It's no news that
the Academy Awards are to the European film festivals what entertainment
is to art in film. Still, expectations start with the New Year. This time the disappointments
came as early as the nominations. We didn't even have to wait until the
ceremony. Most disappointingly, the
Hollywood of old continues to run through the veins of the members of the
Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
Even in the year 2015 it can feel as if we're in the Hollywood of Gone with the Wind.
This year,
however, they've been called out on it. (#OscarsSoWhite)
It’s not just
about race, but that is certainly the best example of the disassociation of the
Academy from the world that surrounds them. That only one black person is among
the 20 nominees for the best acting categories in the year of the amazing
acting in Selma, most particularly that
of David Oyelowo; the year of Tessa Thompson who shines in Dear White People, Riz Ahmed in Nightcrawler,
Chadwick Boseman as James Brown in Get on
Up (given that this is a year of biopics) and many more who have been so
unjustly overlooked. In the Best Director
category we have all white males, when the beautiful film that is Selma was made by the talented Ava
DuVernay. It is a shame that the Old Hollywood continues its sorry track record:
in the 87 years of the Oscars, of the 2,900 winners of the coveted statuette,
only 32 have been black.
This is only
one of the controversies to surround the Oscar nominations this year. Besides
the snubs, there is the nomination of American
Sniper in the Best Picture category. There has not been as divisive a film
as this one in many years. But let’s put aside the polarization to which it has
contributed and the more than $308 million dollars that it’s earned so far. Even
if we overlook the fact that this film has overlooked facts, including the “little”
issue of the non-existence of WMDs that led to the whole presence of American troops
in Iraq in the first place; even if we pretend that the real sniper was like the
Bradley Cooper sniper (the real one was quite racist); or imagine that the “dark”
sniper, the Arab one, fabricated as contraposition to the good “white” sniper
in typical Clint Eastwood Manichean style was actually killed by the “good guy”
(he wasn’t); even overlooking all this, the film is still not nomination
worthy. Who can dismiss the sloppiness (or should we say laziness?) Eastwood
shows in this film? How will we ever not chuckle, for example, when we remember
Bradley Cooper rocking those plastic dolls meant to be his babies?
Eastwood is certainly
Old Hollywood and knows how to pull heart strings in some moviegoers. In a
Google survey on the Oscar Best Picture nominees, a whopping 42% voted American Sniper as the Best film,
followed distantly by The Grand Budapest
Hotel in second place and Selma in
(honorable) third place.
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| My Two Oscar Favorites |
No surprise that
these three films favored by the Google voters are nowhere near being the front
runners for the Oscars. That would be Boyhood
directed by Richard Linklater and Birdman
directed by Alejandro Gonzáles Iñáritu. One of the two will take Best Picture
and the other Best Director. These films are the bland pudding to the fiery hot
issues of the world we’re living today. Boyhood
was an original feat, filmed over 12 years with the same cast meeting every
four, so maybe, yeah, it deserved the nomination for originality. But it’s hard
to not wonder why a film that shows a white, working-towards-middle class
family living in Texas, where the population is 40% Latino, has no contact with
people of color, except for the gardener whose life is changed by an off-hand
remark made to him by the character Patricia Arquette embodies. A more “white-savior”
moment is hard to find in film. And although the boy in this family drama has a
sister, the film is all about him and as he grows, she fades, the point that
towards the end it seems like he’s an only child. A more adequate and realistic
title would have been “It’s All about the Boy (the White One)”. The Academy members seems to relate. Patricia
Arquette will probably win Best Actress, Ethan Hawke was nominated for Best
Actor, Richard Linklater for Best Director in a film that, besides the 12 years
it took to make, is otherwise quite unremarkable.
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| The Front Runners |
Alejandro’s
film, while made by a Latino filmmaker, is also far removed from the
everydayness of people. It’s about an actor doing a Broadway play in New York,
another city where about 60% of the people are of color, with another all-white
cast. Not that every film needs to reflect the diversity of where it takes
place, but, still! The film has a pretentious feel to it, that of someone
trying too hard to make a “deep” story of the many times done script of a washed
up actor who seems to have made the same mistakes most blockbuster actors of
Avengers statute make in Hollywood: drugs, alcohol, infidelities, wasting away
lots of money, bad relationships with family and kids. This time the old story is
adorned with visual effects and even a drunk man calling out (in case you haven’t
picked it up by then) Shakespeare’s Macbeth line about the “poor player who struts
and frets his hour upon the stage and then is heard no more”. I say no more.
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| Major Academy Snubs |
The members of
this Academy seem to be growing old locked up in their eternal ivory towers,
holding tight to what they know best, which is always the safest thing to do.
Only thus can we understand tomorrow’s probable Oscar wins. It is how we’ve
come to accept that Argo could win over Amour or Beasts of the Southern Wild,
or that The King's Speech win over Black Swan, True Grit or The Fighter.
The Hollywood of old. That’s entertainment!
It’s not what
people want in our very political and much polarized world. The divide between
people of privilege and those without grows exponentially and rapidly (in old
Hollywood terms: To Have and Have Not).
An excellent movie like Snowpiercer, that addresses this
inequality, would have been a great addition to this year’s nominees, as would
have Dear White People, which touches
upon the issue of race in the 21st Century, or even Nightcrawler about our media and violence-frenzied world. But the
Academy has played it safe once again. And this time it has lost.
