This year, ask the Oscar questions that really matter
But first you'll have to sift through the glitzy garbage of the movie gold rush
'Flowers, but with garbage.'
Has there ever been a better metaphor for the Academy Awards? Granted, that line comes from Jennifer Lawrence in 'American Hustle' (nominated for 10 Oscars, Lawrence included), and she wasn't talking about the Academy Awards per se. She says it midway through the film, squeezing up her face and trying to describe the compellingly elusive stench of her nail polish. Lawrence loves this top coat, she explains, because it's 'perfumy' with a hint of 'rotten.'
Sweet, sour, flowers, garbage.
Chances are, if you've made it this far into Oscar season and still have a sliver of interest left in the show Sunday night, you're anticipating the pomp, the pageant and the garbage that lies beneath - the flubs, poor fashion choices, tactless red-carpet moments, awkward speeches and deeply undeserving winners. It's probably that opulent odor that's pulling you forward, that perversely fragrant tickle in your nose, the one telling you: You sit through months of Oscar speculation (which, unlike government-election prognostication, doesn't come with polling data), and you listen to the back and forth about who should win versus who will win, and you witness the entertainment industrial complex give itself over completely to a gaudy, self-congratulatory extravaganza.
And in the end:
None of it matters.
The flora's always covering up something rotten. You could argue that awarding Oscars is drafting history; but if so, that's an easily scrapped draft, considering how the litany of Oscar losers (Hitchcock, Kubrick, Marilyn Monroe, 'His Girl Friday,' 'Do the Right Thing,' ad infinitum) is as monumental as the winners. Come Monday morning you always understand, to paraphrase Matthew Broderick in Alexander Payne's 1999 masterpiece 'Election' (another Oscar loser), we're not electing the pope here.
If it's all so unsatisfying, that's because the problem with Oscar season is that we lie to ourselves and talk about the wrong things. We spend months gauging Oscar-caliber work, then months more reasoning out Oscar-caliber winners. But we leave little room to explain that reasoning - and no time to ask questions that resonate after the awards. What follows, then, are four meaningful conversations you can have about this year's nominees. But make it worthwhile: Admit you like the stink.
Q: Is 'Gravity' the future of entertainment, or too much of an effects showcase to win an Oscar?
A: More than likely, a bit of both. It's not just a pretty, hollow promise, nor is it easily replicated enough to be a blueprint. Still, it is the future of the theatrical experience. I watched 'Gravity' on television, and though the visuals were no less engrossing - this may be the only movie in years that actually makes you wonder how they did that - the context was utterly missing, the pitch of the theater seat was absent, the enveloping 3-D was gone. Here was art torn from its context; subsequently, it didn't make as much sense. Particularly missing was the weak-kneed physical reaction that 'Gravity' director Alfonso Cuaron solicited in the right circumstances; more importantly, the rootlessness of the camera - the film's ability to make up, down, right and left look old-fashioned - seemed too showy outside a theater.
Which is one hint at why this is not just empty showbiz: Cuaron's big-screen 'Gravity' so seamlessly connects that zero-gravity disorientation and deep-space alienation in its characters with the visceral, upended feeling it installs in theatrical audiences that, as technologically upfront as it is, the result becomes less digital than human. Not unlike the Lumiere brothers' 1895 footage of a train arriving at a station, which sent audiences scurrying from the path of the locomotive. Without the technology and the theater, the emotion doesn't land in the same way. Like Sandra Bullock, only when we stand to exit do we recognize how much of the experience, and the narrative itself, was actually about the desire for hard, firm Earth beneath our feet. The effect was so powerful and convincing I almost didn't notice the film is also a warning, about how trapped we can be by technology.
Q: If the hedonism of 'Wolf of Wall Street' contained a moral center, would it be a contender?
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