Sort of. I wanted to comment on a couple things. (Rather late to the party, since these are both a couple days old - hey, what can I say?) First, an enjoyable thread - Scott Lemieux at Lawyers Guns and Money asks: "if Brokeback Mountain wins, will it be the best film to win Best Picture since Annie Hall in 1977?" Lemieux says yes. My answer? No. Why? well first - I don't really think Brokeback Mountain is the best film nominated (I'd probably vote for Good Night, and Good Luck). Beyond that, while this year's nominations are all pretty good (except Crash - that's embarrassing; I haven't seen Munich, but will eventually, and it sounds reasonably deserving), they aren't that good. It doesn't seem much better than last year's slate - another pretty decent, if a bit dull, list of nominees. None of this year's nominees are any better than Million Dollar Baby or Sideways, or maybe The Aviator (depending on who you ask.) The truth is, being inoffensive is a bit of a triumph - the Academy Awards have not covered themselves in glory since Annie Hall, if you ask me. The nominees (let alone the winners) have almost never been the best films available in any given year (even sticking to fairly mainstream American films) - but there have been a few pretty good winners, for all that. Lemieux anticipates Unforgiven, Schindler's List and LOTR 3 being named - he says Brokeback Mountain is better - me, I think at least the first 2 are better than BBM. (The LOTR films don't do it for me. I don't dislike them - just find them long and completely pointless - the books serve the purpose perfectly well.) But beyond that - Silence of the Lambs got some play from his commenters, and I agree with that. I'd also say Platoon and American Beauty are better than any of this year's nominees. Now - none of these winners would make the best five nominations since Annie Hall - the 90s and 00s alone prove Goodfellas, Pulp Fiction, Fargo, The Pianist - all better than any winner since the 70s. Raiders of the Lost Ark, ET, The Elephant Man, Raging Bull and Atlantic City, Apocalypse Now - same deal. All better than anything that has won in that interval....
Meanwhile - comedy! or something. A couple days ago, TBogg linked to another of Townhall's "film" commentaries, this one from Jason Apuzzo. Since then, Apuzzo's column has made the rounds - gotten the attention it deserves while I've been worrying over this post. I can't add much (not to the Kung Fu Monkey's evisceration certainly), but I wouldn't be much of a blogger if I let that stop me. So on we go.
Unlike the Virgin Ben, Apuzzo actually makes some pretense of knowing something about films - his home site is Liberty Film Festival, which purports to look at films from a conservative perspective. He tries, but this is not a very encouraging effort. The gist of the piece is the usual natter about liberal Hollywood, combined with sniffing about indie films, adding up to this rather bizarre thesis:
Nonetheless, a new trend is developing in what ‘indie’ films the Academy honors. This year the Academy is hot for left-leaning, ’social issue’ films: “North Country” (sexual harassment), “The Constant Gardener” (evil pharmaceutical companies), “Good Night, and Good Luck” (evil Republican Senators), “Syriana” (’it’s all about oil’), “Brokeback Mountain” (gay cowboys), “Munich” (the ‘cycle of violence’), “Transamerica” (sex change operations), etc.
Taken together these films embody an important new Hollywood trend I’d like to call: The New Triviality.
Yes - he claims socially conscious, political films are trivial.
In fact, he doesn't claim much of anything. It's kind of tied to the Oscars, but he doesn't linger over the big awards, or the awards that might illustrate something like a political slant if there was one. Best picture, the screenplay awards - the categories that reward films for their stories, themes, that kind of thing. He spends most of his time whining about acting awards, since that's where he can find films that he can call "partisan" and sort of make a case for it. Syriana - North Country - that kind of film. Though he doesn't so much make a case and make a bunch of jokes, pretending that acting awards are voted by constituency groups. It's very silly.
Nor is it worth pursuing. The simpler point is - when did the Oscars ever not reward socially conscious, political films? Take a couple years plucked without too much calculation from the past: 1967: In The Heat of the Night won - Bonnie and Clyde, Doctor Dolittle, The Graduate, Guess Who's Coming to Dinner lost. Plenty of social consciousness there, left leaning if it's leaning anywhere.... Here's another: 1985 - Out of Africa beating The Color Purple, Kiss of the Spider Woman, Prizzi's Honor, Witness; or 84 - Amadeus over The Killing Fields, A Passage to India, Places in the Heart, A Soldier's Story; or 82 - Gandhi over E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Missing, Tootsie, The Verdict. Plenty of politics, plenty of social issues, some broad, some relatively narrow, some more personal, some more political... I'm not really cherry picking years - my point is that you'll find social consciousness almost everywhere....
Now - I have a theory about this. I think the Oscars have come back to about where they were in the mid-80s. The 80s is when my idea of the "Oscar picture" was formed. To me, films like Gandhi and Missing and The Color Purple and Out of Africa were perfect Oscar pictures - films on historical subjects, biopics, social problem films, serious book adaptations, movies about artists. It meant a certain style - handsomely shot, conventional, well put together, focused on star turns. That describes most of those mid-80s films, it describes this year's nominees (last year's as well). They're socially conscious, but not exactly political (contra Apuzzo and company). (Though Good Night and Good Luck is political.) They are well written (except Crash, which is really awful, when you get down to it), well directed (even Crash has this), handsome looking (even extraordinary looking, for Good Night and Good Luck and Brokeback Mountain), though conventionally looking. This year's nominees are also (the 4 that I've seen) essentially actor driven films - they are all star turns (Crash for an ensemble), as much as any of those 80s films were. They are, in short, very good middlebrow films. Reassuring, not terribly inventive, classic prestige pictures.
Those were the films getting nominated in the 80s - the genre flicks (comedies, action films, science fiction and fantasy, blockbusters, and obviously Art Films) were on the outside. (No nominations for, say - Blade Runner, Brazil, This is Spinal Tap, Better off Dead, The Sure Thing, Say Anything, Fast Times at Ridgemont High, The Terminator, Die Hard, Evil Dead or any other horror film, Blue Velvet, Full Metal Jacket, Something Wild, anything by Scorsese from Raging Bull to Goodfellas, any Jim Jarmusch film, Do the Right Thing, etc. - a list that might very well be better than anything other than Platoon that was even nominated from 1982 (say) to 1990.) In the 80s those prestige films were being made in the studios - by the 90s, that was less the case. Hollywood slowly shed that part of the industry - leaving the blockbusters and the worst kind of bloated crap, like Forest Gump or Dances With Wolves in the studios. So they got the nominations, though in the late 90s, the Academy seemed to catch up again - they started nominating indie films, or auteur films made in odd corners of the studio system (like Million Dollar Baby or The Aviator.) But not before embarrassing themselves with some of those 90s nominations, and a few last flings with some genre pics in the 00s.
So does this all mean anything? It means, I think, that Oscar nominees will be easier to predict again - look for middle of the road dramas with serious social themes, maybe a hint of politics. Probably fewer blockbuster nominations - but not a return to the 70s, when the oddball stuff had a chance. Just more safe, polite, "serious" films. I suppose it's better than seeing Titanic winning, but think about 1974: Godfather II won, over Chinatown, The Conversation, Lenny and the Towering Inferno. Or 75: One Flew Over the Cuckoos Nest beating Nashville, Barry Lyndon, Jaws and Dog Day Afternoon. Things were different then - it's not so much that there were better movies being made - there are still good, fascinating films being made. It's that the interesting films were getting nominated, one or two a year.
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