When Grantland last checked in on the 2012 Oscar race, it was July, and all anybody wanted to talk about was Matthew McConaughey’s glistening lizard torso in Magic Mike. Now it’s December. Awards season is very much here. So for this week’s Cinemetrics, we thought we’d have a roundtable with a mad oracle’s row of Grantland writers and editors: Mark Lisanti, Molly Lambert, and Sean Fennessey, with your Cinemetrician, Zach Baron, playing host. Was 2012 the best year for movies since 2011? Is Tom Hooper going to King’s Speech us all again? Will Ben Affleck stand nude in the flickering light of a single Yankee Candle? Behold, your 2012 Grantland Oscar Roundtable …
Baron: Dear fellow Grantland movie illuminati,
Maybe it’s the DeSean Jackson jersey I’m wearing right now, or the giant Abe Lincoln beard that has somehow sprouted from my face, or the tiger who is just sort of hanging out in a kindly, existential way on my couch, but I feel compelled to start this discussion with a bold and probably totally irrational claim: As of this first week in December, with Kathryn Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty, Peter Jackson’s The Hobbit, Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, and Quentin Tarantino’s Django Unchained all still to come, we are living in what may well be one of the best film years of my adult life. (Over by the minibar in the seedy airport hotel room to which I’ve checked in to write this, a naked stewardess nods solemnly; cheerful big band music can be heard coming from the yacht full of cult members bobbing at the dock outside.)
I want to do some Oscar handicapping here. But I also want to kick this notion around, even as we continue to labor under the whimsically silent sign of last year’s underwhelming Best Picture winner The Artist, that 2012 has been special. There were this year’s uncommonly entertaining January doldrums films (The Grey, Haywire); its early awards contenders (Moonrise Kingdom, Beasts of the Southern Wild); its uncommonly good blockbuster season (which began with The Hunger Games and continued, in dizzying fashion, through The Avengers, Prometheus, an improbably charming Spider-Man reboot, and the conclusion of Christopher Nolan’s Batman trilogy). There was Magic Mike, 21 Jump Street, the rise of Channing Tatum as Hollywood’s most likable leading man. There were Cosmopolis and Holy Motors and Lawless. And then came the heavyweights, the Oscar contenders: Paul Thomas Anderson’s The Master, Ben Affleck’s Argo, Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln, Ang Lee’s Life of Pi, David O. Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook — to which list we could easily add Michael Haneke’s Amour, Robert Zemekis’s Flight, and Joe Wright’s Anna Karenina, along with the aforementioned Beasts and even Moonrise Kingdom.
To me, this is clearly the best slate of movies we’ve had since at least 2009 (The Hurt Locker, Inglourious Basterds, Avatar), if not 2007 (Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood), if not, well, long before either of those two years. So my questions to you, esteemed nerd-colleagues, are (a) just how much Stockholm syndrome am I laboring under, having spent the better part of the year writing about movies for this website, and (b) as Academy Awards voting begins in a couple weeks, what would you like to see happen? What would qualify as justice, and what would qualify as Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close?
Lisanti: I’d agree without hesitation that 2012 has been a great year for movies. It just has that feeling of quality, from pole to pole; when I start to think back on everything I’ve seen since January, there’s none of the uncontrollable shuddering I experience when trying to recall last year. (Though to be fair, most of that is probably due to Transformers: Dark of the Moon, which was like being hit in the head with a Hefty CinchSak full of rusty car parts while Michael Bay screams at you through a megaphone to “do it again, but way hornier.”) But it’s also possible you are experiencing a touch of the Stockholm syndrome after (1) spending the better part of the year marinating in this stuff for us, and (2) comparing this year’s high-end films to last year’s mediocre Best Picture crop. (To review, for anyone who doesn’t have that window open, listed from “Sweet God, why?” to “Oh, that was actually good”: Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close, The Artist, War Horse, The Help, Midnight in Paris, The Tree of Life, The Descendants, Hugo, and Moneyball. Your order may vary, incorrectly.) There was so much more to get excited about from 2010’s awards contenders, even if, in the end, the stuttering king whupped up on the Coen brothers, Darren Aronofsky, David Fincher (it rained for weeks inside his house after that Oscar debacle), David O. Russell, Danny Boyle, Chris (I call him Chris) Nolan, and the Unrelenting and Merciless Pixar Excellence Machine. That is a directorial murderers’ row. So let’s rightly call 2012 great, but it might be only the best since two years ago. Again, because last year, the dog and the tap-dancing mutes won.
What’s justice for this go-around? Even though I’ve already written thousands of insane words over the past few months deconstructing its ludicrous Oscar pedigree, justice is Lincoln hanging on to front-runner status for at least a little while longer, while everyone figures out if the recent, intense Zero Dark Thirty and Les Misérables buzz is for real or just the inevitable Shiny Object Period that late-game contenders always enjoy. Lincoln was very, very good, with Daniel Day-Lewis slipping into his Honest Abe SkinSuit to cavort in dramatically lit halls of power with the best and most elaborately bearded character actors to ever share a 30-page call sheet. Nothing about a Lincoln win would bother me, even if I might like to see The Master stumble back into the race, pig-fuckingly hammered on freshly squeezed torpedo juice, and give the Great Emancipator a menacing handjob in front of a bathroom sink in the Dolby Theater. (And I hereby reserve the right to turn on Lincoln with a despicable quickness whenever I get to see Django Unchained, because I am so deep in the tank for Tarantino that I need James Cameron to retrieve me with one of those submarines he uses to hang out with bioluminescent ghost-sharks on the weekend.) Gloriously, there doesn’t even seem to be anything ridiculous in the running for a nomination at this point, unless the Les Mis hype is coming from the same unfortunate place that leads people to watch Smash, or a bored Harvey Weinstein decides he wants to run The Artist out there again just to prove he can win with anything. The only scenario I could probably get upset about is Argo taking Best Picture, and that’s not even because it’s bad (it’s not; it’s very good, if maybe a tiny bit overrated), it’s because Ben Affleck has to answer for the crime of putting Ben Affleck in his movies and then seducing himself into taking his shirt off for no defensible reason. Let’s not think too hard about how that casting couch worked. (Some scented Yankee Candles, 15 minutes of awkward small talk about the quiet brilliance of his Hollywoodland performance, and a dropped hint about the unbearable tension that builds in one’s shoulders after a 14-hour day of location shooting in Charlestown.)
Anyway: Yeah, 2012’s been pretty damn good. The Oscars should be fun.
Lambert: Many serious film scholars agree that the copious selfie shots of Ben “Mendez” Affleck’s glorious chest’s brunet underbrush dusted with silver threads, hip bones pointing toward Valhalla as he contemplates imminent political futures and the price to license a Led Zep song, are in fact the greatest moments in all of film history, beating out the opening of Citizen Kane AND the end of Vertigo in every poll ever conducted by me on myself. Oops, there Argo his hands up under his shirt! Oscars! Or at least that’s how it goes in my own awards-season narrative. If we’re going to hammer Affleck it should be for the highly questionable racial stuff in Argo and not for showing off his incredible 40-year-old body. Besides, I had to tolerate all that gratuitous camera ogling of Jennifer Lawrence’s perfect tits and ass in Silver Linings Playbook that David O. Russell thought it was fine to toss in because hey, being slutty is just part of her character. Or how about the sexy underage girl from Moonrise Kingdom and her nebbishy child boyfriend (ooh, are you uncomfortable? It must be ART jk lol). All I ask is that I periodically get to see Ben Affleck’s minimally clothed body on a big screen, so that I might mime Argo‘s hostage negotiation on it using animal crackers. Don’t you dare try to take that from me, Mark Lisanti.
I agree that this year is a lot better than last, and not just because Spielberg is entering a movie named Lincoln and not one called War Horse. I would be more interested in a potential Lincoln win if they’d promise to leak transcripts of the text messages Daniel Day-Lewis sent to Sally Field while in character (“we r not enemies but friends. we must not b enemies”). I’m ready for Django, but having just watched the trailer garner absolutely no response in front of a packed weekend-night house, I’m not entirely convinced. Quentin’s interview in Playboy made me intrigued but also wary as fuck. I’m more stoked for Zero Dark Thirty, whose foreboding tone and genuinely serious subject matter could waterboard Xtina Nolan’s chances at a Bat Oscar. Then again, I’m still recovering from the emotional investment I put into the 2010 race when my beloved David Fincher lost to Tom Hooper and I screamed at the TV like an Eagles fan. But I’ll be there opening day for Tom Hooper’s Les Misérables, dressed like a castle on a cloud. It’s an exciting race because the contenders are all so wildly different. Personal preferences for Best Picture or Director will be influenced most by which genres of movie you happen to like. I’m particularly interested in Les Mis because it seems like the musical that even people who don’t like musicals will love. All the biggest Les Mis fans I know are straight guys. Who isn’t excited to see Wolverine sing his adamantium abs off? Sorry I’m so abs-focused right now. That’s what you get for bringing up The Yankee Candle Seduction of Ben Affleck.
Fennessey: Guys, hold on, closing all my topless Affleck tabs … OK.
I should say that, like much of the world’s population, I am still without the knowledge of Zero Dark Thirty, Django, and The Hobbit — also, hate you, Les Mis, because I’m an ogre — so I don’t feel totally comfortable calling this a great year at the movies. And not because I want to troll you, but because that seems to indicate that this year has seen some sort of corrective. (So-called franchise films still comprise all five top-grossing slots and 10 of the top 15.) But something has changed. As Michael Cieply wrote in the New York Times this week, this is the first time the major studios have done the Oscar-movie thing right in a long time. It has been five years — five! — since a major house won the Best Picture Oscar, when Warner Bros. reeled one in for The Departed (an unlikely, extremely violent winner at that). Bear in mind, these are the wealthiest, most powerful companies in the industry. They make the most movies, by far. If they want to commit to great art, they can. And they did, mostly, under the cover of “indie” shingles like Paramount Vantage, Warner Independent, and Fox Searchlight for the past 10 years. Most of those sub-companies have folded under the pressure to make more profitable cheap movies that then got too expensive, because the system is broken, which left the studios to fend for themselves come award season. And what’s come from that appears to be some down-the-middle thinking.
Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing when you get movies like Lincoln and (I am assuming, because if I am wrong I will impale myself on my life-size Jessica Chastain cutout) Zero Dark Thirty. But what about the rest of the bunch? A beloved musical starring several previous nominees and directed by a former Best Picture–winning director? Not exactly a bold move. A drama about perseverance, love, dancing, and mental illness? Oscar Bait 101. A docudrama about revolution, terrorism, and a movie star’s ribcage topiary? Straight from the ’70s playbook. A scrappy Sundance indie about small-town struggle and the wonderment of childhood? It’s happened before. Even the great, stirring, thunderously beautiful Lincoln is at its core our most celebrated playwright and our most celebrated director shining up a statue to American history. And no matter how grim and procedural-ish Zero Dark Thirty turns out, it is still a ripped-from-the-headlines crowd-pleaser. (Spoiler alert: The bad guy dies in the end.) It doesn’t take a Louis B. Mayer to green-light that movie, crippling industry idiocy or not. (Though in this case that Mayer-esque figure is the young producer Megan Ellison, whose Annapurna Pictures bankrolled ZDT, The Master, and Killing Them Softly, bless her director-stroking heart. She deserves her own award, shaped like Joaquin Phoenix’s hips.)
We don’t know how many Best Picture nominees we’ll have yet — as many as 10, as few as five. I’m betting on nine, which I’ve listed below. My demeanor will brighten and my heart will burst if both The Master, an unerringly weird movie cloaked in prestige auteurism, and Django Unchained, by all accounts a sustained stream of exploding limbs interspersed with a maniacal Leo DiCaprio cackling, get in under the gun. But the Academy is an ever-conservative institution. When they expanded their field to include as many as 10 films in 2009, many pointed to the exclusion of The Dark Knight the previous year as the reason. Now it looks like the follow-up, The Dark Knight Rises, won’t even get a victory-lap nom. So maybe you’re right. Maybe this is a great year. Or maybe the studios figured out how to goose the system again.
Before we go, I’d like to hear from you guys about individual nominations, who needs to work on their Loser Face, and which movies you loved that have no chance of sniffing Maria Menounos on the red carpet this year. (Mine is a small, intentionally unlikable, but also fascinating thing called The Color Wheel.)
The Locks
Argo
Les Misérables
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Zero Dark Thirty
The Likelies
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Django Unchained
The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Life of Pi
The Let’s Hope So
The Master
The Maaaaaybes
The Dark Knight Rises
The Sessions
Moonrise Kingdom
The Nice Tries
Flight
Anna Karenina
Skyfall
Magic Mike
Amour
The Impossible
Baron: Ah, I see we’ve reached the “Sean Fennessey heartlessly trolls everyone” phase of this roundtable. Where to begin here? Use of the questionable phrase “Oscar bait” aside — Mark Harris, we miss you! — it seems incredibly strange to describe this year’s crop of likely nominees as “down-the-middle.” Silver Linings Playbook, for instance, may be at heart just another likable ’40s-era screwball comedy, but (a) man, do they not make enough ’40s-era screwball comedies anymore, and (b) do you really think any other director — including David O. Russell himself at any other point in his career — could’ve pulled it off? This was a movie with disaster — and terrible dancing! — written all over it. Think about that pitch meeting for a second: There’s this guy … he’s violently bipolar, hits his mother in the face … he meets a promiscuous widow … also, there is a dance competition … and everyone is obsessed with one of the most cursed and plagued and insular sports franchises in human history … That’s a winner for a studio? I don’t think so. That movie succeeded by the grace of god and Jennifer Lawrence. (I rate the latter higher, but smart people will disagree — please don’t kill me, Molly Lambert!) Similarly, it seems unfair to throw Beasts of the Southern Wild onto the Little Miss Sunshine Whimsical Schoolbus of Indie Wonderment, or to recognize Zero Dark Thirty as anything but the bluntly unique accomplishment that it is. We may know that the bad guy dies in the end, but part of the brilliance of that film is in the way it otherwise shows us just how much we didn’t know and still don’t. (Like, for instance: Jessica Chastain is more molten ball of flame than human.) Not for nothing does this industry so badly need Ellison’s Annapurna Pictures right now — without her, we would be looking at a world in which Kathryn Bigelow and Paul Thomas Anderson are directing car commercials for cash.
That said, if you want negativity, here goes some: If Les Misérables wins Best Picture, I’m burning the whole Academy down. Last year’s Old-Hollywood-Is-Magic-and-Also-Silent! horror show seems to have made the world forget the craven injustice that was Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech winning over Fincher’s The Social Network (to say nothing of Aronofsky’s Black Swan, Russell’s The Fighter, and even the Coen brothers’ increasingly winning True Grit) in 2010. But I fear this has a chance of happening again: Hooper’s Les Mis is a brightly colored pyre of money and talent, a tale told by — well, not an idiot, but a baldly sentimental guy — full of sound and comically overwrought stage sets, signifying nothing. It’s movie shot almost entirely in off-kilter close-ups, haunted by the earnest, A-student, theater-kid ghost of Anne Hathaway’s Fantine, whose coughing death-rattle sounded a lot like Best … Supporting … Actress in the theater I was sitting in. I will pay any of you Los Angeles natives to crash the Oscar ceremony this year and start a “Hand! Jobs! Hand! Jobs!” chant in honor of Amy Adams’s steely performance in The Master instead. The fact that Paul Thomas Anderson’s astonishing Master has already been reduced to campaigning for the The Tree of Life Is Just Happy to Be Here spot is depressing — doubly so in a race in which the empty and idea-less Les Mis seems destined to join the deserving Lincoln at the front of the line.
OK, deep breath. Flight seems to have fallen mostly out of contention, probably rightly so, but Denzel Washington’s fearsome performance in that movie should continue to be mentioned alongside Daniel Day-Lewis’s flawless Lincoln. I was persuaded by Mark Harris this summer of the fundamental inhumanity of an Oscar campaign for Beasts‘ Quvenzhané Wallis, but they should make up an award for her anyway. Best Voice? It is a really good voice. We have talked a lot about Ben Affleck’s bare chest, and hardly at all about Matthew McConaughey’s in Magic Mike — a performance for which the New York Film Critics Circle just awarded him (it?) Best Supporting Actor. This is something beyond a long shot (maybe if voters were allowed to touch?), but it would be a nice acknowledgment for an actor who is having an improbably great year. And finally, let’s figure out a way to get Fiona Apple onstage singing This Is 40‘s “Dull Tool,” because I can’t think of a more bitter or effective antidote to whatever Seth MacFarlane will be doing up there:
What did I miss, Mark?
Lisanti: In Sean’s defense, I did entice him to participate in this roundtable by promising that he could be the guy to throw a bucket of icewater on anyone who got too exuberant about this year’s movies, so he’s just doing his job. He’s also the designated “scared to death that Django Unchained will be a disappointment” guy in the office, and is already building up a head of lukewarm steam for Star Trek Into Darkness in 2013. Some players accept the thankless roles and execute them with merciless efficiency.
Having finally seen Zero Dark Thirty last night, I feel like it’s time to revise the contenders list from yesterday:
The Best Picture Winner Will Be One of These
Lincoln
Zero Dark Thirty
Some People Will Continue to Pretend This One Has a Real Shot, But If We’re Thinking Clearly About It, Come On, It’s Just Nice for the Academy to Validate Your Lifelong Love of Musicals, Right?
Les Misérables
Here Are Some Other Very-Good-to-Excellent Movies That Will Be Somewhere on the Final Ballot
Silver Linings Playbook
Argo
Django Unchained
How Many Sand-Ladies Does a Profoundly Damaged Soul Have to Plow to Get a Much-Deserved Oscar Nomination Around Here?
The Master
I Really Wonder
The Hobbit
Life of Pi
Pick One, But ONLY One
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Moonrise Kingdom
The Sessions
Amour
Now Playing at Your Local Multiplex, But Not at the Dolby Theater on a Sunday Night in Late February
Flight
Skyfall
The Dark Knight Rises (in a fruitless re-release engagement to stir up last-minute support)
By my calculations, that will give us between eight and 10 Best Picture nominees, only two of which actually matter. We have a good old-fashioned knife fight, folks. And I hope this isn’t merely the Shiny Object Effect I mentioned earlier talking, but right now I’m taking the side that has four-eyed night-vision goggles and machine guns over the horses-and-bayonets gang. Walking out of the screening last night, it wasn’t hard to see why the momentum is with Seal Team Six at the moment; if the (wrongheaded) complaint about Lincoln is that it’s like sitting through a history lesson — You know what? Tony Kushner can write all the history lessons, forever — Zero Dark Thirty is like having a current-events class put a knee on your throat and pour water up your nose until you ace the pop quiz it’s screaming in your face. It’s visceral and thrilling, superior to BP-winning The Hurt Locker in almost every way. And maybe it won’t triumph in the end, but man, I’m not betting against it or Kathryn Bigelow 24 hours after my interrogation.
Now that we’ve solved the Best Picture problem (you’re welcome), let’s run it back to some of the individual performances. Daniel Day-Lewis and Denzel are mortal locks, and deservedly so. (Denzel’s the only reason to see Flight.) Joaquin Phoenix, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Paul Thomas Anderson (I’m giving him Affleck’s presumed spot, because there needs to be some order in the universe) should be locks for The Master in their respective categories, as should Amy Adams and her kung fu handy-grip. (You give ONE DISTURBING UNHAPPY ENDING IN FRONT OF A SINK WHILE WHISPERING LADY MACBETH STUFF IN A CULT LEADER’S EAR and it’s all anyone wants to talk about.) And speaking of tight grips, I don’t know exactly how this happened, but Anne Hathaway was awarded Best Supporting Actress during the first commercial for Les Mis, halfway through her head-shaving, and she’s not giving it back, it’s got her tear-drenched hair all over it. (Disclosure: I have not yet seen the movie, but her fingers already feel so tightly coiled around the Oscar that it’s become impossible to imagine a world in which she relinquishes it. She’ll bite Sally Field, she doesn’t care how many children she’s buried; watch out. Also: Good for her. I love Anne Hathaway.)
And yeah, can we talk about Matthew McConaughey for a second? If there were a way to search for old e-mails you’ve written, I could probably find one I sent after Magic Mike that said, “This is going to sound insane because I think he let a stripper-size lizard in chaps with breakaway ass-flaps do half his scenes, but McConaughey might get nominated for an Oscar for that movie.” I have a sneaking feeling that’s going to happen, and it’s going to be glorious. If you can slip Jonah Hill in through the Supporting Actor back door, you can probably figure out a way to get JK WINNIN in there. Let’s party. And invite Jason Clarke from Zero instead of Bobby D, because actions involving cashing paychecks with Fockers written on them should have consequences.
I can’t spell Quvenzhané, so she’s out. (Let’s call it the Curse of Q’orianka Kilcher.) I apologize for being dumb and for being predisposed against child actors ever winning anything. Best Actress is a coin flip between SLP‘s Jennifer Lawrence and ZDT‘s Jessica Chastain, who seamlessly transitioned her Be In Everything strategy from 2011 to a Be In The Best Thing one in 2012. It’s got to be Chastain, right? She caught her terrorist without repeatedly sleeping with him. There’s a degree of difficulty to this that must be acknowledged.
Before I close this out, let’s put it out there again: Are we really going to let Ben Affleck squeeze Anderson out of the directors’ race? I mean, it may not play out exactly that way, but if Affleck’s name is on the short list for his extreme competence in finding the pulse in international airline boarding procedures and Anderson’s isn’t, ineffectual hissy fits shall be thrown, by me, probably in a department store that offers discount family portraits. And yeah, I think I want Bigelow to storm the stage in body armor again and leave with two handfuls of gold, but I also need PTA in the five-way reaction shot when it happens. (I dreamed a dream: Spielberg, Bigelow, Russell, Hooper, and Anderson. Sorry, Ben and Ang.)
OK, I’m done. Molly, please get into this Silver Linings Playbook situation. I know you have complicated feelings about it and David O. Russell, whom I love with the unbridled passion of a thousand angry headlocks, even when he gets into the fairy-tale ending business.
Lambert: I have VERY complicated feelings about David O. Russell. I think it is hard to have any other kind of feelings about him. I think he is a genius, and also probably an impossible person to deal with. I hated the first half of I Heart Huckabees so much that I almost walked out until I started to love it tremendously halfway through. I think Russell’s dialogue is sometimes too mannered and shticky. I also think he gets that life is fraught with hilarious traps, most of which you set for yourself. I loved certain parts of Silver Linings Playbook so much that I found it hard to reconcile the things I didn’t like at all. It was a bipolar movie that abruptly slapped a happy face on mental illness at the very last second. I expected a ’70s downer ending or some kind of long cringe, but it was smiles all around.
I’ll admit I am more annoyed by the buzz around Silver Linings Playbook than the actual movie, which I thought was good, but nowhere near as great as The Fighter. Bradley Cooper’s performance is incredible and revelatory and Jennifer Lawrence was good, but I already knew she could be good because I have seen Winter’s Bone. The sort of astonished “gee-whiz, and she’s got chops too?” tone of the raves for her seem condescending to me. Like, wow, isn’t it incredible she’s not a bimbo? Which, to be fair, is what the role of Tiffany is all about. But let’s state the obvious: She’s too young and it constantly took me out of the movie. Harvey Weinstein told David O. Russell he thought she was too young for the role!
David O. Russell just admitted he wrote Silver Linings Playbook with Vince Vaughn and Zooey Deschanel in mind, so just picture that alternate universe. In the book it’s based on, both Tiffany and Pat are 40, which morphed in Russell’s imagination into a barely legal widow. Everyone kept alluding to this mysterious maturity and agelessness in J. Law’s performance, but it’s “unnaturally wise and mature for her age” like Jodie Foster in Taxi Driver. Lawrence doesn’t look older than 22, which is how old she is. It just seems weird that everyone keeps bending over backward to justify casting such a young actress in a role clearly meant for an older one. I get that her Tiffany had a tragic life and grew up too fast and it’s supposed to be messy and uncomfortable, but I kept wondering if Russell knew what kind of uncomfortable it made me. The same kind as Spanking the Monkey, which is about a guy who’s afraid he wants to fuck his mom.
My most legit gripe is that I did not enjoy the make-or-break dance sequence! Me, who loves musicals! I wish there were more dancing in Les Mis! I rolled my eyes at the Singin’ in the Rain reference because it’s so gauche to directly point to a movie you’re trying to emulate (especially when it’s a classic). The dance sequence was a choppy mess, much like the training montages were the weakest part of The Fighter. David O. Russell is just not a masterful visual stylist. He’s extremely competent, in a ’90s indie movie way that I can appreciate. But I need more than that in a dance sequence. I wanted to feel something watching it, and from what I can tell everyone seems to have felt something, and that makes me feel vaguely sad. But then I went home and watched the ballet from West Side Story and remembered that I am the only sane person. It’s everyone else who’s crazy.
Obviously I want Zero Dark Thirty to whomp Lincoln because nothing could be more satisfying to me than a Kathryn Bigelow war thriller about a badass ginger crushing Spielberg’s staid ode to everyone’s favorite Manic Pixie Dream President. Here’s the main thing I’ve realized. David O. Russell wanted to cast Vince Vaughn and then later settled on Bradley Cooper, who he thought could do it based on the intense anger he showed in his performance in Wedding Crashers. Last year Woody Allen cast Rachel McAdams and Owen Wilson in Midnight in Paris because he was such a big fan of Wedding Crashers. At the end of the day, we are all just Wedding Crashers. The Oscars have always been disappointing and unjust. Let’s rate what movies we will probably watch on TBS eventually between airings of Wedding Crashers.
The Syndicated on TBS Award:
Argo: When you think about it, it’s a lot like Con Air.
Silver Linings Playbook: With the profanity trimmed for television, it’ll play even more like a screwball comedy set in a heightened Preston Sturges–ish world.
Les Mis: It’s the songs, dummies!
Fennessey: Molly, I have bad news. Our foremost Oscar sage and also my favorite hate-follow, Bret Easton Ellis, has weighed in on the Best Picture race and decided its future.
Now, BEE is one of our most valued reactionary warlocks, an evil prognosticator incapable of sensitivity and built for embeds but not emotional engagement. But in his ritualistic late-night tweet-splurge, there’s an essential truth: The Oscars isn’t about what you like,1 or what critics like, or what’s good, empirically or not. It’s about what a group of relative strangers thinks is worthy. And worthiness is a flimsy construct. For some, that means stolid hagiography. For others, it means audacious instant history. But for most, it means feeling good while watching a movie, and feeling even better when that movie ends. While watching Silver Linings Playbook, I felt as good as I have all year. I saw it in a perfect movie theater with a great person on a wonderful day and I fell deep into Bradley Cooper’s trash bag. But that happy ending, that 360-degree spin-kiss, that dewy-eyed realization of mutual I love you ripped me right out of the moment. It pissed me off. (I realize happy endings are supposed to make you happy. This is probably my issue to cope with elsewhere.) But I’m not so broken as to not see that that ending might work on other, more well-adjusted people. Silver Linings Playbook isn’t just feel-good. It feels good about being feel-good.
The other interpretation of Ellis’s note would be that the long-tail narrative of predictive Oscar-ing always works in negative. What seems obvious often isn’t and underdogs become champions because everyone loves a loser. Just ask Pat Solitano. Let’s for a minute imagine that Zero Dark Thirty does pull out this win. After 2009’s The Hurt Locker victory, that would make Kathryn Bigelow the commander of two Best Pictures in a four-year span. This is essentially unheard of in Academy history. The closest non-Godfather gap I track is the five years between David Lean’s towering triumphs, The Bridge on the River Kwai in 1957 and Lawrence of Arabia in 1962.2 Which is to say, Bigelow is potentially entering the pantheon conversation. So please allow me to return to Bret Easton Ellis’s Twitter account.
Now, admittedly, BEE is gaming the system by ignoring Bigelow’s one true masterpiece, 1991’s Point Break. (Righteously snubbed in the Best Skydiving Sequence category 20 years ago.) And the above tweet was preceded directly by a hateful, misogynistic troll-note meant only to provoke. But his point is taken: Bigelow has had an uneven career. Another Bigelow picture Ellis failed to list is 2000’s The Weight of Water, which is almost certainly the worst movie to feature Sean Penn with Elizabeth Hurley cavorting on a yacht in a white bikini. Before The Hurt Locker, Bigelow was a kind of gearhead industry filmmaker. Not a hack or a for-hire gun, but a visceral genre director working to expand the reaches of schlock cinema. (See: her 1987 debut, Near Dark, a vampire Western about how your family is always sucking the blood from your neck.) For context: Her last movie before The Hurt Locker was a turgid 2002 submarine drama called K-19: The Widowmaker. So what changed? Bigelow translated the musculature and intensity of her previous films to a fist-to-face reality. Grandeur was replaced with intimacy. Skydiving with IEDs. Vampires with terrorists. Is it enough to make her, suddenly, the most decorated filmmaker of her generation? We don’t know yet. What we do know: The Oscars, naturally, like narrative. People get their turns. This truly is an egalitarian process, perhaps too much so. Bigelow’s had hers. It may have been too soon and not for her masterwork. But that’s how it goes. Unless, of course, Les Mis destroys everything, leaving little but a charred Eagles jersey, Osama bin Laden’s beard, a stovepipe hat, and an empty mason jar of torpedo juice in its wake.
