hand, I wrote a 4,200-word essay on what I think the subtitle "The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance" means, so it's not like I wasn't engaged by the movie.

(If you're looking for diversity in Oscar contenders, Birdman's director, its nominated scriptwriters and cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki are Hispanic.)

I'm also a big Wes Anderson fan, but I found The Grand Budapest Hotel remarkably and disappointingly empty, a series of ever more intricately carved nesting dolls that yielded nothing but filigree and lacquer. Admire his framing devices, his set designer and his attention to twee detail all you want, but ultimately I'd like Anderson to take a chance on telling us something about human motives and experience, about what it means to messily connect with another person. He nearly did this in the sweet, yearning Moonrise Kingdom. Compared to that film, Budapest -- his biggest critical and commercial success -- feels like a regression.

Going down the list, The Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything are well-made, conventional "based on a true story" movies, the kind that pop up every fall courting awards and a more dignified audience than that which occupied the cineplexes in August. I like the former better than the latter, though apparently the Alan Turing Benedict Cumberbatch plays is considerably less complicated than the enigma that was Alan Turing. I'm OK with this because I don't expect movies to be faithful to real-life inspirations, but the truth is The Imitation Game is as much a movie about Asperger's syndrome as it is about the irony of Turing sacrificing himself for a nation that denied his full humanity.

As for The Theory of Everything, Eddie Redmayne is very good and Felicity Jones is at least his equal, but I didn't believe a word of this fairy tale.

I've probably written enough about Selma and American Sniper over the past few weeks. I like these flawed films, even if some of Sniper's most vociferous partisans don't want me to. It may be I'm giving Clint Eastwood too much credit by attributing a nuance to Sniper that just isn't there, but I read the movie as an essay on the soul-corroding effects of doing one's duty. Geopolitical considerations were above Chris Kyle's pay grade. It's a shame that so many people have picked up the film so they could misapply it as an ideological hammer -- it's not as blunt as they perceive.

My favorite is writer-director Damien Chazelle's first feature, Whiplash, another conventionally plotted but brilliantly executed drama about the not always pretty ways in which art is made. It's about the costs of pushing past mediocrity and the genuine toll that excellence exacts. At its core is a tremendous performance by J.K. Simmons as a jazz instructor with a punishing method that seems more suited to a Marine Corps drill instructor than a teacher.

"There are no two words more harmful than 'good job,'" he says at one point, explaining that he's uninterested in protecting his students' self-esteem. True greatness, he believes, is only achieved when people push themselves beyond whatever they believe their limits to be. He's prepared to emotionally and physically abuse his students on the off chance that one of them might discover in themselves the next Charlie Parker or John Coltrane.

In the real world, good teachers have to love their students more than their subject, but I'm not sure there isn't something true and vital in Chazelle's film. A simple plot synopsis reduces Whiplash to an ordinary after-school special sort of movie (it even has a romantic subplot), but that's a reductive analysis that misses the beautifully crafted and wonderfully energetic film revealed in the beauty in jazz's calibrated clockworks, the freedom in its meticulous charts.

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I used to be the sort of person who claimed not to see the point of giving separate Best Picture and Best Director awards -- for, after all, wasn't the best director the person who brought in the best picture? Now I tend to think of a director as analogous to a football team's quarterback -- good quarterbacks can languish on lousy teams, and the best quarterbacks only sometimes win the biggest games. (One problem with this analogy is that a director is at least partially responsible for assembling the team, but let's leave that alone for the moment.)

So I understand why DuVernay wasn't nominated for Best Director, and while Linklater or Inarritu might win the award with the Best Picture going to the other guy's film. There's an element of spreading the glory around that goes into filling out a ballot.

I feel less strongly about acting awards. For me it's impossible to say whether Jones (in what I think is a borderline "bad" film) is or isn't better than Marion Cotillard in Two Days, One Night or Julianne Moore in Still Alice. I only know they are very, very good. So is Bradley Cooper, so is Michael Keaton, so are all the nominees in all the categories. The only quibble I have is that Steve Carell's performance in Foxcatcher is not a lead performance, it's a supporting turn, and that Channing Tatum (yes, Mr. Magic Mike), who undeniably was the lead in Foxcatcher, was overlooked.

This was no doubt the result of the studio politics and promotional pressures. Someone figured Carell had a better chance to win (he probably won't, the wise guys say it's either Keaton or Redmayne) than Tatum, but I didn't see a better lead performance all year. No doubt some of that credit goes to Foxcatcher director Bennett Miller (who was nominated in his category), but if all we have to go by is what's on the screen (and I don't know what else you ought to go by, though in reality reputation certainly counts for a lot) then Tatum got robbed. (Or more likely, deferred.)

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I don't hate the Oscars. (I don't. I don't.) But I enjoy their silliest attributes the most. I won't tune in for the red carpet stuff unless I really have nothing else to do, and I likely won't stay up until the bitter end. I only know Neil Patrick Harris is hosting the broadcast because I Googled it. But that doesn't mean they aren't important.

Movies feed Americans' common culture; they are anchoring moments. It doesn't matter if I can produce a list of 30 films I think are cinematically better than any of the movies Hollywood deigns to honor in its little exercise in Chamber of Commerce-style boosterism. These are the movies that we have elected, that will represent us on any number of levels. It doesn't matter whether we had any real say in the process or not; this is what cinema is for most of us, most of the time.

It's important to consider what our dreams may be telling us, no matter how nonsensical, lurid or obscure they may seem. We can remember the year we saw a kid grow up before our eyes, Keaton float lotus-legged in the air, truncheon-waving troopers storm the Edmund Pettus Bridge, a mother in a hijab with a boy on her arm wander into the collective reticle ...

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Style on 02/22/2015

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