Harvey Weinstein Presents the Best
Picture:
- American Sniper – As we all shuffled out of this strong but unspectacular film, no one in the audience could say anything. It was my most memorable audience watching experience of the year, despite the breathless despair with which the woman next to me gasped at every potential moment of violence. There’s something interesting happening in the cinematic lore springing up around Iraq, Afghanistan, and the war on terror. Vietnam gave us a litany of brilliant anti-war films that were critical and financial successes. Those same attempts on these fights have failed badly. Instead, we have now three core films to discuss: The Hurt Locker, Zero Dark Thirty, and American Sniper. They share many of the same attributes: an earnest regard for soldiering and personal sacrifice, the lead's personal addiction or obsession with the conflict that is out of place on the homefront, and a savage moral war of peace over the rightness of the war and involvement in it that ends up becoming background noise. It has taken a few years, but I think Hollywood is on to something.
- Birdman – Birdman-haters dismiss this film’s critical success as so much film-industry navel gazing. I think that’s unfair, there’s a lot going on underneath this movie’s hood: even if it’s staring at a bellybutton, there’s a lot in there. Of the two main contenders, it’s technically flawless, well-acted, smart, funny, and a good watch. It lends itself to further analysis.
- Boyhood – The other prime contender is none of those things. Boyhood has very little to say and says it very little-ly. It sets itself up as an archetype for being raised right now…if it captures something in that sense, it is the banality of the American childhood. The success of Big Hero 6 can tell you much the same. Much like Avatar’s 2D plot crumbles in a world with 3D, Boyhood has nothing to recommend it when watched over 2 hours rather than ten years.
- The Grand Budapest Hotel – Two hours of smile on my face.
- The Imitation Game – Brilliantly conceived and, if it ended 2 scenes earlier, a worthy contender for winning outright. Absent the animus that war movies and race engenders, it’s gone unnoticed that the history here is often weak for the sake of drama. But again, movies are fiction and the debate is boring. No one cares if Henry V is good history. What the movie succeeds at is raising the AI question that other, bigger flops keep whiffing on by going back to its origin and then drawing out a parallel story about a man who is in some ways more computer than man and in other ways more human than the people around him.
- Selma – Let’s dispense with this LBJ nonsense – yes it’s Oprah level politics, but as far as Hollywood history goes, it’s not bad. As eager as I was to lecture about the Director’s bizarre repudiation of objective historical truth, this is a misdemeanor at worst. The problem with the LBJ sections isn’t their historical inaccuracy, it’s that they are written and shot horribly. The director is so uninterested in them that they probably should have been cut entirely in favor of keeping the drama in Alabama. The politics of SNCC are better drawn than those in DC. In fact, I would have preferred that there was less historical accuracy; Dr. King’s marital faults should be left out as well – they add nothing to the movie narratively or symbolically. This choice is symptomatic of where Selma misses: it feels as though it’s trying to make too many movies: one about Dr. King’s whole life, one about civil rights politics in Washington, and one about this march. The first two movies aren’t good. The last one is terrific. If Selma had been only used to frame Dr. King at a certain point in his life, it would have soared. The murders that touch events off are brilliantly staged to shock. The confrontation on the bridge is the year’s most moving scene. The strength of the lead’s performance is how he doesn’t even try to sound like Dr. King for much of the movie; it’s as though he’s literally finding his voice. However, there are flaws. The King family has sold the film rights (to Steven Spielberg) to Dr. King’s speeches, which it has no right, moral or legal, to do – Dr. King’s words belong to all of us. The absence is deafening; we spend the movie longing for more of Dr. King, and maybe a little Malcolm too. Indeed, Denzel Washington’s searing Malcolm so overshadows this performance that we both wonder if Mr. X is the more compelling historical figure and know that Mr. Washington is the better actor. The Dr. King we are given does not capture the public magnetism that made him so transfixing; he doesn’t come across as someone we must hear. Worst of all, the obsession with celebrity, most notably Oprah’s desperate part, distracts from what should be Dr. King’s megawattage. The question has been rightly posed – can you make a bad holocaust movie? The same would go for civil rights, only the dismal Mandela and The Butler already answered in the unfortunate affirmative. This is not a bad civil rights movie. But we still wait for a defining MLK bio. Which apparently Stephen Spielberg owns the rights to.
- The Theory of Everything – Suffers from the same problem of every biopic – it flits rapidly between life plot points and never stops to get to know any of them.
- Whiplash – A self-contained gem that never wastes a second of screentime. It has far more interesting things to say about parenthood than Boyhood, far more insightful things to say about genius than the movie about the handicapped genius, and at least as much to say about art as Birdman. Replete with unexpected virtues.
SNUBS: Fury, Gone Girl, Nightcrawler
WILL WIN: Boyhood
SHOULD WIN: The Grand Budapest Hotel. There’s deeper
commentary in Birdman or Whiplash but this is the movie that I
most enjoyed watching and will most enjoy rewatching someday.
WORST
NOMINATION: Boyhood, The Theory of Everything
Daniel Day Lewis Award for Best Actor
- Steve Carell – Foxcatcher – The kind of nod that says, “This is as far as this goes. We take you seriously. Please go back to comedy.”
- Bradley Cooper – American Sniper – Making a strong push to be actor of the decade
- Benedict Cumberbatch – The Imitation Game – My personal favorite of the five
- Michael Keaton – Birdman – Welcome back. Why were you gone?
- Eddie Redmayne – The Theory of Everything. Rehashing the fete of My Left Foot with the smarts of A Beautiful Mind makes him the favorite. Besides, he’s so very British.
BIGGEST SNUBS: Ralph Fiennes making The Grand Budapest Hotel surreal tragic
fun, Jake Gyllenhaal making Nightcrawler
a different kind of surreal tragic fun, and Jude Law transitioning from
full-haired heartthrob to openly-balding British acting royalty in Dom
Hemingway.
WILL WIN: Michael Keaton
SHOULD WIN: Jude Law. If you strip away
all of the physical transitions, the politics, the questions of whether a
caricature is acting or whether a script makes a great role…if you just ask who
did the most with what he was given, Jude Law had the best performance of the
year. So the movie is not good. And so I might be sympathetic to one of my
dopplegangers. This was a new and daring role for him, way outside anything he's done to date, and he was terrific in it.
Cate Blanchett Award for Best Actress
- Marion Cotillard – Two Days, One Night – One of the Academy’s more bizarre infatuations. They keep telling us that, if we won’t think of her as a star, then she must be a genius. She is neither.
- Felicity Jones – The Theory of Everything – Token British nomination, totally undeserving.
- Julianne Moore – Still Alice – A movie so obsessed with its performance that it never has a chance to be anything more than Julianne Moore. Most of the other characters are largely undeveloped or, in a worse choice, played by Kristen Stewart. Also, some fairly egregious American Alzheimer’s Association product placement for a serious movie.
- Rosamund Pike – Gone Girl – Ms. Pike has long been unjustly ignored as just another Bond girl too hot to be relatable in lead roles. Finally she gets a break…and now she may forever be Amazing Amy. It’s that kind of role and she’s terrific in it. Hopefully it doesn't kill her career all over again.
- Reese Witherspoon – Wild – Walden, brought to you be REI & Snapple. Ms. Witherspoon has astutely noticed, probably through her agent, that no one in Hollywood is making strong female lead movies, so she decided to make her own: Wild and Gone Girl. David Fincher was able to convince her not to ruin the latter by forcing her everygirl innocence on the conniving and intelligent Amy, a decision which has led to two award nominations that would not have happened otherwise. So I don’t want to be cruel – she’s shown pluck, humility, and some skill. But for a passion project, this movie has an astonishing amount of unrepentant marketing. Entire scenes exist only to extoll the virtues of the film’s sponsors. The subtext about Walden was that Thoreau was never far from safety and civilization - it was always more a cry to his neighbors than a cry to the heavens. So here, what's indie and Wild is never too far from a fresh pair of boots and a loving corporate embrace.
BIGGEST SNUB:
Rebecca Hall - Transcendence – Johnny
Depp turned in such a dud performance that he must hate not only the
Director and artificial intelligence, but the whole concept of
transcendence as well (Remember, he's owned by Disney, not REI). Ms. Hall took the title to heart and deserves to
be a name that people know.
Sienna
Miller – American Sniper – I don’t
know whether to put her in actress or supporting actress, but she was a great
addition to this movie and she deserves the role in Hollywood that Ms.
Cotillard is getting instead.
WILL WIN: Julianne
Moore
SHOULD WIN:
Rosamund Pike
WORST
NOMINATION: Felicity Jones, Marion Cotillard
Biggest Snub
- Damien Chazelle – Best Director - Whiplash
- Gone Girl – Best Picture
- Eva Green – The 300 2 - Best Supporting Actress
- Shia LaBeouf – Fury – Best Supporting Actor
- The Lego Movie – Best Animated Feature
WINNER: The
Lego Movie. The category was already a questionable hand-wave that the Academy does
not know how to deal with animation in the context of awards. And that it needs
to reach out to kids. Why heap further scorn on it by deliberately snubbing the clear winner?
Worst Nomination Nomination
- Boyhood – Best Picture
- Felicity
Jones – Best Supporting Actress -
- Richard Linklater – Best Original Screenplay - Boyhood
- Meryl Streep – Best Supporting Actress - Into the Woods
- The Theory of Everything – Best Picture
WINNER:
Richard Linklater – Best Original Screenplay - Boyhood. He had over 10 years to write a
hymn to boyhood and it’s still mostly ad-libbed, poorly. It’s an open question
whether that even qualifies for nomination.
MY TOP 10
- Grand Budapest Hotel
- Gone Girl
- Whiplash
- The Interview
- Birdman
- 22 Jump Street
- Guardians of the Galaxy
- The Imitation Game
- Edge of Tomorrow
- Fury
HONORABLE MENTIONS: American Sniper, The Hobbit 3, The Judge, Lego Movie, Nightcrawler
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