Oscars Postmortem 2012

As always, such an anticlimax. But, the consensus in my tiny Oscar watchfest was "they were not that terrible". Given that these are the Oscars, this is like getting an A-.
First, the dresses. Undisputed best look of the night, Rooney Mara. Best dressed, she was the only one who looked like a bona fide movie star. Second place goes to a brave and elegant Gwyneth Paltrow for pulling off a spectacular white dress. The rest was a parade of high-end schmattes, as far as I'm concerned. Put them all together in a rack and you'd think you were at a formal gown sale at Bolton's. It's a bad day for glamour when Penelope Cruz looks matronly. Where is Tilda Swinton when we need her?
I like Billy Crystal, but the shtick is not getting old, it's getting prehistoric. "Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: that's how my relatives are watching this show". Me and the alte cackers who comprise the Academy are suckers for borscht belt humor. The rest of the world, probably not so much.
Am I crazy, or were there not enough stars? (Never enough stars). At least they had the decency not to bother with the Taylor Lautners and Ryan Reynoldses of the world. But I sorely missed me some Fassbender, some Mortensen, some Gosling, some Swinton, some Theron, some hormone blasting eye candy.  Alas.
I am still at a loss trying to understand what the hell was that commercial for Cirque Du Soleil in the middle of the proceedings. Although we are progressing as far as stopping audience abuse with musical numbers, apparently the producers cannot bear to part with random cheesiness altogether.  Who are we getting next year, Siegfried and Roy?
Obit time was long and corny, and is it me or they always use that song? There were some bad omissions: Raul Ruiz, Pedro Armendáriz Jr, Michael Gough, Michael Sarrazin, Arthur Laurents, Harry Morgan, Nicol Williamson. Instead, there was some marketing research guy in there.
Apropos of which, I thought the focus group bit by the fabulous Best in Show troupe was very funny. Focus groups are exactly like that. This was documentary in its realism. But if Hollywood thinks focus groups are so satanically moronic, as they are, why do they keep using them? Self-serving crap.
Was I moved by stars talking about how they love movies? No, because they didn't say anything specific. And who cares what Adam Sandler's influences are?  Anybody who opens a montage with a scene from Forrest Gump deserves a special circle of hell designed exclusively for them, with that scene looped at nauseam for infinity.
Emma Stone was charming. Ben Stiller should be disinvited posthaste (what was that skin color?), and as far as I'm concerned Will Ferrell and Zack G. can do no wrong. And last year's winners talking personally to the acting nominees is borderline offensive. It's like rabbis giving eulogies at funerals of dead people they never met. Horrifying. The rest is a blur.
Now, as far as the prizes: I was flummoxed by the techie love shown to Hugo, and thought it was mostly consolation prizes to Scorsese, until I read in Deadline Hollywood Daily that Hugo, which cost over $200 million to make, (and for some incomprehensible reason this obscenity is being rewarded) employed almost every tech guy in town and they all voted for it. Which explains. Because although it uses 3D and HD and ADHD, I found the look of the movie garish and applied with a heavy hand, sort of like a Parisian strumpet with a bad case of rouge. Which brings me to the one upset of the night that made me scream in horror. I was not rooting for cinematographer Emannuel Lubezki because he's a Mexican Jewish homie, but because his work in The Tree of Life is truly awesome and ravishing. Plus, he has been nominated 5 times and never won. I really thought he had it in the bag. It went to Robert Richardson's ugly, if super complex, work in Hugo. Aargh.
I had problems with many of the nominations to begin with. I would have gladly exchanged Kevin Spacey in Margin Call and Viggo Mortensen as Freud for Christopher Plummer and Nick Nolte. I would have loved to see Ryan Gosling for Ides of March or Michael Fassbender for Shame instead of Dujardin or Clooney. I would have loved to see Kristin Wiig or Charlize Theron instead of Glenn Close (who looked like the leprechaun in the Lucky Charms cereal box) or Viola Davis (yes, I've said it. I'm tired of her virtuoso weeping). 
And except for The Artist and The Tree of Life, I don't think any of the other 10 movies deserved a best of the year award. Do Moneyball and War Horse (which I haven't seen) deserve to be there, but not Bridesmaids? With bad choices to begin with, it's hard to get worked up about this.
The only awards I really cared about were that justice be made for A Separation, and for Meryl Streep, who everybody loves to hate because they cannot conceive she is as impossibly magnificent as she is. That was the one standing ovation that had actual merit in the entire show. She is the Grande Dame of American Acting if not of All Acting Ever, so back off, haters. She also does fake humility to a t.
As we have complained before, for the Oscars to have some sort of suspense, the ceremony needs to happen at the beginning of awards season and not at the end, when the outcome is almost uniformly a foregone conclusion. Let the voters not be swayed by the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs and the Golden Chickens. Let them do their homework. This would make them more exciting.
And BTW, next year, fix the sound problems. Geez.

Oscars: Award Bathos

Baños de pureza is a phrase in Spanish that means "baths of purity" and is used to denote someone who likes to slather themselves in holiness. Methinks that this is what tends to happen at the Oscars, where the nominations run the gamut from tokenism and holier than thou sentiments, to the pedestrian, predictable and conventional. I never thought that I'd agree with critic Peter Travers from Rolling Stone, but in his fun tirade against the ghastly Oscar choices this year, the guy has a point. This year's awards, as always, smack of humorless, pious self-congratulation, which explains many of the glaring omissions as well as the inexplicable inclusions.
A movie that was widely panned by critics, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, can only be in there because it is about 9/11 and has Tom Hanks in it, like a trusted brand of tissues. Apparently, it is the worst kind of sentimental pandering, the kind of movie that everybody hates but the Academy. Yet Bridesmaids, a hugely successful movie, both artistically and commercially, gets a consolation prize for best screenplay, because God forbid they pick a comedy for best movie or best actress of the year for Kristin Wiig. But then they complain that the ratings are falling and only old, demented farts like me watch their annual train wreck of anticipated boredom. This explains the omission of Michael Fassbender's and Carey Mulligan's searing performances in Shame, because the movie is about SEX and God forbid there is the slightest intimation they would stoop to watch such a film. They, who have no qualms about massive body counts in PG-13 movies, God forbid they look at a tit or a dick. This explains why dark independent movies like Take Shelter, or Martha Marcy May Marlene are ignored. And a solid political movie like The Ides of March, which depicts the filth of politics inside two Democrat campaigns, and is just about evil, not about Good and Evil, as they like it, gets only a screenplay nod, because it portrays flawed, messy people, not heroes bathed in the light of their own halos. For that we have The Help, a terrible movie, but one that guarantees Hollywood a nice pat in their own back, even if it is covered in the kind of schmaltz that is really bad for you. The kind of dreck that pretends that without white people, black people could not have freed themselves from slavery. The Descendants is the typical movie the Academy likes. It is solid and non-threatening; doesn't offend anybody, takes place in Hawaii. Then there is War Horse, which I haven't seen, (a weepie about a horse in the war is not what drives me to the theater), and Hugo, by Martin Scorsese, which is again, well-intentioned about cinema, but not very good. Midnight in Paris is a prestige nod and the best Woody Allen has done in years of mediocre work, but is it a best film of the year? No. I bet Moneyball is a perfectly good movie, but it is about "Triumph", and has Brad Pitt in it. I suspect it is there because no one wanted to make it, and Pitt fought for it until he got his way. Hence, a best actor nod for him as well: atonement. At least they had the good sense to recognize The Artist and The Tree of Life, which are truly magnificent. This was a particularly bad year in this category.
This explains why Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer and Demián Bichir got nominated. Mind you, they all are great, and bring depth and humanity to thin, idealized roles, but they are there so that Hollywood can atone with these two Black women and one Latino, all playing the noble-person-of-color, for all the hundreds of other non-white actors who either are completely absent from their movies or they mostly play the gardener or the maid, the drug dealer or the pimp, or in the best of cases, a noble second banana. With these prizes, the Academy thinks they've paid their dues for multiculti inclusion.
This halo pandering comes from a multi-billion dollar industry that is craven and morally corrupt, but that likes to wish that the lofty moral sentiments of these movies will rub off on them while they crush every other film industry with their might and they flood screens all over the world with mindnumbing crap. This is an industry that is angry at Obama, and threatening to withhold donations to his campaign because he did not support SOPA or PIPA, two strongarming bills intended to protect the billions it makes, freedom of speech be damned.
Could also be that their taste is crap. That they are old and hopelessly behind the times, and they simply love bad, tepid movies that make them feel good about themselves. This is why atrocities of cheap, false sentiment like Slumdog Millionaire, Life is Beautiful, The Blind Side, and maybe this year The Help, are categorized as best movie of the year.
Here is the list of all the Oscar nominees for best movie since 1927. Have fun.

A Better Life

This movie may be the first film to truly broach the subject of immigration in the US as it currently stands, on a cruel impasse of hypocrisy, blatant scapegoating and political inaction.
Directed by Chris Weitz, and starring Demián Bichir, who got an Oscar nomination for his work, it summarizes the enormous and heartrending complexity of the immigration issue through the story of Carlos Galindo, an undocumented gardener in LA.
Galindo is the single father of a teenage son, Luis (well played by José Julián), who was born in the US and is already an entitled American brat; not connected to his roots or sympathetic to newcomers who stand on a street corner begging for a day job, just like his dad when he arrived.
Like many well-intentioned message films, A Better Life is not very original, and does not have a sense of humor. It does show what it must be like to live on the outside looking in, like a zero that no one notices unless they want their hedges trimmed. But for its short running time (hour and a half), it is slow going. Weitz's rhythm is leaden, the writing feels by the numbers, and despite the golden cinematography by Javier Aguirresarobe, the cool homie soundtrack and the unobtrusive, elegant score by Alexandre Desplat, the movie seems a bit like an after-school special. The main problem is that Carlos Galindo is a saint, and saintly characters are not very interesting. Bichir works very hard to give Carlos a rounded character. He is a very decent man, but he seems to have no unruly passions, no edges. He lets the kid give him too much lip. He has no time for women. He is cautious, hardworking, and wants to be as much under the radar as possible. He lacks ambition because he is afraid that the migra will come and take away his life. I could imagine all those nasty people who are always screaming "send them back" rolling their eyes at the sight of this angel without wings.
But to judge from the very authentic locations in the film, Carlos lives outside of his own vibrant immigrant society by choice. It is clear that East and South Central LA are lively alternate Latino republics where a lot of people, legal and not, have perfectly rounded lives that include Mexican rodeos and nightclubs. This guy simply chooses not to partake in the fun. Most of the time, he is a bit of a bore.
The plot starts humming when Carlos is enticed by his boss to buy a truck from him so he can have his own business, but he demurs because as an illegal alien, he can't get a driver's licence. After much soul searching and much effort, he buys the truck. And of course he loses it.
I kept waiting for the moment that got Bichir's acting noticed. Bichir has two incredible moments, one when he reacts at the humiliation proffered by a punk in jail; and a speech to his son in which his feelings are so raw and ring so true, you want to smack him upside the head with an Oscar, cause he deserves it.
Only towards the end the movie accrues intensity as we get to see the inhumanity of the mass deportations, the untenable system that brazenly exploits and then penalizes these immigrants. I'm glad Bichir is getting all this attention (he's been utterly cool, dedicating his performance to all the undocumented immigrants), because everybody else in America is hell bent on sweeping this urgent problem under the carpet, or worse, providing idiotic solutions like building walls and deporting 400,000 people a year. The final scene is sure to give massive heart attacks to the Joe Arpaios of America. Send the illegals back, and they will sneak back in, until their services are not wanted anymore.
This doesn't make A Better Life a great movie, but it can serve as a great polemic in high schools and Washington think tanks. To be a better movie, it needs less sanctimony and a director with a bit more punch.