Oscar Hustle
If you want to stop reading this right now, well, I totally understand. I, too, feel worn out by this year’s Oscar season, more out of boredom than anything else. Not one of the nine Best Picture nominees is currently among the top ten movies in America. Aren’t these nominations intended to generate big box-office returns during the pre-awards weeks? Ideally, yes, but this year the major contenders are either big hits that are all played out, or smaller films seemingly playing nowhere. So far, the big stories of the 2014 Oscar season are the emergence of Kevin Hart as a major draw and The Lego Movie as the must-see of a blizzard-heavy February. It seems America doesn’t care much about Oscar.
Then there’s the bad news of all the “special” things the Oscar producers are planning for the telecast, all kinds of meaningless filler, the type of stuff that devours valuable time and invariably leads to, say, Cate Blanchett having to race through names before she’s played off the stage. Do Oscar producers ever look at previous telecasts? That’s where all the lessons are, learned the hard way but destined to go unheeded.
Best Picture/Best Actor: The only nominee that I hated was The Wolf of Wall Street. Never mind the question of its morality, the one about whether it criticized or condoned its orgy of bad behavior. I was actually too bored even to consider moral issues. My problem is primarily with its bad moviemaking, particularly its unjustifiable, punishing length and agonizingly paced storytelling. But because the director is Martin Scorsese, then, for some, the movie is automatically great. It’s filled with scenes that make their point, then continue for another ten useless minutes, followed by a scene seemingly identical to the one I couldn’t endure in the first place. At three hours, Wolf is, I guess, an excessive and overindulgent movie about excess and overindulgence. Okay, fine, but tedium and repetitiveness are not effective dramatic tools. Leo DiCaprio snorts coke and frolics with hookers in an endless, shapeless movie, the merits of which clearly elude me. And talented as Leo is, he hits the same few notes over and over, an uninteresting performance going nowhere.
12 Years a Slave is a promising film that, despite a mesmerizing opening half hour, quickly disintegrates and never recovers. The most powerful moments come in the shock of matter-of-fact details, such as when a white Southern lady tells a sobbing black woman that she’ll soon forget about the children recently torn from her. The casualness of such sub-human treatment is shattering, but it’s soon replaced by Paul Dano and Michael Fassbender in an overacting contest designed to see who can be the craziest, most repellent white guy ever. Suddenly it’s a movie about recognizable actors self-consciously supporting the film’s worthiness while inadvertently ruining it, as we all wait patiently for Brad Pitt to show up and save the day. There was a great movie to made from this story but this isn’t it.
Dallas Buyers Club is one of those unlikely-hero movies in which the most unexpected person is suddenly politicized, in this case to save his own life. As a redneck rodeo guy stricken with AIDS, Matthew McConaughey is the propulsive force of this movie. His ferocious performance is nothing less than sensational. Yes, his physical deterioration is astonishing but it’s secondary to his total immersion into this wily, fevered fellow with an unstoppable drive. A win for McConaughey will do wonders for my Oscar apathy. Plus, he also happens to be in The Wolf of Wall Street (and actually the best thing in it), having helped Leo to his own Best Actor nomination.
The gay-friendly Philomena is, admittedly, right up my alley, so I didn’t mind its use of tried-and-true devices, which perhaps allow you to describe it as an odd-couple road movie. However, it turns out to be so much more than that, filled with emotional surprises and anchored by two marvelous performances from Judi Dench and Steve Coogan. As a woman searching for the son taken from her 50 years ago, Dench continues to astound, never doing anything predictable, always digging deeper, always unearthing something truer, richer, and simpler as she brings her character closer to us. I’ll be rooting for her on Oscar night but no one seems to think she can win this time around.
Gravity is technically wondrous but far less satisfying dramatically. Captain Phillips is a terrific action thriller, with a superb Tom Hanks performance that, yes, deserved to be nominated. I liked Her, too, especially the way Spike Jonze brought his unconventional love story to an unexpected but utterly logical conclusion. If I could change one thing, it would be Scarlett Johansson, not because she wasn’t good as the voice with whom Joaquin Phoenix falls in love. I just wish it had been an unknown voice so that I, like Phoenix’s character, had to imagine what a “Samantha” might look like if she had a body. With a big star like Johansson, I naturally pictured her, which seemed to dissipate some of the magic of this unusual, gently yearning love story.
Nebraska represents a return of the Alexander Payne I don’t like, the guy who made About Schmidt (2002), rather than the Payne I do like, the guy who made all his other movies, from Citizen Ruth (1996) to The Descendants (2011). While Bruce Dern, in an uncompromisingly crusty performance, is the main event, I was not amused by Payne’s condescension toward a state he supposedly loves. And June Squibb’s acting seems to be a cautionary example of what can happen when you allow an underused octogenarian character actress to explode with all she’s got inside her, which turns out to be too much. The whole movie feels self-conscious, forced in its quirkiness, trapped in a kind of drab whimsy.
At last, I come to the movie I liked best, the one I believe deserves the Best Picture Oscar. American Hustle is often called a mess by those who don’t like it, and I would agree that it gets off to a rocky start. However, while most movies start well and systematically go to pieces, American Hustle is the rare film that gets better and better, richer and more complex, taking all of its seemingly messy strands and fusing them into a movie with more vitality than any other of 2013. Its exploration of what it means to be real—especially in a landscape populated by politicians, scam artists, and cheaters—addresses not just the characters’ actions but their internal lives. Scammers Christian Bale and Amy Adams initially bond over their genuine love of Duke Ellington, something still meaningful for them at the end of the movie. Despite their screwy, thrilling ride in a world of show, they know a pure, honest moment when they see one, and, at the end, they can truly appreciate it.
The characters in American Hustle are not exactly likable but they’re compelling as ambitious scroungers chasing their desires. (In Wolf of Wall St. DiCaprio has everything he could ever want in the first hour, so then we just watch him spend an inexhaustible supply of money.) Each of the main characters has at least one humanizing vulnerability, something we can all recognize and relate to, some flaw that might be their undoing, all of which makes the movie as intriguing in its characters and relationships as it is in its big sting operation. Who can forget Christian Bale’s loving attachment to his stepson, or Bradley Cooper’s blinding career ambitions, or Amy Adams’ cool plot of sexual revenge on Bale? An actor I often dislike, Bale has never seemed smarter or shrewder than he does here, while Cooper was never so complicated or multi-faceted. Then there’s Jennifer Lawrence, as Bale’s wife, whose neediness is camouflaged by her bravado. Sometimes brashly hilarious, other times heartbreakingly exposed, Lawrence represents what is best about writer-director David O. Russell’s grand tapestry of politics, sex, and crime in the 1970s: she mixes gutsy comedy with tender longing. With its pleasurably intricate plotting, crackling dialogue, well-earned laughs, and wrenchingly compromised relationships, American Hustle turns out to be the best “Scorsese” movie since Goodfellas (1990).
Best Actress: Cate Blanchett in Blue Jasmine is as close to a shoo-in as there is in the major categories. My preference for Dench as Best Actress has more to do with Woody Allen than it does with Blanchett. No, not the scandal, the screenplay. Blue Jasmine feels like a first draft of something not ready for the cameras, with an unconvincing second half and consistently cardboard male characters. Despite Blanchett’s all-out commitment and intensity, the film is a miss. I believed everything about Dench as Philomena, but, even with her fiercest effort, I couldn’t quite accept Blanchett’s Jasmine.
Best Supporting Actor/Actress: The supporting-actor favorite, Jared Leto for Dallas Buyers Club, is indeed a fine choice. So accustomed do we become to him in women’s clothes that, in an immensely poignant scene, we actually cringe with discomfort when he wears a man’s suit to visit his conservative father. (But my top choice in this category, Sam Rockwell in The Way Way Back, unfortunately didn’t even make the cut.) As for supporting actress, I’d be fine with Lupita Nyong’o winning for 12 Years a Slave. Hers was the film’s strongest, most haunting performance. I assume the Academy will choose Nyong’o over Jennifer Lawrence, which will actually be good for Lawrence’s career. If she wins this year, right after winning Best Actress for Silver Linings Playbook, how long before people start turning on her and all she’s accomplished at only 23? Besides, it’s not like she won’t be back at the Oscars. And people like me, despite our annual protests, will eagerly be watching to see what happens.
