Oscar nominations

[calimac]

Announced this morning. They just announced them, and put them in the news feed. No snazzy tv show, no big theatre, no tuxes and fancy dresses, no red carpet, no Billy Crystal or whoever telling jokes, they just announced them, as they do every year, even though I find the nominee list far more interesting and meaningful than the final winners.

I made a point of renting The Social Network as soon as possible after the DVD release for the same reason that I bothered to go to see True Grit and The King's Speech in the theatres: in a bid to increase the number of movies likely to be nominated for major Oscars that I'd seen before the nominations came out. Last year, and the year before, I'd only seen 3 at that point.

And this year: 3. The above 3. Run as fast as you can, you'll still be in the same place.

However, we are better off in at least one respect. In the previous two years, I found only two of the three films to be good as films. This year they were all well-made and enjoyable, on that level, to watch. The problems were different. The Social Network is about a villain who wins the game, which could be great if only the story were fiction. Unfortunately it's all too true. Better that, though, I suppose, than a whitewashing of history. I've previously alluded to to the historical howlers in The King's Speech but I tried not to go on and on whinging about it. No, I'll leave that to Christopher Hitchens, who does it better than I could. I'd quibble with some of his emphases (Edward VIII wasn't that pro-Nazi) and query one statement (I've never read that Edward's equerry Fruity Metcalfe was actually a Blackshirt, and it sounds unlikely to me, as Edward actually repudiated Fascist support in the abdication crisis), but every other shocking fact Hitch throws out is absolutely true, including the existence of the notion in Churchill's mind, that Hitler had only one rival as a noxious, vile, existential threat to the British Empire: Gandhi.

Comments

[papersky.livejournal.com]

Fruity Metcalfe either actually was or was a very close sympathiser, according to Anne de Courcy's The Viceroy's Daughters -- he was married to one of Curzon's daughters, another was married to Mosley, they were close.

Edward VIII is sufficiently vile that nobody needs to invent slanders. Never was a man so condemned out of his own mouth as he is in his autobiography.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

True that Metcalfe and Mosley were married to sisters, but Mosley's going around the bend to fascism from respectable politics pretty much coincided with his taking up extramaritally with the equally fascist Diana Mitford Guinness, whom he subsequently married after Cimmie Curzon died. Lots of respectable people were associated with Mosley until the New Party days, after which they dropped him with haste. Metcalfe's connection to Mosley here is a bit too guilt-by-association for my tastes.

More relevant is Metcalfe's own wife, Alexandra, who was also having an affair with Mosley, which continued well into his Blackshirt days. She was tarred fascist in the press, with what justification I don't know, but again I haven't seen that Fruity got the same treatment. He, so far as I know, was not having an affair with Mosley.

[barondave.livejournal.com]

I've only seen three of the films that made a big splash: Toy Story 3, The Social Network and Inception. That's also the order in which I think they should be ranked, at least in my view.

While I liked the Harry Potter entry better than most nominators, I also thought Shrek 4 was pretty good. Really, while many of the nominees have been on my list for a while, I'm in no hurry. Especially after finally seeing The Hurt Locker; a fine film but not the one I would have picked for Best Picture (which is Up).

This is why I don't pay much attention to the Academy Awards.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I use the Academy Awards nomination list - for what I consider the major awards only - as a useful checklist for movies I might want to consider seeing. Frozen River, for instance, never hit my radar until it got a nomination, and I'm glad I subsequently saw it. I'm not particularly interested in the winners list per se.

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Substitute True Grit for The Social Network and you have the only three I've seen. I can't possibly say which is "best" even of those three, because they are so vastly different.

[randy-byers.livejournal.com]

I've seen seven of the nominees. The ones I haven't seen are The King's Speech, 127 Hours, and The Fighter. I only saw Toy Story 3 on an airplane without the sound, so that probably really doesn't count either. My favorites of the ones I've seen are Winter's Bone, The Kids Are All Right, and True Grit, although I liked the others well enough too. Probably liked Black Swan the least, probably because of the horror aspects.

The Social Network also has some historical howlers, including a portrayal of Zuckerberg as not having a girlfriend while he developed Facebook. The whole thread about the girl who rejected him, and his attempts to regain her favor via Facebook, is an invention. But, you know, geeks can't get chicks, so they program instead.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I knew the girlfriend in the movie was an invention. And the closing-off moment of Zuck's trying to win back her favor after he's lost his best friend was a last-ditch attempt to win audience sympathy for him. Bah.

But however fictional it may be, both in fact and even in concept, the opening conversation is, I thought, a brilliant depiction of the idea of the nerd mind. Movie-Zuck is totally tone-deaf to conversational nuance, while being sensitive enough to realize when he's gone wrong somewhere, and also desperate enough to win the woman's favor to acknowledge it - a combination unlikely to be found to such an extent in any real person - and it's fascinating to watch him back up when she gets angry, trying to feel his way back without having any idea of where he's going.

Another oddity is the handling of the aftermath of Sean Parker's bust for cocaine. The movie cuts to Zuck being asked in deposition what happened, and he says merely that Sean still owns a large share of the stock, which was true; what isn't revealed, and only implied by the implication of what Zuck doesn't say, is that, like Eduardo before him, Sean was kicked out of Facebook management at the insistence of investors.

[smofbabe.livejournal.com]

I think that term "historical howlers" is a little strong: they certainly did get it wrong about Churchill, but the actual film said next to nothing about the war effort so Hitchens going on and on about the initial royal family and British reaction to Germany and possible appeasement seem to me to be more his hobbyhorse than anything that they got wrong in this specific film.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

What Hitchens forgets is that this is not a film about Edward VIII. It's a film about George VI. It's not necessary to go into Edward's iniquities except insofar as it explains his brother's story. Nevertheless they altered and elided a good deal in a consistently softening direction, particularly about Churchill, Chamberlain, and Baldwin.

[lynn-maudlin.livejournal.com]

This is always the challenge when making a film about real people: do you present unvarnished truth and put the audience to sleep or do you tell a good story and move things around a bit... or maybe more than a bit.

But I'm also bothered by the notion that a person (in this instance, Churchill) must be entirely good. No one is. We all f* up, sometimes more than we do it right. It doesn't make Churchill less important and heroic for having gotten it wrong for awhile. On the other hand, my father (stationed in England for several years during WWII) said that Churchill was often a laughingstock because of inebriation. Of course, my father had very littler tolerance for drunkenness, so take it with a grain of salt.