Reacting to the Reaction to Today’s Academy Award Announcements

Naysayers are quick to disparage the value of the Academy Awards, always pointing out examples from history where X mediocre movie won when Y much-better movie wasn’t even nominated. I have no reason to dispute those instances, just to point out that while the decision-making process on determining these winners may lack the evenhandedness of an Olympic competition (unless it’s figure skating – woo, Olympic burn!), the results live forever, in Wikipedia entries and trivia questions and even history books.

We remember these films because they expose what seemed important to us at any one time, and when we look back on those years, we use the Academy Awards as a barometer for how people felt at the time. The Oscars, as overhyped and overblown as they are, matter.

So, with the nominations releasing today, I’ll be taking a look at each the categories over the next week and trying to sift out what the nominations mean.

Let’s start with the big one.

Best Picture

I know it’s a dull thing to start on, but because of a rule change in the voting, we need to cover a quick bit of Oscar history before we begin. I promise I’ll keep it brief.

The Academy Awards created the Best Picture award in 1931 (it was named “Outstanding Picture” then, and went through a number of name changes before settling on “Best Picture” in the sixties) and created a system where ten films a year would be nominated for the slot. In 1944, they sliced that number to five, where it stayed until 2008. That year, a number of smart, artistic films (Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Frost/Nixon, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, and The Reader) had taken up all the Best Picture slots, leaving no room for populist fare like The Dark Knight. Deciding that opening up more spots would make room for more audience-friendly movies, they moved the number back to ten.

The decision backfired almost immediately. In 2009, there were five clear-cut Best Picture nomination locks (The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglorious Basterds, Precious, and Up In The Air), and the rest of the category was filled up with interesting indie non-contenders (An Education, A Serious Man) plus at least one clearly undeserving film (The Blind Side). So the decision swung the other way, and this year they developed a sliding scale for the movies: there would be between five and ten movies nominated every year, with the number of the movies on the list being determined by this incredibly complicated sliding scale.

If you don’t want to bother reading the linked article (and I don’t blame you), take this away: in order to be nominated, a film needs a certain amount of first-place votes from Academy voters. So a movie can’t just be considered “very good” by a lot of critics, be placed fourth or fifth on most ballots, and skate onto the list that way. It has to have a significant number of supporters who believe that this movie was the best movie of the year. And so we come to this year’s list. 

There are nine movies nominated for an Academy Award this year, including a couple that a lot of critics (and most of America) hated: Tree of Life and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. The former is viewed as overlong, overly ambitious, and underplotted, while the latter is seen as treacly and contrived. But it doesn’t matter – they’re going to the Kodak! Meanwhile, the well-reviewed and financially successful Bridesmaids and The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo are left on the outside looking in.

Other nominees include several with no chance at all of winning (The Help, Midnight In Paris, Moneyball, War Horse) two likely also-rans (Hugo, the most-nominated picture with eleven, and Golden Globe winner The Descendants), and the almost certain winner, The Artist.  The Oscars are over a month away, so there’s still time for things to change, but I’m pretty sure I can lock that prediction down right now. It’s The Artist’s year. It just is.

I’ll break down why I think it’s the winner in my Oscar prediction column in a few weeks, but let’s talk about the field at large, and what it means about moviemaking this year. 

Most Oscar predictors hedged their bets on Oscar predictions, but the vast majority assumed that there would be at most seven Best Picture nominations. Why? Because most of the movies outside those seven just weren’t that good, or were good but flawed, or were solid but not remarkable. There just didn’t seem to be that many “wow, you’ve got to see this” movies outside the top five or so.

But here’s the thing: there weren’t that many “wow, you’ve got to see this” movies in the top five. It just wasn’t that year. How many movies premiered this year that were unmissable? I enjoyed The Artist and The Descendants a great deal, but they aren’t really memorable, not for the long term. They’re good, and I recommend you see them. But they don’t wow.

Last year was a battle between an emotionally resonant Hollywood biopic (The King’s Speech) and the zeitgest-hitting origination of Facebook (The Social Network). The story, going in to the Oscars, was new school vs. old school (I’ve dismissed this theory before, so I won’t go into it here). The year before that was Avatar vs. The Hurt Locker (also known as Star Wars vs. Annie Hall part II). Great stories, great movies, great matchups. Made for a fun Oscar telecasts, or would have if James Franco hadn't slouched his way through it.

But this year… is anyone so tied to The Artist that they’ll throw a fit if it doesn’t win? Does anyone feel The Descendants  or Hugo is so deserving it must be awarded an Oscar? Did anyone feel The Help, or Midnight In Paris, or Moneyball, was anything else other than a very solid, watchable movie?

Actually, did anyone besides me actually watch those movies?

The reason other movies snuck into the list is that if a voter liked a movie, there was no reason for them not to put them into their top slot. I mean, what else deserved to be there?

The 20th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Transformers: Dark of the Moon

How amazing is it that I saw fifteen movies worse than the third Transformers this year? Boggles the mind.

But let's press onward to my appropriately exclamation point-laden review of Transformers 3: We Have Almost No Understanding of Lunar Cycles.

This movie is exactly what a Michael Bay movie is supposed to be to be – fast-paced, exciting, and packed with some of the most spectacular action sequences you’ve ever seen. The weighty, exposition-heavy storytelling is gone, replaced by characters doing things for no logical reason because we don’t have time to talk about it there are things to blow up! Lots of things, in fact: by the end of the movie, most of Chicago has been leveled in Bay’s constant hunger for bigger and more extensive explosions. I’m not complaining. When it comes to spectacle, action directors should always go for the jugular.

That doesn’t mean that the movie isn’t impossibly silly. I mean, even if you accept the premise of talking robots from outer space that transform into cars and fight other talking robots who also turn into cars as totally logical, it’s still impossibly silly.

As we start the movie, the Autobots are kept mostly secret by our government, even though they’ve now blown up a good portion of the planet at one time or another from their battle with the Decepticons. The Autobots discover… y’know, I can’t even get into it. It’s too silly. Here’s an actual paragraph from the Dark of the Moon Wiki:

The Autobots assist the United States military in preventing conflicts around the globe. After learning of the top-secret mission to the Moon, the Autobots travel there to explore the Ark. They discover a comatose Sentinel Prime – Optimus' predecessor as leader of the Autobots – and the Pillars he created as a means of establishing a Space Bridge between two points to teleport matter. After returning to Earth, Optimus uses the energy of his Matrix of Leadership to revive Sentinel Prime.

You see? Why on earth does Michael Bay think we need all this backstory? Does he worry that if he’s not true enough to the original canon, the Transformers nerds will be angry with him? It’s a movie based on a Saturday morning cartoon from the 80’s! The only thing anyone remembers from those is Law and Order telling them to properly douse their campfires.

For all its effort, though, the movie makes little use of all this mythology. There’s plot, but it’s all just there to speed us along to the next big action sequence, or to shoehorn in another eccentric, fast-talking character. Nothing that happens in the movie happens for any other reason. So why is there so much backstory? Everything that happens in this movie is just a massive plot device to get more angry space robots onto earth to fight the space robots that are already here, preferably in an area that they can do as much damage as possible.

The first scene of the movie is indicative of everything about the movie to follow. We meet the new girlfriend (Victoria’s Secret supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whitley) of our hero, Sam (Shia LaBeouf). The camera tracks smoothly behind her at waist height as she climbs the stairs to their bedroom, wearing only her underwear. She’s standing on extreme tiptoe the whole time. Why? Is she sneaking upstairs quietly? No, it’s because the camera’s following behind her and it’s important that her legs look as good as possible, logic be damned. 

Sam is still in bed, because he doesn’t have a job. Sam is a bright, well-spoken fellow who knows lots about computers. Why doesn’t he have a job? Because… something something Transformers something. It’s not important. How did he manage to get a girlfriend as attractive and supposedly smart as Huntington-Whitley (when they meet, she is employed, impossibly, a political aide for the British embassy. You can tell she’s smart because she’s wearing glasses) with no job ? It doesn’t matter! He has no job and a very smart beautiful wealthy girlfriend and let’s just move on!

As the movie starts up and Sam continues his job hunt, we’re treated to a series of camera-mugging performances by the very best camera-muggers in the business. John Malkovich! Ken Jeong! And here’s John Turturro again! Who can win this weirdness contest? (spoiler alert: Jeong definitely wins. At one point in a scene, he actually starts eating paper.)

And then the explosions start.

Why did I enjoy this movie, where characters stand in carefully-arranged triangle formations whenever they look at things, as if posing for an album cover? Because this movie doesn’t need realism to be good. In fact, realism would only hurt it. This movie understands what Transformers 2 didn’t: that we’re here to watch people shoot machine guns at giant robots from collapsing skyscrapers, and everything else is pointless.

Is it a bit sad that after the movie, I said “hey, Rosie Huntington-Whitley was pretty good!”, then realized that I couldn’t recall her actually saying or doing anything at any point in the movie? Sure. Can I recall any aspect of the plot, including what the “Pillars” were or why they chose to destroy Chicago instead of a different city? I cannot. My description of the plot would go something like this: Tiptoe? Job hunt. Ken Jeong acting crazy! We’re going to the moon! Secret alien technology? It’s a trap! Explosions! Robot worm! Collapsing skyscraper! City in ruins. Robots thank humans for helping even though they mostly just got in the way. Credits.

I don’t know how much effort the writers of this movie put into crafting a grand new Transformer universe, but I can promise them it was all in vain. So, Mr. Bay, if there is a Transformers 4: Now The Earth’s Core is an Autobot, Too! (and this film made well over a billion dollars at the box office, so I don’t see why not) then please, please, please back it down some. Give us fighting robots and explosions and Shia LaBeouf shouting at things and Tyrese Gibson shouting louder and models pretending to be actresses, but don’t bother with all the mythos and the grandiose statements and the rewriting of history to fit your needs. 

We don’t need it. I promise. I mean, look at the box office numbers for Real Steel this fall. It’s pretty clear that America is more than willing to show up just to watch robots fight.

The 21st Best Move I Saw This Year: Crazy, Stupid, Love.

I have problems when I watch “The Office” sometimes. Not because of the dull, plodding mess that it’s become (though that hasn’t helped), but because of its love affair with awkwardness. I cringe whenever someone launches into a scene where they make fool of themselves. Sometimes I’m forced to cover my face, or take a lap around my room. I empathize with the characters so powerfully that I physically can’t take it. Oftentimes, if the remote’s in reach (I try and chuck it across the room so I can’t do this), I’ll pause a scene several times, working through it in little bits and pieces. I can’t help myself.

This condition is known as vicarious embarrassment, and man, do I have it. It’s better when I watch these shows in a room with other people, and the embarrassment is abated by having people there with me.  But it’s always there.

I had a little bit of trouble getting through Crazy, Stupid, Love. It’s not the characters are placed in scenes that are overwhelmingly embarrassing – it’s more that the scenes are unnecessarily embarrassing. People keep announcing personal things in front of large groups for no reason. Every display of affection is a public one. The title of this movie is supposed to indicate that love is lived out loud, but after watching this movie, I’m less and less convinced about that. Everyone seems like their life would be better if they had a quiet talk about how they felt over a cup of coffee somewhere. But they don’t, not when there’s loud displays of affection to be announced in the midst of middle school graduation ceremonies! The plot of this movie hangs on the belief that enough shouting and passionate makeouts with strangers can awaken love. That is a fragile frame upon which to hang a film.

But weirdly, the movie works. And the reason it works is because the actors in it are absolutely, totally sold out to their characters. You believe every word they say, no matter what it is. I’m a fan of all the actors in this picture, but there’s no question that directors Glenn Ficarra and John Requa managed to get their very best performances out of them. They also managed to work in a fairly shocking reveal at the end without ever tipping their hand earlier in the film, showing real storytelling deftness.

After seven years as Michael Scott, Steve Carrell is perhaps now unparalleled among modern movie stars as the master of awkward comedy. But this movie shows why he doesn’t have to be. I’ll watch him in almost anything.

Also, I’m trying to avoid awkward comedies these days. I’m gonna break the remote one of these days if I keep chucking it across the room.

The 22nd Best Movie I Saw This Year: Source Code

There’s no way to talk about this movie without talking about the massive, gigantic, maelstrom of a plot hole at the center of this movie. So if you’re the sort of person for whom spoilers matter, get out now. This review is going to be nothing but spoilers. 

This is a science fiction movie built around a central conceit, that after a massive train explosion outside of Chicago, they have the technology to send someone back into the memory of one of the passengers for the eight minutes before the explosion. It’s not time travel, it’s simply reliving the past. So they send the consciousness of a severely wounded soldier kept alive by breathing machines (Jake Gyllenhaal) into the man’s memory to try to figure out who the bomber is, in order to catch him before he can blow anything else up.

It’s clear from the get go the creators of the technology have no real concept of what they’ve tapped into. When Gyllenhaal is sent into the passenger’s memory, he also inhabits the man’s body.  He doesn’t just relive the person’s life, he’s able to control it – to walk up and down the train, speak to people, investigate rooms the man had never visted before.

So clearly Gyllenhaal isn’t simply living in the man’s memory, he’s somehow ended up in an alternate universe: one where the explosion can still be prevented. The movie does not acknowledge this viewpoint through most of the movie, but logically, there’s no other explanation.

Now, up until this point, I haven’t given you too many spoilers, but this is where things are about to go off the rails (ha!) of standard movie reviewing. Let’s talk about the ending. Get out now if you want to watch the movie someday.

All right, everybody ready to move on? Are you sure? Let’s go.

At the end of the movie, after numerous failures, Jake Gyllenhaal finally figures out who the bomber was (shocking, I know), but he isn’t able to stop the train from exploding. He’s certain that with another trip, he can succeed at stopping the bombing. The operators of the Source Code are reluctant to send him back in again – they already have the information they need, so what’s the purpose of the sending him back? He can’t change the past. Gyllenhaal, understanding that the trips he’s being sent on are not to the past, begs until one of the engineers (Vera Farmiga) finally obliges.

Once back on the train, Gyllenhaal defuses the bomb and captures the bomber. Eight minutes pass and…. nothing happens. The train arrives in Chicago. The passengers exit, and Gyllenhaal continues on, living in the man’s body in this alternate timeline.

…wait. So, what happens to the guy whose body it was beforehand? I don’t know. He disappears. Every other passenger on the train survives and continues on with their lives, and this poor guy is up in Heaven, trying to explain things. “Yeah, Jake Gyllenhaal is living in my body now, hitting on my girlfriend. Don’t really know what happened.”

Not to mention, there’s already a version of Jake Gyllenhaal in this timeline. So Gyllenhall writes a note to Farmiga, thanking her for sending him back into the Source Code (in another timeline that she isn’t aware of). He tells her that the efforts of her alternate timeline-self helped stopped a train explosion this morning, and asks her to mercy-kill the version of Gyllenhaal living there in that timeline as a favor. This seems mean of him, because he’s ruining any chance of this-timeline’s-Gyllenhaal getting to get put into the body of some other poor sap and resurrected in a different timeline, but it is his own life (sort of), so I guess I’ll allow it.

She obliges, which means that in this new timeline, we have a living Gyllenhaal (in someone else’s body), a dead Gyllenhaal (in his own body), plus the soul of this train passenger that’s still out there somewhere. In the original timeline, we now have no Gyllenhaals (not even Maggie!) – just a wounded body with no consciousness. Odd place to leave a movie.

Not to mention that, if the movie’s ending means that we’ve established that Gyllenhaal was tapping into a series of alternate timelines. So each time he failed to solve the puzzle, all of those people died. If he’d figured things out faster and spent less time trying to call his dad, several thousand more people would be alive. That’s a lot of times he allowed Michelle Monaghan to die. More than I can really forgive. 

End spoilers.

All that said, it was a pretty good movie (you weren’t expecting that, were you?). Gyllenhaal, Monaghan, and Farmiga are all really good in it, and the film feels the way thrillers are supposed to feel: like a puzzle slowly being put together in front of you. It’s a very well-directed picture, and I enjoyed myself a great deal. Go ahead and see it.

Just… try not to think too much. It’s only gonna bug you.

The 23rd Best Movie I Saw this year: Fast Five

God, this movie is dumb.

At least it knows that it’s dumb. Rejoices in it, really. There’s no part of this movie that is connected to reality. People drive off cliffs and land, hundreds upon hundreds of feet below, in a small river, and come up swimming and spitting water and acting like nothing had happened.

Here, I’ll embed one of the trailers. In this one, the big takeaway line is Tyrese saying “This just went from Mission Impossible, to Mission Freaking Insanity!” Why is that terrible line in the trailers? Because every line in the movie is like that. The dialogue in this movie is simply a collection of one liners, tossed into a bag and shaken, then dumped on a page:

 

Ridiculous, yes? The whole movie’s like that, except when it’s intercut with horrendously stilted scenes to provide depth. Here’s one where the characters talk about their relationship with their fathers:

You see that? That scene was in this movie. Right after they jump a car off a train. And you know what? I wouldn’t have it any other way. Some movies are made to be silly, to play endlessly on TNT on weekends, to be mindless drivel. This is a movie that my friends who thought Transformers 2 was awesome found ridiculous. This is a seriously silly movie. But I honestly don’t know if the stars in the movie know it. Listen to Jordana Brewster talk about her character.

Oh, man, guys, this one’s even better. Here’s Gal Godot talking about the movie’s strong female characters.

Ready? Now, here’s her big scene, showing her character’s strength.

This is the best thing since Emmanuelle Chriqui got interviewed about what it’s like to play such a strong, dynamic character on “Entourage.” I really could do this all day, but let’s move on.

The movie builds up to the big climactic heist, but first, we need to have a fight scene between The Rock and Vin Diesel, which would be a lot more exciting if it wasn’t for how incredibly obvious it is that The Rock is about a foot taller than Vin Diesel. All the quick-cuts and low camera angles in the world can’t cover up a height difference like that. You know what it’s like to try to punch someone while standing on an apple box? Vin Diesel does.

Man, I’d forgotten how much fun making fun of this movie was. They use sports cars to pull a safe! Because sports cars are perfect for towing! They’re trying to steal as much money as they can from a guy, but they burn several million dollars of it to “show him they’re serious.” Why? No one knows! It makes no sense at all, even in the shallow constructs of this movie. This is a movie where Ludacris looks like he’s too talented an actor to be involved! I can’t get enough.

This movie is too low on the list. I need to move this thing up. Tune in to TNT sometime this summer, guys, and watch this thing. You won’t regret it.