Posts Tagged ‘oscars’
Star awards: Cameron strikes back
February 16th, 2010 | Author: Jack Kirby
For cynical movie-goers, the awards season can be construed as a load of stuff and nonsense; as Hollywood giving itself a self-congratulatory pat on the back, smugly saying, ‘didn’t we do well?’ Well I for one am not a cynical movie-goer and I see the awards season as interesting, fun and an opportunity to examine the inner politics of the Hollywood machine as well as a source of excellent fodder for conversation complemented by tasty beverages. With this in mind, I asked an elite panel of London Student Screen contributors their opinions on some of the awards nominees and their predictions for who will win what.
The nominations for both the Oscars and the BAFTAs have recently been announced after several weeks of anticipation. Zillions of media outlets have been speculating as to what the results might be on the nights. The film to beat, it seems, is James Cameron’s 3D, CGI, officially highest-grossing-film-of-all-time-if-you-don’t-adjust-for-inflation-in-which-case-it’s-Gone-With-the-Wind opus, Avatar. Avatar has nine nominations at the Oscars and eight at the BAFTAs, both including a Best Picture nod. The highly bankable Canuck director will be hoping to replicate the titanic success of, er, Titanic, his previous film which famously won eleven shiny gold men. Cameron will be in direct competition in many categories with his ex-wife Kathryn Bigelow’s Iraq thriller, The Hurt Locker, which has the same number of nominations (though in some cases in slightly differing categories), as Avatar.
Hurt Locker is by far the more ‘serious’ picture and is certainly a lot more deserving than Avatar for a Best Picture award. Avatar may be a technical marvel and should deservedly win a host of technical awards, but it is let down by a frankly shoddy and hackneyed script as well as some dubious acting and some downright weird moments – seriously, what is up with the aliens sticking their ponytails into their horses? Creepy. Others, such as our very own Sam Price, have slightly harsher views of the film, as Price describes it as a, ‘racist neoconservative fantasia inflicted upon world for no particular reason which will win everything, including a gold house for James Cameron and will spell the end of civilisation itself’. Reading between the lines, I can tell you he wasn’t too taken with it. Ben Head, on the other hand, more succinctly sums up the film as, ‘Romeo and Juliet in space. And as horrible blue monsters. Stunning with or without 3D glasses and sure to pick up something among its many nominations.’
Shade Lapite notes the competition between the films, particularly in the directing categories, calling The Hurt Locker, ‘a beautifully shot war story that manages to connect emotionally without melodrama, politics or chest thumping nationalism’. Which is fair. The Best Picture category at the Oscars has swollen to allow ten nominees this year, rather than the usual five. This smacks a little of tokenism, but certainly opens up the playing field a little bit. Personally, I’d like to see A Serious Man take home the prize. It would also be equally pleasing to see Pixar, having long outgrown being limited to the ‘Best Animated Feature’, win for Up, a film Maddy Fry describes as being, “emotive, funny and moving – speaks to the aged and youthful’, an assessment I wholeheartedly agree with.
Several of the panel noted Carey Mulligan’s performance in An Education as a probable winner in the best actress categories; Kate Vine mentioned how Mulligan’s performance was so good, she felt uncomfortable watching during some, more unpleasant scenes. The female acting categories are full of stiff competition this year, particularly from Precious’ Gabourey Sidibe and awards stalwart Meryl Streep. Though in a year where Sandra Bullock has been nominated, anything could happen.
Conversely, in the male acting categories, word on the ‘street’ is Jeff Bridges and Christoph Waltz might as well start making space on their mantelpieces for their awards, the former for his role in Crazy Heart and the latter as the sinister Hans Landa in Inglourious Basterds. Basterds is another much nommed picture and while not as poor as some of Tarantino’s recent output, it seems to sit uncomfortably alongside many better films. Mr Price’s opinion: ‘an eye-poppingly dull non-masterpiece from America’s premier big-jawed, flustering, self-important jabbermouth.’ Ben Head offers the alternative opinion that, ‘Brad Pitt’s accent is the best thing Tarantino has directed to date.’ Quite.
I was disappointed to see such highlights of the last year as In the Loop, Moon, The Road and Mesrine being somewhat or entirely neglected by The Academy. Fortunately the first two get a bit more love at the BAFTAs and foreign language categories are well served by either A Prophet or Let the Right One In – though I’m half surprised Avatar didn’t get a nod here too. The Outstanding British Film award at the BAFTAs seems unfairly evenly contested this year with the aforementioned Moon and In the Loop battling it out against the likes of the excellent Fish Tank, the ubiquitous An Education and the well reviewed Lennon biopic, Nowhere Boy. And The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus, a perhaps surprisingly under-represented picture, should win in the production design category for the BAFTAs.
Ultimately though, all of this awards hoo-ha is pretty meaningless: remember, as I’m sure countless losers in the past have consoled themselves, Welles, Hitchcock, Kubrick and until recently Scorsese never won an Oscar. And for those who can’t stand the damn things, there’s always the Razzies. The Golden Raspberry Awards – or Razzies – serve as an alternative to rather more pompous awards ceremonies by outing the worst films of the year and are heartening proof that some factions in La La Land aren’t too full of it to laugh at themselves. Heavily nominated this year is the god-awful racket that was Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (which is actually Oscar nominated, though we can find solace in that it is only for sound mixing) and Will Ferrell’s ill-advised Land of the Lost. So if the BAFTAs and the Oscars seem all too sickeningly worthy for you, keep an eye on the Razzies coverage to see some well deserving dogs getting kicked. Otherwise, quell the cynic inside yourself, sit back and enjoy the ride.
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Guess who’s like to win an Oscar: racism at the movies
November 10th, 2009 | Author: Sam Price
1967 is often considered something of a watershed for cinema, the year in which the counter-cultural sensibilities of the sixties began to seep through into the mainstream and presage of the so-called ‘New Hollywood’, with the commercial and critical success of The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde paving the way. It was also a busy year for Sidney Poitier, the top box office star of that year and the first black male to win the Academy Award in 1963, who starred in three pictures that purported to deal with serious social and racial fissures of the time, to varying degrees of success. In addition to school-set melodrama To Sir, with Love, Poitier took centre stage in two other self-consciously culturally significant efforts that yearned for Oscar attention.
The first was In the Heat of the Night, a sweaty, raw but ultimately pat police procedural that the actor still cites as his favourite work, its most famous line (“They call me MISTER Tibbs!”) remaining well-known and much-parodied to this day. The second was Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, a toothless Stanley Kramer prestige picture, which boasted the final pairing of Katharine Hepburn and Spencer Tracy and little else. Both were touted at the time as laudable films that wouldn’t shy away from the issue of race, thrusting Sidney Poitier as they did into overwhelmingly ‘white’ environments – a prison cell in a small Southern town, the dinner table of an upper-class liberal family – and having him triumph over backwardness and bigotry. The films were feted with awards (In the Heat of the Night winning for Best Picture), and praised for their forthrightness. But Poitier’s career was never to scale such heights again.
Viewing these films retrospectively in this allegedly ‘post-racial’ clime, it’s tempting to see the outwardly progressive agendas of both In the Heat of the Night and Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner as bald and condescending; thinly-veiled attempts to cash in on liberal guilt and play it as straight entertainment. Granted, we have to watch these films in the context of the era they were made. But even then, they were both, to some extent, preaching to the converted: by the end of each film, a stubbornly antagonistic white male (Rod Steiger in Heat, Spencer Tracy in Dinner) has become reconciled to Poitier’s character’s inherent worth and value, this staggering feat apparently only possible by solving a local murder or enduring several hours’ worth of embarrassment in front of your girlfriend’s parents. By the same token Poitier is idealised to a ridiculous degree. He’s the street-smart homicide detective amongst a gaggle of idiot racists in In the Heat of the Night, and in Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner his character is deified to such laughable heights (an internationally-respected doctor who lectures in Hawaii and Switzerland) it derails the film almost entirely.
Both films never transcend the narrow trappings of their ‘social issues’ agenda. Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, however, is ultimately the weaker effort. Like Kramer’s The Defiant Ones before it, Poitier is taken to be emblematic of all African-Americans firstly, and a character in his own right secondly, only existing as a social phenomena that must be ‘solved’ by the film’s self-righteous protagonists. At least In the Heat of the Night, which was to spawn two sequels featuring Poitier’s Virgil Tibbs, makes attempts at raw exuberance and grim violence, even if its strident rhetoric would’ve merely reaffirmed its largely liberal audience’s pre-existing beliefs. Considering blaxploitation would erupt as a sub-genre just four years later with the release of the incendiary Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song and Shaft, Poitier’s 1967 pair come off as overly mannered and woefully naive. Both should take comfort, though, in the fact that neither are as austere and mincing as Paul Haggis’ insipid race-relations drama and Worst Best Picture Oscar winner ever, 2004’s Crash, which propounds the notion that having Sandra Bullock fall down the stairs will cure her, and by extension the whole of Los Angeles, of their intractable racial prejudices.
Race continues to be a divisive and trenchant issue in contemporary American society, as the wrongful arrest of Henry Gates, Glenn Beck’s continued lunacy at Fox News and ex-President Carter’s recent claims of racism against Barack Obama will testify. Invariably these issues will always reach our cinema screens. Few attempt something genuinely radical; the ones that do flare heated, but often productive debate, by conceptualising people of different races with appropriate individuality and dignity. Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing is the obvious example here. Perhaps it would be better if we didn’t shower the rest of the more ham-fisted attempts with Oscars. But 1967 was a watershed for cinema, in that it opened the channels of racial discourse. And however cloying some of the end results seem today, it would be a grave mistake to consign these issues to a past conceived as either ‘dead’ or ‘irrelevant’.
Are the EDL just misunderstood?
- No, they're dangerous and have to be stopped. (72%)
- Yes. The media have just blown their true motivations out of proportion. (28%)
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