OSCAR
SYMPOSIUM
with
your host Nathaniel
R and his very special guests
February 15th, 2006
NATHANIEL: Participants dearest,
I hope you're wearing your best gowns and tuxes and you have your game faces on. The camera is now zeroing in. "And the nominees for best participants in a Oscar Symposium are... (image yourself appearing now in little boxes on the screen, sweating it out) Drew from Drew's Script-O-Rama, Gabriel Shanks of Modern Fabulousity, Joe Reid from Low Resolution, Josh Timmerman from JLT/JLT, MaryAnn Johansson also known as "The Flick Filosopher", and Nick Davis from Nicks Flick Picks. And the Winner Is... *tears open envelope with mad glee* -Strange, never seen that before --a six way tie!"Hokey jokes aside, I hope you're all feeling like winners for attending. I am. I've already won you see, corralling six of the net's finest into my own stomping ground to discuss a favorite topic. To kick things of I wanted to throw this out at you and see who bites... Dustin Hoffman once called the Oscars "obscene...no better than a
beauty contest". George C Scott, who famously refused his Oscar for Patton, didn't believe that actors should compete with one another. Over the 78 year history of this glitzy back-patting spectacle other famous souls have also expressed reservations. The complaint about naming a 'best' in acting often boils down to this: Unless they're all playing the same role how do you really judge or compare them?Mulling over this quandary while working on my own imaginary ballot, I unintentionally conjured up an image of David Strathairn as "Djay" in Hustle & Flow. He's so great at delivering impassioned Edward R Murrow speeches in Good Night and Good Luck, but what if he had to wrap that eloquent tongue around a Memphis accent and "Whoop That Trick"?
NICK: I know it's quite politic and probably quite true that awards are antithetical to what acting and art are supposed to be about. My brother the sportswriter is just appalled by this sort of competition, where "merit" is totally unmoored to any kind of quantifiable data, so he finds the whole contest sort of puffy and sentimental and distressingly inexact.
Which is exactly why I like it. Naysayers often observe that the best nominee rarely wins, and though this totally galls me as much as the next Oscar fanatic (even when we don't agree about who's being shafted), another part of my brain realizes that I *like* how ephemeral and subjective it all is, the idea that if the voting started or ended a month earlier or later, you'd get different nominees and winners--or, in some rare cases, you wouldn't. The Oscars are like time capsules (okay, highly brokered and hard-fought time capsules) for work that generated enthusiasm from peer artists at a given place and time. Even if the winner might not be "Best," or even if "Best" is an incoherent concept in art, it still fascinates me.
As far as your idea of cross-pollinating one of this year's nominees into another of the nominated roles, I must say I'd love to see Catherine Keener take on Bree in Transamerica. Keener is such a personality actress, but
she's a rangy and increasingly surprising one, and she keeps showing interesting new edges. She's also incredibly funny and good at self-conscious behavior, and though I love how Felicity Huffman shows us Bree in the literal process of putting her new self together, I'd be curious to see if the story and the part still work, maybe even improve, with a more naturalistic approach.
GABRIEL: Keener's one of those actresses, Nick, who seems to be able to do almost anything. There's a versatility in her body and in her ability that, say, fellow nominee Kiera Knightley doesn't seem to possess. (To take nothing away from Knightley...she impressed the hell out of me in Pride & Prejudice; I'd never thought her capable of much prior to that justly-nominated work.)
The other chameleon in the Oscar race this year, it seems to me, would be Philip Seymour Hoffman. Track his trajectory -- Boogie Nights to Happiness to Magnolia to The Talented Mr. Ripley to Punch-Drunk Love to 25th Hour to Almost Famous to Owning Mahowny -- and I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone better suited to Nathaniel's proposal of role-swapping among the nominees. In an alternate universe (one less dependent on Hollywood hardbodies), there's a very interesting version of Brokeback Mountain starring Hoffman as the tortured Ennis. I could also easily see him inhabiting Edward R. Murrow or Johnny Cash (althought admitted DJay might be a stretch). Sure, Hoffman is often relegated to the second banana role (like this year's other oft-ignored nominee, Paul Giamatti), but the power of being an exemplary character actor -- for that is what Keener and Hoffman are, at heart -- is the ability to be almost anyone, anywhere, at any time. They are us, and we are them.
NATHANIEL: Gabriel, why you wanna hurt me? Forcing me to imagine PSH everywhere in everything. NEXT!
GABRIEL: Live it. Love it. Serve it. Hate the game, not the playa.
JOSH: Greetings all and thanks again for the invitation, Nathaniel.
Perhaps, for starters, the kindest thing I can say about the Oscars is that it's not the Grammys. I mean, seriously, in The Year of Kanye West--the Year of "Gold Digger," the Year of "George Bush Doesn't Care About Black People"--U2 takes the top prize for an album no one (besides, evidently, Grammy voters) actually cares about? I know Bono's Mr. Person of the Year, and in all seriousness, I really do admire the philantrophic work he does, but what exactly have U2 done lately, besides appear in that iPod commercial two years ago?Anyway, I digress. I guess what I'm trying to get at is that, this year at least, Oscar could hardly do worse. Well, except perhaps, if they decide to give their big one to Crash, which I'll leave alone for now, as I expect we'll open that can of worms at some later point in this discussion. Among the remaining four films, Brokeback Mountain is my least-favorite, but I can't really argue with it either. It's a bona-fide cultural phenomenon at this point, and if that doesn't automatically qualify it as a Great Film (which I'd contend it doesn't), it's still vastly preferable to five of the past six Best Picture winners.
If it seems like I'm dodging your opening question, Nathaniel, well, I kind of am. You see, I have a bad habit of talking a lot of shit about the Oscars while, at the same time, spending far too much of my time on web boards devoted to discussing to the minutiae of the awards process. Right, it's just a popularity contest. Right, the actual *best* films of a given year never win, and are rarely even nominated. Right, Citizen Kane was robbed. But enough of that. The Oscars exist in the Real World, people (e.g., us) care about them, and despite the infallible annual protests from myself and a few dozen people living in lower Manhattan, they're never going to nominate Hou Hsiao-hsien for anything.
To tackle the topic you've raised head-on, I'd say that the Oscars, while inherently "unfair" the way any subjectively evaluated competition will inevitibly turn out (say, Olympic figure skating or that science fair you lost to the kid who constructed a "tornado" out of two duct-taped 2-liter bottles of Mountain Dew), are probably fairest with regard to acting. Sure, great comedic work always gets short shrift, and actors playing Real People receive special consideration. But there's ultimately less of a gap between Steve Carrell's 40 Year-Old Virgin, Phillip Seymour Hoffman's Capote, and Maggie Cheung's turn as a recovering junkie in Clean (my favorite non-nominated performance of '05) than between what Claire Denis is up to with her latest, the flooring The Intruder, and the generally fine but decidedly more con-ven-tion-al offerings of this year's Best Director quintet. Which is to say, I'll see your Strathairn in Hustle & Flow, and raise you Apichatpong Weerasethakul at the helm of Brokeback Mountain.
We're talking totally different worlds here! As Gavin Smith put it in the editor's letter of the Jan/Feb Film Comment, "movies come in all shapes and sizes." It's just that the Academy clearly prefers their circles and squares to hexagons and trapezoids. Alright, 'nuff said. I better stop for now before I get to ranting about Oscar's insane rules with regard to foreign-language films and documentaries.
JOE REID: A big hello to all, In taking a look around the room, it seems that I’m destined to be the token middlebrow voice ‘round these parts. Which is totally fine, of course. Just try not to leave any visible marks on me once I start enthusing about Munich.
As for the question of judging works of art in a competitive arena, I'm actually going to jump off from a comment Josh made about figure skating. Hey, it's timely, at least. I'm not really a figure skating fan, but from what I have gleaned about the sport over the years, the one aspect that never sat well with me was the "compulsory" portion of the programs. If these routines are supposed to be creative, evocative, or beautiful, why rein everyone in with compulsory movements? Which is the roundabout way of saying that I'm glad movies don't compete with quantifiable data, like most sports.
That being said, I have absolutely no problem with movies/performances/tech achievements competing against one another for awards. Life is competition. Life is measuring yourself by the yardstick of your peers. Moreover, while film is an art form, it is also a business. And business is most definitely a competition. It's why I've never taken issue with box-office as a consideration when judging a film's Oscar potential. Additionally, I don't know who came up with the notion that actors are somehow not competitive people (… Dustin), but I have a hard time believing it.
Asking Academy members to choose the "best" film work of the year is a subjective task, to be sure. But the Oscars -- and really the entire "awards season" enterprise from the critics on down -- serve as a nice counterpoint to the fact that film is already being judged by that harsh voting body known as the box-office. At least the Oscars pretend to care about artistic achievement.
Finally, as to the question of current acting nominees taking on other nominated roles, I think a fine and compelling version of Brokeback Mountain exists out there in the ether starring David Strathairn and Joaquin Phoenix as Ennis and Jack, and Amy Adams and Reese Witherspoon as Alma and Lureen. Not to devalue any of the actual Brokeback performances, which have been justifiably recognized. But that's a national touring company production I'd be interested in seeing.
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