Even though the Oscars expanded their Best Picture nominees to 10 films this year, there is no hiding that the entire ceremony is a joke. Slumdog Millionaire as Best Picture last year? Give me a break! I can name 10 films more deserving. Here goes: WALL-E, Rachel Getting Married, Let the Right One In, A Christmas Tale, Wendy & Lucy, Paranoid Park, In Bruges, The Class, Ballast and Man on Wire. Done!
So once again, the good writers at Spectrum Culture all picked films snubbed by Oscar that we believe should be strolling the red carpet. If you haven't seen them, check them out! I am proud to present Screw You, Oscar 2010. - David Harris
Away We Go
Dir: Sam Mendes
Oscar nominations generally favor two types of films: the epics and the heartwrenchers. Away We Go is a refreshing respite from either of those. It's a story of an average couple, Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph), unmarried thirtysomethings trying to find the ideal place to raise the child they just found out they were having. Written by Dave Eggers and Vendela Vida, directed by Sam Mendes, critics argued that Away We Go reeked of smug, insufferable hipsterism- and the Alexi Murdoch soundtrack doesn't do much to alleviate that assumption. But Krasinski and Rudolph do a stellar job of keeping Burt and Verona grounded and self-aware; and besides, aren't the Oscars all about insufferable smugness?
Trekking across the country in search of the perfect city gives the couple a chance to re-connect with old acquaintances. Allison Janney and Maggie Gyllenhaal play the roles of long-lost friends in perfect caricatures of a self-obsessed, suburban mom who resents her kids and an obnoxiously hypocritical New Age gender studies professor, respectively. Both are easy targets for mockery, and the film takes full aim in a way that would seem contrite if it didn't also leave Burt and Verona open to disparage and question themselves, which they do. Yes, they can be dismissive and judgmental of other people's lives, but they also recognize that they too will be judged. They don't deride their friends' choices- they just decide that those aren't the choices they want to make for themselves.
Krasinski and Rudolph have an undeniable chemistry that gives their on-screen romance the corny undertow that people publicly resent and secretly admire. Their commitment to each other is never questioned, and it's a nice change to watch a movie where a couple isn't thwarted by hijinx or gimmicks or destruction. Sandra Bullock wouldn't know what to do with a script like this (and honestly, the fact that The Blind Side is even up for Best Picture makes me wonder if maybe the Academy is just fucking with us to see if we're paying attention).
Away We Go isn't as nuanced as Little Miss Sunshine, but its quirkiness is less irritating than Juno. And since both of those movies got Oscar noms, the Academy would've done well to keep in tradition and give this film its rightful place in the "token breakout masquerading as an indie film" niche. Maybe it got snubbed because some viewers saw it as nothing but a mean-spirited contempt of American norms- and appealing to the masses is what the Academy likes best. But beyond the bluntness, this is a story of how we decide who we become, and the desire to delay adulthood while simultaneously getting shoved into it headfirst. This movie isn't trying to tell you that you aren't good enough. It's trying to inspire you to live beyond the societal expectations- or stay snuggled in them, if that's where you're truly happiest. - Lisa Bahr
Fantastic Mr. Fox
Dir: Wes Anderson
Technology tends to have momentum. The further we go with it, the further we want to go, hence the proliferation of 3D movies in theaters and blue-skinned cat people with the most difficult mineral to obtain in the galaxy. But while films like James Cameron's colossal Avatar manage to get nods from the vaunted Academy (seriously, nine nominations?), more interesting fare has an unfortunate tendency to drop by the wayside. Specifically, Wes Anderson's first foray into animation, an adaptation of Roald Dahl's beloved Fantastic Mr. Fox was snubbed for a Best Picture nod by the geniuses who've had the benevolence to bestow awards on Chicago and Shakespeare in Love.
And maybe I'm biased here- after all, Dahl is only a beloved children's writer, Anderson is a filmmaker of critical renown and impeccable style and foxes are just kind of awesome animals. But it's undeniable that a snub to a film like Fantastic Mr. Fox is unforgivable. The trials of the George Clooney-voiced titular fox as he steals chickens from comically malevolent farmers, goes straight, slips up and then has to keep an entire menagerie of well-styled animal friends alive would be a good enough story. But the stop-motion animation is so incredibly detailed as to show fur ruffling in a breeze and the characters have depth beyond what a children's story is "supposed" to detail; did I mention Bill Murray is a badger who's an attorney?
Perhaps part of the reason why this film garnered no Oscar noms could be that it stands proudly in the past, while films like Avatar push further on the envelope, making us "ooh" and "aah" over the pretty colors. It's brand-new vintage, using outmoded technology (though brought to an unprecedented level), telling stories that don't necessarily blow up real good or teach us lessons about how we shouldn't be mining other planets for MacGuffins. But some of us like the past and like the kind of thought that has to be put into a simple story of animals stealing cider and giving toasts over a crowded dinner table. And some of us just like foxes. - Nathan Kamal
Gomorrah
Dir: Matteo Garrone
A film about the broad consequences of self-centered behavior, Gomorrah makes its best points through a continued sub-textual criticism of its subjects' egotistical worldview, portraying the carelessly greedy members of its Neapolitan crime syndicate as open fonts spewing toxic waste. The effects this has on their surroundings, which wilt visibly as they exploit them for their own gain, are presented overtly. Men dump tons of noxious refuse from garbage trucks, then bury them. Gang members target civilians as intentional collateral damage. But finer points about the mindset of these avaricious enablers, who kill and plunder without much thought of the cost, are made through consistent use of beautifully stylized shots, which carefully hint at their vanity and self-deceit.
A group of gangsters are killed in a tanning salon, bathed in eerie blue light, their fleshy bodies resting fetus-like in the beds. A mob-connected tailor rides to and from work in the trunk of a car. These cramped scenes are symptoms of a cinematography which favors unyieldingly tight compositions, capturing both the prison-like feel of gritty apartment complexes and the willful ignorance of their more violent inhabitants. In one scene the camera retracts to reveal armed men guarding the perimeter of a run-down housing project, pacing the roof while children play below them, like sentries posted at the walls of a medieval castle.
Director Matteo Garrone applies these visuals in service of a sprawling crime story, thick with violence and tension, visceral on both a dramatic and political level. There have been complaints about the film's expansive structure, its favoring of size and breadth over more carefully drawn characters, but this structure is essential to its message. Like the shambling book from which it draws its stories, Gomorrah, spiraling outward as it progresses, portrays the seeping edges of a steadily growing situation.
Yet the things that would seemingly make Gomorrah attractive to Oscar voters - its stylish, slightly restrained violence, its modern take on a beloved genre, its ambitious (but not overly complex) narrative - also contribute toward its anathema status. Besides being in Italian, the film is too immersed in the world it portrays; its ugliness is never directly refuted. The fact that it contains no moral center, operating entirely in a world of bad people doing bad things, grants a surface sheen of amorality that makes things feel slightly unsavory, even pointless if you're not paying close attention. Unlike the similarly plotted Crash, which made its detachment clear via preachy changes-of-heart and musical cues, or even the great There Will be Blood, which anchored its moral dubiousness to a buzz performance and a familiar story arc, Gomorrah comes off as too grimly unpalatable to work as a candidate. - Jesse Cataldo
Moon
Dir: Duncan Jones
Moon is Oscar bait in science fiction clothing, which unfortunately weighs it down. Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, an astronaut assigned the task of running a base on the far side of the moon with the purpose of mining helium-3, a newly-discovered energy source to be used for stopping an energy crisis on Earth. Bell's job is to do so alone for the duration of three years. The effects of three years of isolation on the moon are wearing on him, and two weeks before his scheduled return home an accident causes a surprise discovery.
Moon is a film surprising in its simultaneous complexity and simplicity. Only two main characters--Bell and GERTY 3000, the onboard computer voiced by Kevin Spacey--play at the front of the action in a relatively limited setting, but the twists in the story and Sam Rockwell's stellar performance as a mind lost in space keep it engaging.
The Academy tends toward movies about current issues, and one is obviously that of our energy consumption here on Earth. As with most good sci-fi, Moon shows us a version of ourselves in a further-developed time. In this case it's one in which we deem it necessary to harvest energy from the moon, which may not seem so far-fetched given the current importance placed on energy. However, that aspect is merely used as background for a more prominent story of self-confrontation--Bell's.
The Academy likes personal dramas. Three years working at any job is bound to reveal some interesting things to an employee, isolated on the moon or otherwise, and with each job and each change, parts of that person move onward and others are inevitably left behind. In the case of Moon, the freedoms inherent in the sci-fi genre allow this aspect of human life to be pondered in the most literal way, and in relation to bigger themes of technological progress and automation. More issues. But at its core, Moon is about personal isolation.
The effects are impressive for an indie sci-fi film, relying on a well-blended combination of physical models and computer-generated graphics that work to enhance the story only by increasing the believability of Bell's surroundings and never taking center stage. The film operates on a level of sci-fi that deals with one astronaut's existential crisis and unnerves us with the resulting questions, striding in the spirit of Solaris and 2001. For this reason it definitely deserves the extra attention it doesn't seem to be getting, possibly due to the sci-fi label imposed upon it, which can be a deterrent to the Academy outside the special effects category. Like astronaut Sam Bell, Moon is a victim of circumstance. - Zac Dillon
The Road
Dir: John Hillcoat
The Road came at the end of a decade in which the post-apocalyptic film became its own genre. However, unlike most of those films, there were no zombie hordes, dire allegories or even an explanation for what happened. All we know when the film begins is that some very bad things have gone down and that a man and his son (neither ever named) are among the handful of survivors. Australian director John Hillcoat, who also filmed the brutal, Outback-set western, The Proposition, had the unenviable task of adapting Cormac McCarthy's much praised, Oprah-approved 2006 novel. While there is no real cinematic equivalent of McCarthy's bluntly wrought, idiosyncratically punctuated prose, the filmmakers capture his intense, gloomy tone and bleak take on the genre- everything looks sufficiently ashen and dead. Though it's not an action movie, which many end of the world movies are, it is tense and punctuated by occasional moments of sudden, shocking violence. Yet despite the almost unrelenting, unforgiving grimness-this is a world where cannibalism is practiced and the father might have to shoot his son-the heart of the story is the relationship between father and son, which is deeply moving. It's this emotional nuance that makes the film stand out. Viggo Mortensen, looking appropriately haggard, and newcomer Kodi Smit-McPhee are great as the father and the son. There aren't many other characters in the film, but a host of fine actors are memorable in small parts: Robert Duvall, Charlize Theron, Guy Pearce, Michael K. Williams and Garret Dillahunt, who was also in No Country for Old Men. Nick Cave and Warren Ellis provide the spare, atmospheric score.
It's one of the most convincing and subtle depictions of the end of the world I've seen, focusing on two people stripped of everything but each other. Even if it may depict a future calamity, it feels strange and ancient- more Biblical or medieval than contemporary. It's not an easy film to watch, but it's an uncommon one in that it unflinchingly deals with very dark material, but is not overwhelming. Purists complained that it wasn't faithful enough to McCarthy, but the filmmakers manage to remain true to his story, while also making a film that stands on it own, no easy task. The Oscars usually shy away from darker films (unless they're historical), but this year's nominees tackled war, child abuse and teen pregnancy, the death of a spouse and job loss, and The Road belongs among them- for the caliber of its performances and direction, for its bleak vision and for its emotional depth. It ends with what may be, along with the opening montage of Up, the most moving scene I saw last year. It's a haunting, sometimes wrenching film that hits on a gut level. - Lukas Sherman
A Single Man
Dir: Tom Ford
While the expansion of the number of nominees for Best Picture from five to 10 allowed for some worthy contenders this year (The Hurt Locker and ), Oscar still loves mediocre films that appear more challenging than they really are (Up in the Air), soulless big budget spectacle (Avatar) and absolute shit like past victor Crash that treads upon white, middle class guilt (Precious).
While I can get behind a few of these nominations, one film glaringly omitted from the limelight is Tom Ford's feature debut A Single Man. While its moniker can easily be confused nominee A Serious Man, the Coen Brothers fable of Jewish guilt and both films take place in the '60s, A Single Man is a beautiful paean about a gay college professor wracked with despair over the tragic death of his lover.
Based on Christopher Isherwood's 1964 novel of the same name, A Single Man features Colin Firth in a career-defining performance as Thomas Falconer, the closeted professor who decides to commit suicide after his younger lover dies in an auto accident. Yet while its story of lost love is nothing new, Ford magically intercuts moments from the past and present while retaining an air of authenticity from a milieu long gone.
But the best part of the film is its emotional core. A funereal sadness hangs over Falconer as he decides to commit suicide. However, a last minute encounter with a young male student may just save his life.
A Single Man also features Julianne Moore as Falconer's boozy best friend, but the film really belongs to Ford and Firth. Although it is less risqué for Hollywood to make movies about the once "forbidden" love, A Single Man treats its characters with a loving tenderness that is devoid from many films. As the credits roll, it is impossible not to feel for Falconer and even more difficult not to weep for him. Too bad, this film wasn't nominated. Oscar could have made up for its close-minded choice of Crash over Brokeback Mountain.- David Harris
Star Trek
Dir: J.J. Abrams
When Oscar season comes around, critics and Academy voters are noted for having short memories. Movies released in the early portion of the year are usually long shots, but no sector gets ignored as much as the summer blockbuster. Surprisingly, a film as unique and over-the-top as District 9 managed to find a Best Picture nod, due to the newly revised 10 nominees, but there were still some films from the summer that were ignored. The Academy usually hates genre films, and there are few they hate more than science fiction, which explains why J.J. Abrams' Star Trek was overlooked, despite its warm critical reception and box office success.
Star Trek has a lot to love - it's visually stunning, it has a great ensemble cast and there's never a dull moment. For all the complaints about the plot, like any time-travel scenario, there are bound to be fallacies. However, the kitsch and logistics of time-travel was one of the most beloved parts of the franchise, so it makes perfect sense to focus on it for a reboot. Abrams, who is not a Trekkie, managed to make a film that has subtle rewards for the keen and informed, but also has sensitivity for the new inductee.
The cast is superlative - Chris Pine, previously unknown, became a sensation overnight for his brazen portrayal of James Tiberius Kirk. While Shatner was rigid and theatrical, Pine plays him with a rogue quality. He even joins Starfleet after getting into a barfight. Zachary Quinto also excels at portraying the internal conflict of Spock, a half-human/ Vulcan who questions his lot in life. Spock and Kirk's interactions hint at distaste and distrust, but also a mutual respect.
So what's the problem? Quentin Tarantino, director of Oscar-nominated Inglourious Basterds, openly praised the film. At heart it is a popcorn film, but J. J. Abrams' Star Trek is also one of the best films of 2009. It manages to avoid the pitfalls of the older films, but also has a keen admiration and regard for the series' legacy. It is a fine example of a science-fiction blockbuster, as well as a tightly scripted and acted film, and in a different reality, it could have been called...Best Picture. - Rafael Gaitan
Still Walking
Dir. Hirokazu Koreeda
Who knows what dictates the behavior of the Academy? Favoritism? Successful marketing campaigns? Do the various shills that sell their review scores to the highest bidder have an effect, by shifting the public perception of a movie's worth, on the Academy's perceptions as well? There are rumors suggesting that older Academy members just give their ballots to their grandkids to fill out every year. It's tough to extract any rhyme or reason from past records - one year, Crash sweeps, another, it's No Country for Old Men. This year, they've decided to give 10 movies the top nomination. Is it because this is a particularly noteworthy year for American cinema? One look at the selection should make it clear that's not the case. Some of the nominees are clearly awful, some are fine, most of them have a pretty clear expiration date stamped on the side, and a few are, in my mind, genuinely phenomenal and built to last. Masochistically, we'll tune in to see the wrong things win.
Still Walking isn't even Japan's Best Foreign Picture submission (that honor went to Departures), but it deserves real recognition at the top of the last year in cinema. Hirokazu Koreeda's film may not have the propulsive quality of some of the top nominees but in its powerfully dense, defiantly understated approach to storytelling, it manages to come upon a sense of authoritative and endlessly beautiful languorousness that is as equally satisfying as the breakneck pacing commonly found among the other nominees. The film is a deeply felt portrait of a family, and its strength is in its sensitivity to each character's personal motivations, even in the face of the overall narrative. Latent resentments and sorrows are, for the most part, left unresolved - there are no tearful revelations that lead to unilateral healing, no apologies for past mistakes. The film ends on an unrealized promise, because we're driven sometimes to make promises we cannot keep. It emphatically shares with us a family that has the best intentions and makes the same mistakes we all do, sticking on pride or keeping quiet about certain emotional realities out of a sense of embarrassment or fear. Part of the film is about a couple of new family members, the eldest son's new wife and stepson, trying to integrate themselves into the whole collective at one of their annual reunions, but we see quickly enough that he is also taking pains to find a way to integrate himself into theirs as well. Still Walking is about that uncrossable divide between our personal realities and the collective selves we try to integrate ourselves into; it's about the attempts we make to know one another, even the people closest to us, and the approximations we have to resort to in order to nearly succeed. - Andrei Alupului
Summer Hours
Dir: Oliver Assayas
It's not that I'm surprised that Oliver Assayas' delicately lovely and sad masterpiece Summer Hours was overlooked for this year's Academy Awards nominations. And it's not that I wish it had been nominated, either - we all know that the Oscars cater to the lowest common denominator of film culture (and blah, blah, blah, add a bunch of other pretentious-sounding stuff here), so the fact that it was passed over in favor of Jacques Audiard's A Prophet is not necessarily a bad thing. No, the reason why I have chosen Summer Hours as my pick for the most undeserved Oscar snub of 2009 is simply this - it has permanently changed the way I view the world.
It is a story about objects, and about how some of those objects become imbued with an invisible, magical quality that our culture has determined is important, called "Art." It is about families, and traditions, and culture, and about how these things are constantly being created, moment-by-moment, through millions upon millions of tiny and ever-shifting acts of faith and love. Love for each other and for our pasts and for those objects which we cherish and covet and dismiss and frame and sell and put inside of other objects called "museums" to be admired and ignored. It is about our world today and how this multiply-complex mesh of global forces and factors are constantly pushing and pulling and striving to destroy these delicately sustained cultural structures which we have erected around ourselves to stave off death. And it is about, maybe most of all, the ache in the chest one gets during its singularly elegiac last scene, of a house, soon to be emptied, filled for a brief moment with all the hopes and confusions and sadness and light-filled splendor of youth. - Shannon Gramas
Watchmen
Dir: Zack Snyder
They'll never again let through a film like Watchmen, a three-hour comic book movie where the typical Manichean worldview of superheroics has a nervous breakdown and explodes in the face of the horrifying grays of something vaguely resembling the real world -- where even hard-earned world peace is a fragile thing than can be shattered by the written word and a pop-punk cover of "Desolation Row."
Considering the average Hollywood superhero movie blockbuster often regurgitates the same tropes that were established with Tim Burton's Batman (origin + villainous plot + love interest who's more often than not a reporter + much better sequel), Watchmen astounds with its ambition in showing us the gears turning before we even understand what the machine is, managing to balance several story components including a murder mystery, a story of Cold War-era apocalyptic paranoia and at least two superhero origin stories. And then some of it takes place on Mars.
Miraculously, Watchmen rarely pulls punches when it comes to adapting Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' multilayered comic book. Scenes remain that in other hands surely would have been smoothed out to keep audiences from feeling bad: mass-murder, moral compromise and just about anything the Comedian does. Thankfully, director Zack Snyder isn't satisfied just shooting the comic book, integrating Hollywood flourishes to adapt a superhero comic about superhero comics into a superhero movie about superhero movies. His best idea, however, is the opening credits, which give us a survey of the 20th century as affected by the film's central characters.
My personal favorite thing about Watchmen is imagining the viewers that had/have no idea what they're getting into. Thinking they were just seeing a superhero movie on a Friday night, surely some minds were blown when they sat through a period piece where Nixon is still President and a naked blue giant won Vietnam for America. Pray humanity lasts a few more decades so a few inspired kids grow up to make ambitious genre films that surpass Watchmen.
However, all of this ambition and mindfucking is irrelevant compared to Watchmen's greatest achievement. For being probably the only film ever to use Leonard Cohen's original version of "Hallelujah" instead of one of the myriad cover versions, Watchmen deserves a Nobel Prize. And during a superhero sex scene, no less. - Danny Djeljosevic
