by Paul D. Miller
It’s that time of year again. Time to ignore the actual quality of movies and instead watch an antiquated and unrepresentative cultural weathervane known as the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences arbitrarily pick the winners and losers of 2013. Time for the Oscars.
The frontrunner for Best Picture is 12 Years a Slave, directed by Steve McQueen. Christian Hamaker said of the American slavery drama that “It’s a harsh, at times brutal film, devoid of humor or other distractions from the horrors of its main story. And it is excellent.” Despite that, the film is not favored to win many other awards. If it does win any others, it is likely to be Lupita Nyong’o for Best Supporting Actress, John Ridely for Adapted Screenplay, and McQueen has a shot at becoming the first black filmmaker to win Best Director (I was going to say the first African American, but he’s British).
If 12 Years doesn’t win, Gravity will. It is a simple story of a stranded astronaut trying to get back home, but it is amazingly told. I proclaimed the movie “one of the greatest movies ever made” and begged you to go see it. Andrew Collins said it was “a metaphor for human experience.” The film is an almost certain winner for cinematography, sound mixing, sound editing, and probably for score, director, film editing and visual effects. It will probably come away with the highest number of Oscars for the night, though it may narrowly win out on the top prize. Gravity and 12 Years tied for Best Picture at the Producer’s Guild Awards.
Third place for the night will belong to American Hustle, the sort-of-true crime-comedy caper starring everyone famous. Elizabeth Whyte found it “light, frothy, funny, with a tinge of melancholy” but “conspicuously lacking much of a deeper message,” which I think it about right. I found the film funny, brilliantly acted, profane, and empty. It won Best Comedy at the Golden Globes but faces very long odds at winning Best Picture on Sunday. Instead, it will probably take home the acting awards–Amy Adams for Best Actress, Jennifer Lawrence for Best Supporting Actress (if Nyong’o doesn’t win it), and, possibly, Christian Bale for Best Actor. In addition, it has a good shot at Original Screenplay for its witty writing, and Production Design (though I’d vote for Great Gatsby in that category) and Costume Design for all that greasy, plastic ’70s glam.
Beyond that, the movies drop off sharply. Kendrick Kuo thought that The Wolf of Wall Street was one of “the most cynical and possibly most elegant” commentaries on money put on screen. Wolf is Martin Scorsese’s dramatization of the true-life memoirs of a ’90s wall street fraudster, complete with his boasting of epic debauchery in sex, drugs, and prostitutes: the film holds the record for the most number of uses of the f-word (506 times) in a movie. Leondardo DiCaprio may finally win his Oscar for Best Actor as a sort of career award–this is his fourth nomination, with no prior wins.
I found Captain Phillips to be a “harrowing, intense nail-biter” and an interesting study in contrasting styles of leadership. The true story of the hijacking of a cargo ship and kidnapping of its captain off the coast of Africa in 2009 made for one of the best movies of the year to that point, in large part because of a tremendous turn by Tom Hanks. Hanks wasn’t even nominated, one of the biggest snubs of the year. Barkhad Abdi has an outside shot at Best Supporting Actor as the lead pirate.
One of the more curious movies of the awards-season has been Her, a movie by Spike Jonze about a man (Joaquin Phoenix) who falls in love with his operating system, a Siri-like siren voiced by Scarlett Johansson. The movie won Best Picture by the National Board of Review, which tends to diverge from the Oscars and pick riskier, more contemporary fare–it gave the top award to Zero Dark Thirty last year and The Social Network two years ago. Abe Timler wrote that the movie avoided moralizing about our relationship with technology but nonetheless forced us to confront the issue through its surprisingly plausible, and melancholy, portrayal of its central character.
Dallas Buyer’s Club, another true story, this one about a man infected with HIV/AIDS in the early ’80s who smuggles drugs from Mexico to keep himself and others alive, has been getting attention mainly for the acting by Matthew McConaughey, who is favored to win Best Actor, and Jared Leto, up for Best Supporting Actor. Elizabeth Whyte said, in one of the best-written reviews I’ve read in a while, that “The film reminds viewers again and again that Ron and Rayon are lost, suffering, and in need of divine mercy, though in the movie at least, they do not find it.” The movie will also probably win for makeup and hairstyling only because the Academy will not dignify the other two nominees in that category, The Lone Ranger and Jackass, with a win.
Sadly, we never got around to reviewing two other nominees for Best Picture, Nebraska or Philomena.
Among the nominees for Best Animated Feature Film, Giancarlo Montemayor read Frozen as a movie about “family bonds and the importance of sacrificial love,” while Josiah and Carolyn Davis thought Despicable Me 2 was about “the sanctifying power of adoption.” I never wrote up a review of The Croods, which I found more moving than I expected but a frustratingly missed opportunity because of its insultingly cliched plot and buffonish father figure. The Oscar will probably go to Frozen (which will also probably win Best Original Song), unless the Academy decides to award The Wind Rises because it is legendary Japanese director Hayao Miyazaki’s final film.
And that’s it until next year.
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