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.