OSCAR
SYMPOSIUM
with
your host Nathaniel
and six very special guests
February 2008
Our Seven Participants
day one / day two / day three
previous page
DENNIS: SLAP #2 to Ridley Scott, Russell Crowe and Denzel Washington. I suppose the slap your dull Oscar bait already got by being virtually left out of the party altogether might be good enough. But not for me. I paid to see American Gangster. Ridley, with every self-important new movie you make you become more of a hack. Slap! Russell Crowe, stick to westerns, and try working with a different director who isn't as in love with your sullen smolder. Slap! And Denzel (I may call you Denzel, mayn't I?), I am officially tired of your dour dignity act, especially when you mix it up with such conflicting impulses as your desire to come off like King Bad-ass and your desire to be a lovable role model. By such witches brews lowest common denominator movies are easily poisoned, and American Gangster is nothing if not self-important and D.O.A. to boot. Slap!
SLAP #3 to the community of horror movie aficionados who either ignored or rudely dumped all over Frank Darabont's movie of Stephen King's The Mist. Here it comes-- Slap! This was by no means a perfect movie, but it was a significant improvement over Darabont's previous two gallingly sentimental Stephen King adaptations-- it was scary as hell; it featured Marcia Gay Harden as a religious fanatic seduced by the power her apocalytpic proclamations have over a group of people under siege from appaling and deadly creatures who stalk through a deadly mist; and it had the brutal courage of its nihilstic convictions. The Mist sports one of the most despairing conclusions in a horror film since Duane Jones took one in the brain pan at the end of Night of the Living Dead.
SLAP #4 to the academy for NOT nominating: Kelly MacDonald, anyone and everyone from Zodiac, Ashley Judd, Catherine Keener, Christian Bale, Kurt Russell, Carice van Houten and Johnny Greenwood. Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!
We're not really getting ready to wrap this up, are we? he said drunkenly. Would anyone be interested in making predictions before we close off the spigot on this party?
NICK: I don't make spigot decisions around here, or anywhere, but I will raise another glass to The Mist, which I loved. Formal problems aplenty, and the problem that is Thomas Jane, but I agree that it was terrific.
BOYD: Oh my, what a little time difference can do... I'm off trying to get in some vertical hours before the Berlinale hoopla starts tomorrow (and managed to squeeze in a digital projection of No Country for Old Men, too -- Roger Deakins better win that Oscar) and on another continent everyone and their mother gets slapped by a bunch of gin and tonic guzzling cinephiles in green dresses.
At the risk of being considered that annoying European that always turns up late: I'd totally adopt the coward Robert Ford. He is clearly in need of some serious lovin'. I just hope he won't turn on me the way he did on his idol Jesse James in what I still consider one of the most breathtaking scenes of the year, right up there with that heart-pounding scene in the cellar in Zodiac. It still gives me the heebie-jeebies just thinking about it (No Country for Old Men may be filled with violence, it never turned my stomach inside out the way that scene in Zodiac did.)
And speaking of Zodiac and The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford... why didn't these movies at least get some love in the technical categories apart from a very deserved second Roger Deakins nod? What's up with that?! I'd love to slap AMPAS voters in general for not considering small films with long titles and films that came out earlier in the year - damn you!
Right - so where are those gin and tonics?
TIM: I can't wait to see The Mist, but I have no idea when it's coming out here in Blighty. Meanwhile, I've pondered my adoption long and hard in between bingeing on Herschell Gordon Lewis flicks and painting my second bedroom in a satisfactory shade of cheesecake, and it's obviously got to be... Will Smith in I Am Legend. I'll be honest, I'm mainly just angling to sleep with him in the bath, but I reckon I could also give out some good fatherly advice like: stay away from those CGI freaks! Drop the whole Messiah thing, it's annoying! Give me a hug! Plus he could do with some pointers in the video store, surely. Who said there was a fine line between adoption and abduction?
As for my slap, I've been holding it in reserve for Tom Wilkinson in Michael Clayton, because he took what was already one of the year's most overconceived, writer's-pet characters and turned him into a sort of miasma of pretension and implausibility hanging over the whole first hour of the movie. I do actually like what MC is trying to do and some of the films it's harking back to, but it makes a pig's ear of the job from page one with that redundant flashback thing -- I can just hear the studio execs telling Tony Gilroy to stick the car-explosion up front, screw the suspense later -- and with every single scene it lets Wilkinson overact and un-act the hell out of. I don't think anyone has a tight enough hold on what they're doing except the miraculous Swinton and the reliably excellent Pollack: Clooney's respectable, but this must be the most pallid, not-quite-there protagonist ever to have a film named after him. (If this is the whole idea, I still think it's an iffy one.) Who IS Michael Clayton? Erin Brockovich would have him lapping out of her contaminated water wells. God knows what milkshake analogy Daniel "DRAAAINAGE!" Plainview would find for him...
Anyway, that's my final harangue I expect. It's been a blast, everyone, and thanks ever so much for hosting Nat. Tonic's gone, you say? Just chuck the Bombay Sapphire over, it'll do...
NATHANIEL: So with that we bring this crazy party to a close.
Thanks to all of the symposium participants for coming ...though, honestly, you could've helped clean up before you staggered out the door! As for all of you reading, I'd love to see your adoptions and slaps, too. This Oscar party runs another two weeks anyway, right? So make like Ruby Dee or Hal Holbrook over @ the blog, embrace and scold with movie loving abandon.
And have fun on Oscar night.
PREDICTIONS / PREFERENCES
In chart form: what our symposium feels about "will win/ should win"
Filled in as I get themOSCAR PAGES
Are being updated. You can now vote for your favorites @ Best Picture and Best Actress for starters. More to come...
