A Disappointing Crop of Oscar Nominations

The oddsmakers have Roma winning, and I agree that it should - pure cinema, as Hitchcock would say - but Green Book will win because it has all those comfy, timely liberal sentiments the Academy loves: an American white man and an American black man together learn through helping each other that humanity transcends race on a journey, both literal and figurative, of self-discovery.  Alas, every single scene is completely predictable, and there is not one single interesting shot in the entire film, though one could easily be sucked in by the 101 nostalgic colours.

As compensation, Roma will win Best Foreign Film, and Alfonso Cuarón Best Director and for Cinematography - all unequivocally deserved.

Glenn Close will win Best Actress and Rami Malek will win Best Actor.

Mahershala Ali will win Best Supporting Actor, though it should go to Richard E. Grant for actually being a supporting actor. Shouldn’t Ali have been considered for a Best Actor since he was unequivocally co-driving the film’s narrative?

Regina King will win Best Supporting Actress.

The Favourite will win for Production Design.

Shouldn’t all three actresses in The Favourite have been nominated for Best Actress? Weisz and Stone were not supporters; they were co-drivers.

Ethan Hawke should have been nominated for Best Actor for his brilliant performance in First Reformed. Hopefully Schrader will win for Best Screenplay.

Contrary to what some have said, Lady Gaga cannot act. She has absolutely no screen presence, and in every single scene, we know she’s “ACTING.” [Yes, I’m referencing SNL from a few years back.] It remains astounding that she received a nomination for Best Actress. Ditto for her “co-star” Bradley Cooper as Best Actor. Of course neither really had meaningful dialogue or a half-decent script with which to work. Was everybody high when A Star is Born  got nominated for Best Picture or Cooper for directing? 

And It’s hard to believe that either A Star is Born or Green Book received nominations for their screenplays. Among many classic weaknesses such as telling rather than showing, gaps in character development, and highly predictable plot points, they both give us disappointing conventional sentimental Hollywood endings. I mean, really? Our hero nobly sacrifices himself by way of suicide so that his Star may continue her wondrous career ascension, having more or less been directed to do so by her agent and thereby ironically undermining the self-sufficiency and value of that very act. And do I really have to explain that white on black hug in the final scene of Green Book, or such dialogue as “Let’s get this man a plate?”

BlacKkKlansman undermines itself by its unnecessarily didactic coda. It is a film that does not have enough faith in viewers to draw their own conclusions about race and white supremacy.

In my judgment, with the exception of Roma and The Favourite, none of the nominated films compares to last year’s extraordinary crop in terms of either cinematic practice or storyline. What a falling off!

P.S. Stardate 25.02.2019

1) Sad to say, my prediction about Green Book was dead on. Of course the subtext here is the Academy's fear that a film produced by a streaming service and/or a "foreign" film would win. The Academy has always felt that it owns film, but the game has indeed changed. Films are less and less being "consumed" in movie theatres, and hard media (blu-rays) are on their way out.
2) Olivia Coleman's win for Best Actress in The Favourite could be seen as compensation for a film that had 10 nominations, this being its only win. She was great, but no better than either Weisz and Stone. Close is now 7 times nominated with no win.
3) It pains a bit to see a CGI production design win out over a "real" production design.

Why a completely unremarkable film called Argo won the Oscar

How ironically fitting that Michelle Obama announced the Oscar for the winning picture. Argo is a putative "true" story from the not too distant U.S. past - a past to which American viewers can easily relate - a feel good story of American perseverance, ingenuity, courage, an inspiring version of U. S. exceptionalism resulting in a bloodless American victory with only, according to the script but not Ken Taylor, a smidgen of help from Canadians. Such an uplifting image was far more appealing to mean-age 63 Academy voters.  

Does Argo deserve the Oscar? Depends on what "deserves" means. 

For the film is remarkably unexceptional in every way including the Howard Hawks overlapping dialogue and suspense building cross-cutting sequences, this last a sequence structure we've see a hundred times before. There are no outstanding scenes, no notable performances - just workmanlike stuff from mostly television actors - no innovative shooting strategy or editing, no production design worthy of note, no serious moral or political challenges offered - only a fiction of another young CIA agent bucking the system to do the right thing thereby exhibiting once again American courage and creativity. (Cf. Homeland and Zero Dark Thirty.) Voters  preferred this image to the dry debates about the dark past of slavery and the questionable conduct of the CIA. 

Postscript: to add insult to injury as it were, Argo was not even shot on film. What possible aesthetic rationale justifies the choice of digital over film for such a conventional project?

Zero Dark Thirty Leaves Plenty of Space for Viewer's Moral Judgment

Spoiler alert: The U.S. Navy SEALS murder Osama Bin Laden and several others in his Pakistani compound without mercy and with vengeful malice.

Most of the controversy swirling round the film revolves around whether the filmmaker, Kathryn Bigelow - positioned as auteur by most commentators -  endorses torture or  whether the film’s narrative raises the moral issue of torture for contemplation. There is, in my reading,  no overt moral position offered by the film on torture or even the morality of CIA procedures in general.  Many commentators have unwittingly bemoaned this absence or taken it as a tacit moral endorsement of torture - their right as viewers - but it is is overwhelmingly clear that torture and CIA investigative procedures, as morally problematic as they might be to us as viewers, are judged - are valued - in the film only in terms of their pragmatic effectiveness in what is for both viewers and participants a classic revenge narrative structure. "Do these procedures and practices work to help us catch terrorists, and in particular do they work to help us get Bin Laden so that we will be able to murder him in a bloody act of revenge?"

Representations of torture are recessed in the second half of the film, it should be noted,  not because of a moral awakening  by any given character but only because of a policy decision by a new administration. The Obama TV moment presented in the background in the context of a CIA war or situation room makes this crystal clear. Even Dan’s warning to Maya  - relatively early in the film -  about the possible repercussions of “enhanced” methods of detainee interrogations comes in the form of a political warning about saving her CIA ass, not moral reprehension.

The devastating loss of American lives on 9/11 is the initiating narrative event that rolls out a straightforward revenge structure ending in the murder of Bin Laden and several of his domestic companions.  Before the film proper begins in earnest, however, we are exposed to an introductory screen text informing us that the representations we are about to watch are based on  "firsthand accounts of actual event." There is an implicit moral distancing in this textual strategy - “I'm just showing you the way it was” - but certainly one of its other effects is to suggest that what we are about to see carries the weight of authenticity and is therefore important if not “real.” The now conventional use of handheld cameras is meant to reinforce this effect with a documentary-like style of shooting. In other words, the “realism” of the film is not an allegiance to “truth” or reality,” whatever those may be since neither is a given, but a filmic effect resulting from a well-established set of film conventions creating an illusion, a fiction, of “what really happened.” It seems appropriate to evaluate the film as such.

The film proper opens with a black screen over which we hear the dying voices of only American victims of the twin towers, a restriction thus positioning us emotionally if not ideologically as American viewers. Immediately after this audio text, we are treated to roughly forty-five minutes of extensive torture sequences, including several instances of the infamous water-boarding technique. Juxtaposing the first visual torture scene of al-Qaeda’s No. 3 leader, Khalid Shaikh Mohammed, with the voices of the twin tower Americans who are about to die creates a  structural effect implying a retaliatory cause-effect relationship - “I am torturing you because of 9/11” -  and that effect is sustained throughout the entire 45 minutes of multiple scenes of torture and implied throughout the entire film.

These kind of scenes are gradually recessed as we move in the second half of the film towards interrogations without torture - but nonetheless grounded in bribes or threats - and sequences of CIA group intelligence analysis:  the so-called “hard work” some critics want to see as the reason for discovering Bin Laden.  But the dialogue reveals on several occasions that the analysis - the “hard work” - really results from information received from interrogated detainees, on screen and off, and those detainees, we know, were abused in some form or other if not overtly tortured.  "Does our treatment of detainees work? You bet."

Inter-cut with these intelligence analysis scenes is a revenge justifying history of  major terrorist attacks against westerners since 9/11, but especially against Americans, each successfully gaining more screen time and thus significance until the final, climactic suicide bombing in Afghanistan of one of Maya’s closest colleagues, Jessica, who has been betrayed  by her al-Qaeda connections. Now it’s “personal” is the implication as we move towards the final bloody revengeful act of murder in Pakistan.

But, in truth there has been little if anything personal in the film - no character development for anyone let alone Maya who has been merely the driving agent of revenge. We know little more about her by the end of the film than we do at the beginning, and the final scene of Maya in a giant U.S. army transport plane alone, isolated, and small is telling in its ambiguity.  "Where do you want to go?" asks a crew member,  his question unanswered. And what do we read on her face?  Relief? Satisfaction? Sadness? An unwinding? Anxiety now that her obsessive-compulsive revenge narrative has come to its end?  Plenty of room for the  the viewer’s meaning.

Following that final character scene is another screen text rounding out the ideological thrust of the film in its acknowledgement of the victims of 9/11 once again and all those who serve the American exceptionalist project.  Closure is provided by that framing text confirming the essence of the film as an apologia of sorts, a justification of policy, of strategy: “Revenge and all that that entails, including torture, are okay because they drove us to get Bin Laden, and we did that for you.”  Whether this is a impaired moral justification is the viewer’s decision.

In the end, it matters little what the filmmaker or commentators say about Zero Dark Thirty.  You are the site of meaning: it’s your reading of the film conditioned though it may be by your cultural, moral, and social inscription that matters. Like any text, film texts are unstable, dynamic, their meaning put in motion by your engagement with them. In a sense there is no film without you.Zero Dark Thirty is provocatively open enough - disturbing in so many ways - to allow for a variety of ways to read it, and that makes it a challenging, ideologically complex film well worth viewing - far more exciting than some of its straightforward conventional Oscar challengers.

Moonrise Kingdom: Enjoy the Quirkiness

Moonrise Kingdom  is another one of those quirky Wes Anderson films with a characteristically  wonderful production design and brilliant cinematography. I especially like the tableau-like shots with such rich, detailed mise-en-scene, including the outdoor scenes. The self-reflexive opening moving tableau sequence is notable, and of course one could linger on the mise-en-scene details of the St. Jack church sequences for at least an hour.  (I’ll do just that once the blu-ray comes out.)  If Anderson is anything, he is a consummate visual storyteller, maximizing film as film whenever he can. It is in this context that our primary engagement with the film should take place.

And of course that trademark slightly off-kilter "reality" - it's not surreal, it's not hyper-real, and it's not fantasy -  is rendered superbly here through Anderson's co-written script but with self-referential allusions to all three modes through the books Suzy reads and the "variations" and “increments” themes in the music played at the Bishops’ house.  In some ways, the film is about the desire to fantasize, the desire to dream, the desire to mythologize, and of course one of our deepest, unconscious urges is to mythologize the past including our personal past - which can frequently lead to nostalgia, in either a fantasy or mythic mode. As I've suggested, this film isn't exactly either, though it could be accused of such, especially because of the romanticizing of 60’s technology and an America that never was and could never be on a fantasy island off the coast of Maine.  In this context,  a serious weakness in an otherwise interesting film is the historicizing narrator functioning like a voice-over, which is an attempt to elevate story self-consciously to the status of myth. It simply is unnecessary as a framing device.  We can mythologise and historicize on our own if we must.

But, as always, despite the self-indulgent auteurism, what redeems Moonrise Kingdom,  as all Anderson’s films, is Anderson's intriguing story-telling mode:   it's "unreal" but “real” enough to be accessible  in terms of storyline, character, and thematic content. The viewer can thus both identify with and distance herself from story and character, both enter into story and simultaneously aestheticize that experience through a massaged recognition of both narrative and filmic technique.  In fact, you really can’t process the film without doing both.

As always in an Anderson film, casting is uncanny. Notable are the cameos from Tilda Swinton, Harvey Keitel, and Jason Swartzman. Both Ed Norton and Bruce Willis surprised me with their nuanced  performances,and both Frances McDormand and Bill Murray were their usual quirky selves. No stretch for these two. Most intriguing, however, were the two young leads, Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward, who were called upon to do what Anderson would ask of his adult actors - believable eccentricity, realistic quirkiness - no easy task for any actor lacking experience, young or old, but they do pull it off.

A film worth playing with and lingering over.

Why The Title Politics and Entertainment

Politics and entertainment here in the title of the blog shouldn’t necessarily be read as a set of binary terms that needs to be, a la Derrida,  deconstructed by a third term; in fact, they are  more often than not  -- if you keep an eye on Canadian and American politics -- seldom mutually exclusive.  I refer of course to the habitually nasty but cynically amusing behaviour of Harperites and Teabaggers.

But having taught film studies, film production, and screenwriting in a university, and having worked in both film and television, I want to write occasionally about film or television projects that might deserve a bit more interest than they currently receive since they’re not in the centre of the media promotional  stream in the hope that others might see the value of these efforts.  Except for Executive Producers, everyone with whom I ever worked in a given production did so with utmost responsibility and extremely hard work. It isn't just about talent.

While I taught, I was also very politically active, both within my institution, trying to hollow it out from within,  and in the city in which I lived at the time --especially with respect to environmental issues.   And so the political scene -- federal, provincial, municipal -- continue to intrigue me and might call forth the occasional  rant and other kinds of commentary.

Of course politics and entertainment come forcefully together in entertainers like Bill Maher, and the extraordinary political activism of actors like George Clooney, Leo DeCapprio, Ellen Paige, and Don Cheadle -- not to mention Bono and the gang. This practical use of celebrity status for political purposes also interests me, and so,  I’ll probably have some specific response to a particular action or project.  Don't worry -- no Charlie stuff.

We begin in  earnest soon.