OVP: Best Picture (2012)
The Nominees Were...
Grant Heslov, Ben Affleck, and George Clooney, Argo
Dan Janvey, Josh Penn, and Michael Gottwald, Beasts of the Southern Wild
Stacey Sher, Reginald Hudlin, and Pilar Savone, Django Unchained
Tim Bevan, Eric Fellner, Debra Hayward, and Cameron Mackintosh, Les Miserables
Gil Netter, Ang Lee, and David Womark, Life of Pi
Steven Spielberg and Kathleen Kennedy, Lincoln
Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen, and Jonathan Gordon, Silver Linings Playbook
Donna Gigliotti, Bruce Cohen, and Jonathan Gordon, Silver Linings Playbook
Mark Boal, Kathryn Bigelow, and Megan Ellison, Zero Dark Thirty
My Thoughts: And so now we have come to the end of the line, the top of the heap, the cream of the crop-the nine films that received nominations for Best Picture. Each of these films we've spent the past summer dissecting, looking through, and now it's time to figure out which one I (and you, if you post in the comments) most supported for the top prize.
I'm going to start with Silver Linings Playbook, because I feel I need to find some peace with the film. The movie is oddly good and terribly bad, and I think that I should first try and explain what I do like about the film. The movie tries to cover a topic that is oddly underutilized in film: mental illness affecting normal, regular families. Jennifer Lawrence, when she was doing all of the awards press junkets, frequently talked about ending the stigma of mental illness, and if this film did that just a little bit, that would have been a noble cause, if not necessarily one that deserved an Oscar nomination. I think that the cinema does have that power to change the national conversation about a particular topic (look at movies like Brokeback Mountain for example).
But Silver Linings Playbook doesn't do that, because in real life, without some sort of medication and persistent work, mental illness is not cured by the love of a good woman. This is not the doldrums of being dumped-Bradley Cooper's Pat has a real medical condition, and while his life going better may momentarily change his state of being, it won't permanently do so, as the ending implies. David O. Russell, and I've said this several times, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to have a story that's about something pressing in the national dialogue, but also something that's cute and fun and a great date movie. Both of these topics can be the source of excellent filmmaking-anyone who poo-poos this film because it's a romantic comedy doesn't get the point at all, as we are in desperate need as a cinematic audience of strong romantic comedies. The problem is that these two don't cohesively meld in the way that Russell hopes them to, and as a result, you get a fine, enjoyable, but unsuccessful film.
Les Miserables will go next (because the two films have so many things in common, obviously). I just checked my list of my rankings of all of the 2012 films, and I have this one oddly low compared to some of the others (including the two films trying desperately to take the top prize). I think the biggest fault with Les Miz is that it has so many ups-and-downs. You are given such a great start with Anne Hathaway's character and performance, easily the best part of the film-Hathaway's Fantine is a tragic, heartbreaking creation, and she sells it to the rafters. Part of what makes a movie musical so appealing is that the sky is really the limit-you've already forgone reality by having people randomly sing in the streets, which, much to my chagrin, no one does in real life. As a result, you can have a dramatic moment with this woman and believe that such a good person can have such a rotten life.
But the film never recovers from her leaving. This isn't necessarily the baser story's fault: Jean Valjean, Javert, Eponine, Marius-this is a musical with a lot of interesting characters, but the performances are so all-over-the-map that when you don't have the unstoppable force of Hathaway's performance to distract you, you are pulled in many different directions. The only work in the movie that equals Hathaway's is Eddie Redmayne's. Sometimes I even feel that Redmayne, with that lyrical quiver in his voice (I just took a ten-minute break to listen to "Red and Black" and sing Don Ju-An multiple times) might be a better fit for the film that Hathaway. But he can't save it when you have two lead performances that are bad for the story, and everyone else having too-limiting of characters. The film is great for the stage, where these sorts of small character developments are more easily forgiven, but in a film they're fatal flaws that obscure the movie too deeply, even though there are definitely things to recommend seeing the movie.
Django Unchained is in a similar situation, with a lot of great pieces that don't seem to fit together. I think the problem with Tarantino films at this point, and it's a growing problem, is that he's starting to lose the ability to shock and even surprise the audience. No longer are we stunned when he puts together a brilliant song-score, or when he willingly kills off most of the main characters, or when the entire screen is doused in blood (it'd be a nice change if he went back to the nastiness of his first couple of films instead of the Sergio Leone-obsessed nature of his later films, at least for a picture or two). His movies are too good to ever be called bad, but when a director can no longer thrill the audience, he needs to develop some new tricks (even Woody Allen has learned this, though he occasionally forgets it for years at a time).
What we're left with is a film that has razor-sharp dialogue, a few solid performances, but drags ferociously in the final third (why the hell does Tarantino keep casting himself, when he's seemingly the only person he can't get an improved performance out of?), and frequently finds offensive things to say without enough substance behind it.
Life of Pi has became one of the movies that, along with Silver Linings Playbook, was a punching bag throughout this OVP series of write-ups. I have a harder time with this, because A) I like Ang Lee better than I like David O. Russell and B) there are moments in Life of Pi that are sheer bliss. The visual effects in the film are of a caliber you rarely if ever see, coming as close to that "change the industry" sort of quality that you saw in Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Avatar as you can get without fully pulling the trigger (I was very happy to give it the OVP for Visual Effects). The movie is beautiful, and the whales and islands and whimsy that comes from the film are all terrific.
But the film gets a sucker punch from the ending. I know that the book ended largely in this way, with you forced to encounter reality in such a harsh avalanche, and normally I like a sprinkle of melancholy in my movies, but here it reads as a slap to the viewer. It's not just that the police decided to believe his tiger story, it's that we all know he was lying, and they just went along with him to make everyone happy and to neglect the ugliness in the world. That's probably the point of the story, but it seems so artificial and lazy to have so much magic dashed. The ending of this movie has ruined my opinion of this film-when you have months and dozens of articles to write about a sole picture, its flaws and high points come further into focus, and that has forever marred my opinion of Life of Pi.
Amour is that rare film that has done neither for me. My opinion of Amour has stayed stunningly neutral for a movie with some things to offer and that critics lapped up with a spoon. It might be that I don't connect with the film in the way I'm supposed to, and I don't think that's because I'm sixty years younger than the characters (I have seen what it's like for one spouse to be affected by a stroke and the other to have all of their faculties). It's just too clinical for me, it's too matter-of-fact. The little touches are what I loved in the film-the Haneke touches. I'm still stunned by the final scene, with Huppert walking through the apartment: the loneliness and foreboding in that scene is stunning. Huppert doesn't give an Oscar-worthy performance, but her character is perhaps the most interesting in the movie. She hasn't stored love for the future. If there would have been more of that biting attitude, I probably would have sunk into the film more. As it is, it is to be admired, but not necessarily to be interacted with, and doesn't quite hit me.
Lincoln is the film of the bunch that I wish I liked better. It's grown on me slightly-the way that they combine all of these great Spielbergian staples; the man has one of the best tech crews in the business. But like Amour, I just cannot connect with the source material in the way I'm supposed to, and here I know why. I just don't buy characters that are saints, and not just because saints don't exist in real life, it's also because saints aren't very interesting. Day-Lewis is far too strong of an actor to not give a quality performance, but I see in his work a legend that also happened to be a person, but he doesn't disrupt a saint that also happens to be a flawed person (Lincoln was only human, of course). I also hate whitewashing history (couldn't David Derickson have at least shown up at some point), but I more so hate when history has been retold dozens of times while other just as interesting stories lay on the back-burner. From a director as important as Spielberg I suppose this film will remain the definitive Lincoln, but couldn't we have picked a subject that has been less covered already in cinema?
Beasts of the Southern Wild, of course, is the bravest and probably most unique film of the bunch, and that is always something to celebrate. One of the interesting things about the nine or ten wide Best Picture races is that you get a film like Beasts (or Tree of Life or District Nine or Up!) to compete when they otherwise wouldn't be able to (I maintain that 2012 would have been that rare year like 1995 or 2001 where we would have gone 3/5 for the directors, and Les Miz and Argo would have completed our nominated set).
The film works so well because Benh Zeitlin allows us to get lost in the world of Hushpuppy, a world that is both real (we all can tell that this is Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana) and of her imagination, and true to the wonder of cinema, Zeitlin never lets us know which is fact and which is fake. Zeitlin's newness behind the camera is evident when he spends too much time on rebuilding the father-daughter relationship (and relying too heavily on first-time actors, a tactic which does give you a great freshness, but also gives you too many staged emotions, particularly from Dwight Henry). The movie is a promising start to a hopefully interesting and long career, and I'm glad Oscar made the investment.
Finally, we come to Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, the two films that I've championed the hardest throughout this process. Except, have I? I don't feel like I've given enough credit to the excellent Argo. Perhaps this is because Argo is the sum of its parts-it's similar to the gymnast who can't win a gold in any of the individual competitions but grabs it in the all-around. The film just works-the humor, the acting, the suspense-Affleck may take some historical liberties, but he at least tells us a story we didn't already know (are you listening, Mr. Spielberg?), and pushes a political narrative without ever sacrificing entertainment. That is a difficult task to undertake, and the film is littered with terrific scenes-that great finger-biting scene in the airport, for example. It takes a lot to get a jaded and movie-educated audience to succumb to the idea that this group won't be successful. I feel like Argo is going to be maligned a bit in Oscar history because it won the trophy for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a super movie that deserved to be amongst the best of the year.
I recently reread my review of Zero Dark Thirty to understand why I gave the film four stars rather than five stars, because some of its best parts (Chastain's performance, the exhilarating final third of the movie) have improved my opinion of it so dramatically. I do feel correct in stating that the side characters in the film, Jennifer Ehle and Jason Clarke in particular, don't give us enough background. Maya is supposed to be a universally, abnormally, almost psychotically driven force-of-nature, and she doesn't need a background, but Ehle's Jessica and Clarke's Dan don't have that tunnel vision. We should learn more about what keeps them going back for more; this would, if nothing else, give us a contrast to Maya's determination.
But that being said, Bigelow has created the darker flip side of Argo here. They are oddly similar stories, with both focused on a single person going up against political bureaucracy to succeed in a seemingly impossible task (and both had reluctant Democratic presidents who took a major risk that paid off). Bigelow's version is more of a Dante-like descent for her character, while Affleck's is an uplifting tale of the human spirit. It depends on which direction your specific cinematic passions swing that makes you cast your vote for one or the other, but I maintain these are the two best nominees of the bunch.
I'm going to start with Silver Linings Playbook, because I feel I need to find some peace with the film. The movie is oddly good and terribly bad, and I think that I should first try and explain what I do like about the film. The movie tries to cover a topic that is oddly underutilized in film: mental illness affecting normal, regular families. Jennifer Lawrence, when she was doing all of the awards press junkets, frequently talked about ending the stigma of mental illness, and if this film did that just a little bit, that would have been a noble cause, if not necessarily one that deserved an Oscar nomination. I think that the cinema does have that power to change the national conversation about a particular topic (look at movies like Brokeback Mountain for example).
But Silver Linings Playbook doesn't do that, because in real life, without some sort of medication and persistent work, mental illness is not cured by the love of a good woman. This is not the doldrums of being dumped-Bradley Cooper's Pat has a real medical condition, and while his life going better may momentarily change his state of being, it won't permanently do so, as the ending implies. David O. Russell, and I've said this several times, wants to have his cake and eat it too. He wants to have a story that's about something pressing in the national dialogue, but also something that's cute and fun and a great date movie. Both of these topics can be the source of excellent filmmaking-anyone who poo-poos this film because it's a romantic comedy doesn't get the point at all, as we are in desperate need as a cinematic audience of strong romantic comedies. The problem is that these two don't cohesively meld in the way that Russell hopes them to, and as a result, you get a fine, enjoyable, but unsuccessful film.
Les Miserables will go next (because the two films have so many things in common, obviously). I just checked my list of my rankings of all of the 2012 films, and I have this one oddly low compared to some of the others (including the two films trying desperately to take the top prize). I think the biggest fault with Les Miz is that it has so many ups-and-downs. You are given such a great start with Anne Hathaway's character and performance, easily the best part of the film-Hathaway's Fantine is a tragic, heartbreaking creation, and she sells it to the rafters. Part of what makes a movie musical so appealing is that the sky is really the limit-you've already forgone reality by having people randomly sing in the streets, which, much to my chagrin, no one does in real life. As a result, you can have a dramatic moment with this woman and believe that such a good person can have such a rotten life.
But the film never recovers from her leaving. This isn't necessarily the baser story's fault: Jean Valjean, Javert, Eponine, Marius-this is a musical with a lot of interesting characters, but the performances are so all-over-the-map that when you don't have the unstoppable force of Hathaway's performance to distract you, you are pulled in many different directions. The only work in the movie that equals Hathaway's is Eddie Redmayne's. Sometimes I even feel that Redmayne, with that lyrical quiver in his voice (I just took a ten-minute break to listen to "Red and Black" and sing Don Ju-An multiple times) might be a better fit for the film that Hathaway. But he can't save it when you have two lead performances that are bad for the story, and everyone else having too-limiting of characters. The film is great for the stage, where these sorts of small character developments are more easily forgiven, but in a film they're fatal flaws that obscure the movie too deeply, even though there are definitely things to recommend seeing the movie.
Django Unchained is in a similar situation, with a lot of great pieces that don't seem to fit together. I think the problem with Tarantino films at this point, and it's a growing problem, is that he's starting to lose the ability to shock and even surprise the audience. No longer are we stunned when he puts together a brilliant song-score, or when he willingly kills off most of the main characters, or when the entire screen is doused in blood (it'd be a nice change if he went back to the nastiness of his first couple of films instead of the Sergio Leone-obsessed nature of his later films, at least for a picture or two). His movies are too good to ever be called bad, but when a director can no longer thrill the audience, he needs to develop some new tricks (even Woody Allen has learned this, though he occasionally forgets it for years at a time).
What we're left with is a film that has razor-sharp dialogue, a few solid performances, but drags ferociously in the final third (why the hell does Tarantino keep casting himself, when he's seemingly the only person he can't get an improved performance out of?), and frequently finds offensive things to say without enough substance behind it.
Life of Pi has became one of the movies that, along with Silver Linings Playbook, was a punching bag throughout this OVP series of write-ups. I have a harder time with this, because A) I like Ang Lee better than I like David O. Russell and B) there are moments in Life of Pi that are sheer bliss. The visual effects in the film are of a caliber you rarely if ever see, coming as close to that "change the industry" sort of quality that you saw in Star Wars, Jurassic Park, and Avatar as you can get without fully pulling the trigger (I was very happy to give it the OVP for Visual Effects). The movie is beautiful, and the whales and islands and whimsy that comes from the film are all terrific.
But the film gets a sucker punch from the ending. I know that the book ended largely in this way, with you forced to encounter reality in such a harsh avalanche, and normally I like a sprinkle of melancholy in my movies, but here it reads as a slap to the viewer. It's not just that the police decided to believe his tiger story, it's that we all know he was lying, and they just went along with him to make everyone happy and to neglect the ugliness in the world. That's probably the point of the story, but it seems so artificial and lazy to have so much magic dashed. The ending of this movie has ruined my opinion of this film-when you have months and dozens of articles to write about a sole picture, its flaws and high points come further into focus, and that has forever marred my opinion of Life of Pi.
Amour is that rare film that has done neither for me. My opinion of Amour has stayed stunningly neutral for a movie with some things to offer and that critics lapped up with a spoon. It might be that I don't connect with the film in the way I'm supposed to, and I don't think that's because I'm sixty years younger than the characters (I have seen what it's like for one spouse to be affected by a stroke and the other to have all of their faculties). It's just too clinical for me, it's too matter-of-fact. The little touches are what I loved in the film-the Haneke touches. I'm still stunned by the final scene, with Huppert walking through the apartment: the loneliness and foreboding in that scene is stunning. Huppert doesn't give an Oscar-worthy performance, but her character is perhaps the most interesting in the movie. She hasn't stored love for the future. If there would have been more of that biting attitude, I probably would have sunk into the film more. As it is, it is to be admired, but not necessarily to be interacted with, and doesn't quite hit me.
Lincoln is the film of the bunch that I wish I liked better. It's grown on me slightly-the way that they combine all of these great Spielbergian staples; the man has one of the best tech crews in the business. But like Amour, I just cannot connect with the source material in the way I'm supposed to, and here I know why. I just don't buy characters that are saints, and not just because saints don't exist in real life, it's also because saints aren't very interesting. Day-Lewis is far too strong of an actor to not give a quality performance, but I see in his work a legend that also happened to be a person, but he doesn't disrupt a saint that also happens to be a flawed person (Lincoln was only human, of course). I also hate whitewashing history (couldn't David Derickson have at least shown up at some point), but I more so hate when history has been retold dozens of times while other just as interesting stories lay on the back-burner. From a director as important as Spielberg I suppose this film will remain the definitive Lincoln, but couldn't we have picked a subject that has been less covered already in cinema?
Beasts of the Southern Wild, of course, is the bravest and probably most unique film of the bunch, and that is always something to celebrate. One of the interesting things about the nine or ten wide Best Picture races is that you get a film like Beasts (or Tree of Life or District Nine or Up!) to compete when they otherwise wouldn't be able to (I maintain that 2012 would have been that rare year like 1995 or 2001 where we would have gone 3/5 for the directors, and Les Miz and Argo would have completed our nominated set).
The film works so well because Benh Zeitlin allows us to get lost in the world of Hushpuppy, a world that is both real (we all can tell that this is Isle de Jean Charles in Louisiana) and of her imagination, and true to the wonder of cinema, Zeitlin never lets us know which is fact and which is fake. Zeitlin's newness behind the camera is evident when he spends too much time on rebuilding the father-daughter relationship (and relying too heavily on first-time actors, a tactic which does give you a great freshness, but also gives you too many staged emotions, particularly from Dwight Henry). The movie is a promising start to a hopefully interesting and long career, and I'm glad Oscar made the investment.
Finally, we come to Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, the two films that I've championed the hardest throughout this process. Except, have I? I don't feel like I've given enough credit to the excellent Argo. Perhaps this is because Argo is the sum of its parts-it's similar to the gymnast who can't win a gold in any of the individual competitions but grabs it in the all-around. The film just works-the humor, the acting, the suspense-Affleck may take some historical liberties, but he at least tells us a story we didn't already know (are you listening, Mr. Spielberg?), and pushes a political narrative without ever sacrificing entertainment. That is a difficult task to undertake, and the film is littered with terrific scenes-that great finger-biting scene in the airport, for example. It takes a lot to get a jaded and movie-educated audience to succumb to the idea that this group won't be successful. I feel like Argo is going to be maligned a bit in Oscar history because it won the trophy for the wrong reasons, but that doesn't mean that it wasn't a super movie that deserved to be amongst the best of the year.
I recently reread my review of Zero Dark Thirty to understand why I gave the film four stars rather than five stars, because some of its best parts (Chastain's performance, the exhilarating final third of the movie) have improved my opinion of it so dramatically. I do feel correct in stating that the side characters in the film, Jennifer Ehle and Jason Clarke in particular, don't give us enough background. Maya is supposed to be a universally, abnormally, almost psychotically driven force-of-nature, and she doesn't need a background, but Ehle's Jessica and Clarke's Dan don't have that tunnel vision. We should learn more about what keeps them going back for more; this would, if nothing else, give us a contrast to Maya's determination.
But that being said, Bigelow has created the darker flip side of Argo here. They are oddly similar stories, with both focused on a single person going up against political bureaucracy to succeed in a seemingly impossible task (and both had reluctant Democratic presidents who took a major risk that paid off). Bigelow's version is more of a Dante-like descent for her character, while Affleck's is an uplifting tale of the human spirit. It depends on which direction your specific cinematic passions swing that makes you cast your vote for one or the other, but I maintain these are the two best nominees of the bunch.
Other Precursor Contenders: The Globes, having split their categories into Drama and Comedy, didn't find room for Amour or Beasts of the Southern Wild, though they did fit in Moonrise Kingdom, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, and in one of the oddest moments of the 2012 awards season, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen (Les Miz and Argo won). The BAFTA Awards, which still maintain just five nominations, put their winner Argo over Les Miz, Life of Pi, Lincoln, and Zero Dark Thirty. And finally, the PGA Awards skipped only Amour (which did win the Palme d'Or, so don't feel too badly for it), giving their final two nominations to Moonrise Kingdom and Skyfall (handing the trophy over to Argo). It's a hard tell over what was in tenth place. I know historically people will scoff that a James Bond film could get this close to the top trophy, but I think if we had had the mandatory ten-wide field, we would have seen Skyfall stunningly top Moonrise Kingdom, The Master, and Flight.
Films I Would Have Nominated: I've discussed at length my desperate need for The Master and Magic Mike, both films that continue to grow every time I view them, to be included in this field. However, neither was my favorite film of 2012. Nor was Argo or Zero Dark Thirty. My favorite movie of 2012 was the little hidden sapphire that was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I cannot tell you how I, who favors the epic scope when picking my favorite film of the year, went with a movie about teenagers, but Stephen Chbosky's tale about such realistic youths, trying to find their way through a period of their lives when they think they know more than they do, and somehow also know more than they think, is a challenging and wonderful opus, with three superb performances from Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, and our hero of heroes, Logan Lerman. It's a wonderland of a movie, and my 2012 favorite.
Films I Would Have Nominated: I've discussed at length my desperate need for The Master and Magic Mike, both films that continue to grow every time I view them, to be included in this field. However, neither was my favorite film of 2012. Nor was Argo or Zero Dark Thirty. My favorite movie of 2012 was the little hidden sapphire that was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. I cannot tell you how I, who favors the epic scope when picking my favorite film of the year, went with a movie about teenagers, but Stephen Chbosky's tale about such realistic youths, trying to find their way through a period of their lives when they think they know more than they do, and somehow also know more than they think, is a challenging and wonderful opus, with three superb performances from Emma Watson, Ezra Miller, and our hero of heroes, Logan Lerman. It's a wonderland of a movie, and my 2012 favorite.
Oscar’s Choice: Oscar loves a bandwagon, and it was very easy to jump on the Argo train, considering they had a movie star's face to put on the snub. Lincoln was likely in second (though Life of Pi could also have been there), and it's still worth mentioning the massive success of this lineup of films: six of these movies made $100 million domestically, and we didn't have to include a superhero film to do it. Thanks for showing adult dramas and comedies can make money still, America.
My Choice: Obviously a race between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty, and I'm going to succumb to my gut and give this to Bigelow's tale of war and obsession. In third place is Beasts, followed by Django, Lincoln, SLP, Life of Pi, Amour, and Les Miz.
And that, my friends, was 2012. It was a long, great journey, so I'm going to leave it to you-what was the best film of 2012? What OVP wins did you most (or least) agree with? What AMPAS wins did you most (or least) agree with? And with six films remaining to be viewed by moi for 2009, whose ready to encounter that race later this month?
Also in 2012: Director, Actress, Actor, Supporting Actress, Supporting Actor, Original Screenplay, Adapted Screenplay, Foreign Language Film, Animated Feature Film, Sound Mixing, Sound Editing, Original Score, Original Song, Art Direction, Cinematography, Costume, Editing, Visual Effects, Makeup, Animated Short, Live Action Short, Previously in 2012
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