OSCAR SYMPOSIUM
with
your host Nathaniel
and five very special guests
February 2010
INTRO |
Day One page 1| page 2 | page 3
Day Two page 4 | page 5 | page 6
Day Three page 7 | page 8 | page 9 | page 10
Previously: Nathaniel was talking about Tarantino's mastery of The Moment excusing his indulgences elsewhere. As a filmmaker he's a perfect match for our DVD chapture-menu cultureDAY THREE
GUY LODGE: I think it's a spot-on point, and I'm both intrigued and troubled by the idea of Basterds being a success story of latter-day audience inclination to edit their own movies. My problem is that, while I'm as capable as anyone else of filleting out treasurable moments -- -- "Attendez la crème!" -- from the sheer morass of stuff in the film, my brain can't blithely discard the missteps as you imply others can. For much sorrier reasons, the wincingly awful appearance of Eli Roth burns as brightly in my memory as that exquisitely extended opening sequence, so much so that one can't eclipse the other.But I think you've latched onto a selectivity that has boosted the fortunes of a number of contenders this year besides Basterds: everyone has cut out and stuck the Married Life sequence of Up into their cinematic scrapbooks, but who really wants the rest? Precious, whatever your take on it, is made for mental re-editing -- Joe Klotz's baffling nomination notwithstanding.
TIM ROBEY: What we're basically saying here is that a lot of these movies are screener-friendly. They can be browsed. And I have to say this faintly depresses me as an old-fashioned, packed-audience-on-opening-night, communal experience sort of guy. This is where I think the 3D selling point of Avatar is quite a canny ruse -- a trick to get people going back out to the movies rather than waiting for the inevitably diminished experience on their home TV -- and it's a ruse for which I have some respect. Did Cameron send out screeners for Avatar? Did he need to? To lesser extents, Up and District 9 (and to be fair, even The Blind Side) are films that audiences discovered together in their first few weeks of release, whether in a mall in Kentucky or the Odeon Leicester Square (where The Blind Side has yet to be unveiled, actually -- Sandy or no Sandy, UK distributors are understandably never in much of a hurry to release anything to do with American football. We get confused! Don't ask me what a Tight End is.)
Whereas when I think about The Hurt Locker, An Education, A Serious Man or even the relatively high-grossing Up in the Air, I don't think of a united discovery. Maybe this is just me, but I think of hectic festival press screenings, hush-hush industry previews, a mundane theatrical release and then a healthy, buzzed-about afterlife on DVDs and screeners. In the case of The Hurt Locker, this is a crying shame and a sad failure of strategy and marketing. It should have been a proper movie event, not a hanger-onner people have come to late, on DVD, in the way of a miniseries. There should have been nothing to compete this year with packed roomfuls of parched viewers reaching for their Sprite during that spellbindingly shot, edited and performed desert sniper sequence. Instead it's a set piece and a film that I'm sure have been ruined a zillion times, in a zillion living rooms already, by the pause button.
I wouldn't necessarily expect this to count against it in the race: indeed, its screener-friendliness, as with Basterds, may count as a positive asset. And maybe it isn't even a rant worth having -- is anyone at all with me, or am I just a relic of the 20th century here? I left Precious off the list above, because I think it's an interestingly mixed case: a movie that had opening-night audiences queuing around the block in Harlem, and yet I'm guessing not many of them were Academy members. Even above Basterds, I think it's the most divisive film of the year, right down to the ways and contexts in which it's been watched. I suspect a lot of the voters loathe it, actually. But they can't not watch it because of the Mo'Nique factor.
Reverting to bittiness (and by all means just fast forward through this, or check out Nat's making-of featurette, or toy with the Finnish subtitles) I speak as someone who has a fair bit of time for Precious, but, yes, that editing nomination made me spray coffee out of my nose. It's the joint last thing it should be in for, along with Best Supporting Actor for Lenny Kravitz. Meanwhile, since Guy brought it up, I am totally in love with that superb, sparse and insinuating Hurt Locker score, especially the woozy main theme. You know it's on an erhu, which is some kind of Chinese violin? (I just googled.) Marco Beltrami, the recipient of a neat out-of-nowhere nomination two years ago for 3.10 to Yuma, ought to win this with Buck Sanders, but I greatly fear it'll go to Michael Giacchino for Up, a pleasant, croony thing which is entirely not my cup of oversweetened tea. It sounds like something from a Giuseppe Tornatore movie, for good and (mainly) bad. I have more time for Zimmer's madly clomping, baroque Sherlock Holmes, but how Carter Burwell and Karen O failed to get on here for Where the Wild Things Are over Avatar (ugh) or Fantastic Mr Fox (meh) is beyond me. And those songs! Should the Wild Things pal up with Fanny Brawne as the great forlorn castaways of this year's Oscar season? I'd love to see what she'd knit for them.
SASHA STONE: Count me among those who loved the score of The Hurt Locker. It's funny that Inglourious Basterds is supposed to be the spaghetti western but The Hurt Locker score reminds me of those old Eastwood movies more than anything else. I also wanted to add that the nomination for Precious showed, more than anything else, that Precious has more support in the Academy than people realize - and the editing nomination proves it.
GUY LODGE: I am also stuck in the 20th century with Tim -- festival and industry screenings are a great privilege, but they can lead to a slight bubble perspective where you have no idea how people in the real world respond to things. (And that goes for journos on their worst behaviour as well as their best -- I can't imagine any normal moviegoers will actually stand up and self-righteously boo at the screen when The Killer Inside Me eventually graces theatres.) Academy members may be even more removed from reality, but I suspect when they pop their screeners, they still do so in a multiplex frame of mind.
With The Hurt Locker, for example, I came to it fairly late in the game, at a deserted afternoon press screening at the Edinburgh Film Fest -- more than nine months after the critical majority had got their hands on it at Venice and Toronto, and yet still months ahead of its UK release. That's as much to blame as anything for its soft commercial performance -- by the time it reached the man in the street, the critical conversation had dried up already. I'm as guilty as everyone else of forgetting that people aren't all that interested in reading about films they can't see anytime soon -- so I shouldn't be as surprised (and aggravated) as I am when I speak to friends who have barely heard of the film.
Not that Summit should get a pass for marketing a perfectly accessible, kickass summer actioner as some kind of lofty prestige pic. If there's one media-assisted narrative that has driven me up the wall all season, it's the "art vs. entertainment" angle applied to The Hurt Locker and Avatar, as if Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron are such aesthetically opposed filmmakers. Is the director of Point Break really that invisible in the new film? I think not, and that's a good thing.
I'll also second Tim's vote for The Hurt Locker's score, handily the most intelligently integrated of the five nominees, while heaving a sigh of relief that someone else finds Giacchino's work a touch on the cute side in this instance. As for Karen O and Carter Burwell, I have yet to hear an adequate explanation for why they didn't even qualify for a nomination, but the longer I dwell on the fate of Where the Wild Things Are this season, the more I want to cry. Though thinking of the film in any context makes me go all soggy.
NATHANIEL R: Soggy like you've just emerged from choppy waters in your tiny imagined sailboat in your faux monster footie pajamas? Sigh.
Where the Wild Things Are has so many wonderful melancholy evocations of childhood but I think, to borrow Tim's description of the Pixar commissioned, Oscar nominated Michael Giacchino score, "cute" is what people want when it comes to children's films... even the ones made for adults. This is why (well one of the many reasons why) I think UP and the Pixar oeuvre in general is so lucrative. I love that long marriage montage in UP just as most sane people do but I'm not willing to overstate its case. I've heard and read so many things about "why can't live action movies have this kind of...blah blah blah" and I think it's a grossly unfair comparison. I think many people, if they saw that exact same shot sequence with the exact same score (which I love - sorry boys) in live action, would feel it was too sentimental and manipulative or maybe totally reductive and evasive about the human experience. Ever notice how much people gripe about scored montages in live-action movies as "shortcuts" to actual character (or romantic) development? To some extent I think people lower their defences when it comes to animation because it puts them in a receptive childlike state. I'm not saying "animation is for children!" so much as that's the way it's generally used and so, developmentally speaking, that's what it means to us on some gut level.
I think Wild Things and Bright Star even (500) Days -- which I guess I like far more than any of you -- got snubbed because they were too complicated emotionally. Or, rather, they weren't complicated in the right (read: excessively familiar) ways.
I don't mean any of this as a dig on The People and their capacity to jump from Entertainment to Art, just their desire to do so. I think when audiences are in the right mood for Art, they totally go for it and there's numerous success stories to back that up. It's just that far more often they're in the mood for simple Entertainment. Which is one of the reasons everyone now mentally edits their favorite movies. But it's all a frustrating argument because really there's no reason why movies can't be both at once [Read: The Hurt Locker] or toggle crazily back and forth [Read: Inglourious Basterds]
That said, a tiny part of me does have some reservations about how Entertaining The Hurt Locker's Art actually is. Isn't it, after all, enormously repetitive? That bomb defusal-bomb defusal-bomb defusal-bomb defusal structure is part of the brilliance of its war as drug theme but both times I've seen it, I found myself drifting away a couple of times here or there. Something that never happened to me at Avatar or even Precious.
