Entries in the Category "oscars"
The Best Actress Fallacy
One of the more controversial Oscar winners from this past weekend was Sandra Bullock. This past summer, her career was seemingly in the toilet thanks to that All About Steve fiasco, and then suddenly The Proposal made a buck or two (although if my sister didn’t like it, I do not see what it could possibly have to recommend itself as a romantic comedy). And then this The Blind Side thing happened, and somehow her career trajectory veered so crazily in the opposite direction that she—as predicted—won a Razzie and an Oscar in the same year.
So the question becomes: does Sandra Bullock, mistress of pratfalls and goofiness, big opening weekends and almost supernatural hotness in her mid-forties (YES, REALLY), fit the profile of the Academy Award-winning actress?
First, we need to establish what the profile is. There’s this tendency to think of Oscar winning actresses as grande dames of cinema.
Bette Davis in All About Eve, for example
Or Gloria Swanson in Sunset Boulevard
Would it surprise you to discover that both of those women went up for Best Actress in the same year, 1951? And that both of them lost? Who swiped the award from these two women in the prime of life, tackling two of the meatiest roles in Hollywood history?
Judy Holliday (age 29) in Born Yesterday
Nothing against Judy--that's a great movie, and her performance is more nuanced than 'dim bulb with a heart of gold.' Although that's a lot of it.
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Osssssssscars!
I am reading all these bloggers who’ve pledged to see all the Best Picture nominees, or all the films with a non-technical nomination (that’s Sarah Bunting, and she almost did it). Some of them spent two Saturdays in a row parked in a movie theater seat watching five wannabe Best Pictures back-to-back. My major regret going into Oscar night is that I haven’t seen enough of the nominated movies. Living virtually across the street from a limited-release haven like the Cedar Lee, just about every one of these movies has crossed my path (not something I could say back when I was living in Lansing, Michigan--sorry Lansing). I went to an Oscar party in which the crowd was generally well-versed in movies—not just the big ones, but independents, foreigns, documentaries—and I wished I could have given more opinions instead of continually saying, “That looked really good. I heard that was good. I was going to see that. Everything I’ve read online says that was overrated, actually.”
The real problem is this whole being-in-grad-school thing, which will be over soon enough. I’ll be a cultural civilian again by May, and then it’s seeing movies all the time, reading books all the time, just because I damn well want to. And maybe next February I’ll plan my own Oscar film binge.
This year, I had to content myself watching the Oscars having seen only Inglourious Basterds, Up in the Air, Julie and Julia, and one-third of The Hurt Locker. I'm catching up on the other movies at my usual snail’s-pace rate. (Oscar-nominated or Oscar-winning movies I have seen in the past few months: Valmont, Mrs. Brown, Frozen River, They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?, Gangs of New York.)
Anyway, here are my totally uneducated thoughts on the proceedings.
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Congrats to Sandra Bullock!
She's now in the running for best performance of the year and worst performance of the year.
I was never gonna see either movie, but now they're just screaming "double feature," aren't they?
P.S. Go team Inglourious Basterds!
Golden Globes Recap
This will be shorter and less detailed than my usual next-day awards show extravaganza. I had family visiting this weekend, and both my mom and aunt joined me for the Globes viewing, so we were able to crack jokes and comment on the clothes in real time, which sort of took away some of the excitement of doing it here. What can I say? SO SORRY INTERNET. We still have the Oscars.
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Emmys Day-After Recap
I’ve got my Emmy food (pizza and mint creme Oreos) and I’m ready to go!
The Host
Neil Patrick Harris is totally cool. He’s singing and dancing, he’s wearing a white dinner jacket, and I think he just insulted Two and a Half Men. (Theme songs are getting so short, next year’s theme to the show will just be "meh." HA!) Later: I love the way he keeps introducing people from their obscure early credits (“from the 1987 Afterschool Special…”).
Click ahead for much much more!
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Summer project!
As people who know me know, I am a huge follower of award shows, and of “best of” lists. I love to see stuff ranked, and to see quality get celebrated (or even debated: I’ve argued with a good many people over the years about whether Shakespeare in Love should have bested Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture at the Oscars back in ’98). Award shows and “best of” lists are great guides for someone who wants to actively seek out movies with great reputations.
One of the best movie list-makers is the American Film Institute. They release a new list pretty much every year (they’ve done 100 Best Comedies, 100 Best Characters, etc.) and they have two 100 Best American Films lists, the original from 1998, and then a revision in 2007. The difference between the two lists is 23 films, some of which were movies that people thought had been overlooked, and some of which first appeared after 1998 (for example, Saving Private Ryan, mentioned above).
Entertainment Weekly also has a 100 Best list, but they do not compete with the AFI; the Entertainment Weekly list is “new classics,” all films originating in the 25 years between 1983 and 2008.
I am a notorious goal-setter and list-maker, and these kinds of lists indulge both of those attributes (or flaws, depending on how you run your life). So, the first in a series of goals I’ll be releasing out into cyberspace (check back on my birthday for more) is this: see 91 specific movies, the ones missing from those three lists, and thus become master of three “best of” lists.
Before I began the project, my record was as follows:
AFI 1998: seen 58, not seen 42
AFI 2007: seen 54, not seen 46
EW: seen 61, not seen 39
With overlap (Schindler’s List and Unforgiven are two movies I haven’t seen, which both appear on all three lists; some other movies appear on two) the number of movies I need to watch to lay waste to these lists is 91.
I created a website where I’m tracking my progress; I've linked it on the sidebar as well. I’m off to a pretty good start, having seen five new movies since my summer vacation began.
Am I serious about this? Well, I watched Stagecoach last week, and Terminator 2. That's serious!
The Oscars Day-After Recap
I watched the whole show, yes. I had a lesson plan to do for the next day, reading, all of it; I still watched all three hours of the Oscar telecast as well as two hours of red carpet.
Here are my impressions (and I'm putting in a jump, because this is gonna be a long one)...
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Slumdog Millionaire
I’m going to start this review by patting myself on the back: I did not jump on the bandwagon to see this movie. I was more like a pioneer in seeing this movie; I was the Lewis and Clark of this movie. I had read about way before it was news, did some online detective work and found a free screening in town before it hit wide release. Jeremy and I saw it in Shaker Square back in December.
I already knew the director, Danny Boyle (in short: Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, 28 Days Later and Millions), and the story sounded awesome. It’s about a young guy who grew up in the slums of Mumbai, India, who is participating on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? and doing quite well. He’s doing so well that they believe he’s cheating, and demand that he tell them how he knows each answer. As he tells the stories, we learn about his rough childhood, including the girl he loved who he struggled to save from the streets.
Anyone who reads my reviews is going to find out that I adore a non-linear narrative, flashbacks, any unconventional narrative device, really. Plus, this is a story set in India, and I have a fairly inexplicable, probably colonialist and un-PC fascination with all things Indian. I saw The Darjeeling Limited a bunch of times. I read Jhumpa Lahiri and Bharati Mukherjee and Kiran Desai. I get incredibly excited when The Amazing Race goes to India. I drink Indian tea.
Anyway, I loved the movie; it was just what I expected and wanted to see. It was wistful and epic, heartbreaking and life-affirming all in the same moment. Some reviews have complained that this film relies too heavily on coincidence, and I always take issue with this point of view. I did it back when Signs came out (because in that case it wasn’t even coincidence, it was the hand of God, duh) and I do it every time we read a Dickens novel in an English seminar. As it happens, Slumdog Millionaire is hugely Dickensian. The young protagonist is orphaned and survives by his wits on the streets. He’s ambitious, and rises to a position of gentility, albeit an unsteady one. The love of his life, meanwhile, is in the clutches of an evil man. And through a series of increasingly unlikely coincidences, the protagonist and his love overcome their obstacles.
The class struggle is classic Dickens, too—the effect of the Industrial Revolution on England made some men rich and gave the rest black lung. In Slumdog, the industrialization is equivalent to westernization. In one scene, the protagonist and his brother stand at the top of a building and look over the part of Mumbai which was once the slums where they lived and is now a solid mass of skyscrapers and condos. The characters may be “better off” now—they have regular meals, probably, and clean clothes and cell phones—but a part of their national identity has been lost, just like the employees in call center where the protagonist works use English names and accents.
But all I’m really foregrounding here are the more sober elements of the film, and the fact is, it’s a lot of fun. There’s some violence that some reviewers got really squeamish about, but I’m pretty desensitized to movie violence thanks to Freshman Film class (1999) where we had to watch Full Metal Jacket and Alien and The Exorcist and The Shining etc., not to mention the Steven Seagal movies my dad had on the TV throughout my entire childhood. There’s dancing, there’s against-all-odds awesomeness. It was just amazing on all counts.
The review in brief: Slumdog Millionaire for Best Picture!