This year, the Best Motion Picture category has been expanded, doubling the number of nominees to 10 – the biggest since 1944 – in what many consider an act of penance for snubbing “The Dark Knight” last year.
So now, contending for Best Picture are: “Avatar,” by James Cameron; “The Hurt Locker,” Kathryn Bigelow; “Inglourious Basterds,” Quentin Tarantino; “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire,” Lee Daniels; “Up in the Air,” Jason Reitman; “District 9,” Neill Blomkamp; “The Blind Side,” John Lee Hancock; “An Education,” Lone Scherfig; “A Serious Man,” Joel and Ethan Coen; “Up,” Pete Docter.
In previous years, only the first five would have made it to the list. The rest seem to have been added as an afterthought, as often happens with the Oscars. They probably thought this was corrective. In fact, it raised more questions, foremost of which is: Why didn’t they just replace such featherweights as “Up,” “The Blind Side” and “An Education” with heavies like Clint Eastwood’s “Invictus,” Oren Moverman’s “The Messenger” and Rob Marshall’s “Nine”?
(If any category needed expanding, it is Best Foreign-Language Film, of which there is a surfeit of worthies in any given year, dozens, actually.)
Frontrunners
There are three front-runners in the Best Picture race: “Inglorious Basterds,” “Avatar” and “The Hurt Locker.”
“Inglourious Basterds” is another of Tarantino’s wet dreams. It’s not just sublimated, it’s a wish fulfillment. He’s not out for a subtle historical revisionism, but for a brazen rewriting of history.
Inspired by John Milius’ “Red Dawn,” a Cold War revenge fantasy he saw in his youth, Tarantino said he had long wanted to make a film that would turn on its head the victimization syndrome often displayed by survivors of the Holocaust (think “Schindler’s List” and “Life Is Beautiful”) and, for that matter, of Hiroshima and Nagasaki (think “Grave of the Fireflies” and “Hiroshima Mon Amour”).
Tarantino, an apostle of postmodern cinema, is a genre-bender of the first order – from Hong Kong tough-guy movie (“Reservoir Dogs”) to noir (“Pulp Fiction”) to “blaxploitation” (“Jackie Brown”) to western and kung fu (“Kill Bill”) to slasher and biker movie (“Death-Proof”).
Taking his title from a far-fetched ’70s war movie (spelling correct), he serves up a heady brew of the war film and the Hitchcockian thriller (espionage, sabotage, detective, psycho, and distinctive camera movement).
His intention was to do away with the martyr complex and turn the table on the oppressors. So here he takes up the cudgels not just for the Jews but for all downtrodden peoples, including American Indians (he is 25-percent Cherokee) and Negroes (in the parlor game scene, King Kong represents the trade slave).
Opening caveat
The man is an inveterate name-dropper, like a movie reviewer who can’t help citing his range of film history to plead his case. This is all very well with cinéastes, as it adds to their amusement, but the ordinary moviegoer would feel disconnected.
Tossed around like ping-pong balls throughout the movie are such names as Pola Negri, Pabst, Max Linder, Riefenstahl (pointing to fascist cinema?), Clouzot (probably referencing the controversial “Le Corbeau,” German-financed and thought to be anti-French propaganda). Even Emil Jannings appears in a cameo. So does Churchill, improbably discussing German studio films.
The carving of the swastika on Nazi foreheads is something that even Jewish liberals find excessive. It serves as a final punctuation in the movie but comes as a punch in the audience’s stomach. We’re treated to graphic scalping and braining throughout (violence is, of course, a Tarantino signature) but they’re not as wince-inducing as the mark of Cain.
The climax is positively Jacobean, a lushly filmed incineration where the four Nazi top guns and their wives are roasted to a crisp. Centuries hence, schoolboys might really think Hitler died at a movie premiere.
There’s nothing new with Tarantino’s historical rewriting – this was exactly what Shakespeare had done with historical figures like Hamlet and Macbeth for dramatic exigency. Centuries thence, only scholars know what really happened to Hamlet and Macbeth.
The opening sequence bears the intro, “Once upon a time … in Nazi-occupied France,” which should be seen as a caveat to viewers: This is going to play like a fairytale. The film satisfies in us something deeper than historians and librarians can.
Sure winners
“Avatar” is another of Cameron’s bloated films – and one more exemplar of derivative cinema. Ranging in sources from “One Million Years B.C.” to Hayao Miyazaki animé, it is ultimately just an old-fashioned western set in a future alternate universe.
And just as the Kate-Leo scenario of his “Titanic” was an expansion of a subplot in the 1976 “Voyage of the Damned,” the love story of Jake and Neytiri in this one appears to be taken from the 1966 prehistoric saga that made Raquel Welch a star.
“Avatar’s” eye-popping visuals and heart-stopping action are, of course, unsurpassable, but this eco-epic is too formulaic for our taste. As with most inspirationals (think “The Blind Side” and “Invictus”), it doesn’t have the complexity, ambiguity and random quality of life. The conclusion is too neat; we’re manipulated to cheer and soar toward the end.
“The Hurt Locker” is merciless in its depiction of American soldiers in Iraq. Filmed in vérité style, it doesn’t stint on the telling details from the minutest to the most apocalyptic: The fly on the soldier’s eyelashes; the mushrooming smoke and crackling conflagration of the bombing of humans and buildings.
The seeming artlessness, remarkable restraint in performance and staging, plus the human pathos that imbues each scene should make this a winner.
Cameron and Bigelow, married for two years in the early ’90s, are in a lock for Best Picture and Best Director – and their contest has been dubbed “Battle of the Exes.”
But while he is a sentimentalist, her films are largely unsentimental, very masculine. Both could win either of the two categories and it wouldn’t disturb the order of the universe.
Top choice
Of the three, “Avatar” is the most enjoyable, “The Hurt Locker” seems most like felt life, and “Inglourious Basterds” is the most intellectually stimulating and aesthetically pleasing.
Our top choice is not one of them, though. That would be “A Serious Man,” about a Jewish family on the verge of a nervous breakdown. This film possesses all the foregoing superlative traits of those three.
We can settle for Tarantino’s work as Best Picture. If “Avatar” wins, he would be fine as Best Director. If Bigelow gets that (making her a historical figure, first female to have won it), then maybe he can have Best Original Screenplay. But for this he has to contend with the Coen Brothers – a really tough competition.
Tarantino won his only Oscar for the screenplay of “Pulp Fiction” 15 years ago. That’s probably because he made only a few films, rather like Kubrick and Malick. Now seems to be the right time to give him his second Academy trophy. They could deny him this, of course, to their eternal regret.
The acting categories are not as contentious as last year’s. We can’t help noticing that the dead-end life has become a recurrent theme in many Oscar entries – not to say that some have parallel story lines and relationship dynamics, such as “Up in the Air” and “The Messenger,” “The Blind Side” and “Precious,” or “Crazy Heart” and last year’s “The Wrestler.”
Jeff Bridges in “Crazy Heart” is a shoo-in for Best Actor. His portrayal of an alcoholic singer-songwriter whose life is spiraling down and who is seeking redemption in love, family and career recalls Nicolas Cage in “Leaving Las Vegas” – but less bleak.
Here, Bridges revisits the milieu of his youth, the small southwestern American town of “The Last Picture Show” 40 years ago. It is interesting to compare his performance from the cockiness of his youth to the world-weariness of his late maturity. That’s why the song “The Weary Kind” is organic to this film.
Main event
Another shoo-in is Christoph Waltz for Best Supporting Actor, as the Jew Hunter in “Inglourious Basterds.” Still another is Mo’Nique for Best Supporting Actress, as the abusive mother in “Precious.” If these two weren’t in the picture, we’d be rooting for Woody Harrelson in “The Messenger” and Anna Kendrick in “Up in the Air.”
So the main event is Best Actress. And here viewers have a real dilemma. Sandra Bullock is an appealing gal, but she’s up against the First Lady of American Movies, the indomitable Meryl Streep. As a white matron who adopts a black teen and turns him into a football star in “The Blind Side,” Bullock is likely to get the trophy, but for the wrong reason.
An Oscar fixture, Streep has had the most number of nominations (16) of all actors living or dead. So we were surprised to learn that her last win had come nearly 30 years ago, for “Sophie’s Choice.” Her performances have always been addictive, in comedy or drama. She is the butter to our bread, and we can’t have enough butter.
Once again, as the American chef in Paris, Julia Child, in “Julie & Julia,” she proves she can play anything, with matching accents. Thus, one film critic suggests that she be signed for the sequel of the alien parable “District 9,” and cast as a prawn.
For Best Animated Feature, “Up” is another shoo-in. Which makes this year’s Oscars as The Year of the Shoo-ins. Less exciting than the last maybe, but still anticipated.
David Mikael Taclino
Inyu Web Development and Design
Creative Writer
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