Weird looking bastards…
The hype of the Golden Globes has passed and the excitement from the Oscar nominations has lulled. We can now get down to brass tax: severe criticisms of the direction being taken for the 2013 Academy Awards; who should win and who will win the illustrious Best Picture prize.
A quick glance at the surface tension around the Best Picture category lends the illusion of a tight race. In no particular order, the contenders line up as such:
- Silver Linings Playbook
- Les Misérables
- Lincoln
- Argo
- Django Unchained
- Beasts of the Southern Wild
- Zero Dark Thirty
- Life of Pi
- Amour
Regardless of how one feels about various different films for personal reasons, it can be admitted that there are some seriously brilliant films in there. Haneke’s Amour teams up with Zeitlin’s Beasts of the Southern Wild to take the category by surprise; adding a dash of patronising zeal to the proceedings this year. Off the back of picking ONE foreign language film and ONE independent film, the Academy have selected the ‘predictable surprises’ in Tarantino’s Django Unchained and Russell’s Silver Linings Playbook. These last two facilitate he portrayal of the Oscar’s sense of humour and humanism. The quaint sincerity of David O. Russell’s offering balances Tarantino’s usual, albeit brilliant, bombastic filmic nature, resulting in a real life narrative that gives the Oscar’s a fake glaze of perspective. Now, while I would revel in one of the above films winning Best Picture (excepting maybe Silver Linings!), it is safe to say that this probably will not happen. The Academy has condescended in all the places it feels it has to, resulting in the fallacy of balance in the category.
Requisite Foreign Nod:
“Hey, we’ve got a humanist sense of humour…”
Now on to the ‘serious’ players…
We are left with five key films from which to choose our winner. These films are blatant in their purpose of creation: they were made to win Academy Awards. However, there are some issues with a couple of them that might beat them out. For example, while Hooper’s Les Misérables is an utterly brilliant film, with a stellar performance from Jackman (our last Song and Dance man in the vein of Fred Astaire and a serious contender for Best Actor), it does not look likely to take home that golden shaft of pure ego. This is the case for two reasons: primarily, Hooper cleaned up with The King’s Speech at the 2011 Oscars, taking hope Best Picture, Best Screenplay, Best Actor and Best Director. This is not to mention the total of 12 nominations! Suffice to say, when this is coupled with the fact that in the last 45 years only 2 musicals have taken the Best Picture prize (Oliver! in 1968 and Chicago in 2002), it begins to paint a reasonably grim picture for Les Miz. If there was a Best Picture – Comedy or Musical, as there is in the Golden Globes, then perhaps Hooper’s camp feature would take home an Oscar and a Globe, but alas, there exists no such Oscar with no such prestige.
Hooper, you’ve got enough on your mantle already:
Dismissing Ang Lee’s arbitrarily esoteric Life of Pi is a little bit harder. While it shamelessly rides the aging success of Danny Boyle’s 2009 Slumdog Millionaire, it also teases the Academy with performative art-house isolation: one inexperienced adolescent trapped on a lifeboat with a vicious tiger, what universal truths will be discovered? Watch on… That being said, while the Academy itself seems to be made up of geriatric romantics with a flair for overt nepotism, we might be able to presume that they can see through this frightfully transparent Oscar stab from the man who glimpsed glory with Brokeback Mountain.
Slumdog Zookeeper…on a boat:
What’s left…
There are three films left on the stage at this point: Spielberg’s Lincoln; Affleck’s Argo; and Bigelow’s Zero Dark Thirty. In our heart of hearts we always knew it was going to be one of these three. In their own ways, they are each of them tailor made and succinctly crafted for Oscar glory. Let the egos swell and the speeches drone on: one of these films will take home Best Picture.
While both Bigelow and Affleck were snubbed for a Best Director nod, Spielberg retains almost mutual assurance across most categories that he will be taking home a faceless and sexless golden man. However, what seems of far more intrigue in this year’s filmmaker showdown, is the thematic subtext of the remaining three definitive contenders. Across the three pictures as listed above, audiences have been treated to a selective historical memory of America’s triumphs. Slap the blinders on and wrap yourselves in those stars and stripes, we’re going to tell you how to remember history!
Beginning in the 1860s in the midst of the American Civil War and at the beginning of Lincoln’s second term, audiences traverse the next 150 years bathed in the grandeur of triumphant Yankee achievements. What starts with a bunch of white guys facilitating the emancipation of an entire race (with very few mentions of the amount of former slaves who died for the cause), finds a midpoint with the emancipation of several hostages from a revolutionary Iran in the 1970s: a crackpot scheme that if botched, would have resulted in an entirely different contender for Best Picture! To round off this trinity of self-appreciation, Bigelow brings us Zero Dark Thirty; a film as ambiguous and unsure with its thematic narrative as most of Europe is about the film’s Stateside hype. Bigelow beings with audio snippets of 9/11 and concludes with the emotional release of the picture’s protagonist after a job well done. Very rarely, if ever, does Zero Dark allude to the 20 year history of complex relations between the U.S. and the Middle East prior to the events of September 11th, 2001. Perspective and character depth are pushed to the side as inadvertent hubristic patriotism takes over. Implied moral grey areas with regard to torture is never interrogated, which is ironic considering the weight of narrative drive given over to “Advanced Interrogation Technique”! The result being a relatively tawdry picture lost in its own ambivalence about its subject matter.
Nonetheless, it is a very real possibility, and a safe bet, that one of the Patriotic Triumvirate will take home the Best Picture statue. While Lincoln contains performances that carry an otherwise dry film, and Argo contains all the hallmarks of a cracking thriller and an honest Oscar winner, Zero Dark Thirty falls short of all the marks, alluding to an Academy nod purely on the basis of its relevant content (re. bin Laden). Personally, I am of the opinion that Argo should take home the prize if it has to be between these three. Lincoln is assured a few trophies across the rest of the board and the Academy can surely not be so blind as to favour Zero Dark Thirty over some of the other, far superior contenders.
In an idealistic ceremony, Behn Zeitlin and Co. would sweep the board clean in an unforeseen coup d’état; illustrating to the world that the Oscar’s retain perspective enough to recognise true brilliance when it is at hand. Alas, Beasts of the Southern Wild and Django Unchained are destined for the annals of nomination, for the probable and simple reason that in the year of Star Spangled nominations at the 85th Academy Awards, these two films criticise while the realistic contenders saturate the board with blindsided hubris. Tarantino delights in twisting the knife that was the heinous slave trade that Spielberg refuses to visually recollect, while Beasts of the Southern Wild weaves the noble savagery of those all but forgotten beyond the Louisiana levees. These caricatured yet honest criticisms of America’s history, both past and present, will not stand up against the cult of personality that drives the one-sided patriotic hubris of the Big Three.
The Best:
Close Second:
Jake O’Brien
jcobbryan 