OVP: Best Picture (2010)
The Nominees Were...
Mike Medavoy, Brian Oliver, and Scott Franklin, Black Swan
David Hoberman, Todd Lieberman, and Mark Wahlberg, The Fighter
Emma Thomas and Christopher Nolan, Inception
Gary Gilbert, Jeffrey Levy-Hinte, and Celine Rattray, The Kids Are All Right
Iain Canning, Emile Sherman, and Garet Unwin, The King's Speech
Christian Colson, Danny Boyle, and John Smithson, 127 Hours
Scott Rudin, Dana Brunetti, Michael de Luca, and Cean Chaffin, The Social Network
Darla K. Anderson, Toy Story 3
Scott Rudin, Ethan Coen, and Joel Coen, True Grit
Anne Rosellini and Alix Madigan-Yorkin, Winter's Bone
My Thoughts: Looking at the above photos, you'd almost be forgiven for thinking this was a great lineup of Best Picture nominees. Put together, when you see the iconic images of movie stars, soon-to-be classic scenes, and your favorites mixed amongst the ones you were relatively indifferent toward, you think "wow, what a year for pictures." But 2010 was just an okay year for Best Pictures, in my opinion, and some of the best films of the year got overlooked (as always happens) in favor of some of the fine or mediocre.
With 2011, the punching bag that I felt the worst about was The Artist, primarily because it's not a film I wanted to persistently rag upon-it's just that I didn't think any of its nominations were really justified. This year's Artist easily became True Grit, a film that is better than I've been saying it is, but has to surpass a higher bar when it comes down to being counted amongst the year's ten best films, which it doesn't really do outside of its cinematography. With ten nominations, I've discussed the film from almost every angle, but the reality is the film just doesn't have enough going for it. Even films like Inception, which try hard and fail on plot execution, at least shot for great and fell. True Grit doesn't even get to that point. This is fine for just being a movie-not every film can be (or should be) No Country for Old Men, and there's something for keeping the tradition of the western (as I get older, one of my favorite genres) alive, but the Duke's films are largely interchangeable with some rare exceptions, and this movie proves that that doesn't alter when you cast Jeff Bridges.
Winter's Bone is the film that has grown on me the most since I've seen it of these ten. Some of these movies I instantly loved, some I disliked fairly strongly when I first saw them, but Winter's Bone is the one film that I have gained a lot more appreciation for the more distance I gain from it. I think it may be the nuances of Lawrence's performance come into a different light the more you think about the people surrounding her. I love the complicated relationships that develop with Dale Dickey and John Hawkes throughout the film, how we never really get to understand their actions properly, but we get a hint of why they are the way they are. Movies like Winter's Bone run a tight line between giving the audience too much (killing some of the remaining mystery of the film) and being too ambiguous (therefore leaving us alienated). It helps that Granik keeps the focus almost entirely on Ree (I'm trying to remember if there's a scene she's not in, and I don't believe there is), therefore making her eyes our eyes, and giving us only what she would know as a character. This helps keep the chill real, since we have our doppelganger on-screen, and have to rely on her for our journey through the movie.
Toy Story 3, as I've mentioned before, is a film that relies heavily on its predecessors, and I don't recall where I read it (if you know who you are, take your credit), but I remember a critic saying that if they ever make a Toy Story 4 they should just take back all of the awards given to this film, and I 100% agree. This film only works as the closing of a chapter. The film would lose something if we saw more of the toys journey without Andy, because he is the anchor of this film. The movies are all about getting older, growing up, and finding that you cannot stay the person you used to be. It's a message that resonates with everyone, because as you get older, you either have to close doors or realize that some doors aren't open anymore (I've been going through this crisis a bit as my thirties come charging out at me like a gun and I'm not ready to give up my twenties quite yet, and this is proof that this story hearkens to all ages). If we get to restart, it takes away the linear aspects of the film, and makes it less relatable-the movie works because we are Andy, and have to say goodbye in the end. The toys get to stay the same age forever, but we do not. There's a lot more to the film (some great action sequences, terrific vocal work from Ned Beatty, Tom Hanks, and Michael Keaton), but it's the final scene that clinches the entire movie-after fifteen years, we are forced to say goodbye to these characters, and if Pixar understands what makes them special, it will be a permanent goodbye.
Since we've already tackled True Grit, it makes sense to also throw out the other film that took a (slightly less intense) beating throughout these proceedings, The King's Speech. I've carped on and on about how this feels like a TV movie, and I don't want to mean that as an insult. Television, and even TV movies, can hit emotional heights that only the finest of art can go toward. I know I spend most of my television time on this blog focusing on the shows of Ryan Murphy, but I do love shows that are less divisive and ones I can defend more universally. Lost, Mad Men, Game of Thrones-I would put these up against almost any films of the past ten years in terms of grandeur and content.
The reality is though that television and movies are very different things. Television, when it's meant to be artistic and not some soul-sucking drivel like Two and a Half Men or 99.9% of cable reality shows, is about developing characters over time. It's about forming a long-term bond with a character and over the years letting them into your life in a personal way. Look at a show like Lost-you cheer on John Locke in a way that you could never cheer on a movie character, because you've spent years with him, and like it or not, when you truly love a show, you truly cheer on a character in the same way you'd cheer on a real-life friend (and let's be honest, with our favorite shows, we spend as much time with these characters as we do with our actual friends).
Film, on the other hand, is supposed to tell a finite, short tale, and is supposed to be a compact story, and should therefore find a shorter, higher arc. The King's Speech would work better as a miniseries or a short series because it tends to gloss over too many of the scenes. We take for granted Bertie's struggle, how difficult it is for him to ask for help, and Hooper gives us history as a crutch, but it's missing the big arcs you want from a movie, and needs more time to grow with us as an audience (think of the montages they use to keep the film a-pace). Hooper understands television, obviously, as that is where he has been most successful, but with a film he's better off with something finite like Les Miserables, a play that has already compressed what he needs to present, rather than something larger that could go the way of television or a movie.
You can compare The King's Speech to The Kids Are All Right in this regard to get a sense of a movie that also could have worked as a television series, but clearly doesn't because the director knows completely what medium she's working in and has the good sense not to lose focus on that. In a television series, we'd get to know a lot more about Paul, and in a TV series, quite frankly, the ending wouldn't work-we'd have spent too much time with these character not to see a happy ending for all of them (yes, spoiler alerts should be issued, but I suspect you've seen this movie by now, and would have skipped the paragraph if you hadn't). Cholodenko knows to keep the focus on the affair, and the turmoil that invades Nic and Jules stagnant marriage, and not meander or try to gloss through certain scenes because there's a time limit. In the end, when Paul is evicted from their lives, we realize that not everyone was required a happy ending here, and the focus was truly on the core family, and not the guy who was thrown into it.
Inception was one of the biggest movies of 2010, and probably the most-discussed film, and was a bit of the inverse of Winter's Bone for me. I remember adoring it the first time I saw it, impressed by the beautiful visuals and the insane amount of twists and turns. It, however, doesn't hold up as sturdily on second viewing, and is instead an artful, but flawed summer film. Without a great performance like Heath Ledger's to anchor the movie, Nolan becomes a bit too in love with his concepts, and while they work on some levels (the entire entering your dream aspect is a doozy), the concept is too big and too full of holes to hold up when you take a closer examination of it. Nolan would have gained from trimming a bit of the fat (cutting a couple of twists), and spending more time on, say, Mar, who is the most fascinating character in the film. In fact, in a land of a thousand sequels, it might have made more sense to have the Mar story told beforehand, as it's a bit more intriguing than the remaining film. The movie is still impressive, and this isn't the screenplay category, so I have to not just base my vote on the plot but also on the visual effects, the cinematography, and how they valuably contribute to the end result, but that's not enough to save it and get it Best Picture.
Danny Boyle's adventures in filmmaking are not without their risks, and I will say that this isn't my least favorite of his films (let's all brace ourselves for the shellacking Slumdog Millionaire is going to take in 2008). The film is ambitious, I'll give it that, but it just doesn't work for me. High concept movies should be applauded, but they should be celebrated when they actually succeed, which this one largely doesn't. The film lives and dies on whether we want to stare at James Franco for two hours, which works (this would have been downright terrible without a star as intriguing as Franco at the helm), but the film seems more intent on us thinking about how we'd react in a scene than how the character is reacting. It says something that the hipster Franco has so much growing to do, when in reality he seemed relatively enlightened at the beginning of the film, and the guy who randomly helps two girls in the desert without a second thought doesn't meld with the guy who didn't tell anyone where he was going. Again, I really want to like this movie, but the stylistic choices (why does he have to do those odd Slumdog closeups in a film that's so different from it) and lack of proper character development don't add up to anything I can get behind.
If Winter's Bone is the film that grew on me the most and Inception the one that waned after a while, Black Swan is the film I forgot how much I loved. Looking through my many awards notes from that year and leading up to writing the OVP entries, I realized how highly I had rated the film, and after re-watching scenes from the movie, I recalled how tightly wound this film was, and how it ended up in my personal Top 10 for the year. The thing people forget about the film is that it's so much more than Portman's girly, mad-hatter performance. People see that Best Actress trophy, and forget about the great deal of symbolism and easter eggs throughout the taut script and the "is she insane or is she being destroyed" aspects of the plot. Think of how brilliant Winona Ryder and Barbara Hershey are in their short, tortured roles, and how we slowly begin to question if everything in Nina's world is illusion or just a twisted version of her reality. This is a movie that stands up years later because it doesn't rely on the "twist ending" aspect as much as it relies on genuine, psychological scares and the fear of what we don't know.
David O. Russell's film I actually recalled liking better than most people, and it was due to two things, both of which we've discussed at length, but for the completist in me, I've got to recount again. The first, as I've mentioned are the fight sequences. I've been trying to pinpoint the reasons for this, and the biggest thing for me is that I honestly didn't know how this was going to end (despite it being a true story). The film has the atmosphere of being about a family who just happen to love boxing, and not focused solely on the actual fighting. Of course, they wouldn't have made the movie if he wasn't somewhat successful, but the boxing is secondary, and after a while, you feel that it could be that Mickey's dream is about to be crushed, and that he had a brief date with fame but failed. That's an interesting story, and one intriguing enough to be made into a movie, and therefore the suspense works.
The second aspect is of course the brilliant work by Melissa Leo. While I've discussed why Bale doesn't work for me, Leo just soars in every scene she's in in the movie. Great films don't always house great performances, but they do know when they have one, and with Leo, they just let her attack the scenes, focusing solely on her despite her lack of star stature. I loved the way that she moves through all of her children-that she doesn't react to her daughters as a giant set of SAG extras, but instead has different reactions for all of them and clearly knows what motivates her, and who her favorites are. It's a great piece of work that bared mention again as we close out our discussion of this movie.
The final film is of course The King's Speech's chief rival, The Social Network. After spending at least two hours yesterday in a social media spiral (by the end of the weekend I'll have my LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr's all up-to-date, and I'll wonder what the hell I did that for when I could have cleaned my apartment or jumped on the treadmill), I can tell you that this film captured a slice of our lives. The primary reason that it didn't succeed in winning the Best Picture is that it spoke (surface-level) to a very young subset of our culture. The film resonated with Gen Y audiences in a way that it likely didn't for other audiences because of its tech pop culture references and the way that Facebook unfolded for those born between 1982-1987.
But the film is universal in the bulk of its messages, which is why the lack of knowledge about the technology is acknowledged, but not forgiven if you dismissed this movie out-of-hand. The tale of a man who goes from having a simple life to throwing away his friends, his morals, his humanity all in the pursuit of an ambition that he's not even sure he desires is a tale that can speak to all of us. Mark, Eduardo, and Sean may represent real people, but they show a universal message of how wealth can corrupt some and enhance others, and we only know what we want when we reflect and realize what we missed.
David O. Russell's film I actually recalled liking better than most people, and it was due to two things, both of which we've discussed at length, but for the completist in me, I've got to recount again. The first, as I've mentioned are the fight sequences. I've been trying to pinpoint the reasons for this, and the biggest thing for me is that I honestly didn't know how this was going to end (despite it being a true story). The film has the atmosphere of being about a family who just happen to love boxing, and not focused solely on the actual fighting. Of course, they wouldn't have made the movie if he wasn't somewhat successful, but the boxing is secondary, and after a while, you feel that it could be that Mickey's dream is about to be crushed, and that he had a brief date with fame but failed. That's an interesting story, and one intriguing enough to be made into a movie, and therefore the suspense works.
The second aspect is of course the brilliant work by Melissa Leo. While I've discussed why Bale doesn't work for me, Leo just soars in every scene she's in in the movie. Great films don't always house great performances, but they do know when they have one, and with Leo, they just let her attack the scenes, focusing solely on her despite her lack of star stature. I loved the way that she moves through all of her children-that she doesn't react to her daughters as a giant set of SAG extras, but instead has different reactions for all of them and clearly knows what motivates her, and who her favorites are. It's a great piece of work that bared mention again as we close out our discussion of this movie.
The final film is of course The King's Speech's chief rival, The Social Network. After spending at least two hours yesterday in a social media spiral (by the end of the weekend I'll have my LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, and Tumblr's all up-to-date, and I'll wonder what the hell I did that for when I could have cleaned my apartment or jumped on the treadmill), I can tell you that this film captured a slice of our lives. The primary reason that it didn't succeed in winning the Best Picture is that it spoke (surface-level) to a very young subset of our culture. The film resonated with Gen Y audiences in a way that it likely didn't for other audiences because of its tech pop culture references and the way that Facebook unfolded for those born between 1982-1987.
But the film is universal in the bulk of its messages, which is why the lack of knowledge about the technology is acknowledged, but not forgiven if you dismissed this movie out-of-hand. The tale of a man who goes from having a simple life to throwing away his friends, his morals, his humanity all in the pursuit of an ambition that he's not even sure he desires is a tale that can speak to all of us. Mark, Eduardo, and Sean may represent real people, but they show a universal message of how wealth can corrupt some and enhance others, and we only know what we want when we reflect and realize what we missed.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Golden Globes, as always, split their trophies between Drama and Comedy, and as eight of the Best Picture nominees are Dramas, there wasn't room for 127 Hours, Winter's Bone, and True Grit (in proof that the HFPA doesn't always predict the Oscars, The Social Network emerged victorious). Toy Story 3 missed in the Comedy category (are animated films even eligible here anymore since they have their own category?), but The Kids Are All Right emerged victorious over Red, The Tourist, Burlesque, and Alice in Wonderland. The Producers Guild Awards gave their trophy to The King's Speech, and with ten contenders, they only cut Winter's Bone for the clear eleventh place The Town. And the BAFTA's, in a five-wide field, gave their trophy to The King's Speech, having it beat out Black Swan, True Grit, Inception, and The Social Network
Films I Would Have Nominated: If there's nothing else that you should realize from these write-ups, it's that if you haven't already seen it, it's time to go out and rent Scott Pilgrim. The film, three years later, seems as fresh as possible, and will likely enjoy midnight movie showings for decades, but it doesn't lose anything by being watched at home and cheering on either Scott or your favorite evil ex. Blue Valentine also plays beautifully years later, and I love the way that Gosling's fame since the film has only enhanced his sullen, broken man in the movie. Both of these films could have toppled all but two of the nominees and I would have been fine with it.
Oscar's Choice: Much to the chagrin of the blogosphere, The King's Speech, the far more traditional choice for Best Picture, triumphed over second place The Social Network and likely third place True Grit.
My Choice: I will admit that at the time, it was a much more difficult choice for me between Toy Story 3 and The Social Network, but upon reflection it's an easy win for The Social Network, followed by Pixar. Rounding out the contenders are Black Swan, Inception, Winter's Bone, The Kids Are All Right, The Fighter, The King's Speech, True Grit, and 127 Hours.
And we've now reached the end of 2010 and our OVP countdown. I only have two films left in 2012 and six left in 2009, so we'll be encountering both rather soon, but I wanted to know your thoughts on the movies-what'd you think of the Best Picture lineup of 2010? Were you in The King's Speech or The Social Network camp (or were you cheering for one of the remaining eight and wondering why your film wasn't being discussed)? And what did you favor as the true best film of 2010?
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