What's On My Mind: The Oscars


Little Golden Statues
At one point in the past eighty-four years, the Oscars and its body of Academy voters represented the shining beacon of cinematic achievement, the ultimate award acknowledging the best qualities in films each year. Its pantheon of past winners comprises the greatest collection of timeless stories – lurid visions of heartbreak and vengeance, of jealousy and ambition. “Oscar-winner” used to carry the weight of quality, the assurance that art could indeed examine humanity in a brilliant, poignant, and sometimes disturbing light.

Within the past five years, the Oscars have managed to completely soil its own legacy. As of 2013, the Oscars have devolved into a sordid mess, a callous shadow of its past prestige. It now stands as little more than a pathetic plea for attention and acceptance, a joke that’s at once hilarious and yet, not funny at all.

The Oscar’s transition from celebrating creative achievements in film to pandering to advertisers and network ratings can be traced to two discrete events in the past five years. The first transgression was the inexplicable omission of Nolan’s The Dark Knight from the Best Picture nominations at the 81st Academy Awards. Nolan’s crime saga was arguably the defining cultural cornerstone of 2008 – think back to that year and name one film that still garners as much attention. But its genesis as a lowly “comic book film” in the eyes of Academy voters kept it from landing the big nominations – as if Heath Ledger’s unforgettable performance would have existed had it not been for Nolan’s script, production, and direction. That year, the Academy nominated five films for Best Picture:

 Slumdog Millionaire
The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
Frost/Nixon
Milk
The Reader

The common thread among these nominations is the depiction of mythologized, romanticized stories dealing with heavy topics – death, poverty, segregation – while making sure not to offend anyone. They are safe stories, carefully calibrated to intrigue without offending, entertain without overwhelming. But beyond simply being unobtrusive, Best Picture films tend to neuter the problems at the core of the narrative so as not to come across too harsh, too political, or too audacious. Slumdog Millionaire, the film that went on to win that year, told the story of an impoverished orphan in the slums of India who ultimately wins the million dollar prize on “Who Wants to be a Millionaire?” It’s a sympathetic tale – the rags to riches narrative always works – but one that is ultimately hollow and fleeting. It minimizes the real horrors of the slums – as if any child who had witnessed abuse or fended for their own life could so easily escape the grim realities of an impoverished world – in favor of a glamorized story of young codependent love. It’s a purely Western take on a country and a lifestyle about which the majority of Americans has no idea or perspective, as if to say, “Look how bad they have it! Cry! Gasp! Now feel sorry for them some more.”

The absence of Nolan’s film created an immediate and drastic shift in the Best Picture landscape. In the following year, the Oscars nonchalantly expanded its Best Picture nominations race from five titles – a sample size that hadn't changed since the inception of the awards! – to an inexplicable ten selections. In any other year, recycled narratives such as The Blind Side – the “true story” of an impoverished black football player who goes on to play in the NFL because of the unconditional love and support of his white adoptive family - wouldn't even have a chance at the award. And yet, its inclusion in the Best Picture nominations only served to undermine the entire field of nominees and further cement the Academy’s penchant for sensationalist stories.

But at the 83rd Academy Awards, the Best Picture field was decidedly stronger, showcasing a greater array of creative, audacious, and poignant stories:

 The King’s Speech
127 Hours
Black Swan
The Fighter
Inception
The Kids Are All Right
The Social Network
Toy Story 3
True Grit
Winter's Bone 

Despite the increased competition, this is where the Academy made its second and gravest miscalculation of the 21st century. The King’s Speech, the film that ultimately took the top award, is by no means a bad film; it’s merely undeserving of any awards claiming it as “best” of anything. It’s a prime example of everything the Academy voters love – handicaps and history, tears and fears – and a disturbing glimpse into the gears of a global marketing machine hard at work, appealing precisely to the demographics needed to garner the maximum votes. It’s the safe choice. It doesn't offend; it doesn't alienate. But it tries hard to emote and evoke. It pushes and pulls as if yelling, “Look at his face! Feel something here!” As Richard Brody observes, the Oscars tend to “substitute emotional expression for emotion itself,” turning an award ceremony meant to celebrate artistic merit into a sensationalized masturbatory exercise in marketing tactics. In other words, The King’s Speech was 2010’s version of Slumdog Millionaire – an easy conceit of a lowly, downtrodden hero who eventually rises to a rousing finish. Predictable and safe. Easy and undemanding. Forgettable and unworthy. 

(It’s also interesting to note here that Nolan’s follow-up to The Dark Knight was none other than Inception, a film that was entertaining but nowhere close to the relevance and gravity of The Dark Knight. One couldn't help but see Inception’s nomination in the Best Picture race as a sorely underwhelming consolation prize for snubbing The Dark Knight two years earlier.)

The Academy loves feel-good stories. But feel-good stories are not synonymous with good stories. And David Fincher’s The Social Network was unequivocally the latter. The Social Network deserved to win Best Picture in 2010. And it should have won.

There is an unofficial theory in filmmaking – call it my own personal musing if you’d like – that no actor should be praised for playing overly sympathetic characters. In other words, playing up an addict or a cripple or a vagrant is easy; playing it down is hard. Any actor can shed a tear, pump his fist, and throw a tantrum when the world already knows he’s been wronged; but how often do we find ourselves hating a character as much as we find ourselves admiring him? How often do we mistake “good acting” for just “acting?” If an actor isn't crying or yelling, is he not feeling? Is he not acting? Of course, it’s this exact hyper-demonstrative brand of performance that attracts Academy voters. They marvel at the gushing displays of emotion, the overwhelming sentiments of hope and fear and love. They want to know that they’re watching someone perform their craft as opposed to losing someone in their craft.

The Social Network, a film posing as a cover story for the juvenile, petty, but brilliant journey of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg, is actually better described as a dark and incisive coming-of-age story for the digital age. Jesse Eisenberg gives a complex performance of an even more complex person that challenges our interpretations of his actions and questions our own stance on ethics, ambition, greed, and betrayal. It’s a deeply layered film that dares to plant big, bold, bright notions of will and in the meantime, populate the story with acting that is expressive without being extravagant, touching without feeling bawdy, and human without seeming contrived. It never reaches for the easy emotional payoff – something The King’s Speech repeatedly aims for – but instead, relishes the subtle but unmistakable moments of renewed intrigue, burning desire, muted guilt, and wounded hearts.

I understand why The Social Network didn't win Best Picture. It is, after all, a story of a young man who breaks the rules, a digital anarchist who just so happened to redefine the entire social structure of the 21st century. It’s a film about change, a vision of a new generation learning to take its first steps. So it shouldn't come as surprise that the vast majority of Academy voters are white males over the age of 62. Their tastes would – and do - lean towards the historic dramas, towards the life-affirming tales of the lowly man overcoming adversity. A Freudian examination would reveal the old white men’s desires to see themselves on screen, beating the odds, lasting forever. Cheating death? Indeed, it’s not inconceivable that Academy voters wouldn't connect with a twenty-something hacker who’s more akin to a graffiti artist with a computer than a stammering King of England.

The Oscars’ desperate plea to appeal to a younger generation – asking Anne Hathaway, James Franco, and now Seth McFarlane to host the show in recent years only goes to cement my theory – would be amusing if it wasn't so disturbingly sad. The Academy voters – and by extension, the very awards themselves - are sorely lagging in not only accepting new forms of storytelling, but appreciating ambitious, creative, and culturally significant works of art. They fear the progressive and lament the past. They are caught up in how things once were and not how things are. They wish for a time when things were simpler, when the digital age didn't distill everything into pokes and tweets. They remember when their generation held social power, never to be undone by the Biebers or Zuckerbergs of the world. So they choose to cling onto their nostalgia for as long as they can. And for all I care, they can stay forever frozen, hermetically sealed in their perfect worlds from long ago, living as little golden statues.

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