Cinema: Oscar 2011: Battle of the Egos
It’s been often called Super Bowl for film geeks. For me it’s another opportunity to go on a movie-related rant. Oscar weekend is here, readers, and I’m in a celebratory mood, not just because both frontrunners for Best Picture, David Fincher’s The Social Network and Tom Hooper’s The King’s Speech, are damn fine movies (that’s not always the case), but also because it allows me to raise a toast to this year’s admirable slew of snubs and long shots.
Bravo to writer-director Debra Granik, as well as actors Jennifer Lawrence and John Hawkes, for getting some much deserved recognition for their terrific work in the Ozarks-set backwoods noir Winter’s Bone. All hail my favorite movie of 2010, the sublime Italian melodrama I Am Love, which unfortunately was not that country’s submission for the Foreign Language Oscar but nevertheless caught the eye of Tinseltown’s costume designers. It will probably lose to Alice in Wonderland in this category, but I’m beyond ecstatic to see it among this year’s nominees. And as for Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, I suppose I could bitch and moan about what a travesty it is to see it passed over for Adapted Screenplay, Film Editing and Visual Effects. (The film made it to the final seven finalists in the latter category, but ultimately the Academy felt compelled to make room for that tidal wave at the beginning of Clint Eastwood’s Hereafter.) I have a feeling, though, that you’re going to see its director, the immensely talented Edgar Wright, hit the red carpet eventually.
Let’s hear it for Sunday evening’s sure thing Christian Bale, whose career I’ve been following since he sang for Japanese World War II soldiers in Steven Spielberg’s Empire of the Sun. His galvanizing tour-de-force in David O. Russell’s The Fighter – a dysfunctional family squabblefest that almost forgot it’s a boxing film – is a lock to win for Best Supporting Actor, and quite possibly for Bale’s onscreen mom Melissa Leo for Supporting Actress. It’s in the bag, sir. Just promise me you won’t go all Patrick Bateman in front of the podium. Save all that pent-up anger for the makers of Toy Story 3, who will score yet another win for Animated Feature. Why doesn’t the Academy get it over with and rename that category the Pixar Default Trophy? Either one of the two competing titles, Dean DeBlois and Chris Sanders’s rousing Viking adventure How to Train Your Dragon or Sylvain Chomet’s bittersweet Jacques Tati homage The Illusionist, would be a far more deserving alternative. And don’t even get me started on how Disney threw Tangled, my favorite animated film of 2010, under the bus to focus on a more pervasive Oscar campaign for Pixar’s warmed-over greatest-hits piece of nineties nostalgia. Way to go, Mouseketeers.
What about Oscar night’s grand prize, you ask? Well, it’s a bit tricky this year. Many of my colleagues are already resigned to the notion that The King’s Speech will walk away with the most coveted statuette. I’m not so sure the race is over for The Social Network. Statistics all point in the direction of the stuttering monarch saga: No movie except Braveheart has won Best Picture after failing to win The Directors Guild of America award (Hooper got it this year), the Producers Guild of America award (check), and the Screen Actors Guild (yep)…and the most-buzzed-about film Braveheart beat at the Oscars in 1996, Ron Howard’s Apollo 13, wasn’t even nominated for Best Director, a death knell for your Best Picture chances, though that didn’t stop Driving Miss Daisy from winning in 1991. And yet, my gut instinct has been quite insistent in demanding that I resist calling Oscar night in favor of The King’s Speech, much as I’d like nothing more than to do just that. The reason can best be summed up in two words: Scott Rudin, producer of The Social Network.
Scott who? Rudin’s one of Hollywood’s most prolific movers and shakers, and his career stands out for having been able to strike a balance between commercial fare (The Firm, In & Out, The Addams Family) and prestige productions (Doubt, There Will Be Blood, Wonder Boys). This year he became the first producer since 1974 to have two films nominated for Best Picture (the second is Joel and Ethan Coen’s thoroughly satisfying True Grit). This season, The Social Network seemed destined to sweep every major award after its big victory at the Golden Globes. Suddenly, The King’s Speech started winning, and it hasn’t stopped.
The man responsible for this awards-season freight train? Harvey Weinstein, who co-founded Miramax Films with his brother Bob in 1978 and has since brought us some of the past two decades’ best films: The Piano, The Crying Game and Kill Bill immediately spring to mind. With The King’s Speech, he plans to repeat the stunning upset he pulled back in 1999, when Shakespeare in Love snatched the top prize expected to go to Saving Private Ryan. To add insult to injury, the winning film was announced by Steven Spielberg’s homeboy, Harrison Ford.
I’m willing to bet many Academy members haven’t forgotten than night, but here’s where it gets really interesting. Not only have Rudin, 52, and Weinstein, 58, been longtime rivals. Their shared penchant for literary adaptations and sophisticated subject matter have led them to, gulp, collaborate on several occasions. It was not a pretty picture. The two men, New York Jews known for their Type A personalities, butted heads on a variety of issues. Should, for instance, Nicole Kidman wear a prosthetic nose when playing Virginia Wolff in the movie version of The Hours? Weinstein: “No way in hell.” Rudin: “Oh yes she is.” Rudin won that round. Should director Stephen Daldry’s request to postpone the release of The Reader so he could have more time in the editing room be granted? Weinstein: “Are you <expletive> kidding me?! There go our Oscar chances.” Rudin: “He’s Stephen Daldry, for G-d’s sake. Mr. Billy effin’ Elliot!” Daldry got a few weeks’ reprieve, but Harvey got his way. Not long after that announcement was made, Rudin had his name taken off The Reader…and Kate Winslet won her first Oscar.
And now here we are. Two Hollywood titans with a trail of bad blood and bruised egos face off against each other in front of millions of viewers. Will Weinstein be able to retain his grip over Academy members who may have found The Social Network too cerebral and remote for their taste? (Fincher did himself no favors during his chilly Golden Globe acceptance speech.) Or will Rudin pull off a come-from-behind victory in the category for which his film was the frontrunner less than a month ago? Let me point out that he shepherded the Coens’ No Country for Old Men – as grim and cold-hearted as they come – to four Oscars, including Best Picture, in 2007. Cliffhangers like this are one of the reasons why I enjoy watching the Academy Awards. That, and all the fashion disasters on the red carpet.
Oscar weekend usually results in a fairly uneventful outlook for moviegoers at the multiplex, at least outside of this year’s nominees. (Peter and Bobby Farrelly’s Hall Pass, which opens Friday, will be reviewed in next week’s column.) This, however, is hardly the case in the arthouse beat. After months of anticipation, founders Kareem Tabsch and Vivian Marthell are officially opening Wynwood’s nonprofit O Cinema to the public …with a dud. Mississippi Damned is a painfully earnest slice of desperate Southern living that made the festival rounds – and won a handful of awards – in 2009. Juggling multiple storylines and a large ensemble cast, writer-director Tina Mabry follows the many, many troubles of two working-class African American families struggling to make ends meet in rural Mississippi, first in the midst of Reaganomics, and then at the tail end of Clinton’s second term.
Mabry, who was raised in Tupelo and is making her feature directing debut here, may have experienced some of the calamities that befall Leigh (Chasity Kershal Hammitte), her baby sister Kari (Kylee Russell as a child, For Colored Girls‘s Tessa Thompson later on) and their cousin Sammy (Lost‘s Malcolm David Kelley, then American Gangster‘s Malcolm Goodwin). Leigh makes very little effort to hide the fact she’s carrying on a fling with another girl, much to the chagrin of her mother (Michael Hyatt), who also has to deal with her husband’s gambling addiction. Sammy, a talented basketball player at school, discovers he’s going to have to pay a huge price is he’s to have a shot at getting a college scholarship. Not that his absentee father would care. A few doors down, Charlie (Jossie Thacker) endures bouts of verbal violence from her unemployed husband, while goodhearted Anna (Simbi Kali Williams) nurtures Kari’s musical talent by letting her use her piano.
As I watched the characters play out this cycle of hardship and abuse, I started writing down every big dysfunctional crisis Mabry force-feeds the viewer: domestic discord, alcoholism, sexual abuse, addiction to prescription drugs. At the point we discover a major character has been diagnosed with breast cancer I threw my hands in the air. Enough already! Life is a constant struggle, Mabry conveys in every scene of Mississippi Damned, and that makes for some compelling moments in which the characters deal with money problems. This issue, not the aforementioned laundry list of calamities, should have been Mabry’s focus here. We need movies that explore the African American experience from a personal perspective. There’s no reason why they should be a drag like this one.
Over at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, patrons can catch up with one of several movies Natalie Portman has scheduled to be released in theaters this year. Adapted from Ayelet Waldman’s novel “Love and Other Impossible Pursuits” by writer-director Don Roos (The Opposite of Sex, Happy Endings), The Other Woman is a sourpuss of a movie, a wan, curiously uninvolving portrait of a homewrecker than has you cheering for the bitter ex-wife. As the movie begins, Emilia Greenleaf (Portman) is picking up her precocious, high-maintenance stepson William (Charlie Tahan) from school. It’s safe to say their relationship is strained, and things aren’t that much better with her husband Jack (Scott Cohen), who used to be, wait for it, her boss on her first job right out of Harvard. The elephant in the room, which William uses to taunt her incessantly, lies in that empty baby room in their posh Upper East Side apartment.
The Other Woman asks a question other films have answered with far more insight: Can a couple that came into being at the expense of one marriage survive theirs after they lose a baby? Roos is too busy keeping the plot’s wheels turning to dive beneath the surface of his leading lady, though every time Lisa Kudrow, who plays Jack’s ex, is onscreen the movie comes to life. The war being waged between her and Portman’s character over William is, indeed, juicy stuff, but there’s not enough of it. If ever there was a film in need of Roos’s deliciously wicked sense of humor, this was it, but for the most part he opts to go the serious route. Wrong move. Stick with Black Swan, Portman fans.
For an example of how to successfully inject humor into serious subject matter, look no further than the new deadpan delight from director Elia Suleiman (Divine Intervention). The Time That Remains unfolds in a series of autobiographical vignettes in which the director, on a trip home to visit his ailing mother, looks back on his childhood and adolescence as a Palestinian living in Nazareth and in one case, goes back even further to dramatize the ordeal his father endured at the hands of the Israeli army when they took over the city in 1948. Suleiman, who plays himself in the present-day sequences, is obsessed with the cyclical nature of life, so several scenes play like a repetition of preceding ones, such as the ones in which Israeli soldiers check in on Suleiman’s father (The Band’s Visit‘s Saleh Bakri) and a fishing buddy and ask them the exact same questions every time, or when Suleiman’s father keeps preventing an elderly neighbor from setting himself on fire. I nearly fell out of my chair during a scene in which the teacher at Suleiman’s Israeli-run primary school blocks out the screen on which the students are watching Kirk Douglas and Jean Simmons kissing passionately in a scene from Stanley Kubrick’s Spartacus. “He’s like a brother to her,” she insists.
Suleiman’s genial brand of poker-faced satire has rarely steered him wrong, and he combines his sharp wit with a masterful use of single long shots that convey more in one static image than most directors can accomplish with more elaborately conceived sequences. In The Time That Remains, subtitled Chronicle of a Present Absentee, the personal becomes political, but never at the expense of a well-timed gag.
Mississippi Damned screens this weekend only at O Cinema. For more information go to o-cinema.org. The film also airs later this month on Showtime as part of Black History Month. For showtimes of The Other Woman go to gablescinema.com. The Time That Remains screens this weekend at the Bill Cosford Cinema following a special screening Thursday night that includes a post-film Q & A with University of Miami faculty and special guests. For more information go to cosfordcinema.com. The 83rd Academy Awards are scheduled to air Sunday night on ABC beginning at 8 pm and are being hosted this year by Anne Hathaway and James Franco. Make sure to tune in, folks. I’m sensing we’ll be witnessing a few surprises before the ceremony is over. Join the party and follow my Oscar night comments on twitter.com/RubenRos.
