Lord in heaven, thank god this dumpster fire of an Oscar season is finally wrapping up. Why do I feel this way you ask? Dare I recount the ways that the Academy has shot itself in the foot throughout this season? The lack of host doesn't bother me, and I would have gritted my teeth while Kevin Hart ramble without telling a joke, but that was one fiasco. A sign of things to come.
Then came the decision to have only the two biggest stars in the Best Original Song category perform. This decision was quickly rescinded.
Then came the announcement that four categories, the less "sexy" awards who part of the culling as if acting, directing or picture would ever get removed from the telecast, were to be announced during commercial breaks and spliced back in later in the ceremony. The reaction was swift and brutal. Yes, let's celebrate the best in cinematic arts by shoving cinematography and editing to the kids table. It's not as if one of those categories contains the word "cinema" in it or anything. We're now getting all 24 presented during the ceremony as it should be.
Perhaps the writing was on the wall from the ABC mandated "Best Popular Film" category? "Quick, give the plebs a category so they'll watch Black Panther win something!" The reaction was not exactly welcoming to this news, and the award was shelved indefinitely. Look, the Oscars are a hoary thing. They're pomp and circumstance, they're overlong, they're slightly stuffy. It's the nature of the beast. No amount of cosmetic procedures are going to make the Oscars look fresh and lively again.
Anyway, here's my choices for the major categories. (Plus Animated Feature 'cause there was a time that I thought about going into that field. Long story short: while I can draw, drawing consistently on model is not my strong point.)
The Nominees: Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Bohemian Rhapsody, The Favourite, Green Book, Roma, A Star Is Born, Vice
Best Picture is the only category to use a weighted ballot, so you rank the nominees from favorite to least. Typically you rank only five of them, but I've gone ahead and ranked all eight. So here would be my ranking of the nominees:
- Roma
- The Favourite
- BlacKkKlansman
- Black Panther
- A Star Is Born
- Vice
- Green Book
- Bohemian Rhapsody
As always, my explanation for the preferential ballot is in descending order from worst to best. The presence of Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book makes this category feel like it came straight out of 1989. Much like Green Book, Bohemian Rhapsody plays like a parody of its genre. Instead of middle-class white liberal feel good bullshit, this one is a biopic about Freddie Mercury (and the rest of Queen to a much lesser extent). This isn't a movie. It's a Wikipedia page that's been regurgitated on the screen for a little over two hours. Skip this movie, listen to Greatest Hits Vols I & II and scroll through Mercury's Wiki entry for a similar effect.
If there's one sub-genre of Oscar bait films that I hate it's the feel good story about racism/the white people solve racism movie. Green Book is one of those movies where the racist white character learns the error of their ways through the acquaintance/friendship of a saintly black figure. Would you be shocked to learn that this movie sprung from the mind of Peter Farrelly trying to go straight after decades of gross out frat bro humor? You shouldn't be.
If there's one sub-genre of Oscar bait films that I hate it's the feel good story about racism/the white people solve racism movie. Green Book is one of those movies where the racist white character learns the error of their ways through the acquaintance/friendship of a saintly black figure. Would you be shocked to learn that this movie sprung from the mind of Peter Farrelly trying to go straight after decades of gross out frat bro humor? You shouldn't be.
I have a strange relationship with Vice. I loved and hated it in equal measure with my affection or derision fluctuating on a scene-by-scene basis. Much like The Big Short, Adam McKay mistakes sheer volume for satirical intent, and adds all sorts of scenarios to jam in more exposition when he can't shove it down the throats of his characters. Relaying facts at maximum volume isn't exactly the hallmark of satire, and Vice's nebulous position between political hit job, satire of American media and political landscapes in the post-Watergate years, and portrait of a charisma-less Machiavelli feels bloated and shapeless.
Things take a huge leap in quality from A Star Is Born up. This particular story is on its fourth go-round, and it's a huge step up in quality from its immediate predecessor, Barbra Streisand's ode-to-self version. It doesn't match the majesty and emotional grandeur of Judy Garland's version, still the best after all these years, but it's the obvious silver medallion out of the four variations. The performances are strong, the beats are all there, and the whole thing works from beginning to end. It's a damn shame this thing has ended up flat-lining as the season as barreled through while Bohemian Rhapsody and Green Book have ascended. This is how you do a well-known story justice.
Now we're into the films that I would easily rank as some of the best and brightest of 2018. Black Panther's importance cannot be overstated, not just for its centralizing of a predominantly black cast but for giving us an understandable, deeply human villain that we alternately root for and against. There's also the simple fact that nothing has ever really looked like Black Panther before on the big screen. Afro-futurism finally making its way from the page to the screen feels like science-fiction cinema finally opened an entire new section to play with and discover. Wakanda is a fully realized and immersible world populated by fascinating characters played by one of the best ensembles of the year.
Honestly, the top three are more porous as rankings than the publishing of this blog post would otherwise dictate. Any one of them could maneuver around in these slots, but this was how they shook out as my (self-imposed) deadline came around. (And went, got pushed back, and ultimately wound up being hours before the damn ceremony. Again.)
Who foresaw Spike Lee finally getting his overdue recognition from the Academy at this stage of the game? A few years ago during one of several "Oscars So White" Lee received the honorary award for his body of work. He deserved it then as he deserves his directing, writing, and producing nominations now. BlacKkKlansman is another Spike Lee joint that dives deep into the truth of American racial animosity, and it does so with intelligence, humor, and a zippy pace and confidence that manages to neatly tie the past and present together through several metaphorical means before splicing in modern day footage at the very end. It's haunting final note to go out quickly followed by Prince's impassioned singing of "Mary Don't You Weep." It's a late period masterpiece from an undervalued American icon.
The Favourite, if you didn't know any better, looks on paper like an conventional costume drama about palace intrigue and a powerful queen trying to balance duty and personal desire. It is anything but conventional. There's Olivia Colman's draggy performance as Queen Anne for one, the lesbianism for another, and a general sense of the macabre and absurd that penetrates the material down to its marrow. Yorgos Lanthimos, the Greek king of weird and austere cinema, spins his tale of petty power struggles and gives three talented actress the parts of a lifetime.
And then there's Roma and its quiet dignity and emotional tactility to sucker punch you as it slowly builds to several intense emotional crescendos. Alfonso Cuarón's memory play is a tender glimpse at a year in the life of a domestic worker, and it's an incredibly intimate affair. No grand three act structure here, Roma instead wants to lull you into this woman's day-to-day existence. Your mileage may vary on its slow burn poetry, but I was completely enthralled by it from the first gorgeous shot to the last.
The Nominees: Spike Lee (BlacKkKlansman), Pawel Pawlikowski (Cold War), Yorgos Lanthimos (The Favourite), Alfonso Cuarón (Roma), Adam McKay (Vice)
The Academy's love for Vice baffles me. Adam McKay's political caricature sure is loud, full of energy, and manages a few moments of humor, fascination, horror, and brains. At least Peter Farrelly got snubbed thanks to him. Or, maybe, it was Pawel Pawlikowski that caused Green Book to get shoved out of the way. Either way, thank god for small miracles. Back to Pawlikowski - Cold War is a highly engrossing glimpse into a severely toxic relationship, and Pawlikowski manages to make us understand, to a point, why and how these two can't quit each other.
Yorgos Lanthimos is one hell of an idiosyncratic auteur. Not just in his use of fishbowl lenses, or the darkly humorous conceits, or the generally corrosive aura that permeates every scene, but in his overall choices of unconventional, occasionally incoherent material. That he turned his eye towards a normally staid genre of costume drama and managed to make something so deeply felt is stunning. It's like a distaff Barry Lyndon after having ingested copious amounts of illicit substances. His work is delightfully batshit. I'm so happy to see him nominated.
This really comes down to a two-horse race for me. Spike Lee and Alfonso Cuarón both deserve it. Hell, for managing to make crosscuts of phone conversations ripe with tension Lee should walk away with Oscar. Yet there's something about Cuarón's one-man-band passion project and artistic output that has me signing off on his inevitable second Oscar. Cheer up Spike, there's always Adapted Screenplay.
The Nominees: Christian Bale (Vice), Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born), Willem Dafoe (At Eternity's Gate), Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody), Viggo Mortensen (Green Book)
Fun confession: I am largely indifferent to many of these performances and their respective films. The real winner of this category is the grossly overlooked Ethan Hawke for his stunning work in First Reformed. In a year of seemingly never-ending foibles and self-inflicted wounds, the Academy's ignorance of so transcendent a piece of screen acting renders many of these nominees the worse by comparison.
But I suppose we should get to the actual nominees.... There's Viggo Mortensen's casually racist blue collar Italian, and that performance is primarily made up of an accent, Mortensen stuffing his face, and a completely serious scene where he proclaims himself blacker than the actual black person. He's reliably solid, but I find the Academy's choices as his standout performances to be entirely baffling. His work is frequently thorny, so I guess the few times he plays in feel good, twee movies that aim for prestige is just cat nip for the Academy's worst impulses. I'd gladly trade him out for John David Washington's work in BlacKkKlansman, a performance that provides a male "star is born" moment and a chance for him to escape Denzel's lengthy shadow.
Rami Malek and Christian Bale are far better than the films they're in. Malek's work occasionally feels a bit too much like impersonation rather than characterization, but playing real life figures is awards bait. I'm fully expecting him to win, and this won't get much of a rise out of me. Whatever merits Bohemian Rhapsody contains are entirely within his life-giving performance, which he delivers (false) teeth first. While Bale's trying to find a core of truth to his reading of Dick Cheney, but Vice thinks regurgitating facts as loudly as possible is actual satire. Bale feels undone by writer/director Adam McKay's choices, as though they were trying to make two totally different movies that only rarely merge into one coherent work.
Willem Dafoe's work in At Eternity's Gate is uniformly strong, and a reminder of just what a great actor he is. I'm not sure what's in the air this year, but a bevy of these nominated performances are in films that seem obsessed with pushing the camera as close to their faces as possible. Not just Dafoe, but Glenn Close (more on her in a bit) and the unjustly snubbed Ethan Hawke are delivering performances where I'm sure I could charge them as an optometrist or for a dental checkup.
That leaves Bradley Cooper as the last man standing, and I don't mean to sound so resigned to throwing this thing his way. He's very good, and it's startling how varied his four acting nominations are from each other. His range alone deserves it. But A Star Is Born is also his baby, and his passionate reworking of a classic is in every frame. It's more his story than Lady Gaga's (more on her too), and he makes every tragic, compulsive decision understandable, and he's unafraid to get dark and dirty for his art.
The Nominees: Yalitza Aparicio (Roma), Glenn Close (The Wife), Olivia Colman (The Favourite), Lady Gaga (A Star Is Born), Melissa McCarthy (Can You Ever Forgive Me?)
Unlike Best Actor, this is a category that excites me. Look at that array of performances! Stunning work ladies, bravo! You've got a novice, a veteran, a comic going serious, a member of the British contingent, and an artistic polymath.
When your weakest nominated performance is Lady Gaga then you know you're doing something right. And it's not that she's undeserving of the nomination or bad, she's actually quite extraordinary in the part, but the script ignores her interior life too often. This version of the story rests more squarely on the handsome, broad shoulders of Bradley Cooper's tragic male instead of more equitably on Gaga's petite rising star. Gaga's occasionally a little bit too eager of a theater kid to please and perform, she really wants to underscore her sincerity, but it's a strong announcement of heretofore unseen depth and potential as an actress. I look forward to seeing what else she's capable of as an actor.
Besides, if the Academy wants to throw a first timer the award, Yalitza Aparicio's right there. Her work is possibly the least flashy of the nominees, but its the quiet ones you need to watch out for. The dignity of her character is projected through a serious of turbulent emotional experiences, and her character's refusal to lie down is written all over her mysterious smile. Her birth scene is a knockout, the beach scene is wonderful, but she's enthralling even in the smaller moments where she just impassively watches.
Praise be to director Marielle Heller for looking at Melissa McCarthy and thinking she could play Lee Israel. McCarthy doesn't submerge her natural charisma and willingness to do anything in the name of comedy, she redirects them into the interior life of a seemingly very angry person that is incapable of connecting with most of humanity. Her work as a dramatic actress is a reminder of the truism that comedic actors make for great "serious" actors, as if comedy were somehow easier to play than drama or drama were somehow superior.
Olivia Colman gives an aggressively daring and complicated performance as Queen Anne. While Rachel Wiesz and Emma Stone have clearly delineated characters and trajectories, Colman is a grotesquerie that reveals real human feeling and pain in unexpected moments. As Queen Anne's body succumbs to gout, poor eyesight, and a childish temperament, Colman plays it all as broad yet finessed as Bette Davis in What Ever Happened to Baby Jane. It's a performance that hits a few notes then surprises you with a completely new set of them at unexpected moments.
Behold, The Wife and a chance to watch Glenn Close give an interior, subtle performance that makes you want to throw a shoe its so good. The rest of the movie is not quite up to her level, but it's never an outright bomb. The Wife gives Close a chance to capture the silences that filled with palpable tension as the emotional undercurrents spark off of her face. She telegraphs her conflicting emotional states with carefully calibrated pieces of body language and the subtlest of movements. Think back to her learning of her husband winning the Nobel Prize for Literature once the great secret of the plot is leaked out. She gives a masterful performance in the art of screen acting.
The Nominees: Mahershala Ali (Green Book), Adam Driver (BlacKkKlansman), Sam Elliott (A Star Is Born), Richard E. Grant (Can You Ever Forgive Me?), Sam Rockwell (Vice)
Uniformly stronger than the leading category, sure, but supporting is also filled with a few baffling choices. Well, mainly one strange choice: last year's winner, Sam Rockwell. He's not bad in Vice, but he's not tasked with playing a character, either. His Bush is a clueless boob with daddy issues, which is a popular idea about the man but Vice never explores the truth of this or where it came from.
The rest of the group is a stunning array of performances and actors. It's not to see Adam Driver get a nomination after building up quite the career over the past few years between Girls, Star Wars, and numerous indie films. He's phenomenal in BlacKkKlansman as the face infiltrating the KKK, a culturally Jewish man who must continually build and destroy a series of facades and identities.
Then there's prior winner Mahershala Ali working miracles out of Green Book's "can't we all just get along" script and borderline magical negro archetype. Ali's a character actor blossoming into a major career between Moonlight, True Detective, Luke Cage, House of Cards, and this film all happening within the past five years. He's deserving of his slot and fabulous in the role.
The best thing about this category is seeing a pair of overdue veterans finally get the golden nod. Sam Elliott's at his mustached best in A Star Is Born, always subtle and quiet even when delivering his homespun eulogy about the limited amount of notes between an octave at the end. The nomination is his reward.
It's Richard E. Grant's portrait of a grifter doing Oscar Wilde cosplay that landed the hardest with me. Can You Ever Forgive Me? is dependent upon Grant generating chemistry with Melissa McCarthy, and the pair are invigorating to watch together. Grant's ability to seemingly "exist" as whatever character he's playing has long deserved recognition, and his gay itinerant self-styled socialite is a highlight of his enviable body of work.
The Nominees: Amy Adams (Vice), Marina de Tavira (Roma), Regina King (If Beale Street Could Talk), Emma Stone (The Favourite), Rachel Weisz (The Favourite)
Let's get the elephant in the room out of the way: Emma Stone and Rachel Weisz's parts in The Favourite are closer to leads than supporting. I understand the argument being made for them as supporting players: since Colman's Queen Anne is the object that orientates the plot she's the lead and all others are supporting, which is similar to Nicole Kidman's leading placement over her costars in The Hours. Anyway, they're both absolutely phenomenal and I have a hard time picking one over the other. I guess Weisz has the showier role, so maybe her if I had to pick? Either way, they are phenomenal.
Marina de Tavira is just happy to be nominated, and I'm pleased to see her drop in as a surprise nominee. Her character exists on the periphery of the narrative for the first half, and it's up to her performance to clue us in on the emotional life and trauma she's currently experiencing. Her proclamation that women are inevitably alone in the world is laced with pent-up rage and impotence, with misdirected aggression and heartache.
Poor Amy Adams. If she wins this thing, her sixth career nomination, it'll be for her weakest nominated performance to date. It's not her fault. She's dynamite in the earliest parts of Vice, including a scene of loopy energy where she gives a stump speech denouncing women's lib, then gets regulated to "long suffering/supportive wife" for the rest. Vice does her performance as disservice by seemingly not knowing what to do with it as the characters age.
The injustice that If Beale Street Could Talk isn't in more categories aside, Regina King's performance is a stellar bit of supportive work making a film live and breathe. She doesn't get the big Oscar scene, but she's the pillar of this family as she narrows her vision down to two singular tasks: helping her daughter through her pregnancy/birth and getting her future son-in-law out of jail. King's a longtime actor getting a juicy role in a major film that's garnered her the attention and adulation she's long deserved. Her work really is just that good.
The Nominees: The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, BlacKkKlansman, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, If Beale Street Could Talk, A Star Is Born
A uniformly strong batch of films, but does anyone really think the greatest virtue of A Star Is Born is the script? I suppose for applying a fresh batch of paint to an old house I could see the nomination, but I still think it's an odd one. Granted, it does provide enough verisimilitude about the music industry and deviations from the routine narrative beats to somewhat justify its presence.
I have a similar agnostic attitude about the script for The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, the Coen Brothers frontier western anthology film. Some of it is great, some of it is merely fine, and their presence feels a bit like rubber stamping a beloved cinematic institution. Granted, the best sequences are tight, tension fueled combinations of black humor, violence, and slapstick. In short, as it was described by my close friend during a text exchange, "Buster Scruggs is a Coen movie. It's good but eh."
I would say it comes down to a threeway race, but honestly, no. If Beale Street Could Talk is a masterful distillation of the poetry, grandeur, and Biblical heft of James Baldwin's prose. I loved that movie and in any other year would throw all the Oscars at it, but there's a stronger contender. Same goes for the jaundiced, strangely buoyant examination of two misfits pulling an artistic con in Can You Ever Forgive Me? I was surprised at how much I enjoyed that movie, and the script's ability to explain but never excuse Lee Israel's actions is a marvel of engrossing writing.
But I'm going to do the right thing (sorry not sorry) and give this to BlacKkKlansman. In telling to too absurd to be fiction story of a black cop infiltrating the Klu Klux Klan, Lee manages to tie a historical moment to the present day without ever forcing the connection. Long term white nationalist language is deployed and you make the connections yourself. Don't call this a lifetime achievement award by any other name, Lee's script is just a perfect balance between politics, humor, tension, and a testament to his artistic might.
The Nominees: The Favourite, First Reformed, Green Book, Roma, Vice
"Wait, how can you give Oscars to Roma for picture and director but not its script?" Well, that is a film of emotional textures and profound intimacy with its characters. It's not exactly an achievement in narrative structure and payoff. That leaves us with the other four nominees.
You think I would ever vote for Green Book or Vice? Go back and read what I wrote about them previously. That Green Book is even nominated here is a joke. Vice is certainly daring in how it goes about telling its story, even many of its choices render everything a political cartoon. A very obvious, on-the-nose political cartoon that provides labels, arrows, and underlines for all of its points and jokes.
That only leaves First Reformed and The Favourite. First Reformed, a surprising first nomination for Paul Schrader, is a monument to his career-long obsessions. It's a fascinating story that becomes a reflection of its creator. First Reformed's priest reaffirms his faith in much the same way that Schrader reaffirms his love affair with cinema by the end. There is, of course, plenty of self-isolation, obsession, bloodshed, and redemption along the way. It's a knockout, but I really loved The Favourite.
You cannot argue that one of The Favourite's strongest virtues is its script. There's numerous great lines, three unbelievably great female roles, a couple of wicked supporting ones for the male side (poor Nicholas Hoult, my kingdom for his nomination), and a general aura of flagrant disregard for the totemic seriousness of the typical period piece. It's original all right, and bonkers in all the best ways.
The Nominees: Incredibles 2, Isle of Dogs, Mirai, Ralph Breaks the Internet, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse
With the exception of Mirai, a film I loved more conceptually than in its execution, this was another fun batch of films to watch. Wes Anderson's quirky sense of melodrama is in full display on Isle of Dogs, a close contender for the top prize. Ralph Breaks the Internet is a strong sequel that works best when it focuses in on the changing dynamics between Ralph and Vanellope, even if it does pale in comparison to the first film. Incredibles 2 is the rare long-gestating sequel that lives up to the hype, is a worthy successor to its predecessor, and manages to be as emotionally engrossing as it is spectacularly thrilling.
Yet nothing compares to the originality and spunk of Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, the best Spider-Man film ever made, period. A gigantic love letter to the entire character, his universe, and myriad of doppelgangers and successors, Into the Spider-Verse argues that anyone could adopt the mask and become the hero. The balance between action, humor, and heart is maintained throughout by presenting a fully-fledged character before he even gets around to obtaining powers and maturing into the mask.
I've never seen anything that looks like it either, and it was a joy to just sit back and bask in its visual opulence. By the time we got to the dimension shattering finale I was enthralled by the elastic reality presented in this film. Untethered from the basic physics of live-action cinema, Into the Spider-Verse is the brightest, purest example of a comic book property brought to fully realized cinematic life.
So there we have it. Another year, another completed Oscar season. Let's discuss this again around the same time next year.
Comments
Post a Comment