Hollywood's Identity Crisis: Why No Oscars Preview

I decided against doing my Oscars review this year and going forward. This may come as a surprise, as who more than me longed to see the Weinstein empire of lechery receive its overdue comeuppance?

One reason is the market: it’s ruined movies. Almost everything big is calibrated for a global market which means it has to be big, translatable, and cowed by Chinese censorship. As a result, most of Hollywood’s talent labors year round making Marvel films. And they’re all very good and entertaining. But I didn’t buy comic books growing up, let alone collect them all, and I find it difficult to do the same as a grown man with movies.

Those are the winners. The bigger problem is that film is behind its streaming competitors and charging more for it:

• Streaming has unleashed a river of mediocrity churning out all-but straight-to-digital duds.
•  TV has washed away the pool of potential screen writers – anyone talented with the pen flows inevitably to the job stability that TV offers and the greater artistic freedom – longer narrative arcs, more dialogue.
• Podcasts flood the political entertainment sphere, ripping straight from the headlines and surging to mini-documentary at a speed films cannot match.
• What’s left to film then is power fantasy and visual spectacle. In this, video games have movies swamped. Games lure the best visual artists, forced as they are to stand out with unique visual styles that put to shame film’s relatively monotone special effects realism. As for power fantasy, why watch Keanu Reeves labor through 90 minutes of John Wick 2 stunts when you can control the action, the fantasy, the narrative choices, or even create whole new Minecraft worlds?

As a value proposition, a movie is the most expensive dollar to minute digital entertainment, easily more expensive than everything from a podcast on the Olympic Games to Game of Thrones. And yet despite being the luxury priced good, in no category of what makes digital entertainment entertaining do films lead the market. This is a description of an industry verging on collapse.

What then do the movies have to say, beyond driving people to serial comic books and space operas? We live in an era defined by two things: technology and identity. 

Technology’s dominance opens broad vistas for science fiction, yet all we receive as an audience is dystopian twilight. I call this the Black Mirror phenomenon: an endless string of clever reasons why the technology we love has a dark future. Perhaps this well reflects the vertigo of our time, as the pace of change exceeds the pace of our ability to adapt it and assimilate new tech. Still, is it impossible to imagine a brighter future as a result of technology? That perhaps by laying out such a vision in art, we could all be inspired to achieve it?

The deeper problem with sci-fi as a dominant genre remains that it has to say something about human nature in the presence of calling that nature into question. AI consciousness challenges our humanity, social media alters our behavior – this is what sci-fi wants to talk about. It can tickle our brains a bit but rarely our hearts. Our heart craves a ray of light that illuminates our timeless humanity, a guitar chord struck of ineffable truth, to put our fingers to the face of the eternal, to savor the milk and honey of divine mystery. How can sci-fi do that when in must cast a shadow on our humanity, give voice to questions about the ineffable, make tangible the eternal as merely the past, and deglaze the divine into the chemistry in our brains?

And so instead we are told to appreciate Oscar nominated films that squat squarely in the mundane. Technology has paused the suffering that supports great narrative events, even as perhaps it plots against us. It is time then, Hollywood tells us, to investigate the exurban soul, to house art in a narrative cul-de-sac of trite lives and small ideas. In the absence of a steady expository income from events or ideas, cinema has only one thing left to pay the mortgage for its artistic past: identity.

In identity as art, we are all the products of our surroundings, agents of circumstance, defined by the voice given us at birth. This caste-based world-view instructs us that no story is so valuable, no character arc so important, as the speaker who tells it. Everything rests on the preamble, the defining throatclearing in which we introduce each topic, “As an *insert identity*, I think…” and from this the worthiness of the statement cum film may be judged. What follows from identity is experience, another life’s name signed onto the plaster of the caste. In terms of narrative structure, there is only setting. The character arc, inciting event, and adversary are all trappings of the setting that inherited identity or pathology has chosen. We have tacked onto the start of each film the phrase, “Here I am, I can be no other,” a self-fulfilling birthright.

It’s not that there isn’t tremendous value to be derived from telling the stories of people who haven’t had their stories told before, or to retell old tales by beginning with a new, “As an *identity*” in the place of “Once upon a time.” It’s just that the effort is derivative and boring. I want to hear a new story, not a the same one in a new costume. I want inspiration from movies about people who drive the action, not those who experience it. I want characters whose life speaks to a common truth, not a personal one. In other words, I don’t want to pretend that Get Out was turgid social commentary when it’s just a few hours of flaccid satire. But here we are, an objection anticipated: as a straight white male, we have to discuss first whether my opinion has any validity beyond my identity.

The British have dealt with this turn of events by focusing exclusively on period drama, which is why Dunkirk and The Darkest Hour are the best nominated films, (with Victoria & Abdul misfiring Dame Judy Dench at trying to bridge the gap between royal fan service and a growing British Muslim population. P.S. I've always thought it amusing to ponder all of the modern Dames/Knights being gathered for a grail quest. And in a way, that’s what these movies are: the service that a knight or dame now owes is to protect the public image of the crown from the dust bin of history in which it belongs.) It’s a pity that they have nothing to say about anything since World War 2, a truth applicable beyond the limits of cinema.

Surveil the nominees and tell me I’m wrong.  I’m as interested in gazing at your navel as you are at mine. I’d much rather stare intently at the ideas we’re not sharing while we loudly state who we all are. My deeper fear is that we no longer generate ideas; that the triumph of subjectivity and identity is to make us all intellectual tourists rather than thinkers.

Here instead is are a few movies I bothered to take notes on. 

WATCH:

-          A Dog’s Purpose – Or as I call it, “Doggie Holocaust.” You know how in movies they kill the dog and you cry? Well in this movie, they keep killing the dog over and over again. I watched in sheer horror that at any second, a dog might die. They literally kill a puppy in the first 90 seconds. And they send children home wandering America looking for their dead dog. This is absolute torture. I loved it.

-          All Saints - Never was there a more welcome "based on a true story." 

-          The Big Sick – The year’s only-acceptable-romantic comedy. It steals its engaging female lead for too long when she is the highlight. Like all Apatow films, it needs to be edited, as his ad-lib style provides a note of realism that is flabby and indulgent. 

-          The Darkest Hour – “You don’t negotiate with a tiger when your head is in its mouth!”  

-          Dunkirk – Criticized for glorifying British heroism in retreat by the French and Russians, in fact, it does neither. The movie is constantly subverting heroism, rewarding its runaways, castigating those who show bravery, lionizing those who did little, putting Churchill in the words of the film’s least worthy survivor. The idea isn’t so much to say that there is no heroism as to underscore that bravery is in the conscious decisions that are made – to join the fight whatever the cost.

-          The Hitman’s Bodyguard – The Year’s Most Eminently Watchable Action Movie.

-          Icarus – Hitchcockian on accident, the documentary that starts out as sporting “I dare me” and turns into an international thriller. Ignore the terrible title, other than Hoop Dreams, this is one of the greatest documentaries ever.

-          Kingsman: The Golden Circle – It’s got all the right moves. Still, the Whig in me is starting to rebel, as it doubles down on the absurd royalist tendencies, throwing in Kentucky colonels as the American doppleganger of the Kingsmen, and simultaneously embracing Scandinavian aristocracy. The bad guys are corporate America, as always, to include POTUS, greedy cowboys, and the 50’s, highlighted by evil Julianne Moore in a great role. And robot dogs… Such is the writ of an unaccountable rogue intelligence agency with a license to kill with impunity – no one seems to have any complaints about the absurd plot holes. The interesting note is that Kingsman belongs to the same universe as the American egalitarian hero series Kick-Ass. What a joy it would be to see the Kick-Ass kids take some starch out of all these stuffed shirts.

-          Last Men in Aleppo – Couldn’t make it more than 10 minutes in. Still the most memorable 10 minutes I saw this year.

-          The Salesman – One of the few literary films released this year, courtesy of an Iranian director/writer. A glimpse of what art is, or at least once was, before we politicized everything.

-          Shin Godzilla – A bruising indictment of Japanese officialdom. After Fukushima, a new Japanese Godzilla was needed, and this was the perfect response.

-          Star Wars: The Last Jedi – It’s feminism killing off the male savior myth, it’s a really slow car chase, it’s a bit ripped from the headlines. I’m into the Kylo/Rey plotline, if not the rest. Also, it made fun of the previous episode, a lot, which I appreciated. No better antidote to fan service than to unapologetically defecate all over your fans and see how they like it. As I’m not a Star Wars fan, I at least enjoyed the fireworks, both in the theater and online.

REALLY DON’T WATCH BUT MAYBE WATCH:
mother! – Things I hate all wrapped into one: art about art, an extended metaphor that does not work as narrative, an artsy director who has been given free reign and no editor, Jennifer Lawrence’s ongoing attempt to live up to her inflated reputation. Michelle Pfeiffer is the only worthwhile thing here. And yet…I thought about the movie and what it meant. And it’s chock full of ideas. Big biblical bullshit ideas.  This is what I’m reduced to: sort of recommending a movie I hated because it had the courage to think. But really do not watch this movie. 

DO NOT WATCH:

-          All Eyez On Me – Tupac is the most interesting rapper in the same way that Malcolm is more interesting than Dr. King. What a cruel feat that he gets the least interesting rapper movie.

-          Atomic Blonde –This is the Berlin Wall falling movie we get? Honestly? Are there still that many Stalinists in Hollywood that we have to undermine this event by countering a dominant narrative that Hollywood’s never bothered to recount?

-          The Great Wall – Everyone got mad about casting Matt Damon as an Asian guy. Nobody got mad that this movie is a Chinese-supremacist nightmare – unapologetically imperialist and xenophobic, (in the bitterest irony, adding a few extra evil white guys in China to steal their technology and take it back to the West). It was critically panned in China, but a huge financial success, because xenophobic imperialism is unworthy of Chinese culture, but very much what its laymen are being readied for by their government. In order to align the domestic cosmos, Chinese review aggregators were ordered to remove their unfavorable reviews by an increasingly unapologetic Chinese panopticon.

-          Karl Marx City – The Banality of Evil. As boring and poignant as you’d expect an East German prison town to be. At one point, a Stasi expert ruins the film The Lives of Others by emphasizing that there is no known case of anyone helping a subject of surveillance. The message of the Iron Curtain: There were no heroes. Only victims.

-          The Mummy – I’m assuming Tom Cruise did this as a favor to Scientology. Otherwise, the comparison to the aging if timeless Mr. Cruise is uncomfortable.

-          Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell no Tales – As a comic book franchise that stopped making sense as soon as a sequel landed, it has become both impossible to understand what is going on and yet charmingly simple to track – almost the entirety of the dialogue in the second half of the movie here was clearly dubbed in afterwards to try to help the viewer figure out the plot.

-          Rough Night – In the effort to remake every Hollywood trope with a female cast, the one thing that wasn’t going to work was to have a man write a male raunchy comedy a la The Hangover but try to turn all of the gender roles on their heads. Women already wrote a version of The Hangover, it was called The Bridesmaids, and it was better than the Hangover. 

-          Tulip Fever – One of the worst movies ever, all the moreso in light of the scandal that consumed Hollywood at long last. This is what the Weinstein revelation does to us – the leads, Mr. DeHaas and Ms. Vikander, have been made the stars of a series of Weinstein Co. releases despite no remarkable talents. This putrid stinkpot sat in editing for 3 years but still got a full feature release courtesy of Mr. Weinstein. Neither of these actors belong, and yet here we are, with at least 2 Academy Award winners humoring them in dialogue so bad, George Lucas was called in as script doctor and threw his hands up in disgust. Why? Now, forever after, we are left to wonder just what Mr. Weinstein’s casting process was.

My favorite movies this year

The best movies this year:

10. Lion

9. The Secret Life of Pets

8. Silence

7. Weiner

6. Hidden Figures

5. Ghostbusters

4. Captain America: Civil War

3. Fences

2. Deadpool

1. Game of Thrones

A word on continuing:

The time may have long since passed to give up on my movie blog. Longform narrative blogging is passe. But mostly, I have grown bored with most films and would rather spend my time doing something other than watching them. The best work being done in entertainment writing is now on TV. The best work in cinematography is being done in video games. The movies are dominated by comic books, horror, and children's movies, and I'm no longer the target demographic. I may be moved to get to work next February but I make no promises. 

Oscars Preview: Awards

Best Director:

• Damien Chazelle – La La Land
• Mel Gibson – Hacksaw Ridge
• Barry Jenkins – Moonlight
• Kenneth Lonergan – Manchester by the Sea
• Denis Villeneuve – Arrival

WILL WIN: Damien Chazelle

SHOULD WIN: Denzel Washington – Fences

BIGGEST SNUB: Denzel Washington – Fences – Mr. Washington paints his work with a number of unanticipated artistic brushstrokes that I’m still noodling over.

WORST NOMINATION: Reluctantly, Mr. Chazelle. So much of La La Land is elegantly constructed and shot with picturesque precision; no one could fault him for winning but an inveterate contrarian by nature. So I’ll state my case. One: he allowed himself to be talked into casting stars in roles that should have gone to the best broadway stars you’ve never heard of. Two: he has no idea how to stage and choreograph dance. The best thing I saw this year was a live performance of Kiss Me Kate put on by DC’s Shakespeare Theater Company. Musically, and in dance, it was everything that La La Land isn’t – bursting with raw talent and joy. It was so good that at another play 4 months later, everyone in the audience was still talking about it. Why is an off-Broadway theater troop blowing the prohibitive Oscar favorite out of the water?

Best Supporting Actress:

• Viola Davis – Fences
• Naomie Harris – Moonlight
• Nicole Kidman – Lion
• Octavia Spencer – Hidden Figures
• Michelle Williams – Manchester by the Sea

WILL WIN: Viola Davis

SHOULD WIN: Viola Davis – best ugly cry in the business

BIGGEST SNUB: Kate McKinnon – Ghostbusters. She walked into THE female comedienne movie to top all others and made her more famous colleagues look like the straight women. Once upon a Jack Palance time, the Oscars could at least countenance comedy in the Supporting actor awards. This was one of those performances. 

WORST NOMINATION: Octavia Spencer. I appreciate the strong bounceback from last year’s Oscars too white scandal, but this feels like a throwaway on a middling performance.

PSH Award for Best Supporting Actor:

• Mahershala Ali – Moonlight
• Dev Patel – Lion
• Jeff Bridges – Hell or High Water
• Michael Shannon – Nocturnal Animals
• Lucas Hedges – Manchester by the Sea

WILL WIN: Mahershala Ali

SHOULD WIN: Issey Ogata – Silence – easily my most memorable performance of the year

BIGGEST SNUB/WORST NOMINATION: This is usually the strongest category but this time you could replace almost all of the nominations comfortably and have a better list. Most notably: Woody Harrelson – Edge of Seventeen, Kevin Hart – The Secret Life of Pets, Issey Ogata – Silence, Glenn Powell – Everybody Wants Some, and Sunny Pawar – Lion. How could you put Dev Patel in over the cutest kid ever?

Cate Blanchett Award for Best Actress:

• Isabelle Huppert – Elle – I can only guess that this is a conspiracy of the wardrobe voters
• Ruth Negga – Loving – If ever there was a call for a stage name, it was here. Ms. N. stands out for soldiering on despite a dismal script, where the rest of the cast clearly gave up 30 minutes in.
• Natalie Portman – Jackie – Godmother Streep must have spiked the distribution on this film, which disappeared almost immediately from theaters and mysteriously will not be available for rental viewing prior to the awards. I can only assume she was too good for comfort.
• Emma Stone – She has a lot of subtlety within her relatively narrow range. 
• Meryl Streep – An obligatory vote, this performance was wholly undeserving. Not deliberately bad enough to be funny, not touching enough to be moving. She seems to have hired a lot of bad actors to surround her only to prop up her underwhelming work here.  

WILL WIN: Emma Stone

SHOULD WIN: Lena Headey – Game of Thrones. With the convergence of TV and film, and another embarrassing crop of niche-film-only female leads, I choose violence.

SNUB: Taraji Henson – While Ms. Spencer’s performance was forgettable, Ms. Henson’s was a welcome surprise. She deserves a chance to see what she can do with more big roles.

WORST NOMINATION: Meryl Streep.

DDL Award for Best Actor:

• Casey Affleck – Manchester by the Sea – Not so much acting as selecting roles that allow him to do the same thing over and over again.
• Andrew Garfield – Hacksaw Ridge – Kind of a year-long achievement award for both this and Silence. Who would have guessed that everyone’s Spiderman, Tobey Maguire, would be done, and Mr. Garfield would have a well-earned career in front of him?
• Ryan Gosling – La La Land – Ignore the singing and dancing issues and it’s amongst his best work
• Viggo Mortensen – Captain Fantastic – I watched this so you don’t have to. DO NOT WATCH THIS. 
• Denzel Washington – Fences – He’s bombed on enough roles now that I can’t put him in Daniel Day Lewis territory as the best actor of his generation…

WILL WIN: Denzel…but this felt like a career capstone fully meriting another trophy in all the ways that Training Day did not.

SHOULD WIN: Denzel

BIGGEST SNUB: Nate Parker, Birth of a Nation.

WORST NOMINATION: Viggo Mortensen

Best Picture:

• Arrival – My mom once worked as a telemarketer. She told me at one point that she had an idea for a movie, in which a telemarketer saved the world. Apparently a linguist had the same idea about themselves. Perhaps the most interesting question we could ask ourselves after Arrival is, how many of us don’t have a story in mind about our infinite willingness to use our trade to save the world in theory. Who are the people who don't dream of soaring heroism. Are they happier?
• Fences – The only literary work in this list.
• Hacksaw Ridge – A nice war movie which tracks very closely to the personal life of its troubled director, in which his alcoholic Opus Dei father dragged his family to Australia to avoid having them fight in Vietnam. In keeping with Arrival’s theme, in Mr. Gibson’s mind, then, perhaps what the lead character does in this film is the heroism he imagines he would have engaged in. That is, before coming home and getting arrested for an alcohol-induced anti-Semitic rant in which he referred to the arresting officer as “angel tits.” 
• Hell or High Water – The sort of airplane movie that you discover to your surprise a) exists and b) isn’t half bad. It has absolutely no business being nominated for anything.
• Hidden Figures – Belligerently manipulative and cloying in all the ways that Fences deliberately avoids. I ate it up along with the rest of America. 
• La La Land – Almost classic. Evocative of the Los Angeles I remember and fell in love with, but would never be a part of. Wonderful performances, and an aggressively un-Tinseltown but very Hollywood ending. The much-remarked upon problem is that neither Mr. Gosling nor Ms. Stone can sing or dance much better than half of the audience. Less remarked upon is that the company dance routines are little better. In fact, the most evocative musical performance throughout is the jazz. Which appears to be the director’s real interest, given that it’s the topic of both of his movies to date. Perhaps he has backed his way into a more insightful point on accident: the death of an art form, jazz, evoked by his failure to put together top-tier musical numbers, another dying art form.
• Lion – A powerful advertisement for Google Earth.
• Manchester by the Sea – I could not bring myself to see Casey Affleck return yet again to the greater Boston region to brood.
• Moonlight – Another film I did not get to, because NPR was too busy reporting this same story every time I called it up on the car stereo.

WILL WIN: La La Land. Hollywood loves nothing more than itself, in musical format. 

SHOULD WIN: Fences. My favorite idea in Fences is the conceit that segregation is a never-present character, that it turns everything in more standard fare like Hidden Figures on this topic its head, that it provides no cheap tears moments like Costner-knocks-the-racism-down-with-a-crowbar. Ultimately, it is a film more interested in ideas, in characters, than in politics. And hence it never stood a chance.

WORST NOMINATION: Hell or High Water

BIGGEST SNUB: Silence. The only other truly literary film I saw this year, Scorcese’s bleak missionary drama was too religious and too remote for voters to connect with.

Biggest Snub ALL OTHER CATEGORIES: Hardcore Henry

Pitched as a relentless POV video game single-shot, you are not likely to love this movie, but it is jaw-dropping that they pulled it off. Easily the most "how did they do that" moments of the year. 

Oscars Preview Part 2: Dubious Achievements

Movie I Didn’t Like As Much As Everyone Else: Star Wars: Rogue One

Going Rogue in the Star Wars universe means killing everyone within one “episode,” vice slowly, over three. The problem is that there are far too many new characters introduced at once to grow to care about any of them. The dialogue remains drab and there is no intellectual horsepower behind anything. At least Vader got his groove back. In fact, a 2 hour, fully-suited Vader lightsaber tantrum where he curb stomps the galaxy might be just what Rogue Two needs to be. I'm sick of the good guys winning every movie and yet still somehow coming out behind. Let's go full Star Wars: Suicide Squad. 

Movies I Liked More Than I Should:

• Ben Hur – So much to dislike. The dialogue is tell-me-don’t-show-me. Morgan Freeman keeps waiting for Charleton Heston to show up…or any other actor that anyone has ever heard of. The actor playing Messala is so wooden that Charleton Heston out-acts him in absentia. The costumes and sensibility appear to have been pulled off the discount rack at H&M. Jesus is played by the Love Actually boytoy who mysteriously gave up on Laura Linney after she had a family emergency, leaving the audience to ponder why Jesus left her hanging. There’s a ludicrous happy ending replete with unlistenable cheesy pop end song. I don’t care. The chariot scene is outstanding, and, in its humble way, I was moved by the Jesus stuff in a way that Mel Gibson’s blood-soaked The Passion never accomplished.  
• The Accountant – An autistic male power fantasy

MOVIE I WANTED TO LIKE MORE THAN I DID: Nice Guys. Nice movies finish last.

2016’s most bizarre cinematic moments:

• 10 Cloverfield Lane. John Goodman: “Problem-solving puts me in a musical mood.” Commence shaking that ass.
•  Matthew McConaughey lives out every well-meaning white actor’s dream of saving the South from slavery and Jim Crow by cobbling together a ragtag band of women, children, and runaway slaves in Free State of Jones.
• The Jungle Book. A semi-serious movie with real suffering…and 70's-acid trip variety show musical numbers performed by CGI guest stars. 
• The Lobster, an over-reviewed absurdist Scandinavian thought experiment. Scandinavians commit suicide a lot, on account of the long darkness. When they don’t, they play Trivial Pursuit and make absurdist thought experiments.

Biggest Disappointments:

•  Superman vs. Batman succeeded at being a children’s movie about crashing toys together. Unfortunately, the fans are now adults.
•  Star Trek Beyond – Tepidly wanders where every action sci-fi movie has gone before.

Overused Plot Device I’m Most Sick Of: The Acceptance Hour

You’ll note “The Acceptance Hour” most frequently high concept comedy. The notion is this – you have 10 minutes of movie based on your pitch. You have 20 minutes of shabby sex farce to add. That leaves an hour of exposition filler to hang the jokes on. Lacking any real ideas, you reflexively pull the Acceptance Hour off the shelf. The Acceptance Hour is the stock framework about how we are all worthwhile, and if we accept each other and embrace tolerance and diversity, we can all work together for the common good. It is the modern equivalent of Campbell’s stages of myth, and hence its greatest sin against art is not in being wrong, but in being dull.

The problem with the acceptance orthodoxy isn’t the behaviors it seeks to regulate so much as the thought it seeks to suppress. For the ideology of acceptance, tolerance, diversity is the idea to end all ideas. We are all fine and good, no one may be judged but those who judge, and anyone with an idea of the good best not advance it too forcefully, for fear of offending. It seeks to suffocate the romantic soul in the wetblanket of, “And your perspective is valid too.” This is the death of the mind.

To wit, you’ll find this chorus back benching any number of films. Core examples: Mrs. Peregrine’s Home for Peculiar Children, Dirty Grandpa, Sausage Party. This is where we have arrived at: Freaks & Geeks in a WW2 Timeloop, Robert DeNiro doing lines and hookers in trying to break up his grandson’s wedding, and an animated sex romp about hot dogs – these are the modern leviathan's weapons. 

Biggest Missed Opportunity: The Birth of a Nation

Its achievement, beyond its compelling lead performance, is to turn the namesake original on its head by pointing the proper historical fingers at who was raping who. Pity all the attention was paid on the director and lead's alleged past sexual misdeeds, as it undermined an important, if brutal history lesson. But this film fails otherwise to cleverly play off of the crudely effective propaganda of the original by eschewing any references to it but the title in favor of a relatively faithful rendering of Nat Turner's abortive revolt. 

Biggest Cinematic Hate Crime: Tarzan 

Navigates troubled source material identity politics by steering directly for the Heart of Darkness .Continental in outlook, it has a Teutonic wit, Wagnerian dialogue, and Victorian creativity. 

Most Difficult Watch: Knight of Cups.

Terrence Malick pulls his usual trick of carefully constructing an overwrought literary framework for something interesting and then sparsely decorating it with beautiful imagery and procedurally-generated poetry voice over. In essence, an exceptionally well-cast screen saver.

Most Groan-Worthy Remake:

• Sing Street – There’s a beautiful moment in The Commitments when the band is falling apart and their spiritual mentor turns to their defeated manager and says, “This way it’s poetry.” Sing Street removes the poetry for a happy ending. And you can't make a movie about the soul of music if the music sucks. 

Most Absurd Effort to Make the Government Out to be the Bad Guy: Sully

In an era of bitterly contested identity politics, the most acceptable villain is the government. It’s the only one that won’t complain, and never we mind if it breeds several generations of conspiracy mongers who instinctively assume that the government is out to get them. I mean, what could possibly go wrong?

Don’t believe me?: let’s start listing movies set in contemporary times and their villains. Ghostbusters? Check. Central Intelligence? Check. 13 Hours? Check. The Brothers Grimsby? Check. Jason Bourne Again? Need we even watch to know? Even Paw Patrol falls victim to this trap. 

The most absurd extremity of this phenomenon this year goes to Sully, in which a 30 minute docudrama in need of  a villain more dastardly than a flock of birds invents a sinister conspiracy against heroism at the National Transportation Safety Board. Long overlooked thanks to years of the CIA framing its best agent and then trying to kill him, the NTSB finally gets the spotlight shined on its cruel campaign to frame a hero pilot for a crime he necessarily commited. Thankfully, justice prevails and the NTSB returns to the bitter reaches of the bureaucratic swamp, plotting against truth, air bags, and the American way.

Most Obvious Casting of US Government As Bad Guy: Suicide Squad

Fine, the bad guys are the good guys. In that case, make the villain the most unimpeachable good guy imaginable, not a 3rd rate bureaucratic hack and her generic supervillain witch accomplice. Heaven forbid we have any fun at the movies.

Most Egregious Positive Potrayal of the Chinese Government: Arrival 

Unlike the US government, the Chinese government by Hollywood’s lights is at worst a quirky state-run milk producer with a few non-commercial functions, and more often, the unlikely authoritarian hero. This is all a sordid effort to shoehorn every plot into something that makes jealously protective Chinese plutocrats willing to provide access to their massive, rigorously-censored market. Perhaps the cruelest silver-screen dagger in the back of the famous Tianenmen protestor was Arrival, if only because it sets you up to believe it was a film ready to take a stand. For much of the movie, the Chinese government drives the conflict, antagonizing our alien visitors and accelerating the world towards war. My Red Dawn hackles started to rise. “What's that in my gonads? The rising chant of Wolverines?” I wondered. No. No. None of that. The benevolent Chinese general has a change of heart because he loves his dying wife. World united, Utopian future secured. 

Most Egregious British Royalist Nonsense: The BFG.
Queen Elizabeth defeats supernatural bullying with a few cups of tea and a battalion of Tommies.

Actual Worst Portrayal of Government: Eye in the Sky

In which the War on Terror is reduced to a series of inane conversations portraying government officials universally as buck-passing cowards. If only they would just send in their best agent to get the job done, and then try to kill him! Which they still kind of do in this movie anyway...but only after very long, very earnest, very British deliberation.

Adam Sandler Award for Shockingly Unfunny Comedy: The Boss, starring Melissa McCarthy

The annual animated film everyone loves that I don’t: Kubo and the Two Strings

Bizarrest Re-Casting of the Same Actor, Same Role, Different Show: The Infiltrator – Bryan Cranston plays Walter White again.

Oscars Preview Part 1: 2016 in Movie Titles

BONE COLLECTOR AWARD FOR BEST INADVERTENT PORN TITLE:

5. Sully

4. The Magnificent Seven

3. Pete’s Dragon

2. Alice Through the Looking Glass

1. Me Before You

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN WORST INADVERTENT PORN TITLE: The Disappointments Room

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN SACRILEGE: Risen

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN ADVERTENT INADVERTENT PORN TITLE: Weiner

ZOMBIE STRIPPERS AWARD FOR B-MOVIE TITLE BEST LEFT TO THE IMAGINATION:

• For the Love of Spock
• The Greasy Strangler
• Kill Me, Deadly
• No Pay, Nudity
• We Are Twisted Fucking Sister

WINNER: No Pay, Nudity: I believe this was the original name for the internet.

SPECIAL ACHIEVEMENT IN TRYING TOO HARD: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies

ED NOTE: It’s sadly become time to retire this award. The proliferation of digital dissemination platforms has all but ended theatrical release of b-movie shlock. It’s just after “jobs with dignity” on the list of things weighing on retiring boomers’ minds. All that’s left to drive this category is the aggressively absurd documentary title. For which we already have…

MOST POMPOUS TITLE:

• Generation Found –  We have a new name for millennials: Generation Found. It perfectly captures the nature of millennial angst – an unmet desire to be discovered, heard, employed, celebrated. A generation obsessed with self-discovery. A generation not lost, but badly foundering.
• How to Let Go of the World and Love All Things Climate Can’t Change – The longest title of the year is almost always a contender…
• Michael Moore in Trumpland – Mr. Moore’s Barnum-esque genius for relentless self-promotion has gone from putting his face on every poster, to adding his name to the marquee, and now summited by joining the ranks of similarly skilled sleuths like the Pink Panther and Ernest, yes “Hey Verne” Ernest, in making himself a running titular character in his own cinematic reality show
• Requiem for the American Dream – We’ve been singing this dirge since the 60’s. Go meet a few immigrants. Rumors of the dream’s demise are greatly exaggerated.
• Revelation: Dawn of Global Government – I’m particularly fond of the “Revelation” at the outset of the title, which manages the tabloid bifecta of polishing the movie’s contents with a preposterous “look here”, while also alluding to biblical millenarianism in forecasting the evils of internationalist humanism.

WINNER: How to Let Go of the World and Love All Things Climate Can’t Change -…on top of which are equal parts environmental Cassandronomy, faux Buddhist rejectionism and misanthropy, and free-aimed love.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR TITLE POMPOSITY IN WIDE RELEASE: Collateral Beauty 

SPECIAL AWARD FOR TITULAR SELF-MOCKERY: The Finest Hours – Allow me to assure you, they most definitely were not.

SPECIAL AWARD FOR MOST FOOLISH SEQUEL TITLE: Now You See Me 2. Now You Don’t. There was even a fan campaign to fix the title. 

Oscars Preview: My Best Pic, The Best Pic, Worst Nomination, Biggest Snub

MY TOP 15 MOVIES

15. What We Do in the Shadows

14. Ted 2

13. Trainwreck

12. Brooklyn

11. Mission Impossible: Rogue Nation

10. Me & Earl & the Dying Girl

9. Montage of Heck

8. Bridge of Spies

7. Relatos Salvajes (Wild Tales)

6. The Martian

5. Spotlight

4. Spy

3. Inside Out

2. The Big Short

1. Mad Max: Fury Road

Best Picture

• The Big Short – A bit too much of an Ocean’s 2008 vibe for this vibrant romp to win. Strong 2008 crash movies keep falling short of awards; while it’s fun to imagine there’s some sinister corporate hand keeping them from winning, it seems more likely that these movies are a bit remote from Hollywood. There’s a part of me that thinks that, despite handholding everyone through the logic of the derivatives market with cameo-chorus asides, maybe the voters still don’t get it. Consider that no one has ever even bothered to make a movie about the crash of 1929. What does seem clear is that to push a crash movie over the top, they’re going to have to push another button in the great Oscars wheel of justice – say a crash movie about a mentally handicapped broker, or a Birdman-like movie about the artistic process…and mortgage backed securities. You see the problem. 
• Brooklyn – The year’s tolerable romcom, Brooklyn can’t win because it’s far too upbeat about the immigrant experience. Oscars voters want a bitter, clawing fight. They want 1920’s immigrants huddled on boats. They want broken dreams. (Although for some reason they don’t want to do a good movie about Latino immigrants now). Brooklyn spins a yarn that’s made of less tattered cloth. There’s a network of support, people want her to succeed, and ultimately the real dilemma is whether to stay in America, the place that made the main character’s dreams come true, or whether to go back home and spread the dream that America made possible.
• Mad Max: Fury Road – An aggressive visual metaphor and explosively creative universe. As a visual poem, it’s everything The Revenant is not. It has more to say, it bizarrely seems more believable, its prettier to look at, and its lead(s) are the more memorable characters.
• The Martian – What would happen if you made Gravity upbeat and didn’t kill George Clooney? Something more rewatchable and less likely to win any awards. As I said before, The Martian is the Tomorrowland Disney should have made – a science-is-fun movie that truly believes in the possibility of human endeavor. Perhaps Tomorrowland SHOULD have been upbeat. Or perhaps it should have killed George Clooney. Anyhow, The Martian isn’t going to win anything, nor should it - the dialogue is for the audience rather than the people involved and it’s all a bit unfair to make up this scenario and then pretend that it’s going to end anyway other than well. The flip side of “the cake is a lie” is that space is an uncaring murder machine that asphyxiates happy endings and explodes their heads. But this is Matt Damon and we know he’s going to survive, so there’s little drama, just fun.
• The Revenant – All of the preceding contenders have the same problem – not serious enough. The Revenant is far too serious. Its ponderous, grafted-on Native American deus ex machina sub plot is as silly as Marlon Brando’s famously dismal Oscar speech cop-out. It’s excuse for an idea is the leitmotif that all of the primary agents of the film, Leo, the bear, the Chief, are in dispute to protect their child. That’s really as far is it goes. Narratively, it has a far deeper problem – the whole time, you keep thinking that the villain, Tom Hardy, is right. Leo should have taught his adopted Native Amerian son English to help him get by. Leo’s job WAS to scout the attack on the trapping camp that touches off the plot…he WAS a failure. It was crazy to try to carry him back across hundreds of miles after a vicious grizzly attack rather than leaving him for dead. The worst part of it all is that the ending is ridiculous. After pitching this as the ultimate revenge story by adding the one major ahistorical part of the story, a murdered son, we get carried to a climactic final battle with several bizarre decisions. First, no one runs for the gun. Second, after they’ve fought to the point of death, Leo lets Tom float 20 feet over to the angry Native Americans so that they can kill him - This is Leo learning the meaning of forgiveness. That lesson learned, Leo’s angel wife descends from heaven on her visible puppet strings. In real life, Leo’s historical counterpart had no reason for revenge – there is no murdered son – and he tracked these guys down and forgave them for leaving him for dead. In other words, if this movie was to end well, it was going to end with sweet, vicious revenge. If it’s here to teach us about forgiveness, then why muddy the history of an incredible survival tale with this silly non-murder murder? An over-ambitious flop. 
• Room –The first half of the movie is oppressive, relying on a credits montage to make it watchable. The release is revelatory and intense. The second half of the movie is narratively aimless and imminently worthy of being fast-forwarded through.
• Spotlight – This is the sort of earnest, mistake-free film-making that the Academy used to throw awards at in the 70’s. The man behind us at the screening left sobbing; one can only wonder what they went through. With little to be said, I’d like to say a positive word for Lieb Shriver’s measured performance. Lost probably amongst Michael Keaton’s screentime, Mark Ruffalo’s fidgeting, and his general detachment from all of the legwork of getting the story, he’s the commanding, moral compass of the movie; a quietly great boss and someone we like to think of as the person responsible for delivering us the news. 

WILL WIN: Revenant

SHOULD WIN: The Big Short. Yes, I have Mad Max as #1. But this should win the award. Consistency is the hobgoblin of small minds. 

WORST NOMINATION: Room

BIGGEST SNUB: Inside Out

WORST NOMINATION:

• Anomalisa – Best Animated Feature
• Jobs – Kate Winslet
• Room – Best Adapted Screenplay
• Room – Best Film
• Star Wars – Visual Effects

WILL WIN: Best Adapted Screenplay – Room. Takes a good book and makes it bad. Gaping plot holes (I spent the first 45 minutes devising ways to easily get out of the room. For example – the code is 4 digits. There are only 9999 combinations. If it takes 10 seconds to punch in a code, that’s a little over a day’s worth of punching in codes until the right one comes up. Or maybe just stack some stuff up and climb out the sunroof?).  And what reporter badgers a woman who escapes this horrible situation into suicide? A reporter who doesn’t want to be employed tomorrow. Dull dialogue. An almost unwatchable last half hour. This screenplay was an obstacle to greatness. 

SHOULD WIN: This is my blog. I make the rules of at least this award!

BIGGEST SNUB:

• Bridge of Spies – Steven Spielberg
• Mad Max – Charlize Theron
• Me & Earl & the Dying Girl – Best Adapted Screenplay, Jason Andrews – I blew it the first time around and forgot to credit one of the year’s best scripts for this high school movie overrun with witticisms and cute ideas.
• Montage of Heck – Best Documentary Feature
• Spy – Jason Statham – How great would a nomination for the Stath be?

SHOULD WIN: Charlize Theron.

WILL WIN: African Americans. (I don’t make all the rules).

If you didn’t believe me the first time, let me explain the real reasons the Oscars are so white. First – how white are they? Mathematically, the odds that no black actors or directors will win given just US population statistics (13% black) is about 50/50. The odds that no black actors or directors will be nominated, however, is about 3%. So once every 33 years or so, this is going to happen. But it happens more often. So why?

The first reason is the UK. The Academy has a ton of British members. They love fellow Brits. African Americans make up 13% of the US population. They make up 3% of the UK population. Run those same numbers with the UK, and you get a little less than 50/50 odds of no black Oscars winners...and closer to 5% odds of no black nominees at all. In other words, instead of this happening once every 30 years, it happens once every twenty.

That’s in a vacuum where there’s nothing preventing black actors from getting work or getting nominated. And surely some outright discrimination in even liberal Hollywood goes on.

But I’m going to propose a second reason, one I’d long suspected, and one that the Sony papers make explicit: the global marketplace is unabashedly racist with its media buck. I first got up on this issue when I saw an interview with one of my favorite actors, Denzel, in which he talked about never getting sent scripts for mainstream, not-African American roles. Sour grapes you say? It actually lays out in the Sony papers hacked by North Korea that a senior producer refused to offer roles to Denzel, the very same man even(!), not because they didn’t think he was good for the role, but because their models say that the global box office take will be much lower if the hero is black. And the models say that because it’s true – Chinese people don’t want to see Denzel.

I’ve long complained that the globalization of the marketplace has churned out blander movies. For one, most jokes and word play don’t translate. Secondly, the themes have to be universal. The over-abundance of tracking the Stages of Myth almost religiously is the most obvious example, but more broadly, it means that everything that’s not bland is financial risk.

Studios are in the business of making money first, not art first or social justice first. Competition for the global market buck is fierce and foreign revenue has made many a domestic flop a financial success. If there’s a variable in the formula that kills revenue, it gets excised.

And the reality is, the world is startlingly, unapologetically racist against black people.

Anyone who has traveled a great deal will know this. Europe has done an able job of sweeping it under the rug publicly but the migrant crisis is pulling the rug back out from under them. Go to Argentina, where black Brazilians are called monkeys. Go to Egypt, where a white woman walking with a black man will be stopped, almost block by block, by the police making sure the woman is “alright.” Go to East Asia and just ask.

We Americans like to see racism as our problem, race relations the crucible of our dedication to our noble ideals. But racism isn’t our problem, it’s endemic to humanity; as Einstein said, it’s the measles of humanity. It is our problem because everyone in America came from somewhere. It’s our problem because we imported it, literally and figuratively. Perhaps nativists in America can be brought around on this topic by looking at racism as just that – a foreign idea, as unwelcome in our republic as authoritarianism, communism, and shari’a law.

All of this is to say that the Oscars are likely to stay white, and get whiter, the more the industry relies on the global box office.

Which doesn’t explain why there aren’t any Latinos or Asian Americans either.

I take it back, maybe Hollywood is racist. Mr. Rock...you have the floor. 

Best Actor and Actress

Cate Blanchett Award for Best Actress

• Cate Blanchett, Carol – It is better to be thought the new Meryl Streep and remain making similar movies than to make Ricki and the Flash and remove all doubt.
• Brie Larson, Room – She benefits greatly from working opposite a child actor’s performance so grating, the audience starts to hope something horrible happens so he will just get off the screen.  
• Jennifer Lawrence, Joy – Supposed to be a sequel to American Hustle, this movie got swept under the rug before it could be seen…by me or by anyone. Presumably the ballots were turned in before everyone realized they had a disaster on their hands because it is not possible to dislike Jennifer Lawrence. We’ve been officially informed that she’s the real person in Hollywood.
• Charlotte Rampling, 45 Years – Annual grand ol’ dame nominee
• Saoirse (Pronounced Sersha) Ronan, Brooklyn – It's not fair if you already have the proper accent.

WILL WIN: Brie Larson. Larson only carries the first half of the film. Her breakdown in the second half remains unsupported.

SHOULD WIN: Of these 5? Cate Blanchett. She might as well make 5 movies a year and spare us the boredom of nominating anyone else.

BIGGEST SNUB: Charlize Theron – Mad Max. Furiosa was the iconic performance of the year. Theron is a huge star in her prime. Should have won…not even nominated. 

Daniel Day Lewis Award for Best Actor

• Bryan Cranston, Trumbo – Tropic Thunder instructed us “Never go full retard.” Trumbo reminds us, “Always go full communist.” So many flame out at pinko rancor with a bit too much humanity. See, for example, Will Smith's Concussion or Idris Elba in Beasts of No Nation. To borrow from Stalin, when one communist man is snubbed, it's a tragedy. When a whole race is, it's statistics. Or maybe they just weren't that good. 
• Matt Damon, The Martian – Or just go full Matt Damon...in space!
• Leonardo DiCaprio, The Revenant – Spends most of the movie crawling, groaning, and desperately searching for chapstick. Bill Paxton should have won for Twister by that rubric.
• Michael Fassbender, Steve Jobs – He never really tries to do a Steve Jobs impression. Neither does he create something else that would be more interesting. 
• Eddie Redmayne, The Danish Girl – Jennifer Lawrence: America::Eddie Redmayne:England. If not for this movie, we might have seen him nominated for Jupiter Ascending. At some point in their careers, Redmayne and Lawrence will make a movie together, and the resulting Third Era of Good Feelings will reunite the colonies with the Union Jack. 

WILL WIN: Leonardo DiCaprio. After years of bizarre snubs, he graduated to “should-have-won” last year with  a career-best performance in Wolf of Wall Street. Instead, he gets his trophy for a dialogue-free performance that seems earned mostly as in that he endured extreme privation. So do the actors on Survivor. Ooops, sorry, I mean reality stars. The point being, DiCaprio may have turned in this performance largely against his will. Is that acting? 

SHOULD WIN: I guess we should just give Leo the damn trophy.

BIGGEST SNUB:  Ben Mendelsohn, Mississippi Grind. Whodat character actor turned strong lead…in a forgettable movie headlined by, gulp, Ryan Reynolds. In a weak year, this was the best performance. Or maybe he was just standing next to Ryan Reynolds.
WORST NOMINATION: Michael Fassbender. This wasn't a nominee, it was a missed opportunity. 

Best Supporting and Director

The Phillip Seymour Hoffman Award for Best Supporting Actor

Christian Bale, The Big Short

Tom Hardy, The Revenant

Mark Ruffalo, Spotlight

Mark Rylance, Bridge of Spies

Sylvester Stallone, Creed

WILL WIN: Sylvester Stallone. The annual most competitive award, Stallone stands as the odds on favorite for a lifetime achievement award, spent mostly playing this same character.

SHOULD WIN: Mark Rylance. Perhaps the biggest problem with Bridge of Spies is that Rylance is too effective. Not only do we sort of like the Soviet spy, certainly a lot more than the goober playing Gary Powers…but we keep hoping there will be more of him in the movie.

WORST NOMINATION: N/A. Hardy, Bale, and Ruffalo all create convincing, fresh characters with varying levels of script support. Hardy has the worst script to work with, but does the most to turn it into something. Ruffalo once again has created someone I’ve never seen before. And Bale can’t help but always be good.

BIGGEST SNUB: Jason Statham, Spy. Statham’s extended self-parody in Spy was one of the funniest things ever put to film. Another Brit who can’t get any support from his countrymen because he worked his way up from the bottom rather than going to all the right schools. Let’s hope he always has the courage never to pretend he wants one of these trophies. Just be Statham.

Meryl Streep Award for Best Supporting Actress

Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight

Rooney Mara, Carol

Rachel McAdams, Spotlight

Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl

Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs

WILL WIN: Alicia Vikander, The Danish Girl – A Swedish ballet dancer plucked from obscurity to star in everything – Testament of Youth, Ex Machina, The Man from UNCLE, Burnt, The Danish Girl, Michael Fassbender’s wife; that’s a busy career, let alone in one year. Life has been very good to Ms. Vikander, not necessarily deservedly, and it’s about to get nicer.

SHOULD WIN: Jennifer Jason Leigh, The Hateful Eight – Life has been less fair to the more talented Jennifer Jason Leigh. After Fast Times at Ridgemont High, she grinded parts in forgettable movies for over a decade, picking up critics award nominations but no real attention, until the Coens made her timeless in Hudsucker Proxy.  And then back to the grind for another decade plus. Leigh outshines even a great Samuel L. Tarantino part in the most memorable performance this year this side of Jason Statham. Leigh deserves the attention, and this award, that someone powerful has decided will go to Vikander.

WORST NOMINATION: Kate Winslet, Steve Jobs – Rachel McAdams was merely forgettable; Winslet was actively bad. I would compare her inconstant Polish accent to Martin O’Malley’s presidential campaign: everyone feels obligated to keep mentioning its presence even as everyone just wonders when it will go away. As each inevitably did. At least O’Malley had the grace to stay gone.

BIGGEST SNUB: Erica Rivas, Relatos Salvajes. Her Romina makes reality TV Bridezillas look like the Geico Gecko.

The Spielberg Award for Best Directing

Adam McKay, The Big Short

George Miller, Mad Max: Fury Road

Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant  

Lenny Abrahamson, Room

Tom McCarthy, Spotlight

WILL WIN: Alejandro González Iñárritu, The Revenant - This follow-up to Birdman makes Mr. Inarritu out to be more a gimmick, difficult-to-execute tracking shots, than a director with a full bag of tricks. That said, the biggest revelation of my cross-country driving tour was the beauty of Big Sky Country and it’s hard to fault him for filling a dull script with high-end photography shots. The great American road trip – the original extended tracking shot.

SHOULD WIN: George Miller, Mad Max – Directing is the art of creating a world in 2 hours. No one did it better.

WORST NOMINATION: Lenny Abrahamson – Room – A good rule of thumb is to wonder, if someone else made this, what would it be like. In this case, the answer can only be...  

BIGGEST SNUB: Spielberg, Bridge of Spies – I have my issues with Spielberg’s ham-fistedness but he’s found a late career groove that suits his style. The point being, Lenny Abrahamson and NOT Spielberg? Spielberg will take his ‘un and beat your ‘un and then take your ‘un and beat his ‘un.