We all understand how the Oscar game works. If you want your indisputably excellent film to be regarded as a Best Picture contender, you have to release it during award season (late October to Christmas).
Yes, there have been exceptions. Everything Everywhere All At Once was released on 3.25.22, and it wound up winning the Best Picture Oscar on 3.12.23 — nearly a full year later. The Silence of the Lambs opened on 2.14.91, and collected five major category Oscars 13 and 1/2 months later, including Best Picture.
Timing is nonetheless a huge factor (at least in most people’s minds), and so let’s play a game, shall we? Let’s pretend that Ben Affleck and Alex Convery‘s Air, by any yardstick an excellent character-driven sports film with at least two Oscar-calibre performaces (Matt Damon‘s Sonny Vaccaro and Viola Davis‘s Deloris Jordan) and a terrific finale that really sinks in…let’s pretend that Amazon didn’t release it on 4.5.23 but during award-season prime time.
You know it would be sitting on the Gold Derby best-of-the-year rosters and possibly might have prevailed among one or more the critics groups. You know it would have. So let’s cut Air a break and pretend it was released six or seven weeks ago. We’d be looking at a whole different ballgame.
Wiki: “Air was originally slated for a streaming-only release on Amazon Prime Video, but Amazon Studios eventually decided to release it theatrically following strong results from test screenings. It was the first Amazon title since Late Night to be given an exclusive theatrical release, and $40 to $50 million went into promoting the theatrical. It began streaming on Amazon Prime Video on 5.12.23.”
And here we are in late December 2023, and the world has obviously changed since last spring, but Air is still a first-rate, dialogue-driven sports film. As well as being an excellent “dad” film. (No shame in that!) It’s a very human, inside-baseball sports drama that feels honest and relatable every step on the way. Cut from the Moneyball cloth.
Posted on 3.22, 10:30 pm after catching Air all-media in NYC:
Ben Affleck’s Air is a solid 8 or even an 8.5 —- just don’t go expecting the world. It’s a modest, well-crafted film about vision and risk and soul and salesmanship, and the best aspect, I feel, is that it doesn’t swing for the fences.
It’s an unpretentious, steady-as-she-goes sports saga that frets about stress and failure and at the same time insists over and over that “if you don’t take a risk you can’t make a gain,” which is precisely what Walter Huston’s chuckling, goat-like prospector said in The Treasure of the Sierra Madre.
In a way Air is just as much of a pikers-strike-it-rich story as John Huston’s 1948 classic was and is, and the stakes are just as life-and-death when you consider what might’ve happened if Nike hadn’t signed Michael Jordan and if Damon’s Sonny Vaccaro and Affleck’s Phil Knight had taken a gut punch instead.
Their down-to-business story is about marketing and branding that wound up on a super-scale, but told with a modest brush. Nothing goofy or pumped or slick about it. It starts out ordinarily or even ho-hummishly, but then it picks up a little steam and then a little more, and then little dabs of feeling are sprinkled into the second act and then spoonfuls of the stuff into the third as it gets better and better and better.
And then the big payoff moment comes. Air isn’t about wives or girlfriends or kids or dogs…it’s strictly about business and that’s a good enough thing.
I love movies that represent the sensible end of the spectrum…movies that speak rationally, work their way through a logical, non-looney tunes narrative and wind up making practical sense — an almost disappeared genre.
Here’s the thing: Damon’s Vaccaro is a beefalo bordering on a lardbucket, and I was bothered by this at first. But guess what? I stopped thinking about the paunch around the 30-minute mark. By the one-hour mark I’d forgotten about it entirely. This in itself says a lot.
It’s being said that Viola Davis’s grounded performance as Michael Jordan’s tough negotiating mom, Deloris, is the keeper. She’ll probably be Oscar-nominated, but Damon’s Vaccaro shoulders the weight. He’s playing the poet and the singer and the believer of the piece, and it’s his best performance since…what, the second Bourne film? Or The Informant? I love how he’s never cowed by Affleck’s Knight, calmly standing his ground, and in fact plays him at the very end. It’s brilliant.
And I love .Chris Messina’s tough-shithead agent who reps the Jordans and is content to eat alone.
Air is no edge-of-your-seat type thriller like Gone Baby Gone or The Town. It’s basically about a cast of charismatic actors volleying back and forth for two hours with intelligent dialogue as they approach what we all understand will be a satisfying conclusion.
And yet Air manages to charm your pants off. It challenges the viewer to refrain from rooting for it, flaws and all. Strip away the overt corporate branding and it’s the kind of movie that used to be Hollywood’s bread and butter and now feels increasingly like a rarity in today’s cinematic landscape.
Will Mavity: “Air doesn’t have any grand social themes of importance, looking to make a change in today’s world. It’s a simple, competently told, feel-good drama that will likely appeal to your dad, and there’s nothing wrong with that.”