OSCAR SYMPOSIUM
with your host Nathaniel and five very special guests
February 2009
intro / day one
NATHANIEL: First things first, please welcome this year's Symposium guests (in alpha order just like Oscar do): Timothy Brayton (Antagony & Ecstasy), Ed Gonzalez (Slant), Karina Longworth (Spout), Erik Lundegaard (ErikLundegaard) and Kris Tapley (In Contention). They were chosen through an elaborate and painstaking ranked balloting system. Only Price Waterhouse employees know who was snubbed for the 4th annual Film Experience event. Pundits suggest that they were invited on the basis of their mad skills with dramaturgy and accents. I'm happy to have these five in my virtual house to discuss the 81st annual Oscars.
But where to begin in a year when the Academy is feeling so passive aggressive? It's almost as if they took a look at the semi daring and pleasingly rangey shortlist of 2007 and thought: 'we simply can't have that again!' , beating a hastry retreat back into their bios, Holocausts pictures, and vaguely ambitious epics a good portion of which will be forgotten about in five years time. I'm still unsure, given the ranked balloting system of the Academy, how at least 60% of them managed to get a sufficient number of #1 votes to compete. Who is passionate about them?
AMC Theaters is hosting a marathon of the Best Picture nominees in several cities the day before the Oscars. I've considered going for the blog fodder but who wants to sit through these five particular films back to back to back to back to back and AGAIN for that matter? That's someone's idea of hell surely, or at least one circle of it. There's not even a comedy to break up the 12 hour day. Could you do it? Or would you like to propose a separate marathon. Is there an entire category you could sit through all at once?
ERIK LUNDEGAARD : Is the Academy feeling passive-aggressive? Does the Academy feel?
All I know is I'm feeling passive and Harvey Weinstein is feeling aggressive. A friend of mine said that 2008 was a bad year for movies but it was really only a bad year for Oscar movies. The blockbusters were great: The Dark Knight, Iron Man, WALL•E, even Hancock which I think is underrated. The Oscars have Milk, which I think should win, and Slumdog, which I wouldn't mind winning, but nothing to stir the passions like No Country or Brokeback or The Pianist. At least for me. Anyone else?
As for Nathaniel's question: I could sit through all the foreign language films, since it's probably the only way to see them all. I'm in Seattle, not a bad city for movies, but only Waltz With Bashir has shown up. The Class is scheduled soon. The others? Lotsa luck.
KARINA LONGWORTH : I agree that 2008 was not a bad year for movies. I don't think it was even necessarily a bad year for nominated movies -- I can't complain about the fact a lot of films I love (including Encounters at the End of the World, The Betrayal, Rachel Getting Married, The Wrestler, Vicky Cristina Barcelona and even Iron Man) all got nominations, some against previously pegged odds. But it is a terrible year for the Best Picture category, and the lack of imagination and risk taking shown by the Academy in pegging those five films as the best of the year extends to the Screenplay categories, usually the one place where voters are willing to throw a bone to underdog contenders. Happy-go-Lucky and In Bruges get nominated, and I'm supposed to jump for joy? Sorry. The former doesn't make up for Sally Hawkins' slight, and anyone who tells you the latter is a better written film than Synecdoche, New York or Burn After Reading is out of their mind.
So no, I certainly wouldn't torture myself with a quintuple feature of these Best Picture nominees -- two of which (Button and Slumdog) I actively hate, one which is fine but overrated (Milk) , one which I'd probably rate more highly than most critics but still can't justify as a Best Pitcture nominee (The Reader), and one which I haven't seen and even with the nomination, feel as though I'm at no personal or professional disadvantage for it (guess). Since France's selection of The Class over much better French films like A Christmas Tale and Secret of the Grain only makes me mad, I'd skip a Foreign Language category marathon, too.
ERIK: Karina: I’m out of your mind. Didn’t like Burn After Reading at all. The Coens are immensely talented but this thing is so misanthropic, without even a whiff of a grace note, that I wanted to take a shower afterwards. Their misanthropy feels as wrong to me as any Hollywood ending and infinitely more hopeless. Yes, people suck, but not that much. They set us loose in this world without benefit of a Dude, a Marge Gunderson or “A Man of Constant Sorrow”? That’s just mean.
That said, I probably would’ve preferred a nom for Brad Pitt here than in the CC of BB.
KRIS TAPLEY: That's nearly my thoughts on the film exactly, Eric. Thought I was the only one!
KARINA : The one category to devote a day to is probably Best Documentary. And that reminds me of a post that Kris wrote, arguing that Man on Wire isn't only not a lock, but doesn't deserve to win. Kris, I'm in the process of writing a post about this, but can you expand on why you think the reenactments in that film are "dubious"? Are you anti-reenactments in documentaries in general, and if so, what do you make of films like My Winnipeg and Waltz With Bashir?
KRIS: Count me among those who actually think 2008 was an awful year for movies, worse even than 2005 and I didn't think that was possible. And I'm an odd duck in that films like Bolt and Pineapple Express mingle with others like Synecdoche, New York in my personal top five.
But I find myself in an odd position this year. Despite this lack of quality product (in my opinion, of course), this looks to be the first year since, jeez, probably 1992 that my personal pick for the year's best film is likely to actually win the Oscar for Best Picture. So on one hand, it's difficult to complain. But complaining about the Oscars has become something of an instinct now, hasn't it? And they gave us plenty of reasons to gripe this year.
So to Nat's point about passive aggression, I think the Academy may have simply solidified itself as a reactionary body this year. The precursor glut of awards shows has, in some sense, rendered the big show at the Kodak an afterthought. By the time we see whichever frontrunner accept his or her Oscar, we'll have heard the same speech over and over again (I'm looking at you, Ari Folman). I first noticed this maybe four years ago when Jamie Foxx was sweeping the circuit. And so members perhaps found a way to distinguish themselves and their proceedings by "shocking" with a The Reader nomination, or catching others off guard by sliding Kate Winslet into the lead actress category.
But if that's distinguished...
To Ms. Longworth's question about reenactments, I would say that yes, in general, I am against their usage in documentary. I generally prefer the clever editing of original footage to tell a story. If you want to make a narrative, make a narrative. But that's not to say I'm a Nazi about it. I think there's room for creative exceptions to any rule, I just haven't really come across them yet. Unfortunately I never did see My Winnipeg this year, but the reenactments in Man on Wire seemed to clash with the overall tone of the piece for me. Each and every one of them took me out of the lullaby. I was more taken by the editing of stock footage and Petit's interviews than these manifestations. I don't know, I always think of the classic show "Rescue 911" when it comes to reenactments.
TIMOTHY BRAYTON: First off, thanks to Nathaniel for inviting me for the first time ever to his place for this hoedown, and may I say it's an honor to be a part of it; and second, greetings to my fellow panelists, all of you writers whose work I have enjoyed many times in the past, such that I now find myself more than a bit overwhelmed to be in your company. < /kissass>
Anyway, the second-most burning question of the moment (stepping away from the Burn After Reading landmine, for I cast my lot as an uncritical Coen fanboy many long years ago - though I still think In Bruges had the best screenplay of the year): what on Earth happened in Best Picture? Somehow, the Academy managed to take a year that everybody already knew was going to completely boring, awards-wise, and find a way to make it boring AND awful. I don't think I've been left so cold by the nominees since at least 2002; and The Reader in particular is, in my insufficiently-humble opinion, the worst film given a Best Picture nod since Chocolat. There's just something about that Weinstein fella...For my part, I blame the widespread idea that 2008 was such a dreadful year for cinema (though like Karina and Erik, I actually thought that there were some pretty amazing films out there). Once it became clear that the studio-appointed awards bait was pretty much nothing but one washout after another, that conventional wisdom provided cover for unimaginative voters - which is, let's face it, pretty much all of them - to firmly entrench themselves in the familiar and the comfortable, instead of doing something crazy like watching a lot of diverse movies and deciding which of them are good. In that sense, I guess I agree with Kris, that this was basically the year the Academy went completely reactionary. Perhaps I'd phrase it more charitably, that after a couple years of experimentation the Academy is regressing to the mean. After all, it's a collection of data points, not a self-guided consciousness, and thus completely in thrall to the conventional wisdom. The problem is that it feels like every year brings more precursors, making the conventional wisdom that much more entrenched.
In a year like 2007, when the conventional wisdom anoints genuinely great movies, nobody cares that this is the case. In 2008, though, we had the rare sight of virtually all the expected Oscar contenders flaring out, leaving the awards bodies to either make things up as they went along, or calmly pick through the rubble of the Benjamin Buttons and Readers as though nothing had happened. We know which path they chose, and it shouldn't be suprising that they did so. Institutions are meant to be conservative. But it's resulted in a Best Picture slate that is, to my mind, 2/5ths unwatchable and 3/5ths disposable.
To answer Nathaniel's challenge, I guess I'd follow the old rule that the screenplay categories are where the real art lies. And since WALL-E and Happy-Go-Lucky were two of my three favorite films of the year, and I liked or loved elements of all the others, I could certainly stand a marathon of the Original Screenplay films, if I had to.
Should we all put our cards on the table? Give our top five? Then Nathaniel can tally them up and find out what we as a group (rather than an individuals) would’ve chosen. Here’s mine: Milk, Slumdog Millionaire, The Wrestler, In Bruges and Appaloosa
KRIS: Here's where I get to be "that guy": 1. Slumdog Millionaire 2. Bolt 3. Synecdoche, New York 4. Pineapple Express and 5. The Dark Knight
