Why is this Awards Season So Strange?

There seems to be consensus around one thing right now: this awards season is awfully strange.

Typically there are two or three movies that win most of the Best Picture awards. But this year, the awards have been all over the place. “Hugo” won one of the early awards but has failed to win any others. “The Artist” looked like it might turn into an awards darling, but that hasn’t panned out. “The Tree of Life” topped many critics’ lists but has barely won any awards. “The Help” and “War Horse” were on many Top 10 lists, but towards the bottom. And that’s just to name a few of the films.

What is going on? Were the English-language films of 2011 so bad that none of them has been able to generate much enthusiasm? My answer to that question is a resounding No. One thing is for sure: 2011 was a good year for English-language cinema. Not a great year but definitely a good one.

The problem, as I see it, has not been with the films. It has been with the nominating committees. The nominations have almost exclusively gone to middle-tier films.

In my view, the top tier of 2011 has been almost completely ignored in this awards season. I’m sensing a strange fear on the part of awards-granting bodies to nominate trenchant, deep works of art. With a few exceptions, these groups have overwhelmingly turned their attention to works of entertainment. Instead of “Best Film of 2011,” these awards should be renamed “Most Entertaining Movie of 2011.”

Am I really the only person who thinks “Drive” (the hypnotic, heart-breaking, spectacularly original neo-noir near-masterpiece starring Ryan Gosling and Carey Mulligan) was one of the best films of the year?

When “Drive” was released in the early fall, it was greeted with almost universal acclaim. It also packed in audiences. It must have had some of the best per-screen averages of the year, nearly selling out wherever it played. I saw it in a theater with about 1,000 seats, and it was nearly sold out. 

Ditto for “Martha, Marcy May, Marlene.” When it was released about a month after “Drive,” it triggered almost as much enthusiasm. Here were two phenomenally original works of art that really got under your skin and haunted almost everyone who saw them. Was anyone haunted by “The Descendants”? I was moderately entertained by “The Descendants.”

Elizabeth Olsen’s performance in “Martha,” furthermore, was spoken about as the best screen debut in years. Then awards time comes around and no one nominates her! Was her performance considered too scary? Her depiction of mental illness too much like our state of mind? Do we want our screen performances and our films only to be entertaining nowadays? That’s all we want from cinema?

Critics, who have a responsibility for reminding nominators about the major artistic achievements of the year, made nary a peep when Olsen appeared on no nominating lists. I did not see one article expressing disgust over this.

I could go on. What happened to “Beginners,” the film starring Ewan McGregor and Christopher Plummer that warmed (and froze) so many hearts during the summer? Sure, Plummer’s great, artistically rich performance has been remembered, but what of the film itself? The nominating committees didn’t think “Beginners” was at least as good as “The Descendants”?

In my book, “The Descendants” was not much more than a good pilot for a TV show – a show that would run on NBC, not HBO. Move over “Parenthood.” “Beginners” penetrated far deeper into the soul of its characters and had about 1,000 times more originality, I would say. Would many serious cinephiles really disagree with me there?

Who’s getting put on these nominating committees? People who only enjoy popcorn movies? Or are they cinephiles who have become frightened to nominate major works of art? Has someone convinced them that the nominations should be dumbed down?

What saddens me most is that there are so many American moviegoers who rely on the awards season to draw their attention to worthy films. Most intelligent moviegoers will not go see 150 movies a year, like I do. They will see some films throughout the year, but mostly they will wait for awards season and then go see a bunch. They go to see the films that win a lot of nominations.

This mechanism has worked quite well for the past 40 or so years. But if awards-granting bodies lose their nerve, what will we end up with? We’ll have the bulk of our smartest moviegoers getting sent to see mediocre films, which will lead to bitterness. It will also lead them to think that smart movies don’t exist anymore, which is completely untrue!

This mistaken notion has started to circulate. Talk to most smart Americans, and they demonstrate more enthusiasm for premium-cable TV shows (such as the awesomely good “Breaking Bad”) than for cinema. What a terribly disturbing development.

Top 15 Films of 2011

This year for some reason it was particularly difficult for me to see all the late-year releases. It's never taken me until mid-January to get it done. But I finally did it! At long last, here is my list of Top 15 Films of 2011.

1.  Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives

2.   Drive

3.   Incendies

4.   Martha, Marcy May, Marlene

5.   Beginners

6.   Meek’s Cutoff

7.   Hugo

8.   Weekend

9.   Sarah’s Key

10. Another Earth

11. The Future

12. A Separation

13. Trust

14. The Help

15. The Adjustment Bureau

Honorable Mentions for Being Artistically Ambitious, if Flawed in Delivery (in no particular order):

•   Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

•   Margaret

•   The Tree of Life

•   Bellflower

•   Higher Ground

•   Hesher

•   The Skin I Live In

•   Shame

•   We Need to Talk About Kevin

Honorable Mentions for Being Thoroughly Entertaining and Full of Movie-Making Passion:

•  Warrior

•   Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

•   Moneyball

•   Crazy Stupid Love

•   Bridesmaids

•   Thor

•   The Green Hornet

•   Country Strong

•   The Artist

•   Midnight in Paris

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close: Very Good but Not Great

"Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close" has many special qualities, and it is a beautiful story. But something is off. A little something about the direction was off right from the beginning, and it never really righted itself.

Director Stephen Daldry ("Billy Elliott," "The Hours") just seemed unable to find his footing and clue into this family's experience well enough. But he got very close to something amazing.

The main character (who is on-screen about 90% of the time) is a Manhattan boy with Asperger's trying to process his grief after his beloved father's death in the World Trade Center on 9/11. The idea of trying to look at 9/11 through the eyes of a child who lost a parent is brilliant and profoundly humane, and we have Jonathan Safran Foer to thank for that (the author of the novel on which the film is based). To give that child Asperger's is also inspired. Foer is nothing if not ambitious as an artist.

First-time actor Thomas Horn, as the boy, does a good job, but there's a touch of phoniness and excessive sentiment to the portrayal. Too often I felt like I was watching an actor trying to pretend he had Asperger's. It just didn't feel real enough to really take off as a film, especially given the fact that the film is almost overly fixated on the boy.

Tom Hanks does a good job as the father, but he's killed off very early in the film. And he's a smidge too sentimental in his portrayal, too. The great Max Von Sydow does what he can as the boy's grandfather, but his character never speaks! Sandra Bullock is pretty flat as the boy's somewhat distant mother.

There were some raw and brutal moments, such as when the boy tells his mother that he wishes it was she who was in the World Trade Center that day, and not his father. Another is when the boy shows his grandfather photos from the Internet of people plummeting from the Towers. The boy is trying to make out if one of the falling bodies was his father.

But the film has no idea what to do with moments like that. They just get dropped in our laps, and then the movie moves onto something else. There's an odd unfinished quality to the film, and paradoxically an overcooked feeling to it.

It is certainly worth seeing, and the film hopefully will find a sizable audience. Its flaws are unmistakable, but so are its sublime and devastating moments, such as when the boy draws a picture of a man falling upward from the ground to the top of the Towers. Wrapping one's mind and heart around this boy's grief is enough to make you feel at times that you are breaking into pieces. We have all thought a lot about those who died in the Towers. Thank you, Jonathan Foer, for helping us direct some attention to the thousands of children who lost a parent that day. This film pays loving tribute to those children.

Pariah: Well-Told Coming-Out Story

"Pariah," from first-time writer/director Dee Rees, doesn't break much artistic ground. It tells the same gay/lesbian coming-out story that we've seen a million times. But it's told particularly well and from within a black urban context, which I don't believe has been done before.

It also goes a bit deeper into the hearts and minds of the homophobic parents than typically is done, which was great. Unfortunately, it only scratches those surfaces. Kim Wayans, who of course has a long history in comedy, shows she has major dramatic talent, playing the homophobic mother of the main character. The cast is universally good, but Wayans is the stand-out.

The main character is a black teenage girl in Brooklyn going through the coming-out process. She has fully come out to herself as a lesbian, and she has even found her way into a lesbian circle of friends. She even frequents a women's night club. But she hasn't told Mom or Dad about any of this, both of whom are homophobic. Mom is particularly venomous in her hatred of gays and lesbians. You can see that Dad, a detective in the NYPD, in his heart of hearts is not a bigot.

Thrown into the mix to complicate things a little bit is a bisexual girl eager to have lesbian experiences to explore herself. But she tosses lesbians aside like useless candy wrappers after she's had her fun.

If I were going to give Dee Rees advice, I would say this:

Ms. Rees, in "Pariah" you started digging into the parent characters with some real psychological and artistic depth. I encourage you to go more deeply in that direction. I think your true gifts as an artist lie there. I would give anything to see a sequel where you explore what happened to that mother and what she's really fighting. You hint that her husband is beginning to stray, but I think there's more in there. Help us see it.

Remember when that great schoolteacher tells Alike that she could "go deeper" with her poetry? You could go deeper with your films. I know you could.

Iron Lady: Great Performance But Not Great Film

Meryl Streep's performance as Margaret Thatcher is awesome to behold. (When is Streep less than magnificent?) But "The Iron Lady" has some problems as a film. It's not bad, but it isn't great.

The movie, directed by Phyllida Lloyd ("Mamma Mia"), spends entirely too much time in the present day, following the senile Thatcher around her apartment as she putters, looks through memorabilia, and hallucinates that her dead husband is still living with her. (The eighty-something Thatcher is still alive but rarely appears in public.) These sequences are affecting in the beautiful, mournful opening to the film. But over and over again, Lloyd interrupts the dramatic action of the film to bring us back to the disoriented old lady ambling around the house.

It's hard to understand what Lloyd found so fascinating about this footage. My companions and I agreed that the far more interesting sequences were of the young Thatcher struggling to overcome class and gender discrimination to rise to power in England. If Lloyd and screenwriter Abi Morgan (who, incidentally, also co-wrote another film in current release, "Shame," starring Michael Fassbender) had focused in more on Thatcher's youth and heyday as Prime Minister, "The Iron Lady" would have been vastly more engaging.

As it stands, "The Iron Lady" is quite superficial. At times one senses an almost ghoulish desire on the part of the creative team to denigrate the arch-conservative Thatcher. She was ultra-tough in her attacks on the British Left in the 1980s, but now she's demented and alone. No one loves her. Was Lloyd happy to depict the arch-nemesis of the Left as a woman with little to no family or friends? If so, I find this disgraceful and not the work of an artist. Even though I disagree with many of Thatcher's policies, I find her an immensely interesting figure -- far more significant than the rather shallow Phyllida Lloyd.


The most thought-provoking line from the movie shows the elderly Thatcher expressing her disappointment with the 21st century: "It used to be about trying to do something; now it's all about trying to be someone."

War Horse: Effective Entertainment, but Predictable

After seeing "Munich" (2005), I felt that Steven Spielberg was (finally) becoming a major filmmaker, graduating from entertainment and moving on to the realm of art. But it hasn't panned out. "War Horse" confirms that Spielberg isn't much interested in art. He's an entertainer through and through. That's what he was put here to do.

This is fine. He should stick to what excites him. The sad thing is that even his skills at entertainment are declining. "War Horse" is an effective entertainment, but you can predict every move it's going to make. It operates within such a conventional formula that there's little real excitement.

The story focuses on a lower-class English teenager (played fairly well by newcomer Jeremy Irvine) who develops a deep relationship with a young thoroughbred that his father buys at auction. Quite early in the film, World War I breaks out (1914), and the family is forced to sell the horse to the British Army. The bulk of the film follows the horse's travails on various front lines.

The boy eventually enlists in the Army. The drama then moves to the question of whether the horse and boy are going to find each other on the battlefield. Along the way, the horse encounters an array of German, French, and English folk, some of whom go out of their way to protect the horse. The screenplay bends over backwards to portray the Germans as kind and humane. This was a nice touch, but not really surprising anymore. American and British storywriters have been doing this for about 20 years now.

It is all lovely to behold, and one cannot help but get carried up by it. I do believe that animals and humans can share deep, surprising, and authentic bonds. But "War Horse" never moves beyond the predictable. It ultimately coddles its audience and never gives it much to think about. After you've wiped away the tears and felt the warm afterglow dissipate, you go back to the challenging world, not having grown at all. "War Horse" is just a very good Hallmark greeting card.

Shame: Harrowing Tale of Human Misery

British artist-turned-filmmaker Steve McQueen is a great cinematographer, a superb editor, and a talented lighting/sound engineer. As a storyteller, he's not so great. But he's learning.

"Shame," McQueen's second feature film (after 2008's "Hunger"), is a harrowing look at human misery. The main character, played very well by Michael Fassbender, on the surface looks great. He's fit, handsome, sexy, well-educated, and prosperous. He gets any woman or man he wants and enjoys the life of the 21st-century Manhattan playboy.

But inside, something is terribly wrong. His sex drive is so compulsive that it threatens to capsize his life. When his boss discovers that his work computer is filled to overflowing with pornography, the first sign of imbalance appears. Also disturbing is his near-constant masturbation and sex with strangers.

When we meet his sister (played beautifully by Carey Mulligan), we see that trouble runs in the family. The script never indicates what happened in their childhoods, but these siblings are clearly haunted by something.

There has been much press about the sexual explicitness of "Shame" and the full-frontal nudity of Fassbender. I'm happy to report that this has been greatly exaggerated. Fassbender does very little full-frontal and doesn't do many butt shots either. This is not a titillating film at all. It is a depiction of human frailty and suffering. I'm embarrassed to make reference to Fassbender's private parts. But the press has been so obsessed with this that I felt obliged to do some truth-telling with regard to it.

It's quite a depressing statement about American culture today that critics have so fixated on the nudity in this film. "Shame" may not be a great film, but it's certainly not soft-core porn! I feel sorry for the morons who will see this movie hoping for titillation. They will get the shock of their lives. 

-- unfinished –

Ride With the Devil: Ang Lee's Worst Film

Every great director has one or two misfires. The Civil War drama "Ride With the Devil" (1999) is Ang Lee's, and it's a doozy. 

The photography is gorgeous at times; it captures the panoramic majesty of the American countryside. But everything else falls flat. The story is dull, the casting is spectacularly off, the actors were coached unbelievably badly, the editing is flaccid, the music is pedestrian, and the costumes and hair are downright laughable. Lee gives almost all the young male characters very long hair, making them look like girls. It's quite silly.

Lee took a lot of risks with this film. He did not want to make a standard Western. This courage is admirable, but his judgment goes wrong at almost every turn.

Chief among the disasters is the casting of Tobey Maguire in the lead role. I've never been a big fan of Maguire. His range is among the smallest of any big-name actor in American cinema today. All he seems capable of portraying is gentle, doe-eyed boys. His voice is so soft and high that you wonder if he ever experienced puberty. I like the idea of trying to build a Western around a girl-like male character. On paper it sounds interesting and innovative. But Lee was not able to make it work at all.

His direction of almost all the actors was disastrous, and there are many of them -- far too many. Skeet Ulrich and Simon Baker are almost as bad as Maguire. Jonathan Rhys Meyers parades around like he's doing an imitation of Mick Jagger circa 1968. Jewel, making her acting debut, is bizarrely anachronistic, reeking more of 1990 than 1860. Only Jeffrey Wright, playing the one black character, knows what he's doing.

Lee seems to have wanted to make a real effort to reach out to younger audiences. But filling his cast with Brat Pack youngsters isn't the way to go about that. He demonstrates here a real difficulty directing younger actors.

The film Lee made before this was "The Ice Storm" (1997). After it was "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon" (2000). What a stunning contrast there is between those two near-masterpieces and this goofy, boring dud.