The Oscars and Movies for 2008

It's been said in the press that people don't care about the Oscars this year. I myself was surprised to find them to be less than a week from now, or maybe I was surprised that they haven't been given out already. Slumdog Millionaire has been said to have the "momentum" of the "pre-awards season buzz," so will likely win most of its 10 Oscar nomations. Maybe that's sapped the momentum.

I think, though, the change in 2003 to move the Oscars up a month, and shorten the voting season by a month has made the Oscars not only duller and more predictable, but made the movie industry in and of itself even more obsessed with the things it says about it itself. Because Oscar ballots are due so shortly after the new year, people vote for the movies already winning awards, just because they're easier to catch. Worse, because of that, there's so much campaigning on each coast to try and get into those ever-important LA and NYC film circle awards that there just isn't even enough time to tell the false prophets from the good movies. This year has had many stories written about Harvey Weinstein's ability to make The Reader a nominee for Best Picture, and even a contender, but what remains to be seen is if anyone outside of the movie industry cares. The Reader still in ten weeks has made $18 million. Even the pre-awards sure-thing, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button turned out to be a flash in the pan whose gross depended on how many people talked about it before anyone had seen it. After having seen it, does anyone feel like they've fallen in love with a movie? I'll let you know if I hear from someone who has.

But it wasn't a bad year for movies, not at all. Rather than rehash how "out of touch" the Academy is to have not nominated Wall-E or The Dark Knight for Best Picture, I'd like to suggest an alternative complaint: The Academy simply no longer has the time or objectivity to determine its own taste. Maybe the late March awards need to come back, just so people can figure out what the hell happened in the previous year of movies. Here are my picks for who should win the awards, based on my own taste, and perhaps some alternatives.

Best Picture

Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire

Should Win: Milk

Who's Missing? Elegy, The Wrestler, The Dark Knight, Wall-E, Happy-Go-Lucky

Like each of the recent years, this Best Picture category was mostly picked a long time ago, and when the nominations were announced, it felt fairly underwhelming. I think if nominations were announced in mid February, like they were before 5 years ago, The Wrestler would have really benefited from the popularity it built as an art-house favorite. In any case, I'd still likely pick Milk as the superior picture of the year - the rousing, specific biopic of Harvey Milk that stuns you with the human attachment you build beneath all of its politics. Now, friends have pointed out to me - rightly, I think - that a conventional biopic really shouldn't stand as any Movie of the Year, and I do think a couple of movies were better (namely, Elegy and The Wrestler), but Milk is the type of biopic I can see myself turning to if I need a good weeper, or to just see a spectacular performance. Of the remaining nominees, I'll admit I haven't seen The Reader and feel it's too much of an assignment to sit through, despite my love for Kate Winslet. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, I'm fairly certain, is terrible - it's Old Man does Forrest Gump, before it's a completely unconvincing love story (wait, and a, um, statement on Hurricane Katrina), and Frost/Nixon is sort of interesting history leading up to one fairly excellent scene, not a good full movie. I like Slumdog Millionaire, but as a longtime Danny Boyle fan, I must say I missed the passion and thrill I felt in Trainspotting and Millions or even 28 Days Later.

Best Director

Will and Should Win: Danny Boyle Slumdog Millionaire

Who's Missing? Christopher Nolan The Dark Knight, Jonathan Demme Rachel Getting Married, Mike Leigh Happy-Go-Lucky

I may have missed the passion and thrill of his earlier movies, but what Boyle proves in Slumdog is the same thing that he proved in some of his other just-good movies, like Sunshine and 28 Days Later, that the movie is just lucky to find him. So stylized and intense, Boyle knows just how to make a movie look, knows just the right buttons to push. It's easy to remember the scene of poor Latika in the rain outside of the train car, of young Jamal plunging into a pile of poo to meet a famous actor, or that astonishing overhead shots of Jamal and Salim running through the slums of Mumbai. For individual scenes, Boyle deserves the recognition as one of the greatest talents in the world. Did he bring the authority of some other great directors this year? No, despite vision, I didn't find the same control that Nolan or Demme or Leigh brought to their better movies - but they had better material.

Best Actor

Will Win: Mickey Rourke The Wrestler

Should Win: Rourke, or Sean Penn in Milk

Who's Missing? Christian Bale The Dark Knight, Ben Kingsley Elegy, James Franco Pineapple Express

My "Who's Missing" here is relatively nitpicky, which is why I can't quite bring myself to pick a winner here either. Does it really matter if Rourke or Penn wins? How lucky are we to get two performances this astonishing in a year? I suppose my gut really goes with Rourke, who's fearless, physical, and so wounded in The Wrestler, a movie that is so much more than a performance piece because it's such a great performance piece - because Rourke inhabits the role and reveals a life. Lucky for us, so does Penn in Milk, and these are clearly the two finest male performances this year.

Best Actress

Will Win: Kate Winslet The Reader

Should Win: Meryl Streep Doubt

Who's Missing? Penelope Cruz Elegy, Sally Hawkins Happy-Go-Lucky

I do, very much, believe that Cruz gave the performance of the year in Elegy, but in a year that half the people saw that movie that had seen the already-not-seen-by-many Vicky Cristina Barcelona, I'm more than happy to see her walk away with Best Supporting Actress, which she deserves. Too bad she deserves to win both categories, which is what people once thought Winslet would do if The Reader had been considered eligible for Best Supporting Actress. I do think that Winslet is one of the greatest actresses in the world, but without seeing The Reader, I think that this win is a product of sympathy and marketing - I'd much rather retroactively give her the Oscar for Little Children or Sense and Sensibility. There were two astonishingly vivid, challenging performances this year - this seems to be the thing to do to get Oscar nominations, and it's a trick I'm happy to fall for over and over again - in Anne Hathaway's Rachel Getting Married work and Melissa Leo in Frozen River. Both are so extraordinary, and so deserving. My heart is too, in some way, with Leo, who I fell in love with watching Homicide in the mid-90's, seeing those searing eyes poking out from that fiery mane of hair. But Streep in Doubt made me feel the impossible - a world of sympathy and understanding for a world of order and "certainty" that is Streep's battered core in Doubt. I never expected to be so moved and fascinated by the performance, but that is perhaps why the greatness of Streep has become so expected as to be forgettable - a mistake if I ever heard one.

Best Supporting Actor

Will and Should Win: Heath Ledger The Dark Knight

Who's Missing: Eddie Marsan Happy-Go-Lucky, James Franco Milk, Richard Dreyfuss W.

Some of the Oscar haters this year have said they don't think the Academy would "recognize a comic book performance" if Ledger had still been alive, a way to critique the Academy's tastes while agreeing with them. I think that even had Ledger lived, he'd be the front-runner for this award, and he'd win. His Joker is a sort of instant icon, so immediate and unignorable from the moment he speaks - even before he walks on! - that it would have been too much to ignore, much like Daniel Day Lewis in There Will Be Blood last year, or Helen Mirren in The Queen. The performances have become, in our everything-is-analyzed-immeidately culture, part of our contemporary understanding of the current state of movie-making. Add to that that I can barely even muster goodwill for the other four - Josh Brolin in Milk? James Franco was that movie's breakout performance, for his quiet, unshakable chemistry with Sean Penn; Brolin was serviceable, and got consolation votes for those not voting for his work in W. Robert Downey Jr. in Tropic Thunder? Obnoxious. Phillip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt? Serviceable, but for Hoffman, it's work he could do in his sleep; it never made me feel his conflicts with Meryl Streep were battles of equals. And as for Michael Shannon in Revolutionary Road, Shannon is a terrific actor (see him seethe in 2007's Bug), his performance revealed the movie's unswallowably self-serving pessimism; his crazy-man-who-speaks-the-truth didn't have much of a life of his own except to propel Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio into arguments about "the truth" of things. To me, it was the lie of things, and a nasty one.

Best Supporting Actress

Will and Should Win: Penelope Cruz Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Who's Missing? Nursel Köse The Edge of Heaven, Nürgel Yesilcay The Edge of Heaven, Ari Graynor Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

This one's a no-brainer. Cruz pops in halfway into Vicky Cristina and isn't just a jolt to the movie, she's the core of its sex-and-love-caldron hippie idealism - and better, she coaxes you right into her unstable arms. This is the role that allowed Cruz, like nothing since Blow, indulge the heights of her vulnerability and sexiness, allowed her to give in to all of her wildness. And, since she wasn't nominated for that even-better performance in Elegy that also showed that spark coming to life, she just deserves this. Of the other nominees, I think both Amy Adams (for Doubt) and Taraji P. Henson (for Benjamin Button) are extremely talented, but their performances are nothing special. Marisa Tomei is the conflicted heart of the real world in The Wrestler, and I'm happy she's getting some of the respect she's deserved all along for her great work here. And Viola Davis is certainly a spoiler here - a ten-minute tete-a-tete with Meryl Streep that proves her a sad, wise equal, which is about as great of a compliment as anyone deserves. I'd love those performances to be side by side with the hilarious drunkard Ari Graynor in Nick and Norah (that gum in the toilet scene!), or either of the mother-daughter team in The Edge of Heaven of Köse and Yesilcay that connects us with that movies globetrotting loose threads. Critics centerd on The Edge of Heaven this year because of Hanna Schygullah, a German legend from Fassbinder's old 70's films, but hers, wonderful as she is, doesn't have the emotional ease and truth of those two central performances - Köse, who is scarred but shows the same temerity and anger that comes out in Yesilcay's enraged protestor.

Best Original Screenplay:
Will Win: Milk

Should Win: Wall-E

In a surprising category, I'm moved enough by the cleverness of the Wall-E Earth to beat great indie writing in Frozen River and Happy-Go-Lucky, and the smart politics of Milk. Also nominated is the forgotten January 2008 release In Bruges, what a shock, eh?

Who's Missing? Rachel Getting Married, Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

Best Adapted Screenplay:

Will Win: Slumdog Millionaire

Should Win: Doubt

John Patrick Shanley had perhaps the easiest job of all the nominees - to make an already pretty cinematic stage play slightly wider and make it work for great actors. Still, the only nominee that isn't nominated for Best Picture, Doubt is the briskest and most interesting on the page of any of the nominees, tantalizing in its mysterious clues to something that doesn't connect because all it should make us do is doubt, but with the certainty that an answer lurks somewhere.

Who's Missing? Elegy and The Dark Knight, of course!

Conversations With Dead People

It's a long forgotten argument, but it's one that I've been thinking of lately and I just can't let drop. The argument? Buffy The Vampire Slayer "let down its viewers" in its last two, more adult, "darker" seasons. This is wrong, but more importantly, the fact that it still rattles me is something I need to discuss.

Time has gone by - Buffy ended its 7 season run in May of 2003 with "Chosen," an episode that accomplished the rare feat of bringing me to tears during even its fight scenes - potential slayers working together to conquer evil tugged at the heart strings, who knew? Yet today, as a news item on Salon.com was discussing Buffy creator Joss Whedon's new series Dollhouse (starring buxom Buffy alum Eliza Dushku), links were listed to synopses of Buffy's season 7 and season 6 finales, and Salon's sometimes-gushing, sometimes-puzzling analysis of it. I guess it had been a number of years since anyone had mentioned Buffy in print, thus these two articles were the most recently linked related articles.

I've been thinking a lot of Buffy lately, and I mean all of Buffy. A month or two ago, I watched their seminal 1997 season 2 2-part episodes "Surprise" and "Innocence," two episodes that really transformed the series into the cult it became. In it, Buffy (Sarah Michelle Gellar) turned 17, faced an apocalypse and responded by having sex with her vampire true love, Angel (David Boreanaz), accidentally making him evil in the process and losing him forever. On this risky 2-parter, after which nothing in the series remains the same, a franchise was launched - Buffy and Angel were never to truly get back together, leading to the ability to create Angel, and the ability to keep that show's entire 5-year run stocked with shelves and shelves of romantic anguish. I watched the episode because of the show's heartwrenching final exchange between Buffy and her mother, Joyce (Kristine Sutherland):

Joyce: So what did you do for your birthday?

Buffy: (with a pause) I got older.

Joyce: You look the same to me.

Joss Whedon commented in today's article on "Dollhouse" about how surprised he had been that internet culture allowed head writers and creators or shows to become celebrities in their own right. Really, it was dialogue like that - simple, cutting, powerful. I went and watched a separate Whedon-penned episode a few days later, their famous season 3 finale "Graduation Day." I wanted to see the ferocious fight scene between Buffy and "bad" slayer Faith (Dushku) that involved leather pants and handcuffs. Even more, I wanted to see the elliptical dream sequence that followed it, in which a comatose Buffy and Faith share an untennable moment of bonding. These were risks, like the season 4 all-dream episode "Restless," that people remained behind, even as Whedon challenged his viewers. Yet when season 6 came along, people stopped answering the challenges. They knew their Buffy, and that wasn't it.

Buffy and Buffy have been such a part of my life. As season 6 began, it was 2001, and I was a college sophomore, doubting my life and wondering what I was doing in college. The season began with Buffy returning from the dead and contemplating a malaise that she had never anticipated. The subject of the season, truly, was constituting life after the end of certainty - it was about learning how to live with confusion. That season was, I thought rather undeniably, exciting and well plotted. In its end, Buffy regains a certainty of some kind and comes back in season 7, their final year, as a leader. It was in this season that the fans really started to hate the season, calling Buffy "a total bitch" and complaining about everything - the villain that talked too much, Buffy giving inspirational speeches, a crew of Slayers-in-training that "mostly whined," and a rush of too many series-long topics not given the forefront they deserve.

These are the arguments I take most issue with, and it's because I can't forget about them. I don't necessarily care that people didn't like seasons 6 and 7 of Buffy because I have them. I can go back and rewatch their legendary "Once More With Feeling" musical episode and feel the same stir I always felt. These arguments to me just show a lack of understanding not only about what made Buffy such an incredible experience, but of a lack of willingness to appreciate entertainment that asks anything of its audience. In my mind, it doesn't matter that Buffy reached a point in its run in which it could no longer resembled what it was before - that to me was so much the point of using the television medium, of allowing a story to actually take place across time, as only a work that played out over 7 actual years could truly do.

It also just points to TV audiences inundated with too much modernity, too much ability to whine, too much familiarity with having influence over the production of a TV show. This is probably something that makes a certain marketplace sense - an audience for a TV show, in effect, gets to be its "boss," since TV shows are just a product, a means to satisfy advertisers that you'll stick around through commercial breaks. Therefore, if an audience is unhappy with the product they are seeing, they, via blogs and letter writing and simply changing the channel, have the capacity to demand a different show. This happens - I can recall stories about The OC and 24 and Grey's Anatomy and Lost changing directions of plot lines mid-season in response to terrible audience reaction.

But I suppose terrible audience reaction is the problem - if you're a writer with a "voice," shouldn't this be the exact thing you should avoid? This is rather hard to enforce, considering how inundated television is with terrible writing (I've given up on far more shows than the few I've watched until the series' conclusions). But for a show that had the voice of Buffy, it's difficult to not find people taking the same territorial control as an affront to quality. Much as I complained about the whining regarding The Wire and The Sopranos' final seasons, I couldn't help but want to shut the whiners up - since most, anyway, were coming up wtih complaints in order to have some sort of relevance. I always fear that a gifted writer would hear so much complaining, consider it too valid, and collapse the trajectory of their show and their work - leading to both the next clear criticism by whiners, that a show has "lost its direction."

Thankfully, Joss Whedon was never one to cave to too much pressure. I remember reading about "The Body," the famous Buffy season 5 episode without any background music. Whedon included a kiss, out of panic and solace, between its two lesbian characters Willow and Tara (Allyson Hannigan and Amber Benson). The two had never kissed on screen before, although we knew they were lovers. The WB took issue with the kiss - it was rather long, in an episode that was supposedly focused on the death of Buffy's mother - and Whedon told them simply, it was "not negotiable." Looking at that landmark episode objectively, the episode would have been plenty powerful without the kiss, and there's one line in that great scene that I just don't buy at all (Willow says to Tara about her need to wear a blue sweater, "Joyce loved it so!" No one says "so"). But this was the mark of someone who did not compromise his vision. Because of the inclusion of that scene, Willow and Tara seemed to make out in virtually every season 6 episode, and Buffy even included a lesbian sex scene towards the end of season 7 that was just as graphic as its hetero counterparts.

In season 6, though, one of the haters was one Whedon couldn't shut up - Sarah Michelle Gellar, who described the season as "missing Buffy's spirit." In a way, Buffy is a hero of mine - somoene with power and knowledge, and the clarity to know when she's in the right and when she's not needed. It saddens me that Gellar didn't see Buffy's own battles with confusion and uncertainty as an essential part of that knowledge. Buffy has one line in the season 7 episode "Conversations With Dead People" in which she explains, with vivid clarity, the true tenor of her confusion:

"I feel like I'm worse than anyone. Honestly, I'm beneath them. My friends, my boyfriends. I feel like I'm not worthy of their love. 'Cause even though they love me, it doesn't mean anything 'cause their opinions don't matter. They don't know. They haven't been through what I've been through. They're not the slayer. I am. Sometimes I feel—(sighs) this is awful—I feel like I'm better than them. Superior."

The vampire she's speaking with tells her, "You do have a superiority complex - and you have an inferiority complex about it."

In reading about season 7, some writers of the staff felt that Joss Whedon was writing the thinly veiled Joss Whedon story - a leader with "vision" (over his writing staff) who was aware of the direction he wanted his season to move in, and a gifted group of underling writers, many of whom were his close friends, that he distanced himself from in his decision making. That only makes the season more profound to me, in looking back on it.

A PJ Harvey line I also identify with: "I freed myself from family, freed myself from work, freed myself, freed myself, and remained alone."

What am I speaking of exactly that I see reflected in the last two years of Buffy? An understanding of certainty, the role uncertainty plays in it, the way that certainty of who you are and what you do can make you whole, but can also make you separate from those around you, even those you love. I see so much said about how we live in these two astonishing years of television. And perhaps that means when I read of these arguments about what Buffy did "wrong" in those last couple of years, I hear an argument not against the show, but against how human beings are in general, a lack of understanding, and a getting-in-the-way. I hope I hear others returning to those final two years with a bit of growth and humility at some point.