Ummmm....
12 year-old Dakota Fanning is now a member of the Academy of Arts and Sciences, making her eligible for voting on future years' Oscar nominees? How is this? Yes I understand how, but what sense of movie history does she have to properly contextualize a film's place in the annals of mainstream American cinema?
Does she know the first thing about D.W. Griffith's work? Has she even seen Wings, the first film to ever take Best Picture at the Oscars? Does she understand how traditional acting styles were discarded once Brando's Stanislavski-infused performance in Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire shook up audiences and critics? Could she even begin to identify Lillian Gish, F.W. Murnau, Grace Kelley, or David O. Selznick?
I mean really; I would have no problem with it if it meant she were taking a one year hiatus from acting in favour of an intensive film history/theory grounding, consisting of five films a day replete with commentary, critical analysis, and comparative studies against world, experimental, and art cinema. Any less is an insult, and is too often part of the Vo-Tech World of filmmaking.
Bleh.
Does she know the first thing about D.W. Griffith's work? Has she even seen Wings, the first film to ever take Best Picture at the Oscars? Does she understand how traditional acting styles were discarded once Brando's Stanislavski-infused performance in Elia Kazan's A Streetcar Named Desire shook up audiences and critics? Could she even begin to identify Lillian Gish, F.W. Murnau, Grace Kelley, or David O. Selznick?
I mean really; I would have no problem with it if it meant she were taking a one year hiatus from acting in favour of an intensive film history/theory grounding, consisting of five films a day replete with commentary, critical analysis, and comparative studies against world, experimental, and art cinema. Any less is an insult, and is too often part of the Vo-Tech World of filmmaking.
Bleh.