And the award goes to...
Oscar nominations came out yesterday. Of the five Best Picture nominees, I’ve seen one, and I don’t know if it’s really a “Best Picture” sort of picture. In fact, of the remaining four nominees, there’s only one I’m really interested in seeing in a big way: Slumdog Millionaire, which you can read about here: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1010048/.
I saw Frost/Nixon, which I think was an absolutely terrific movie which I’d recommend highly, even if you’ve no particular interest in Watergate or its aftermath. There are some amazing performances, especially from Frank Langella as the disgraced Nixon (who has received a very deserved best actor nomination for it). But aside from that, I don’t know that it struck me as anything unique, special, ground-breaking, or profoundly emotionally affecting. I admittedly don’t know what qualifies a movie as “Best Picture,” but I figure it should have some combination of those qualities. While Frost/Nixon was, indeed, very, very good, it wasn’t anything unfamiliar, and while there were moments here and there that were potent, the film overall didn’t cause any great surge of feeling other that being quite thoroughly entertained.
As for the remaining three nominees: while none of them look bad per se, they also all look like the sort of films that all but have the main character stare out at the audience mid-scene and scream “Please, please, please give us an Oscar!” (or plead for it quietly from the poster, as Brad Pitt does on the one for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). Sometimes these films are well crafted enough that the intensely blatant pandering to The Academy can be forgiven; others, however, merely offend. As I’ve never seen any of them, I can’t say if any cross this line or not. But even when they don’t, does this actually make them Oscar-worthy?
Me, based on what I’ve seen (again admitting I’ve only seen trailers for the majority of the best picture nominees), I’d personally choose Wall-E for the top spot. Now, I know the dusty old men of die Akademie would never take an animated picture seriously enough to give it the statue, but I was hoping to at least see a nomination. It has, of course, been nominated for best animated feature, but its only competition is Kung Fu Panda and Bolt (which represents the closest Miley Cyrus ever come to a legitimate award of any kind). I’ll admit to having seen nothing more than the trailers for these films, but it’s obvious they’ve only been nominated because of the rather small amount of domestic theatrical animated features this year, not because they’re actually even remotely deserving of any kind of accolades. Wall-E is going to win that one, and while it’s deserved, it feels lame because there’s no legitimate competition.
What is Wall-E if not something terribly unique? When it was gearing up to come out, there were Hollywood analysts who weren’t wondering if Pixar was about to have their first massive misfire. It’s a movie about a basically-mute robot and his attempts to woo another robot with a vocabulary of about three words. There’s no real dialogue for the majority of the opening of the picture, which is set on a barren, dust-choked, and clearly-empty Earth. This seemed to be the stuff of a joyless, dank independent movie, not a family film released by Pixar-Disney. But when it came out, it topped the box office (eventually making over $223 million) and received almost universal acclaim. It has an 8.6 on the IMDb and a 96% “fresh” rating from Rotten Tomatoes - both of them public polls, the latter of which also integrates professional critics.
Even more surprising, though, is that it’s a film starring a CG robot that still manages to be affecting. Audiences became truly emotionally invested in Wall-E, who ultimately adds up to being no more than a box with treads and a pair of binoculars for eyes. True, he’s somewhat anthropomorphized, but nowhere near as much as he could’ve been. Yet somehow, through a combination of story, clever animation tricks, and brilliant sound editing, they made a character more interesting than many humanoid or just plain human animated characters (and, for that matter, many actual humans who are allowed to appear on film).
Of course, this almost sounds like I think popularity necessarily equates with quality; this isn’t true, though. For example: wasn’t The Dark Knight awesome? It was definitely the best Batman movie ever, and an argument could be made for it being the best superhero movie ever. It made, worldwide, something close to one billion dollars at the box office, just over half of that domestically (Wall-E’s total worldwide take just about equaled TDK’s domestic gross). I think it’s also fair to say Heath Ledger definitely deserved his posthumous Best Supporting Actor nomination; having (again) not seen any of the films the other actors were nominated for, I can’t say if I think he should win (frankly, I kind of hope Downey, Jr. gets it, if only because comedies and comedic roles are rarely recognized).
But was it worthy of a Best Picture nomination, which some people (read: fanboys) certainly felt? Nah. The story was excellent, and the presentation the most mature of any costumed hero flick. But in the end it was still a superhero movie, and the story not anything too terribly new. Maybe it was more complicated (and somewhat contrived, it must be admitted) than other films that have pursued the same end, but it’s still a familiar idea. Also, the entire ending is actually somewhat weak. For example, the ferryboat sequence, while sort of interesting, felt vaguely unnecessary. It was obvious everything was going to be fine; while this is the case with many action-adventure franchise pictures, it fails in this case because there is literally zero tension. With these sort of foregone-conclusion movies, the tension isn’t will everything be okay but how will the hero work it out this time? With the ferryboat sequence, it wasn’t even Batman doing anything; it was going to be the people proving that people are better than the Joker thinks. Obvious and dull. As it is, the Joker had achieved his end by snapping Harvey, and that was endlessly more fascinating than watching a pile of mediocre extras looking scared on boats. This moment never jelled. Beyond that, I’m pretty sure every single person in the audience had worked out that the Joker had switched the hostages and his thugs at the end, yet neither Batman nor anyone at all in the Gotham PD works that out. This wouldn’t be a problem, except the film asks us to believe Batman is terribly, terribly clever, which he normally is. The fact that he falls for such a basic, cliché’d trick goes against what they had spent the previous few hours establishing. All of this of deflated the ending of what had, up until then, been a pretty spot-on picture.
Story issues aside, let’s look at the acting. Bale is good, but nothing phenomenal. He has 4 gears: Batman, playboy Bruce Wayne, and real Bruce Wayne, which is subdivided between palling around with Alfred and brooding. And depending on who you ask, his Batman is unbearable. Aaron Eckhart is impressive in giving the mostly-good-guy Dent a dark side here and there, and then going full-blown villain during his underutilized run as Two-Face. Maggie Gyllenhal was certainly better than her predecessor Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes, but it wasn’t as big an improvement as I think a lot of people were hoping for. Michael Caine was as reliable as ever as Alfred. Either way, hardly an overwhelming ensemble overall.
So it was an excellent movie, a popular movie, and a movie I thought was absolutely terrific: but none of these make it award-worthy beyond possibly Ledger and maybe in the technical categories (for which it also got some nods). Likewise, a film isn’t necessarily not Oscar worthy just because it is small and/or “artsy,” but nor should that mean a film automatically gets an award. The Academy seems a bit schizophrenic: some years they veer towards awarding stuff because it panders to “Art;” other years (read: whatever damn fool year Titanic came out) they seem to go towards throwing as many Oscars they can at that year’s biggest picture, regardless of merits. I guess, really, I’d just like the Academy to do their job and just give truly good movies recognition, regardless of “artistic merit,” box office take, or names of its cast.
But that’s not likely to bloody happen.