I haven’t time write a full-on review because of commitments to attend four schmooze parties today (brunches for Carol and Mr. Holmes‘ Ian McKellen at 11 am, a 3pm gathering for Beasts of No Nation and a soiree for the Spotlight gang at 5 pm), but my estimation of Adam McKay‘s The Big Short shot way up last night when I caught it for a second time. I still don’t get a good portion of the flim-flam jargon and I still find the financial milieu rank and appalling, but the second viewing was the charm. I honestly feel like a slightly wiser and better person for having seen it. Seriously…it expanded my horizons. Obviously not in a Bhagavad Gita sense but in a crusty, eye-rolling fashion. It’s not a rumor — we live in a country that is largely ruled by financial criminals and the people they’ve bought off.
The Big Short is a fascinating deep dive into a galaxy I’ve never really visited before, and after doing some research yesterday and skimming through the Michael Lewis book I suddenly awoke to the film, or somehow found that switch that allowed my brain to not only accept but savor what the movie is pushing.
Advice to HE readers: If you want to half-understand and therefore enjoy The Big Short, you need to do one of the following: (a) see it twice like I have — it really makes a difference, (b) acquire some personal experience in investments and/or the high-end financial markets, (c) arrange to be born into a wealthy, connected family that talks about financial crap at the breakfast table, or (d) be smarter than me, Scott Feinberg, Sasha Stone and other blogaroonies who had a little trouble with it the other night. But if you have more brain power, family wealth, some experience in the market and a willingness to see The Big Short a second time, the curtains will part and you’ll find a special arousal, a spark, a little bit of Tom Wolfe‘s “aha!” phenomenon.
There’s no question in my mind that James Vanderbilt‘s Truth (Sony Pictures Classics, 10.16) is Best Picture material. It’s brilliantly acted, tightly assembled and cut from the same thematic cloth (i.e., corporate-minded news org dilutes or dismisses important news story) and shaped with the same finesse that produced Michael Mann‘s The Insider. But it’s already taken a torpedo in the form of an unusually early opinion piece posted last Thursday by The Hollywood Reporter‘s Scott Feinberg, and if a couple more attack articles from reputable journos come out between now and mid-October Truth will almost certainly come to be regarded by the rank-and-file lazybrains as controversial or damaged goods — a movie that might have a loose screw or iffy content or whatever.
The argument against Truth is not, of course, about how smartly assembled or engagingly complex it is. It is aces in these respects, trust me. The film is especially riveting in its layered, detailed portrait of big-time television news culture — the personalities and priorities of news reporters and stringers vs. corporate overseers. The argument will be that Truth, which is based on Mary Mapes‘ 2005 book “Truth and Duty: The Press, the President, and the Privilege of Power,” seeks to whitewash or exonerate Mapes for her disputed reporting on that September ’04 60 Minutes segment that explored ex-President George Bush’s performance in the National Guard in the early ’70s, and that exoneration is not appropriate.
Feinberg and others I’ve spoken to believe that Mapes messed up, plain and simple. They correspondingly seem to believe that approving of Vanderbilt’s film is tantamount to approving of Mapes’ reporting, and therefore Truth must be given the cold shoulder. Which of course would be redundant as Mapes and Rather were already given the cold shoulder 11 years ago. Truth is about looking more closely at the reasons why they were thrown under the bus.
For me the standout event at last night’s Palm Springs Film Festival awards gala was the appearance of Still Alice‘s Julianne Moore, who was conspicuously absent from the Oscar campaign trail all through the 2014 Oscar season. Her campaign strategist no doubt instructed that the “she’s due” buzz, which began during last September’s Toronto Film Festival, was all they needed and so let well enough alone. With absolutely no one anticipating flotation from Alice, a Lifetime disease-coping movie, the best approach would be to do nothing at all until January when things kick off in earnest with the Palm Springs Film Festival, the Golden Globes, the BFCA awards, etc. Team Moore knows that the competition isn’t that strong (with the exception of Cake‘s Jennifer Aniston, who’s running the most successful go-for-it campaign) and that they’ll almost certainly coast to a win. But the rest of us are bored. It would be far more engaging if at least one other contender posed some kind of threat to Moore…alas, no. Then again Moore’s speech last night was spirited, relaxed…a bull’s-eye.
Birdman director Alejandro G. Inarritu, star Michael Keaton, last night on Palm Springs Convention Center red carpet.
I sat through the whole thing, man…four and a half hours of chit-chatting and smiling and eating the salad and and dessert and the mashy meat entree, grinding it all out in that huge, cavernous convention hall, dressed in my tuxedo-like black suit and tweeting now and then at table 1302. (In Contention‘s Kris Tapley sat to my right.) The venue, as always, was basically a tryout venue for speeches that everyone will be giving over the next seven weeks or so, and there was something to be said, naturally, for hearing them for the first time.
The horses…I’m sorry, the honorees were Gone Girl‘s Rosamund Pike (Breakthrough Actress winner), Selma‘s David Oyelowo (Breakthrough Actor), Whiplash‘s J.K. Simmons (Spotlight winner), The Judge‘s Robert Duvall (who got the evening’s only standing ovation), Boyhood maestro Richard Linklater (Sonny Bono Visionary Award), Moore, The Theory of Everything‘s Eddie Redmayne (uncharacteristically dressed in black), Birdman director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, The Imitation Game‘s Benedict Cumberbatch and Wild‘s Reese Witherspoon.
Last night Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stoneposted a report about a Vanity Fair-sponsored Oscar bloggers panel that happened yesterday afternoon, and the “bombshell” of that event, says Stone, came when veteran publicist Peggy Siegel, who’s been staging toney Oscar-related gatherings in Manhattan for many years and who kibbitzes with Academy members and journalists constantly, “said that voters she spoke with (and remember, she goes to EVERYTHING) could not even bring themselves to watch 12 Years a Slave. You have to watch it, she would urge them. But they would hold up their hands and say ‘I can’t!'”
(l. to. r.) VF host/moderator Mike Hogan, Indiewire‘s Anne Thompson, Deadline‘s Pete Hammond, Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone, Vulture‘s Kyle Buchanan.
To me that sounds like bad news for Slave and the Fox Searchlight team, but what do I know?
I’ll tell you what I know. For decades members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have made themselves infamous for succumbing to soft, tepid emotional impulses in their voting for Oscar winners, but lately it’s gotten worse. It seemed for a while that they were getting braver by giving Best Picture Oscars to The Hurt Locker and No Country For Old Men, but the last three years have been crushing with Best Picture honors going to The King’s Speech, The Artist and Argo. And now (I hate to say it but it’s probably true) effing Gravity. Academy folk like what they like and don’t give a damn about what history will say or what people outside the narrow little AMPAS culture think about their mediocre aesthetic standards.
The problem with the Academy can be boiled down to the “deadwood” members — the over-the-hill crowd that doesn’t work that much (if at all) and whose tastes are conservative and smug and myopic. These people, I’m convinced, have been refusing all along to get past themselves and bow down and show 12 Years A Slave the respect and praise it absolutely deserves. Steve McQueen and John Ridley‘s film is honest and searing and, yes, at times difficult to watch, but it’s brilliantly sculpted and superbly acted and profoundly affecting if you let it in. But the old farts have been stand-offish if not hostile from the get-go. Dollars to donuts they’ve all voted for Gravity or American Hustle or even Philomena, but…well, nobody knows anything but my guess is that Siegel’s comment probably speaks volumes.
Imagine if the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences was to announce a three-season award calendar — January 1st to April 30th, May 1st to August 31st, and September 1st to December 31st. And then require members to fill out sudden-death online ballots for the best achievements of season #1 (winter/spring) and season #2 (late spring & summer)? No nominations, no campaigning — just a simple popularity ballot. This would be coupled with two Junior Oscar ceremonies to announce and celebrate the winners of season #1 and #2.
I know the Academy would never go for this in a million years, but be honest — wouldn’t this approach encourage distributors to release better films between January and August? Wouldn’t this result in a richer, more nutritious film year with the “wealth” spread around more evenly? The winners of these seasonal award ballots would obviously derive some commercial benefit. Season #1 and #2 winners wouldn’t be eligible for the third and final season (Labor Day to New Year’s Eve), so this wouldn’t change award season as now know it. Everything would still start at Telluride/Venice/Toronto/New York. It would obviously make things better all around. I’m fairly certain this has been suggested before so I’m not claiming this as my idea. But it’s a good one.
Hollywood Reporter award-season columnist Scott Feinberg is reporting that A24 will be campaigning James Franco for Best Supporting Actor in Harmony Korine‘s Spring Breakers. The campaign “will pay homage to Franco’s character Alien and his extended boastful rant in the film about his cool property by using the slogan ‘CONSIDER THIS SH*T’ as he holds an Oscar statuette in each hand,” Feinberg writes.
I’ve been saying for the last three or four years that it’s not the win-or-lose aspects of the Oscar race but the award-season arguments that define why people want this or that film or filmmaker to win — that’s where the pleasure and the uplift lie. An annual Socratic dialogue about who and what we are, and why. That and pushing the films and filmmakers that I strongly believe in. Who could stand writing about this stuff day after day if it was just monkey chatter about who’s gonna win?
This is the HE calling. This is the task. I am swallowed by it as surely as Gregory Peck was by his great 1956 obsession. Is Ahab Ahab? Is it I, God, or who that lifts this arm?
The inspiration, tenacity, toil and achievement that go into winning any Oscar will always warrant honor and admiration, but the practice of Oscar-winner-picking is a doodle exercise, for the most part. I wouldn’t equate it to movie-watching and magazine-reading on a coast-to-coast flight, but it’s in that general ballpark. And yet it propels things along and brings advertising to Hollywood Elsewhere. The pickings, in any case, are more the specialty of those who are seriously into it — i.e., Scott Feinberg or Sasha Stone or Pete Hammond or Dave Karger.
I play these games because I must or should or need to. For if the great sun moves not of itself but as an errand boy in heaven, how then can this one small brain think thoughts unless God does that beating, does that thinking, does that living, and not I?
But my heart and head are two different entities, and I’ll simply never be able to reconcile my diminishing ability/interest in picking Oscar winners (other than the ones everyone else has decided upon…Hurt Locker, Bigelow, Bridges, Bullock, Waltz, Mo’Nique) and my personal prefs and admirations. And because the real joy, to repeat, is in wrestling over the cultural-political issues that are brought to the fore by Oscar-contending films.
I’ve picked my picks and will post them in an hour or two, but I’m sick of it, sick of it, sick of it, sick of it! Phase Two will be two or three weeks shorter next year, right? The Winter Olympics will somehow not be the delaying factor that they were this year for whatever reason?
However it shakes down, Anne Hathaway — mark these words and this post — will be a Best Actress contender for her performance as a Parkinson’s disease sufferer in Ed Zwick‘s Love and Other Drugs, as I half-predicted on 2.27.
And yet — and yet! — watching the Hurt Locker team bounding up to the stage to accept the Best Picture Oscar is going to be truly glorious. I’ve been a hammer for that film since my first viewing at the September ’08 Toronto Film Festival, so in a sense I’m coming to the end of a journey myself. It’s lasted a little less than 18 months.
Unless Avatar wins, of course, in which case…well, okay. This won’t be the “wrong” call or anything. It’s an amazing ride, that film, and one of the greatest pieces of left-wing, tree-hugging, anti-corporate propaganda — wonderful propaganda! — ever made. On top of which the tradition has always been that the film with the strongest emotional undertow wins the Best Picture Oscar, so if that rule holds The Hurt Locker will lose because…well, I don’t recall reading any articles about people being depressed upon realizing they preferred the world of The Hurt Locker to their own lives.
Everyone will ascribe The Hurt Locker‘s loss, if it happens, to those recent Hurt Locker-fragging articles generated by the Los Angeles Times and that Paul Rieckhoff Newsweek piece and so on.
L.A. Times/Big Picture columnist Patrick Goldstein recently tried to explain how it’s not fair that his newspaper has become the designated “bad guy” in this affair. He offers some reasonable-sounding explanations as to why this impression is unfounded. I nonetheless believe that in mid-February certain journalists and editors sensed a great dramatic potential in the prospect of a Hurt Locker reversal-of-fortune, especially after the BAFTA and Eddie Award wins created a front-runner status, and that some decided to research and write articles that might introduce a cliffhanger element into an already thrilling David-vs.-Goliath scenario.
The Brooklyn air outside smells fresh and clean. I’m ready to breathe it in and take a nice long speed-walk this morning. Okay, this afternoon sometime. Jesus, it’s already 11:30 am. All I know is that everyone is feeling a sense of great impending relief that it’s all going to be over in a few hours, and that we can finally get going with 2010 — all to the good. Until this same feeling of engulfment by great overpowering forces surges again, as it does every year.
We are turned round and round in this world, and fate is the handspike. And all the time, lo! that smiling sky and this unsounded sea!
