Notes on the Best Picture Nominees

This year I’ve managed to see all nine of the Oscar nominees for Best Picture. Below are my short comments on each film, four today with the other five coming tomorrow.

The Artist

This is, as common knowledge has it, the front runner, and it does deserve its place at the top of the list. It is beautifully filmed, acted, and designed, and though it certainly isn’t the second coming it’s still one of the best films of the year. It would be lovely to see a scherzo-like film win the top prize (The Artist shares that light quality with Midnight in Paris), as critics and cinephiles often have the misguided view that films need to be deadly serious to be ‘great’. Everyone calls this ‘the silent film’ but it isn’t actually silent: it has a fine score by Ludovic Bource, and two very effective scenes with synchronised sound. The only major fault is the use of Bernard Herrmann’s love theme from Vertigo at the film’s emotional climax: though the music works for the scene it takes one out of the film because of its time (there isn’t much music that is less evocative of the early 1930s!) and its strong connection to Hitchcock’s film. But the final tap-dance makes up for any previous mis-steps. One really can’t complain much about a film that leaves one in such a good mood.

The Descendants

Though this film is very well acted, I found it utterly unoriginal and uninventive. The plot is pure cliche. Though it is a plot that works, and which has worked many times over, that isn’t really enough to make a good film. Its downfall is the predictability of its style: there are no unexpected camera angles or moves, no unexpected settings for the various scenes, and no inventive uses of the Hawaiian milieu. Though it wasn’t as annoying as Sideways, and I didn’t ever feel like running out of the theatre, it isn’t a film I would need to see again. It doesn’t fit Italo Calvino’s definition of a ‘classic’, that one should get something new out of a work each time one encounters it. Everything here is spelled-out, leaving no space for personal invention (on the poietic, or creative, side) or interpretation (on the aesthesic, or reception, side). The Descendents seems like the most calculated Oscar-bait of all the films here, and it ticks all the boxes of a generic Best Picture nominee: among others, family drama ending happily, love affairs, the death of a loved one, a touch of the ‘ethnic’, a pretty setting, lightly comic moments mixing with high drama, and George Clooney. I hope that the Academy doesn’t vote for the easy option.

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

I was looking forward to seeing this film because I couldn’t believe it could be as bad as so many critics said it was. As it turned out, it wasn’t that bad, but it certainly doesn’t deserve its nomination, especially when films such as Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and The Skin I Live In weren’t nominated. This film isn’t offensive or exploitative as so many have suggested: its critics didn’t understand that it was presenting New York as a fantasy world in which a tragedy occurred, rather than being a social drama about a healing city. I found its fairy-tale view of New York refreshing. Sandra Bullock and Tom Hanks weren’t very good in this, though their characters were poorly written. Max von Sydow was excellent, though much more could have been done with the similarities between his Second World War experiences and young Oskar’s 9/11 one. So here we have a film whose execution doesn’t live up to its general idea. The parts don’t quite come together into a convincing whole. The film is rather more interesting for its critical reception, which tells more about the critics than about the film itself. People feel adverse to any artistic response to 9/11 unless it deals in platitudes (which this film does not). There are various psychological and political reasons for that, but the basic reason, I think, is that people felt this event very personally. Any response that is very different from their own therefore makes them uncomfortable. Stephen Daldry’s mistake was that he didn’t try to bridge the gap: his hero is too idiosyncratic in his response to attract empathy from the narrow-minded.

The Help

Of all the films nominated this year this one has the best all-around acting, without a weak link in the cast. It is also very well crafted, with a nicely-structured screenplay and highly competent camera work. As many critics have pointed out, the problems lie in the film’s ideology. It isn’t quite the racist film some have claimed it to be, but it does open up various interesting issues about representation and voice to which the screenplay gives short shrift. It is never quite clear what kind of book Skeeter has made out of her interviews, as we never get more than short excerpts. Is it a true-life novel? New-journalistic reportage? Ethnographic study? We don’t even know to whom the book is credited, other than the anonymous author on the cover: is it all from Skeeter’s point of view, or is it an edited collection of testimonies? From Skeeter’s conversations with her editor I would suspect that it leans toward the true-life novel side, and that it is from Skeeter’s point of view. But whatever the case, it is a commercial book rather than an academic one, and questions of authorship are raised (and because of that the film would make a good starting point for discussion in a class on methods in social anthropology). Is it ethical of Skeeter to sell the stories of her informants? Though the fact that she gives some of her payment back to the individuals she has interviewed is meant to make the character magnanimous, the gesture comes across as somewhat paternalistic. The quality of the performances, especially from Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, save the film from these problems. Perhaps a more hard-line critical theorist would say that the acting hides the problems from the audience, but Brecht doesn’t sell (at least not in the American box office). For me the best aspect of the film is the use of Jessica Chastain’s role: bringing out the similar place on the margins of the power-holders’ community of the black maids to that of someone considered white trash makes the film something more than the essentialising text it could easily have been (and which many consider it to be anyway).