Those Left Behind II: Reviewing A Very Sparse Original Song Category*

*I workshopped a Left Behind II: Tribulation Force joke for about five minutes for this post before finally giving up, mostly since there’s no joke I could make about that film that anyone would get. I tend to be a little inside baseball, I know, but I’m not that inside baseball.

There was an announcement the other day that the Academy Award producers had decided the show would not include live performances of the two songs nominated in the Best Original Song category. While one part of me was sad that there would be no Muppets singing on the show, the other part of me (there’s only two parts of me) thought “well, it would seem pretty odd to have musical performances, but then only have two of them.” Because there are, as you might have guessed, only two songs nominated in that category.

That’s not hyperbole, or anything. I’m not saying “it’s a neck-and-neck race!” There are literally only two songs nominated this year.

I don’t understand the voting system in place for this category, nor do I care to. I understand that there are often not even five good original songs most years. Sometimes there’s not even three. The Age of Loggins is over.

But I’m perfectly fine with the Academy saying “we’re gonna have five songs nominated every year, and some years most of them will be terrible.” You know, like we do in every other category.

This year, voters will have a choice between a Muppet song that isn’t even the best in its own movie (“Man or Muppet” is great, but it doesn’t really compare to “Life’s A Happy Song”), and a Sergio Mendes song from a forgettable kid’s movie.

Both songs feature one or the other of the two members of Flight of the Conchords. It is not surprising to me the Oscar producers didn’t want to showcase the songs – it would just have made it more obvious how silly the category is this year.

The Golden Globes managed to nominate five songs this year, from movies like The Help and Albert Nobbs and from musicians as varied as Elton John, Chris Cornell, Brian Byrne, Mary J. Blige, and Madonna, and none of those songs were nominated in this category. The Academy made 39 different songs eligible this year, including tracks from Jonsi, Robbie Williams, and nineteen-time Oscar nominee Alan Menken. Evidently there just wasn't room for artists of such limited talent or films of such little credibility.

I mean, after all, this is a category that has nominated such legendary performers such as Gwyneth Paltrow, Three 6 Mafia, Eminem, Shel Silverstein (!), Janet Jackson, the dude from Fountains of Wayne, and the South Park guys. Randy Newman has been nominated twenty times. "Chim, Chim, Cher-ee," "I've Had The Time of My Life," and "You Light Up My Life" all won this award at one point. But evidently we can't have Elton John about mucking the place up.

Fix the category, Motion Picture Academy. But don’t feel the need to jam those songs into the Oscar ceremony every year. Because for every this…

 …there’s also this. This song won the Oscar that year.

Not to mention this. Uruguayan singer-songwriter Jorge Drexler was apparently not enough of a big name to sing at the Oscars, so the producers decided that a performance from Antonio Banderas and a possibly-hungover Carlos Santana was in order.

Why Eli Manning Is Nowhere Close To As Good As Everyone Says.

It’s Super Bowl week, and the desperate hunt for narratives continues. Some of these are interesting ones (“here’s how the Patriots defense has been secretly improving all year”), some are a bit unknowable (“the Giant’s defense – is it in Brady’s head?”), and some try to answer The Big Questions (“what would a win for the Giants really mean?”). I have tolerance for most of those – it’s two weeks in between games, after all, and there’s only so long we talk about Rob Gronkowski’s ankle – but I get annoyed when the media latches onto a Narrative, and refuses to let go no matter what the actual facts are concerned.

The Narrative in question? “If Eli Manning wins a second Super Bowl, does he surpass his older brother Peyton as the best Manning?” Or more worryingly, “How elite is Eli Manning? Is he the best quarterback alive?” Is he "A guaranteed Hall of Famer"? Apparently, if he wins tomorrow, it's a lock.

Slow your roll, talking heads. I recognize that Eli is “tough.” That he’s “just a winner.” That he won that NFC Championship Game “like a man.” That he has “the look.” That he’s playing “hotter than any other quarterback in the league right now.” That you’d “prefer him to Brady, yes, I said it!”

Let’s take a look at these questions with statistics. And yes, I know that Peyton Manning only has one Super Bowl win. And I also know that every quarterback with two Super Bowl wins other than Tom Brady, Ben Roethlisberger, and Jim Plunkett is in the Hall of Fame. But just for fun, let’s use other statistics for a change. Not even advanced statistics, that measure his eyeline or quarterback rating in muggy weather. Just regular statistics.

Elisha Manning (I just found out today that’s his real name. Fun, right? How have we not been making fun of him for this?) entered the league in 2004 with the New York Giants. The Narrative goes that after a weak start, Eli turned it on and became a top-flight NFL quarterback. But that’s just not true.

Eli has led the NFL in interceptions twice, including 2007 (the year he last went to the Super Bowl), and last year. He’s never led the NFL in any other category. Since becoming a starter, he’s thrown 129 interceptions in 119 games, while throwing for only 27,579 yards and 185 touchdowns.

Alright, but what does that mean? Let’s put those numbers in perspective.

If you average together Eli’s numbers and create a standard Eli Manning season, it would look like this:

Average Eli Manning Season:
522 Att, 58% Cmp, 3,677 Yds, 25 TDs, 17 INTs, 228 Yds/game

Good numbers. A very solid quarterback line. So, how does that stack up against some of the other quarterbacks in the league? Let’s start with his matchup on Sunday, Tom Brady.

Average Tom Brady Season:
532 Att, 64% Cmp, 3,997 Yds, 30 TDs, 11 INTs, 248 Yds/game

Wow. That is dramatically better. Brady has him licked. Let’s compare Eli to his older brother, who he supposedly supplanting.

Average Peyton Manning Season:
555 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,217 Yds, 31 TDs, 15 INTs, 264 Yds/game

Well, that’s not close. Let’s compare him to Aaron Rodgers.

Average Aaron Rodgers Season:
514 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,259 Yds, 33 TDs, 9 INTs, 280 Yds/game

Ouch. Okay, Drew Brees, who was once released by the Chargers, after all.

Average Drew Brees Season:
548 Att, 66% Cmp, 4,072 Yds, 28 TDs, 15 INTs, 265 Yds/game

Well, okay, so he’s not as good as some of these other quarterbacks, it seems. But how does he stack up against some of the more average quarterbacks?

Average Ben Roethlisberger Season:
473 Att, 63% Cmp, 3,797 Yds, 24 TDs, 14 INTs, 233 Yds/game

A little less aggressive, but with better effectiveness. Now, Tony Romo.

Average Tony Romo Season:
540 Att, 65% Cmp, 4,285 Yds, 31 TDs, 15 INTs, 267 Yds/game

Romo is apparently much better. Okay, Matt Schaub.

Average Matt Schaub Season:
512 Att, 64% Cmp, 4,098 Yds, 22 TDs, 13 TDs, 256 Yds/game

Okay, when even Matt Schaub has a more effective average season than you do, I think that a second Super Bowl means almost nothing historically. Eli Manning is not The Greatest Quarterback Alive. He is not The Greatest Manning Alive. He is not even a top-ten quarterback in the NFL.

Give up The Narrative, guys. Can’t you guys just spend some more time talking about Ron Gronkowski’s ankle?

Those Left Behind: Inspecting the Jilted Best Picture Nominees

Roger Ebert had a good piece the other day about whether someone can really be “robbed” of an Oscar (I'm glad he's still on his game. He confused Emma Stone and Jessica Chastain in his Oscar post the other day, and I got worried about him). It’s a reward, not a right, based on people’s opinions, so how can any Oscar really be “wrong”?

I agree, up to a point. I think there’s something to be said for a little bit of righteous outrage on behalf of the people and movies left behind. The ignored have a small window to complain about being unjustifiably forgotten, and everyone is very sympathetic during that time – and then a few months pass, everything dies down, and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close get to have “Best Picture Nominee!” on its DVD cover for all time, and everyone forgets that people thought Young Adult even had a chance.

Sure, sometimes it’s better to be the jilted than the triumphant (anyone who thinks that Pulp Fiction losing to Forrest Gump for Best Picture was bad for that movie’s credibility long-term needs to have their head examined), but for every derided win (Crash, Shakespeare In Love), there’s a hundred more wins where no one even remembers who else was in the competition.

So let’s have a quick moment for those left behind.

Best Picture

We’ve covered these movies before, but let’s cover the half-dozen movies that didn’t snag a nomination that might’ve deserved to:

There were three or four movies that didn’t get nominated where the conventional wisdom is that the films were “too dark” for the Academy.  There’s a case to be made that The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, Drive, Shame, and Young Adult were all legitimate contenders that never made it out of the gate because they were thematically bleak or had disturbing violence. But I’m not sure I buy the premise. The Academy loves schmaltz, but it also loves being considered cutting-edge. If the studios of any of those films had tried to gather Oscar momentum for them, I don’t think their subject matter would have mattered.

More to the point, no one really feels that these movies were the best picture of the year, they just feel that they were better than three or four of the nominees who made it in. Would I feel better about the nominees this year if we lopped off Extremely Loud and War Horse and wedged in Dragon Tattoo and Young Adult? Sure. But none of those four films could win this thing, so what does it matter. There’s at least a handful of critics who loved the first two of those films, and as I mentioned last week: small pockets of belief that something is fantastic is much better than broad appeal from all quarters.

The Bridesmaids question is a different one. The argument for including it goes like this: it was critically beloved, a box office hit, and a breakthrough for women comedians (I’d argue this last point, and I imagine Lucille Ball, the cast of “Laverne and Shirley,” and anyone on SNL the last ten years would, too).  People arguing in favor of it say that comedy is much harder than drama (it is), say that comedy is underrated by the Academy (indisputably), and point out that if a comedy is this well-reviewed and successful and still can’t get nominated, what would it take for a comedy to get in? The answer to that last one, of course, is “it would have to be written by Woody Allen.”

Let’s separate from this and look at this more historically. Pretend for a moment that over the last ten years, the Academy had actually been biased towards big comedies. What would the award landscape look like then?

Well, we’d have to take a look at our most well-reviewed, successful comedies and see how we’d feel about them as Best Picture winners. Two years ago, The Hangover had a 78% score on Rotten Tomatoes and raked in $277 million at the box office. What would your response have been if it’d won Best Picture over The Hurt Locker? What about Borat? It had a 91% RT and made $128 million. Not to mention Talledega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby (72% RT, $148 million) and The Devil Wears Prada (76% RT, $124 million). Would you have picked any of those over The Departed?

Both of those years were weak ones for film. A comedy with some studio backing could have been in a real battle for the title.

Let’s keep going. Wedding Crashers over Crash? Anchorman over Million Dollar Baby? How about or Shrek 2? It made $436 million and had an 89% approval on Rotten Tomatoes, after all. Of course, let’s not forget the first Shrek, which came out the same year as Bruce Almighty. Would you pick either over A Beautiful Mind? Would you take My Big Fat Greek Wedding over Chicago? I might, actually. But I wouldn’t take Men In Black over Titanic. Or What Women Want over Gladiator. Or Austin Powers over American Beauty. Or Mrs. Doubtfire over Schindler’s List.

These are the best reviewed and most successful mainstream comedies ever made. And none of them seem like Best Picture winners.

Comedies don’t age well. What seems like a real argument now seems sillier in retrospect. That’s why the more recent comparisons seems sort of plausible (Borat was groundbreaking, right? At least compared to The Departed), but the further back in time we go, the less and less acceptable these suggestions seem. Comedies have a shelf life. Most of the films that seemed hilarious in the 70’s seem slow and stagnant now. We still adore a good half dozen of them (Animal House, Blazing Saddles, Young Frankenstein, some of the Monty Python films). But the Best Picture winners from 1970-79 were, in order, Patton, The French Connection, The Godfather, The Sting, The Godfather: Part II, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, Rocky, Annie Hall, The Deer Hunter, and Kramer vs. Kramer. All of those films have held up over time. How badly do you need to wedge a Mel Brooks picture in there? Especially when you consider that I can name a baker’s dozen of other deserving nominees without breaking a sweat: The Clockwork Orange, Fiddler On The Roof, The Last Picture Show, American Graffiti, The Conversation, Chinatown, Jaws, Dog Day Afternoon, All The President’s Men, Network, Taxi Driver, Star Wars, and Apocalypse Now. Doesn’t leave a lot of room for Up In Smoke or Return of The Pink Panther.

So, take heart, Bridesmaids fans. Maybe you didn’t score a nomination you felt you deserved. But you definitely won’t be talked about in ten years as a ridiculous nominee for an award you’ll never win. And that’s something to be glad about.

The 19th Best Movie I Saw This Year: Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows

I watched this film in the middle of our student ministry all-nighter, and it might have been a bad choice of films. 300 exhausted junior high students in a theater at 3AM, all trying to follow a movie that enjoys twists this much? An hour in, half the populace of the theater was strewn across the floor, fast asleep. I can’t say I blame them. It’s not the sort of movie you want to try to follow after two hours of ice skating.

Which isn’t – and I can’t say this enough – to say that the movie isn’t any good. I tweeted half a dozen quick potshots at the movie’s elaborate and increasingly unnecessary twists as our bus was plodding home, and most people took that as a sign that I hadn’t enjoyed the film. I actually enjoyed it a great deal, it’s a fun action caper, and I enjoy watching people argue while wearing waistcoats. I’ll watch Robert Downey, Jr. doing almost anything, and I’ve got a real soft spot in my heart for Jude Law. Really, any Guy Ritchie movie is a tremendously watchable affair (with one giant exception). I’d go see Sherlock 3: A Twist inside a Twist inside a Dream Sequence in a heartbeat.

But it seems that while Ritchie clearly put his whole heart into directing this movie (even as an experienced action director, he’s never been this on his game when it comes to all the whizz-bang of these turn-of-the-century gun battles), he doesn’t seem to have any interest in directing an actual Sherlock Holmes movie.

A Game of Shadows is really just a buddy cop movie set in old England, and two or three “Sherlock’s mind at work” cutaways in the world don’t make it anything else. We never really know what’s going on in Sherlock’s head from moment to moment, nor do we get the sense that any of this is really a slow-playing master plan. Sherlock seems purely reactionary, and a quick-cut “it was all on purpose!” sequence at the end is belied by the sheer magnitude of bullet-dodging and train car-diving it took to get there.

While part of me wishes Ritchie would drop the whole Sherlock façade and just make the tweedy, bare-knuckle action comedy he wants to, I know that:

a)    No one would go without that name recognition, though I’d bet pennies to petticoats that maybe six people who saw the movie ever read a Sherlock story.

b)   This whole strategy is just Ritchie’s way of reinventing and reinvigorating the drama.

The story goes that the first of these movies got greenlit when Joel Silver showed the studio heads a drawing of Sherlock Holmes leaning out of the shadows, holding a knife in one hand and a gun in the other. Their reaction was “oh, now we get it. Go for it!” Whereas my reaction would have been, “Sigh. Must we?”

For my money, if you want to see Sherlock Holmes done right, there’s only one place to go. 

Let’s Talk About the Oscar Announcements: Best Supporting Actress

I thought about delaying this post until the end of these discussion, because it’s a tricky subject to broach, but there’s no way to get around it: we have to talk about the underlying sexism of this category’s most applauded nomination.

The five nominations in this field are Janet McTeer for Albert Nobbs (a classic “woman playing a man” nomination, the Academy loves ‘em), Bérénice Bejo for The Artist (if The Artist makes as strong a push as I expect it to leading up to the Academy Awards, she'll end up with the victory here by default), Jessica Chastain and likely winner Octavia Spencer for The Help (both performances are a nice balance of comedy and melancholy, which always plays well in the Academy – not to mention The Help’s box office success and mild cultural importance, which’ll certainly sway voters), and Melissa McCarthy for Bridesmaids. And it’s McCarthy I want to talk about.

First off, I love Bridesmaids, and I loved McCarthy in it. And I’m not going to argue that her nomination is undeserved; good comedy is always woefully underrepresented at the Oscars. I’m just going to point out that a male comedian who had broken out in a bawdy comedy with physical humor, farting, sink-pooping, and overly aggressive sexual behavior would be a good deal more reviled by critics and would stand no chance of being awarded anything, least of all an Oscar. No one would deny this. So why is McCarthy nominated?

Let’s start with Bridesmaids’ box office success. The overarching media storyline in the following weeks of its big open was “See? Women can be funny and bawdy too!” That was immediately followed by a backlash storyline of “whoever said that they couldn’t?” Now, every actress in a comedy movie has to answer questions about Bridesmaids and the comedic differences between men and women. Every woman-centric comedy that’s followed has been compared to Bridesmaids, as if there had never been women comedians before this summer.

I grew bored with both storylines pretty quickly, frankly, and I’d like to move on from them. What I want to talk about is that both storylines agree that Bridesmaids’ was a very good movie, and pretty much everyone agrees that women comedians don’t get a lot of credit, and all of those people assume that no one else had noticed until now. It’s the same cultural momentum that gets people like Sandra Bullock and Reese Witherspoon Oscars - they rode a crest of likability and general approval and “this is her time!” to an award that seemed somewhat undeserved just a few months later. Welcome to the Bridesmaids’ Oscar campaign. 

Melissa McCarthy is at the forefront of this movement, because she’s so good in the movie, a scene-stealing comedy force. And it really is more daring (I try to avoid using the word “brave” at all costs when talking about acting, because it's a ridiculous word to use. I also managed to avoid using tour de force in this paragraph's first sentence, a show of restraint I feel I should be commended for) to be a vulgar physical comedian as an actress than as an actor. It’s not socially acceptable, for whatever reason, and there’s no point in pretending it is.

So her performance of puppy-stealing and public defecation is viewed as a form of social progress, which is why award shows are desperate to honor her. McCarthy won the Emmy award for Outstanding Lead Actress this year, ostensibly for “Mike and Molly”, but actually for Bridesmaids.

But that doesn’t change the fact that honoring McCarthy for her broad comedy just widens the gap between male and female comedians. If McCarthy is awarded trophies for having the audacity to do “male” comedy, it just pronounces that such behavior is unexpected and extraordinary. A bad assertion to make, I think.

If people really wanted to make a statement, they wouldn’t honor her at all. The awards would go to actresses playing cross-dressers or suicidal parents or whale riders or whatever, and McCarthy would be watching the awards from home. Nothing to see here, folks. Just another woman, doing whatever she can to make us laugh. Nothing out of the ordinary.