The State of the Race – the Shifting Winds

If Avatar wins the Best Picture Oscar, it will be the first film to do so without having won the DGA, the PGA and without having ever even been nominated for the SAG ensemble. True, history for the PGA is relatively short, ditto the SAG ensemble. The DGA has a much longer history, and there have been quite a few films that have won Best Picture without winning the DGA. On the other hand, those films usually also had writing and acting nominations to go with them.

But let’s turn our attention once again to 1997. Earlier in the season, we looked at how Titanic stomped into town and crushed every other film in its path. At the time, it looked like Avatar might do the same. But the winds shifted. Titanic’s dominance of the Oscars was a late-in-the-game play. That was back when there was a lot of time for the shifting of the winds because first, there weren’t as many pre-awards, there were no bloggers – and the Oscars were staged as the really big awards show of the year.

Titanic’s run fairly last-minute, but not so last-minute as Shakespeare in Love. By the time Oscars rolled around, LA Times journalist Kenneth Turan had already published his prediction that Saving Private Ryan would win. From that moment until the day of the Oscars it became apparent that Shakespeare in Love was going to win, despite the dominance of Ryan in the other awards, like the PGA and the DGA. Not the SAG, however. The actors went balls-out for Shakespeare in Love, which went into the Oscar race with the most nominations.

Titanic, though, had support from the actors branch.¬† This is where the Lord of the Rings first and second films had trouble winning Best Picture, and where Avatar will have trouble winning Best Pic. With the preferential ballots being what they are, no one knows how this will go. We only have the 1930s, 1940s to fall back on and things were very different then.

What we do know is that Avatar heads into the race in the unusual position of having no acting nominations and no writing nominations, no major guild wins and not a single SAG nod. Is it possible it can win? Sure, just as it’s possible Up and The Blind Side can win. Will they win?

Conversely, there are still four movies with the right stuff to win: The Hurt Locker sitting pretty with a PGA and a DGA win (Saving Private Ryan did not win with those two under its belt). Inglourious Basterds, has the actors vote with the SAG. Up in the Air, which has more acting nominations than any other film in the race, and Precious, which landed the coveted editing nomination. My work thus far, which might amount to nothing more than a wild guess that turns out to be wrong, tells me that only one of these four films can win.

And they deserve to win. The Hurt Locker is more than just an Iraq film that made no money. It is a film full of suspense, tightly wound yet not rushed. It doesn’t give over to the violence for indulgent pleasure – it lets the plight of the characters drive the story. The film is framed by the amount of days left in this outfit’s tour of duty. As the film unfolds we count down the days. As the team nears the end of their tour, things just keep getting worse. Eldridge watches the doctor (who is helping him just survive the day without falling apart) explode — he’s there one minute, the next minute he’s gone. Eldridge asked him to come along for the ride to see what life was like for them and this is how it ends up? What kind of life is Eldridge going to have when he comes home?

Sgt. Sanborn is supposed to be in charge, or at least keep the men safe but he can’t control James, who is off on his own wild mission to stop the clever Iraqis, one IED at a time. Sanborn thinks he knows how to get in, get out and keep on living a normal life but when confronted with a desperate Iraqi trapped in a spider’s web of explosive devices, when he sees James almost die trying to untangle the web, and when they all dive out of the way as the man prays while his body explodes – he confronts his own mortality, something no one ever wants soldiers to do. You just don’t go there.

James is the core of the film, and is the embodiment of the American involvement in the war. He just can’t stop himself. He thinks he’s being a hero but he can’t even recognize the ones he’s supposed to be saving. Everyone looks like the enemy – who is he fighting? What is he fighting for? All he can do is be good at his job. And he is so good at his job he can’t pull himself away. This says more about the predicament we find ourselves in than a dozen lecturing anti-war films. We are still in Iraq. We are still in Afghanistan. We can’t leave because we’ve built a house of cards. And for what?

Inglourious Basterds is a film that has a lot of heat, not just because of its epic scope, but it is wildly entertaining and watchable. Is it the pinnacle of Tarantino’s career? It is, I think, his most mature story to date. Much of his earlier work felt like, to me, dialogue for dialogue’s sake. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It was beyond entertaining and some of the best American films ever made.¬† But there was not a lot of “there” there for me. Inglourious Basterds is full of layered emotion and historical context, both in terms of how it remembers Nazi propaganda movies and Hollywood victimization movies. It turns convention on its head and imagines a different outcome. Inglourious Basterds belongs in the same room as Paths of Glory, Dr. Strangelove and the Great Dictator.

As many times as I’ve seen the film, I find that the part that cuts to the bone most is the sequence where Aldo Raines carves the Nazi symbol into the Nazis forehead. It is so visceral, that picture, because we all know it is what they deserved, all of them, so that no one would have to hunt them down years later.

Up in the Air comes into the race with the most acting nominations – two for supporting, Vera Farmiga and Anna Kendrick, and one for George Clooney. It lacks an editing nod, and it lacked a SAG ensemble nod, but with the preferential balloting being what it is, Up in the Air could be just popular enough with the whole of the Academy to pull in a surprise win. This would be funny considering it was the film everyone pegged as the Best Pic winner early on.

Up in the Air is all about George Clooney, as it turns out. It is partly about the flagging economy, and the firings by memo, and downsizing — though without any pivotal enemy, there is nowhere to put our emotions regarding the economy in that film. There is no sense of urgency because none of the main characters are particularly threatened. Clooney’s character is threatened, to be sure, by the idea that he can be easily replaced and thus will be forced to stop playing his game of earning sky miles and avoiding life. But the truth is, the film is about a man who cannot connect with women in any real sense. It is a very personal film for Jason Reitman, and it doesn’t really take hold in a broader context. But a personal story is always a powerful one, provided you believe enough in the main character’s plight.¬† Where is he going? He’s going nowhere. He’s flying in circles, collecting air miles he’ll never use, pursuing one illusion after another. He is the American dream if that means life-by-ad-slogan. If you buy into the ideas the corporations are selling you might start to think you really are as important as they tell you you are.

But of course, as is driven home at the end of the film when Clooney finally reaches that pivotal moment in his frequent flyer mile goal, you really buy the things that really matter in life.

I’ve heard different theories as to how the balloting could play out – some say the film has to be a number 1 or a number 2 to win. Others have said if it’s split up enough it could be a number 3. We just don’t know what film is going to fall where.

Precious comes into the race with a lead actress nomination and a supporting nod, is the first Best Picture nominee ever directed by an African American and contains two of the year’s most talked about performances, with Gabby Sidibe and Mo’Nique. Precious is a story about, to hear Lee Daniels tell it, invisible people. They might not be invisible so much as they are considered repulsive and are therefore dismissed by society for being obese. This is a film that could have been told in any community that hides and condones abuse. It doesn’t have to be black, nor even American. Abuse happens all over the world all of the time, especially to women. But what Precious has that the others don’t is that it is by far the most emotionally moving of the bunch. You don’t walk out of that movie and forget what you saw.

Finally, Avatar can still win Best Picture but it will have to make history to do so.¬† Cameron’s epic seemed to have its peak when it won at the Golden Globes. But things kind of tumbled from there. Was it Cameron? Was it the preferential ballot at the Producers Guild? Was it the simple fact that the actors don’t want this to be their future? No one can make the kind of movies Jim Cameron can.¬† Still, in order to make the kind of money he makes on his movies, the writing has to be universal enough that it doesn’t exclude anyone. Good writing usually does exclude whole groups of people – those who like to watch The Bachelor, for instance. Most people can get the story and be moved by Avatar.¬† Where the Academy is concerned, it’s a love it/hate it movie and without the support of the actors branch or the writers branch, it would be an odd and unlikely winner. But anything can happen.

The Charts.

2008