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5 Oscar Snubs…and One Pleasant Mini-Surprise

Doug Strassler — Thu, 10 Jan 2013 16:20:45 +0000

The nominations for the 85th Academy Awards were unveiled earlier this morning, and largely went as foreseen. Whether you agree with me or not about thoughts like Silver Linings Playbook was too chaotic to be clever about family strife and mental illness, that Amour and Beasts of the Southern Wild were major, if esoteric, emotional triumphs, that Lincoln was well done but maybe not the harrowingly illuminative biopic to end all biopics, the frontrunners were clear, and many placed exactly as predicted. Below, then, find five notable snubs from the list of nominees…and one pleasant surprise.

John Hawkes not nominated for Best Actor in a Leading Role in The Sessions

I placed Hawkes’ performance, along with co-star Helen Hunt’s, as my top film work of the entire year, so this omission is a standout one. As a polio victim looking for physical with Hunt’s sex surrogate, Hawkes’ performance was demanding physically and emotionally, a triumph in each way. Making things more curious is that Joaquin Phoenix, who had not only not campaigned for his nomination but who had publicly decried the aggressive campaigning process, still got in – despite the lack of overall love for his film, The Master (co-stars Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman got supporting actor nominations, but there were no nods for Picture, Director, Screenplay, or amazing cinematography). That means Hunt really deserved her Supporting Actress nomination – apparently she was having sex with herself in the movie.

Neither Kathryn Bigelow nor Ben Affleck in the Best Director race

Did Argo peak too early? Did Zero Dark Thirty polarize too many people? Hard to say, because while the two early Best Picture favorites both made it into the category (which also includes seven other films this year), neither director did. This might be an especially hard blow to Affleck who was campaigning ultra-hard to be seen as a leading Hollywood director. The good news for them is that both still got nominated as producers. And oh yeah, they both already have statuettes on their mantles.

Ann Dowd, Compliance

Dowd was as perfect a performance as captured on celluloid this year. Alas, her film’s studio, citing budget restrictions, didn’t provide screeners to award nominators, allowing bigger stars with bigger representation to move right on in. I’m impressed by veteran Jacki Weaver – the character she played in Silver Linings was the emotional fulcrum of the novel but reduced to inexpressive wallpaper in the film. And still she got in over Dowd.

Ewan McGregor, The Impossible

Naomi Watts received a well-deserved Best Actress nom for tsunami story The Impossible, but in a more crowded Best Supporting Actor category, McGregor was dismissed. It’s a shame. Both carry equal halves of the demanding film, and McGregor had one scene, reconnecting with certain family members over the phone, that makes for a perfect “Oscar scene.” Making this category all the more yawn-worthy is that all five nominees have already won at least one Academy Award.

Leonardo DiCaprio, Django Unchained

DiCaprio’s Django co-star, Waltz, is terrific and got nominated this year. But his role is really a lead. And DiCaprio demonstrated remarkable prowess, cultivating a comically nuanced Southern villain. Maybe if his upcoming Gatsby role doesn’t do the trick for a leading actor nomination, he can play a singing alcoholic president grappling with mental illness. Just as long as the character doesn’t have polio.

Michael Haneke and Benh Zeitlin in the Best Director race

The directors of Amour and Beasts, two of my big 2012 triumphs, got in – pushing the aforementioned Affleck and Bigelow out of their presumptive slots. One’s a veteran and one’s a newcomer, and I’m happy to see both recognized. I just wish Life of Pi’s Ang Lee or Silver Linings’ David O. Russell could have lost their slots to make room for Bigelow and Master’s Paul Thomas Anderson.

The Oscars will be handed out on February 24.

Zero for Conduct

Armond White — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 17:53:39 +0000

High Information/Low Interpretation in Bigelow’s yellow journalism comic strip

Zero Dark Thirty opens during the second age of yellow journalism which is the same as in the 1890s when the press shamelessly sought readership through sensation, innuendo and jingoism (its news pages were indistinguishable from the lurid, tinted pages of comic strips).

This comic-strip account of U.S. agents hunting down and killing Osama Bin Laden in revenge for the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center has received both praise and condemnation due to the media’s confused ethics and aesthetics. Through yellow journalism’s prevailing biases (the oligarchic will of conglomerates seeking to control the way people think) news and history get distorted into propaganda.

“High information readers” and “High information viewers” consume limitless propaganda while thinking themselves “engaged,” “enlightened” or Internet “smart.” This includes film critics who award Zero Dark Thirty and those pundits and politicians, such as Senators John McCain and Diane Feinstein, who disparage it. Both sides want confirmation of their feelings about Obama’s unmentionable war on terror; they see in the film what they want to find.

Yellow journalism’s routines have stunted their interpretive abilities but director Kathryn Bigelow just wants to practice her craft. Zero Dark Thirty partly resembles the semi-documentary tradition once famously practiced by 1940s producer Louis de Rochemont. Because we like to think we’re smarter today than Rochemont’s obvious socially-conscious dramas (Lost Boundaries, The Fighting Lady, Booomerang, House on 92nd Street) Bigelow’s skills end up serving a cynical topical awareness and polarized sense of urgency.

A bigger budget and a more definite subject improves on the muddled “war is a drug” pathology of Bigelow’s now-overrated The Hurt Locker. She almost personalizes this story, using her first female action-hero since the 1990 Blue Steel. As played by Jessica Chastain, mostly in mime, this undercover cipher hides her political feelings behind job-proficiency. Calling herself a CIA “motherfucker” she gets closer than the all-male The Hurt Locker to articulating Bigelow’s trademark interest in the androgynous erotics of violence.

Chastain’s character’s enigmatic patriotism that will please or irritate viewers depending on their politics. Her post-IED comment (“I believe I was spared for this mission”) suggests a messianic devotion that comes out of nowhere. Zero Dark Thirty gives no sense of her background or who she really is which vitiates the film’s emotional effect, unlike Bigelow’s Soviet submarine movie K-19: The Widowmaker which was richer, more effective storytelling.

Zero Dark Thirty is unambiguous action-filmmaking. Yet its vague politics are vexing. Throughout the long Bin Laden manhunt, it takes on the bland procedural manner TV viewers favor, not the morally-defined action of post-9/11 films like Munich, From Paris with Love, the Taken series and War of the Worlds which moved audiences to reassess politics, patriotism and global relations. Bigelow’s action emphasis, inflated to epic length, recalls insincere post-9/11 agit prop like Syriana and Rendition. She gainsays connection between killing and politics through a mind-numbing series of searches, bribes and attacks staged no differently than generic horror movie tropes, only set in Middle Eastern black site locations and government offices. (Her gotcha climax quotes Silence of the Lambs.)

Hardly more superficial than Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down and the sloppy Argo, this, unfortunately, is no better. Except when Seal Team Six arrives to deal Bin Laden’s death blow: they’re as amusingly beefcake-sexy as the surfers in Bigelow’s best film Point Break. Sensualizing violence doesn’t clarify the political ramifications–or, as some have charged, the political truth–of the Bin Laden killing or the purported (off-screen) funeral rites and burial at sea. Plus, sexy warfare lacks the wit and complexity of Godard’s 1960 torture essay Le Petit Soldat.

In one of the CIA pow-wows where the amped voice level is close, loud, intimate, forceful, an agent declares “We don’t know what we don’t know. It’s tautology.” That’s also Bigelow’s position on the history she recounts. Her cool distance from confirming facts makes Zero Dark Thirty a tautology, perfect for yellow journalism’s “high information” dupes.

Follow Armond White on Twitter at 3xchair

The Hurt Locker

admin — Wed, 24 Jun 2009 17:21:15 +0000

Although Brian De Palma lost his artistic bearings on the anti–Iraq War bandwagon, director Kathryn Bigelow found her perfect subject. That’s the difference between De Palma’s confused, preachy Redacted and Bigelow’s The Hurt Locker. Bigelow (working from a script by Mark Boal) stays focused on the personalities of soldiers during Bravo company’s last 39 days of rotation in 2004 Baghdad. An early reconnaissance jest (“It’s my dick.”) between Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Sgt. Thompson (Guy Pearce) recalls De Palma’s ribaldry, but it also indicates Bigelow’s erotic view of masculine endeavor—here defining the propensity for violence and bravery during war.

Bigelow’s focus on male psychology won’t satisfy anti-war protestors, who have been curiously becalmed during the Obama administration. The Hurt Locker’s prologue, “War is a drug,” suggests it could be about any war. This is a breakthrough in the pop-war genre that, since Vietnam, has accustomed us to sentimental agit-prop.

Bigelow conscientiously streamlines her filmmaking. Avoiding portentous Kubrickian camera dynamics—which are only about self—she’s evocative and focused, unlike the showy, undisciplined Apocalypse Now.

Having already done poetic symbolism in the underrated K-19: The Widowmaker, Bigelow tells a Billy Budd–type story of Sgt. William James (Jeremy Renner), expert at defusing Improvised Explosive Devices, but, actually, constantly testing his mortality. James outrages and mystifies his comrades—especially Sanborn. Their white/black cultural differences are subtly highlighted by military equality. Their missions reveal suspicion, determination and inquisitiveness—authentically modern American traits as one would also find in westerns and urban noirs.

Bigelow shrewdly distills several genres, yet it’s all metaphor for personal involvement in policy. (The “hurt locker” is where James keeps souvenir detonators: “It’s fascinating to hold something that almost kills you.”)

So far, the best fiction films about the Iraq War are Nick Bloomfield’s Battle for Haditha, Irwin Winkler’s Home of the Brave and John Moore’s allegorical Flight of the Phoenix remake, which Bigelow evokes in a stand-off scene between Bravo company, a group of British contractors and distant insurgent snipers. It’s sufficient praise to say The Hurt Locker joins that short list.

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The Hurt Locker
Directed by Kathryn Bigelow
Runtime: 131 min.