So if King Kong had a son, why was the son so much smaller, and why did he have a light gray (silverback) coat? And where was the mother, by the way? Why did the son behave like a lovable organ-grinder monkey? It makes no sense that dad would be the scariest, growliest, baddest motherfucker on Skull Island and his son would behave a little bit like Stan Laurel.
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An HE state-of-the-race riff titled “Old Academy Farts, As Always, Are Calling The Shots,” posted on 1.4.15: “At this point, everyone wants to know which film is going to win Best Picture,” MCN’s David Poland has written. “Anyone who tells you they know the answer is pulling their own chain. [But] it is looking more and more like Boyhood vs. Imitation Game and The Theory of Everything with the latter two splitting, allowing Boyhood to win.
“Birdman is divisive, especially amongst older voters,” Poland wrote. “There are a number of reasons why Selma is unlikely to win and two years in a row of ‘historical dramas focused on race’ is amongst them, whether we like it or not. Grand Budapest Hotel is a bit too light and magical and Whiplash is too thin, however entertaining. [And] Nightcrawler is just too brutal to win.”
Concurrent HE comment: “I’m still waiting for a definitive sign that Boyhood is something more than a critics’ film, or more precisely a Steve Pond film. I’m not saying it isn’t that. Richard Linklater‘s Best Director campaign may indeed result in a win, but somebody needs to point out the solid indicators that say Boyhood‘s popularity is as deep and wide as the Jordan river. As much as I like and truly respect that film, I’m honestly questioning — unsure of — its strength amongst the fartists.”
With the Gold Derby gang having begun to pull award-season predictions out of their ass, we might as well have fun by asking ourselves (with almost no firm knowledge about anything and with the b.s. factor piled higher than an elephant’s eye) a subversive question of sorts: Which of the presumably Oscar-friendly headliners may experience the hype-and-crash syndrome that befell Angelina Jolie‘s Unbroken, Ava DuVernay‘s Selma and Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood last year?
This is a fool’s errand as every film has its own path to follow and no two Oscar-season experiences are the same, but let’s play this stupid game anyway. For those who were living in caves in Northern India during last year’s Oscar season with no wifi access, here’s a recap of what happened with these three.
Starting in late summer and all through September, October and November, several Oscar handicappers had Unbroken at the top of their list of likely Best Picture candidates. Grit and survival in a Japanese POW camp, Coen brothers‘ script, Roger Deakins‘ cinematography…can’t be denied! And then Jolie’s film screened on Sunday, 11.30 at the WGA theatre on Doheny and it fucking collapsed. The air just whooshed out. High levels of craft but too labored, too Christian, too torture-porny. It was respectably reviewed and made $115 million domestic, but the Oscar game was stillborn when everyone realized it was more or less The Passion of the Christ revisited — a stealth Christian film.
Thank God the season is over and now on to 2015. The 34 films opening between now and 12.31.15 that seem like the most formidable and aspirational are now posted inside the Oscar Balloon. But I have one last bark in the wake of last night’s four-pronged Birdman triumph — Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Cinematography. I’m speaking, of course, about the appalling levels of sour grapes, elitism and snide derision from the charming Boyhood gang on Twitter. You guys were deluded predictors all along, and now you’re exuding nothing but class — what can I tell you? If it had gone the other way no fair-minded Birdman admirer would dream of calling Boyhood anything but a remarkable achievement and a profound family epic. But last night some were calling Birdman‘s win a tragedy, and Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s film one of the least deserving Oscar winners ever. How dare you?
Birdman is a film that screams audacity. It is pumped full of fear and anguished exposure and angst and brutal New York-itude, and is obviously one of the most daring, “divisive” and non-coddling Oscar winners ever (many of the old farts despised it) and one of the very few comedies to win. And then it blows through all the derision by winning the top four Oscars and you’re slagging it? You’re doubling down on a hand that’s already lost? Gotta know when to fold ’em, guys. Noblesse oblige and all that.
It needs to be said again that if nothing else the 2014/15 Oscar season has exposed the fraudulence of Oscar-predicting, and particularly the alleged impartiality of industry experts. Every year I’ve declared I’m not a predictor but an advocate, but except for Awards Daily‘s Sasha Stone and one or two others everyone else in the Oscar-blogging racket has claimed they were coming from a place of studied cultural impartiality. Well, maybe they were in previous years but not this time. Over the last six months most Best Picture predictors were encamped squarely inside their own rectums with Boyhood flags planted outside.
Birdman‘s Emmanuel Lubezki won the top prize Sunday night at the American Society of Cinematographers Awards at the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza on Sunday night. The ASC honor makes it…what, the seventh big guild award for Alejandro G. Inarritu‘s film? Producers Guild, DGA, SAG Ensemble, art directors, Cinema Audio Style and makeup/hair stylists. Whatever lingering doubts there might have been, etc.
This afternoon a Boyhood Bluray was left on my doormat, and tonight there’s a cool-sounding Boyhood party at a certain old-world location. Director Richard Linklater and costars Ethan Hawke, Patricia Arquette and Ellar Coltraine will attend. The official inviters are Diane Keaton, John Hamm, Frank Marshall, Sean Daniel, Jack Black and Julie Delpy. I always laugh when the person who initially sent the invite writes back to say that (a) rsvps are through the roof and that (b) you therefore might want to come a little bit later (it’s a four-hour event) and (c) if you’re thinking of not attending to please let us know. The 2-disc Paramount Home Video release popped yesterday.
I’m told I shouldn’t read too much into Deadline‘s Pete Hammond having posted last night that many Academy members still haven’t seen Boyhood, which has been called a presumptive Best Picture favorite for months. Hammond wrote the piece for a print version of Awardsline that was due in early December, and the Boyhood DVD had only been mailed a couple of weeks before it was written.
But you have to wonder why people were still dragging their feet a week after Thanksgiving with Boyhood having opened last July and many screenings having occurred over the previous couple of months. The reason seems obvious to me but let’s call it a guess.
Boyhood is the Julianne Moore of Best Picture contenders in that the blogoscenti decided long ago that it fully deserves and therefore needs to be a major contender and that it should/could even win, and since this perfect storm of opinion occurred the Academy and guild members have had it on their “to do” lists but…with…some…degree…of…procrastination. Just like their attitude about Still Alice, which nobody in the world feels even vaguely excited about and yet people are nonetheless sluggishly resigned to Moore being the big Best Actress lockdown.
2014 has not been a weak year in my personal book. Okay, maybe a little bit weaker compared to the recent past but you can’t be too lamenting about a lineup that includes Birdman, Citizenfour, The Babadook, Wild Tales, A Most Violent Year, Boyhood, Leviathan, Gone Girl, A Most Wanted Man, Nightcrawler, Locke, The Drop, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Edge of Tomorrow, Omar, etc. But in award-season terms it seems “weak” because the lazy Academy default crowd (the people who look to TheWrap‘s Steve Pond to interpret and explain and defend their aesthetic convictions to the outside world) feel that the 2014 season is lacking in Big Commanding Emotional Gushers, and so they’re kind of flailing around and going “yeah, sort of but not quite…I was hoping for more…where’s the Big Gorilla?…I kinda like that film but my friends don’t” and so on.
And so in this weak or somewhat pallid climate it’s entirely possible and perhaps even probable that a soft favorite like Boyhood could take the Best Picture Oscar at the end of the day. And that would be, in a certain sense, delightful. A little movie from IFC Films taking a bow in front of billions. A little Richard Linklater movie that’s not as good, really, as Before Midnight becoming “big” because of its family values essence and the stunt of shooting a kid’s life over a 12-year span, and despite the fact that it feels more like a series of short films than a truly fluid and unified whole, even though it’s obviously unified and flowing in so many impossible-to-ignore-or-deny ways. So it really could be Boyhood, especially given that my personal favorite, Birdman, has been meeting with resistance from women all along the trail. It’s clearly the only breathtaking film in Best Picture contention, but when people decide they’re going to be mule-stubborn about something there’s no stopping them.
The New York Film Critics Circle used to represent an elite standard (and by that I don’t mean ingrown and dweeby). It really mattered to win one of their awards because they didn’t suffer fools and only the creme de la creme contenders were considered. Four years ago they gave their Best Picture award to The Social Network…exactly! But they’ve gradually become more easygoing as far as admitting new members were concerned over the last few years and so their choices have begun to feel less and less discriminating, at least as far as Best Picture choices have been concerned.
In my mind the NYFCC shit the bed when they gave their 2011 Best Picture award to The Artist — that was a sign that they could adopt the mindset of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences if so moved. Okay, AMPAS with a vague sheen of East Coast urbanity. From then on I’ve been grimly acknowledging that the NYFCC of legend was no more. Agreeable surprises can still happen, but no longer do they necessarily represent gold-standard honors decided by critics of serious merit. Certainly not in a Best Picture context. The consensus gene has gotten into the bloodstream.
And yet this year is different — more than a bit curious — with Mr. Turner‘s Timothy Spall winning for Best Actor, Marion Cotillard winning for The Immigrant and Two Days, One Night (seriously?) and Darius Khnodji‘s fine but unremarkable work on The Immigrant taking the Best Cinematography award…what? Where did this Immigrant love come from? What cabal of James Gray loyalists got together and rammed this through?
No disagreement at all with Boyhood winning for Best Picture or Richard Linklater winning for Best Director.
But let me explain something very clearly: Nobody has been talking about Marion Cotillard as a Best Actress contender of any consequence. Nobody at all. She’s clearly genuine and stressed-out and crumbling in a non-actressy way in the Dardennes Brothers film but c’mon, going door to door and asking her co-workers for the same consideration in scene after scene after scene? In my book she phoned in her performance in The Immigrant. Quote from my 5.24.13 review: “Cotillard isn’t playing a character named Ewa as much as playing herself playing a character named Ewa. I only know that Ewa/Marion never seems to play her cards with any kind of deception or cleverness, like anyone would. She’s always just surveying the sordid nature of 1921 New York City with those big, watery, guilt-tripping eyes.”
Spall turned in an admirable, authentic-seeming performance in Mr. Turner but many couldn’t understand half his dialogue, or at least I couldn’t when I saw the film in Cannes. Don’t kid yourself — landscape painter J.M.W. Turner was known to speak in a slurry, guttural lower-class accent. Spall reiterated this in a recent phone interview I did with him, and said that he went for his less-than-decipherable quality. I have the screener now so I’m going to re-watch — maybe the dialogue will come through a bit clearer this time.
J.K. Simmons has won Best Supporting Actor award for his performance as an inspired but demanding and at times malevolent Julliard-type music instructor. I would have voted, due respect, for Birdman‘s Edward Norton but I have no quibble with Simmons, who will definitely be AMPAS-nominated and most likely win the Oscar. A totally expected consensus choice but fine.
The six nominations given to Alejandro G. Innaritu‘s Birdman for the 30th Film Independent Spirit Awards means it’ll probably take two or three top honors — definitely Best Actor (Michael Keaton), probably Best Feature and maybe Best Director for Inarritu, although Boyhood and its director, Richard Linklater, could nab the Best Feature and/or Best Director trophy as a split-decision gesture…who knows? Boyhood, Nightcrawler and Selma each snagged five nominations. Whiplash was also nominated for Best Feature. Ira Glass‘s Love Is Strange was nominated for Best Feature strictly as a token attaboy neck rub, strictly to round out the pack.
HE Suggestions/Predictions For Spirit Wins:
Best Feature: Birdman (suggested); Birdman or Boyhood (predicted).
Best Director: Alejandro G. Innaritu (suggested); Inarritu or Richard Linklater (predicted).
Best Screenplay: A Most Violent Year‘s J.C. Chandor or Nightcrawler‘s Dan Gilroy (suggested); ditto (predicted).
The Boyhood screener arrived last night. The fold-out jacket is quite elaborate and almost flamboyant by IFC standards. Obviously IFC Films honchos and their award-season strategists sat down a couple of months ago and agreed to put a big chunk of their funds into this. “Screeners are key,” somebody said, “and if we play up Boyhood‘s importance by emphasizing rave reviews on an attention-getting jacket, it’ll be money well spent.” IFC Films screener jackets have never looked this swanky. This one equals if not betters the usual award-season screener packaging from the major distributors.
Before I get into this let me again reiterate my affection for Richard Linklater‘s Boyhood. I don’t think it’s quite the masterpiece that others are calling it, but it’s a very warm and humanistic film — deft and assured and wise and quite unusual. You could even call it unique if you want to ignore Francois Truffaut‘s Antoine Doinel films and Michael Apted‘s Up films. I think it will probably end up as a Best Picture nominee if, as I wrote on 8.3, “the Oscar-blogging mafia (less than 15 people when you boil it down) keeps pushing it as Best Picture-worthy over the next five and a half months.” At the end of the year Boyhood may indeed seem like the pick of the litter because it has “that all-encompassing, life-embracing sprawl or theme” that touches people where they live.
But has Boyhood been overhyped, and is this affecting the responses of those who are just getting around to see it? More particularly, did TheWrap‘s Steve Pond lovingly poison the well by stating on 7.31 that it might not just snag a Best Picture nomination but “actually win” the Best Picture Oscar?
A couple of hours ago a smart industry guy, someone I’ve been talking to for years and genuinely respect, called to say that he and two guild-member friends caught Boyhood over the weekend, and they all agree that Pond’s piece about it possibly winning the Best Picture Oscar is out to lunch. The guy doesn’t want to be identified because he doesn’t want to openly diss Linklater. But he insists that Pond overdid the enthusiasm. “Stop Bogarting that doobie, Steve, and pass it along to us,” the guy said. “That’s such a reach. If it turns out to be a really shitty year, I can see it being Best Picture nominated. But winning?”
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