I’ll admit that until just a few days ago I was absolutely positive that nothing could beat the juggernaut that is David Fincher’s The Social Network on Oscar night. Well, now everything’s a little less definite. Tom Hooper’s win for The King’s Speech at the Director’s Guild Awards and the cast’s win at the Screen Actors Guild Awards (remarkable for such a relatively small group of actors) is causing everyone to rethink who the front runner for Best Picture is. Cinematical spells it out better than I can.
So who will win? It’s funny, because I always find it difficult to pick who I think should win in any category. I spend so much time wondering who will win that I rarely consider who I think should win. That’s partly because I unfortunately have rarely seen all the nominees, so I feel bad choosing any one nominee when I haven’t witnessed them all. It’s also partly because the choices are often so different, especially in the Best Picture category, that it is difficult to decide which is “better.” I know that’s what the Oscars are all about, but I think that it is often a very subjective decision. I often have favorites going into it, films which strongly affected me or which I immediately decided I would watch many more times. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King was the first of these for me. I was obsessed with the trilogy, and the film’s clean sweep at the Oscars had me on the edge of my seat and screaming at the television. Slumdog Millionaire was another instance of a film I was really rooting for. I wish I had one of those movies this year. The reason I don’t have one isn’t that there weren’t any worthy films. It’s because there were so many films which I believe are equally deserving and appeal to me in very different ways.
The Social Network and The King’s Speech, for example, were both great films, if you ask me, but they were also very different, so it’s difficult to pin down which was better. The Social Network is very American, very contemporary, very hip, very young. The King’s Speech is very British, very much a period piece, innovative but with a classic story, and about older characters. It’s really hard for me to choose which one is more deserving. I honestly cannot decide.
As far as which film the Oscars will choose, I can only base my choice on recent Oscar trends. The awards seem to recently be geared toward more hip, unorthodox films, as opposed to the period pieces and “serious” dramas which reigned in the early to mid nineties (Dances with Wolves, Schindler’s List, The English Patient, Titanic, Shakespeare in Love). For instance, a Coen brothers film (No Country for Old Men) won Best Picture. I wasn’t a big fan (I just didn’t get it), but that’s definitely a hipper choice than, say, Atonement, its competiton. Slumdog Millionaire (Hooray!) beat more conventional Oscar bait Benjamin Button (a David Fincher film, ironically) Frost/Nixon, and The Reader. And gritty, female-directed, intimate military drama The Hurt Locker beat out Avatar, which was probably considered the front runner for a while. Now, if Inglourious Basterds had won, the world might have been taken over by Tarantino-obsessed film hipsters, and the Oscars would never be the same. But you can still see that the Oscars are no longer this seemingly stuffy, pretentious awards show that only honors serious movies about older people decades ago. Hell, the show’s being hosted by James Franco and Anne Hathaway (the youngest host ever), for Christ’s sake! What I’m saying, in case you haven’t figured it out, is that I’m still pretty sure The Social Network will take home the gold, although I’m not as certain as I was a few weeks ago. We shall see.
This also brings up an interesting question concerning the Oscars, and film in general, and a generational gap. Is this battle for Best Picture a generational battle? A fight over the future of film? A struggle between the old and the new, the old-fashioned and the hip? Ah, I’m being too dramatic. Right?
Just an aside: I was directed to this amusing site the other day. It’s called the Film School Thesis Statement Generator. You’re supposed to type in a film and it will give you an appropriate thesis around which to write a paper. Of course, these are randomly generated statements, but it’s funny how many films of I typed in resulted in sort-of-convincing thesis statements (“Through the use of implied depth-of-field, Jaws reminds the spectator of the post-war crisis of masculinity.” Hmm, that’s kind of spot-on.) As a Film Studies student, I’m familiar with these kinds of thesis statements, whether as a result of reading academic articles by intellectuals or struggling to form my own arguments for papers. Maybe it won’t be as funny to those who aren’t familiar with concepts like the male gaze or mise-en-scene, but I thought I’d share it. Maybe that should have been included in my previous film nerd post. Aw, who am I kidding, all my posts are nerdy.
Wow, it’s been a while since my last post. Blame it on college. But I’m back now.
Pop and Ceremony 