Questionable Taste Theatre/We Need to Talk: The Oscar Nominations
What a shithole.
Shame, which I thought was an obvious awards contender for both quality and General Awardnesness, was utterly ignored. Drive has it even worse, with one piddly nomination for Sound Editing. (Shame at least got a nice clean cut direct; the Academy walked past Drive, turned around, came back, and flicked it right in the nose. That’s why Ryan Gosling’s face looks like that. That shit stings.)
In other news, we live in a world in which Puss in Boots is up for consideration for Best Anything, and Jonah Hill can now put “Oscar Nominee” in front of his name forever. Didn’t they understand what that means? You can’t take them back! No amount of 21 Jump Street can ever take that away! THE OSCARS INVITES YOU TO 21 JUMP STREET, OKAY? THAT IS WHERE WE LIVE NOW.
But that horror aside, the dual snub of two of the best films of the year seems especially cruel since the new 10-slot Best Picture slot had plenty of room for the appalling Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close, the Are You Kidding Me With This The Help, and the middling Midnight in Paris, and still had a slot left over. They only used nine out of ten, and STILL wouldn’t nominate Shame or Drive. That’s sort of when you know that you’ll be in for an evening of watching Steven Spielberg and/or Martin Scorsese repeatedly take the stage and pretend like either of their nominated movies is anywhere close to their best. And that’s if you’re lucky. (Also when you knew that: as soon as those movies were announced. Be real.)
Amid rare victories (If a Tree Falls gets rightly nominated for Best Doc), there are other small outrages (Rooney Mara and not Tilda Swinton? I see), and some all-around sighing (so, we can nominate actresses of color…as long as they’re playing maids, I see, yes, that is an excellent thing to reinforce, thank you, definitely we should have more of that), but honestly, the movie that annoys me most in terms of the accolades being showered upon it is The Artist, because seriously.
Here’s why; very vague spoilers under the cut.
Despite its obvious Awardsness, The Artist, while always competent and sometimes clever, is the barest sketch of what it purports to be about; the hat-tips to Singing in the Rain are cute, but the movie rarely goes deeper than that. A slightly-dickweed silent-movie star is sidelined by the development of the talkies; he spends most of the rest of the movie drinking and feeling sorry for himself, while the young object of his affections rises to a potentially-interesting studio-system stardom we barely see, because her main function is to Love Hero. Jean Dujardin is clearly talented (though the dog was the most compelling aspect of this particular character), and Berenice Bejo is…there, but the movie was both jaded and blithely twee; the story and its central relationship are flat (unless you count the central relationship as Jean Dujardin/Uggie the Dog, in which case, it’s fine), and the eleventh-hour career solution is the kind meant to be an adorable, self-congratulatory transition to talkies, but only if you never, ever question it for one second; otherwise, the whole movie is a series of echoes of the early scene in which Our Hero shoves his leading lady into the wings so he can return and take another grinning bow himself.
The thing is, I don’t even dislike this movie because of what it isn’t. Silent film is a vast and complicated phenomenon that definitely deserves in-depth study, but not every movie that takes place in that era has to be that study. (Singing in the Rain wasn’t; then again, Singing in the Rain wasn’t trying to be.)
But like Berenice Bejo sliding her own arm into his tux so she can molest herself, this movie is too navel-gazey to be grand, too happy skipping to be sweeping. If it had gone for more complex characterization, or a smaller, better story instead of A Story of Art, The Artist might have been sweetly forgettable. As it is, it’s carrying the awkward burden of being Forgettable While Smug, which means that dog will be given its own musical number during the ceremony, just before it wins Best Picture for being a movie that’s proud of being The Movie about The Movies, while Tilda Swinton stands just backstage in her presenter’s dress, Watching, and Waiting.
