The State of the Race: Of Saviors and Psychopaths – the Extremes that Drove Best Picture this Year

Now that the critics have mostly laid out their own chosen films for the year, the separation between industry and critics could prove most dramatic in 2014 than it has in a while. This, because many studio films are waiting in the wings that could position themselves in the race starting with the Producers Guild onward.

The Oscar race always wants to be about studio movies, for the most part, even if it’s given away Best Picture a couple of times lately to independent films made by directors from anywhere but America. Last year’s two frontrunners were directed by Mexican-born Alfonso Cuaron and British-born Steve McQueen.

Yet the frontrunner is as indie as you can possibly get. Look up independent film in the dictionary and you’ll see Boyhood there. Cost practically nothing, premiered at Sundance, it has become The Artist this year because nothing has come along to challenge it. Nothing has come close to the reviews its gotten, and no other film has an “Oscar story” that’s better than 12 years of filmmaking edited together to look like a seamless two hour film. It’s remarkable.

Still, The Artist was able to win in 2011 because it was a “weak year.” The Artist had one challenger, Hugo, which cost too much and didn’t make enough back. Had it been a blockbuster it might have toppled The Artist in the end but I doubt it. The Artist had the win locked in early, just like Boyhood has.

One of the reasons Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is winning everything as it continues its march to its inevitable Best Picture win is that real life still exists within it. There are no real monsters that threaten the fabric of society and there are no unrealistic saviors or heroes who dwarf the importance of the rest of humanity. Boyhood remembers what real life was like before cell phones and social media replaced the human experience. It remembers when friends were people you met in towns you lived in. People are still people, not trolls cloaked in anonymity waging a path of destruction in our all-too-necessary electronic encasement.

Boyhood to today’s generation is like what It’s a Wonderful Life or To Kill a Mockingbird was to older generations. What life used to be like when things were still good. When Ellar Coltrane at last comes of age in Boyhood he remarks on how things have changed now that electronics had added such a dominant dimension to our lives. He rejects it because he’s an independent thinker. Boyhood never collapses into the darker regions of what this life has become for so many of us. It reminds us that flesh, blood and heart still drive our human impulses.

But outside the safe haven that Boyhood represents are two wildly divergent themes in this year’s presumed lineup. So far, we’ve heard from the critics who have lived up to their reputation in rejecting most of the mainstream studio films to embrace an increasingly independent representation of cinematic art.

The question remains – will the industry voters, the thousands of them that find their consensus with the common denominators — reach for the studio films the critics rejected? Will American Sniper, Into the Woods, Unbroken find their place at last in the race?

There is the continuing pull to remember and honor great men. Martin Luther King, Jr., Louis Zamperini, Stephen Hawking, Alan Turning. There is also the Birdman – a martyr for the cause of what life used to be like before it all went to shit – before superhero movies, before viral videos, before the truth about marriage, the collapsing structure of the American dream. He floats half through Birdman, dying for our sins.

While there will always be that pull in a consensus vote to pick admirable characters who reflect the betterment of society, it starts to feel like an Oscar cliche after a while. That is how you can sometimes get a mixed bag in the Best Picture lineup. That’s how movies like Wolf of Wall Street, Black Swan and Django Unchained get in. The Oscar movie isn’t always just about the good.

One of the perplexing plot twists in this year’s Oscar race is the hypocrisy that emerged over the accepted portrayals of male psychopaths in Foxcatcher and Nightcrawler but the rejected portrayals by psychotic or sociopathic women. This unearths the different ways we view men and women on screen and it will explain why complex women are disappearing from film while men are flourishing.

The sociopath in Nightcrawler is a wide eyed freak, the result of a culture raising children with high self-esteem over character, perhaps. Asportrayed by Jake Gyllenhaal, Louis Bloom’s arrogance comes from the idea that he is just doing what the American dream promises every white male at birth: the opportunity to do whatever you want to achieve success. What a wonderfully odd performance, right up there with Robert De Niro as Travis Bickel. He takes what he wants. He’s smart enough to manipulate the system and in so doing, he gives the people what they want, no matter what ethical line he’s erasing. Audiences, journalists and bloggers are free to adore this movie, to lavish it with awards and you’ll never see any tear-down of this film because the lead character isn’t depicted in a good light.

Steve Carell plays a pitifully isolated boyman who has no moral or ethical line either. If you’ve lived through the past decade you’ll know why.The inequality in this country is worsening by the day. Thanks to a couple of key decisions our elections can mostly be bought by those with the majority of the wealth. Our democracy has become an oligarchy. Foxcatcher brilliantly depicts this disparity with the relationship between working class Mark Ruffalo and Channing Tatum at the hands of billionaire John Dupont. And yet, no one is ever going to criticize Carell’s character for depicting a rich man at his worst (well, maybe some at Fox News).

The way social justice bloggers and so-called feminists attacked the portrayal of Rosamund Pike’s incarnation of Amazing Amy had only to do with David Fincher having directed it. The “Misogynist” finger pointing started then. It continues here, despite Gone Girl’s shattering the stereotype that women must be portrayed as saintly supporters, hottie babes, or throwaway self-destructing bitches. Pike’s Amy is terrifying because she wins. She always wins. She gets what she wants no matter what she has to do to get it. She manipulates people because they hold those preconceived notions of what women are supposed to be like.

This was also true of Julianne Moore in David Cronenberg’s masterful satire, Maps to the Stars. There aren’t many films willing to be elusive, artful and vulgar all at once. It is an inexplicable head-scratcher how this movie hasn’t gotten more attention. I can’t help but think Julianne Moore’s neurotic, desperate older actress who will do anything for a part is “too insulting” for women to deal with, certainly for Academy members to deal with. In a way it’s lucky it isn’t big enough or attention-getting enough to incur so much wrath as Gone Girl has.

If Gone Girl’s success teaches us anything it’s that people are hungry for what they never get to see anymore – dazzling versatile portrayals of all kinds of women on screen — old, young, beautiful, bitchy, funny, evil, good — they’re all there. Oh, how I wish women were all as good as Hollywood and the chattersphere wants them to be. Alas, they’re not. We’re human, after all. You know, like real people?

As we dutifully jot down our expectations about how people are going to vote, they must stare down that screener pile and decide what is worth watching and what isn’t. Once the votes are cast, the history is written, the winners celebrate and the losers shrug, we turn to face the world we live in and the people we know. We’ll all find much better and richer stories told on television because that world, unlike the world of film now, isn’t filtered through an online collective. How many people watch is all that matters. While television isn’t perfect, the relationship between material and audience is pure. The Oscar race is controlled and managed so that the only stories that squeeze through are tailor-made for so-called Oscar voters.

Maybe it doesn’t matter anyway because no one is really here to decide anything that matters. Movies like Boyhood deserve to win awards. Awards were invented specifically to reward exceptional efforts that pay off like that film. We might see history in the making this year with the first African American woman to be nominated for a Best Director Oscar. We might see the first women to adapt her own novel and get an Oscar nomination for it. It is these minor and major bursts of happiness that keep and hold my ever diminishing attention.

Predictions

BEST PICTURE
1. Boyhood
2. Birdman
3. Selma
4. The Imitation Game
5. Gone Girl
6. The Theory of Everything
7. The Grand Budapest Hotel
8. Whiplash
9. Foxcatcher
10. Nightcrawler

BEST ACTOR
1. Michael Keaton, Birdman
2. Eddie Redmayne, The Theory of Everything
3. David Oyelowo, Selma
4. Benedict Cumberbatch, The Imitation Game
5. Steve Carell, Foxcatcher
6. Jake Gyllenhaal, Nightcrawler

BEST ACTRESS
1. Julianne Moore, Still Alice
2. Rosamund Pike, Gone Girl
3. Jennifer Aniston, Cake
4. Reese Witherspoon, Wild
5. Felicity Jones, Theory
6. Hilary Swank, The Homesman

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
1. Patricia Arquette, Boyhood
2. Jessica Chastain, A Most Violent Year
3. Keira Knightley, Imitation Game
4. Meryl Streep, Into the Woods
5. Emma Stone, Birdman
6. Renee Russo, Nightcrawler, Carrie Coon, Gone Girl

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
1. JK Simmons, Whiplash
2. Edward Norton, Birdman
3. Mark Ruffalo, Foxcatcher
4. Robert Duvall, The Judge
5. Ethan Hawke, Boyhood
6. Josh Brolin, Inherent Vice

BEST DIRECTOR
1. Richard Linklater, Boyhood
2. Ava DuVernay, Selma
3. Alejandro Inarritu, Birdman
4. David Fincher, Gone Girl
5. Wes Anderson, Grand Budapest
6. Bennett Miller, Foxcatcher

BEST SCREENPLAY, ORIGINAL
1. Grand Budapest Hotel
2. Birdman
3. Boyhood
4. Selma
5. Nightcrawler
6. Foxcatcher

BEST SCREENPLAY, ADAPTED
1. Gone Girl
2. The Imitation Game
3. The Theory of Everything
4. Wild
5. Inherent Vice
6. Obvious Child