waking up to the Oscar results

[calimac]

How about that: Best Picture went to a movie I saw and actually liked, as opposed to the expected winner of a movie I wouldn't see on a bet. This is only the second time the former has happened so far in the 21st century, as opposed to the latter which has happened eight times. (The other six were somewhere in between: two I saw and thought tolerable, two I saw and didn't much like, one I turned off, and one I'd be willing to see but never have.)

Two I saw and liked: Spotlight, Argo (I'm not comparing these in quality, except that I enjoyed watching both. And to which I could add, just over the century's edge, Shakespeare in Love, one of my favorite movies of all time and one of only three in that category ever to win Best Picture, the other two being Driving Miss Daisy and The Sting)
Eight I wouldn't see on a bet: Birdman (sounds weird, and not in a good way), 12 Years a Slave (torture porn), The Hurt Locker (I filled my quota of movies about Iraq with Three Kings), Slumdog Millionaire (just does not sound appealing), No Country for Old Men (sounds way too gruesome), The Departed (gangster movies are one of the two genres I just won't watch), Crash (sounds way too violent), Million Dollar Baby (and boxing movies is the other genre). Note that this is my decision about what I want to spend my entertainment time on, and this is entertainment time, not a political or artistic judgment. I am not disputing these movies' quality, or their importance, or whether anybody else might want to see them. And it's not that I avoid movies on difficult or painful topics: didn't I just praise Spotlight? I would also give thumbs-up to Brokeback Mountain and Mystic River among Best Picture near-misses, among others. But I'm not going to see a movie just because the topic is important or meaningful.
Two I saw and thought tolerable: The King's Speech, Gladiator (both pseudo-historicals, a genre I have a weakness for)
Two I saw and didn't much like: The Artist (mannered and vaguely repulsive), The Return of the King (which I only watched because I felt obliged to see it on the grounds of "know thine enemy")
One I turned off: Chicago (I'd hoped its being a musical would overcome my distaste at everything else about it. It didn't.)
One I'd be willing to see but never have: A Beautiful Mind

Comments

[pink-halen.livejournal.com]

That is an interesting assessment. I especially like the line about Torture Porn. I had no desire to see any of the Best Picture list this year. In fact, Films that I watch and love seldom find their way to the Oscars.
I chose not to watch the Oscars in favor of the Downton Abby marathon.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Well, we're different here. I saw four of this year's Best Picture nominees in the theatre and found three of them good (Spotlight, Big Short, The Martian) and the fourth not bad but dull (Bridge of Spies).

I watched an episode of Downton Abbey once, but found the ceaseless channel-switching among plotlines of thundering triviality to be unbearable. Each to their own.

[sartorias.livejournal.com]

With you on all the violence. I would have loved Shakespeare in Love if only the female lead had known how to act Shakespeare. Paltrow was so teeth-grittingly awful it spoiled the entire thing for me.

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I thought I knew more about judging such things, but perhaps I don't. So ignorance is bliss.

[wild-irises.livejournal.com]

Okay, this is fun:

Seen and liked: Chicago, The King's Speech, Argo, Spotlight.

Seen and liked with reservations, or disliked with some good stuff: A Beautiful Mind (I don't buy the premise); Lord of the Rings 3, which I would not discuss in this journal unless someone paid me substantial amounts of money; Birdman (I see everything Edward Norton is in, and I thought a lot of the ways this was weird were good ways, but in the end, not enough).

Not interested for various reasons: Gladiator, Million Dollar Baby (really offensive to disabled people), Crash, The Departed, No Country for Old Men, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker

Would see or would like to have seen: The Artist, 12 Years a Slave

[rwl.livejournal.com]

"No Country for Old Men" was by the Coen Brothers. Absolutely worth seeing, though there is some violence.

[(Anonymous)]

I had thought I might actually have time to watch the Oscars last night, for the time in several years, but then I came down quite ill over the weekend, and so, like you, woke up (late) to the results.

Although I'd see every film of potential merit if I could, I've actually caught relatively few over the past fifteen years. So far, I've not gotten around to "Spotlight", "Birdman", "12 Years a Slave", "Crash", or "Million Dollar Baby", nor many of the other Oscar nominees or critical favorites. Back in the nineties, I might watch fifty or more new films annually.

I liked "The King's Speech" very much, and in my opinion, it's the only one of the eleven 2000s winners I've seen that I would say deserved the award, and I saw it at least a month after first reading your mixed comments about it here. (But I liked "The Social Network" almost as much, and you didn't--and neither of us is on Facebook.) It was so well done that I could look past the historical inaccuracies (about which I know much less than you) in a way that I could not, by comparison, with "The Imitation Game".

"Argo" was good if a little contrived (especially in the airport climax).

"The Artist" was clever and enjoyable but less so than "Midnight in Paris" (I had forgotten that was even nominated for Best Picture; good for Oscar getting that much right). "Slumdog Millionaire" likewise. I never loved "Chicago", but I enjoyed it more before I saw the stage musical on tour a couple years later, which emphasized how often the camera cut up the dance sequences.

"No Country for Old Men" and "The Departed" are problem pictures for me: very well made films whose stories disappoint. I laughed out loud in the theater at the very heavy-handed final shot of the latter movie. But I'm glad to have seen the performances of, among others, scary Javier Bardem in the first and earthy Mark Wahlberg in the second. More than ten years earlier, John Simon had written of "Casino" that even though it showed Scorsese merely "spinning his wheels", still he was a master spinner. By contrast, the Coens' film isn't particularly flashy; it goes so far in the other direction, especially with the multiple long conversations at the end, as to have eventually drained the interest for me.

I know one Vietnam vet who admires "The Hurt Locker" very much for its honesty about soldiers' psychology, but I was mostly bored.

"The Return of the King" was my favorite entry in that mediocre trilogy, mainly because at least I got to find out what happened to the characters I'd already invested six hours in.

Roger Ebert actually quoted a letter I wrote to his "Answer Man" column when "Gladiator" was nominated; I didn't think it deserved its special effects nod, or much else, really. Joaquin Phoenix was better in "Signs".

I liked "A Beautiful Mind" even less than "The Fellowship of the Ring", which should tell you what I think of it. (Of that year's nominees, my pick was the grim "In the Bedroom".) Mental illness (and illness generally) doesn't interest me as a subject. Either it will be cured, or it won't, and there's not much the character suffering from it can do about that.

All of the above should be taken with an especially large grain of salt by you, since, for instance, one of my all-time favorite films is "Schindler's List", a deserving winner in my book if ever there was one. I saw it three times when it was originally released, and rate it vastly ahead of the same director's "Bridge of Spies"--about the latter, my opinion matches yours.

At some point, I'd be most curious to learn more about your opinions of Shakespeare in Love, Driving Miss Daisy, and The Sting, all three of which I enjoyed while the better film critics found them seriously lacking. In the case of Shakespeare in Love, that enmity is even more widespread, as the movie is frequently identified as one of the Academy's biggest mistakes: it is alleged that heavy lobbying by Miramax stole the prize from the expected winner, Saving Private Ryan.

-MTD/neb

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

The impression I have of critical opinion of Shakespeare in Love isn't that it's a bad movie so much as that it beat better movies. I don't agree: I found both Saving Private Ryan and Elizabeth unwatchable.

I knew I was going to love Shakespeare in Love, however, from the time I saw the trailer, because it included this perfect exchange:

HENSLOWE: The show must ... you know ...
SHAKESPEARE (encouraging him): Go on.

And it proved every bit as clever, witty, and referential as that promised.

Correction: I didn't dislike The Social Network. It was an excellently-made movie. But I found it agitating. It's a portrait of real-life evil, and evil wins.