Integrity 1, Smurf Cats 0
Traditionally I’ve always followed the results of the Academy Awards. I find you can’t be a film fan without showing at least a passing interest in the Ceremony.
Like pretty much all award institutions, the ceremony is a garish and, well, kind of wanky affair. The actual winners themselves can raise an eyebrow or two, as politics take precedence over quality in the deciding process. For me it has always been about the after effects of the awards, to see the ripple effect it has on those who win. Many unknown directors, producers, animators and sound technicians have gone on to bigger and brighter things because of the accolades. It seems to be a little more random when it comes to actors though, with winners falling into four separate groups:
Big time careers stay big time: eg Denzel Washington
Floundering careers hit the big time: eg Geoffrey Rush
Floundering careers stay floundering: eg Mira Sorvino, Marisa Tomei
Big time careers flounder (aka the Oscar’s curse): eg Cuba Gooding Jr
I sat through Channel Nine’s entire Oscar telecast last year. The time difference meant that the initial showing was on the Monday morning, but they put a repeat on that night which I sat and watched. My favourite film for that year was The Wrestler, so I wanted to see that do well and for Mickey Rourke to pick up the Oscar for best actor. Slumdog Millionaire was also an excellent film, and I was quite happy for that to reap some rewards (which it did), and had a passing interest in Heath Ledger’s Best Supporting Actor nod.
I read up on the Oscar telecast the following day, and realised that I missed a lot of interesting moments (Ben Stiller’s last minute idea to do a mock Joaquin Phoneix presentation, acrobat Philippe Petit accepting his award and then balancing it on his chin to name a few) because of Channel Nine’s truncated approach to the Ceremony. Nine had chucked their Oscars repeat on at the late time slot of 9:30pm, obviously considering Monday night too precious to waste on such frivolous garbage as the Academy Awards, and filled the earlier time slots with Two and a Half Men reruns (as usual). Because of the late airing, it meant they had to ditch at least 90 minutes of the show, and as such lose about half a dozen award presentations in the process.
To be fair, the Academy Awards is a very long haul, and Nine had rightfully decided that your average viewer couldn’t be fucked sitting through four hours of this stuff. I decided to give most of the ceremony a miss this year – one thing I had learnt from the 2009 telecast was that you could sit through two and a half hours of shitty jokes and boring dance numbers, only to miss decent stuff that hit the cutting room floor.
I was actually at a barbecue on the Monday of the Oscars (it was a public holiday here in South Australia), and got my fix of Oscar updates by checking the web site every hour or so, a much simpler form of intel. A lot of my barbecue peers found my interest in the Oscars to be quite amusing, and more than a few declared my interest an obsession. The irony being that my update process consisted of hitting the refresh button on the list of winners page a total of three times for the entire afternoon, while my detractors would soon be clocking up ten hours a week on their fantasy teams once the football season starts at the end of the month (those crazy cats).
I guess it was also the wrong crowd for Oscars interest. This was a meeting of school friends, many of who had been breeding like rabbits in the last few years. I shit you not, there were hundreds of kids and babies crawling around the backyard of this social gathering. (I found a baby chewing on a clothes peg at one point, and yanked it out of it’s mouth before it choked. True Story.) Cinema excursions were few and far between for this crowd, and even then it would be for the latest Ice Age or Madagascar sequel to keep the rug rats happy. Why would they care about this year’s line up of nominees?
The Oscars has always had a bit of a stigma surrounding it. Pretty much everybody has their own story of watching their preferred film of the year lose out at the Oscars, get the sulks up, and have turned their backs on the ceremony ever since.
For me, the Oscars has always trod the tight rope between reputable and complete horseshit. As far as Awards ceremonies go, you have the bullshit at one end (the Blockbuster and MTV awards), the prestige at the other end (Cannes and Sundance), and the Oscars floating somewhere in between.
On a personal note, this Oscars was going to be the decider of whether I continued to follow the awards in future years, or whether I would declare the institution a pile of shit. Like so many others who have turned their backs on the most famous of awards ceremonies, it was down to the best picture award.
The interest in the Academy Awards has been slowly dwindling over the last few years, as the older generation dies out and the younger one takes centre stage, and viewing figures have been on a sliding demise. The I-pod generation can’t be fucked with a four hour ceremony, a fact that doesn’t really surprise anybody, and so the Academy Awards have tried to counter this problem with various measures. One such “measure” they installed last year, and continued this year, is to put the spotlight on popular younger actors, such as the High School Musical and Twilight kids. Actors who should not be within several hundred miles of the Academy Awards (I’m looking at you Miley Fucking Cyrus) are taking to the stage to present awards.
A more extreme measure was to expand on the most popular of the awards: best film. Many of the awards of the night are surrounded by disinterest (Best Costume Design goes to that Victorian Era period piece nobody saw, and there is ALWAYS a Victorian Era film at these awards) or just plain confusion (Best-Sound-Editing-What-Now?). To counteract this, they have taken the number of Best Film Nominees and doubled it to the kind of stupid figure of ten.
The silly thing here, is that they threw ten titles out there, and then declared it a race between just two films: Avatar and The Hurt Locker. This was a marketing strategy to garner interest, as fans were divided in a David and Goliath battle between the most profitable Oscar nominee of all time, and the least profitable. That the two directors were once married to each other only helped fan the flames of interest.
It was a shame that the main drawcard had come to this show down, as a few very good films fell to the way side in the process such asDistrict 9 and Inglourious Basterds (Up is also a fantastic film, but I think we are still a few years off Pixar taking home best picture nod - that got best Animated Feature anyway). However, it was the Avatar vs Hurt Locker affair that made this the deciding Oscars ceremony for me. It was a style vs substance battle, and if style won, I would declare the Oscars a ”load of shit” and not bother with the 2011 ones – my passing interest would devolve into no interest at all.
Before anybody gets shitty with me, I want to point out that I think Avatar is a good film. I saw it during the Christmas holidays with a bunch of relatives, and found it to be an engaging experience. Although it was almost three hours long, I was happy to sit and watch the adventure on screen.
Yes, Avatar is a “good” film, but it is not a “great” one. When I start to point out Avatar’s faults in conversation, everybody stares at me like I broke into a child’s birthday party and took a shit on the cake, but I’m not trying to be a spoilsport on this one. If Avatar is going to be thrown into the ring for the “Best Movie” accolades, then I feel that my hand has been forced and that all cards should be shown.
As I pointed out in my Golden Goose series (a set if posts I one day hope to finish), I’ve never been a fan of films high on budget and low on substance. Avatar sure is a pretty thing, but the story and characters are decidedly lacking.
The overall story feels like something you would find in a notebook, one belonging to a 14 year old girl who has just discovered the joys of recycling and environmental awareness. In between the puffy Unicorn stickers and “I Heart Zac Efron” scrawling, lies the highly unoriginal (South Park best sums it up: Dances with Smurfs) love story set in an alien world. The horribly nasty corporate scum (“Fuck it, let’s blow up that giant tree and kill those pesky aliens”) fight the honourable blue cat people (who can plug their hair into the trees and animals to connect with them spiritually, sorry but that’s fucking dumb), who in turn team up with a few stupidly heroic humans (for absolutely no reason at all, Michelle Rodriguez’s soldier character, who has had next to no contact with the Na’vi, decides to go on a suicide mission against her own unit to help the aliens).
This all happens because the humans want a precious mineral called “unobtainium” (I wish I was kidding, but that’s what’s it called), located under the Na’vi’s home.
Throw in a wooden performance by Sam Worthington (there’s a reason this guy only get’s action film roles), and a host of forgettable paper-thin characters and predictable plot points, and what you have is a colourful, yet ultimately empty experience.
There is the argument that because of the spectacularly ground breaking effects, the film doesn’t need a well thought out plot or character arcs. However, it is possible to have an effects driven film without forsaking story and character development (off the top of my head: The Empire Strikes Back, Starship Troopers, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy...). Besides, Avatar’s effects are a decent step in CGI development, but they are not the huge leap we were promised; the best quote I read on the effects was by the critic Devin Faraci ”I was whelmed by the effects”. Not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. Just ‘whelmed”.
I feel like I might have lost a few of you kids, so to reiterate: Avatar is a fun, visually exciting film. But it has an unoriginal plot, with weak characters and phoned in performances. Just because you and your silly-ass friends enjoyed it, doesn’t mean it should win an Oscar for best film. It would be like giving the fourth place runner in the 100 metre sprint the gold medal, because he had the best sneakers.
On the other side of the coin, we have The Hurt Locker. It wasn’t my favourite film of last year (I’ll post my top 15 of 2009 in a few weeks), but it is still an exceptional accomplishment. A tight script, with tense scenes and incredible performances shot on a low budget – it’s everything Avatar is not.
Avatar is like having a birthday at McDonalds with all of your friends, while Hurt Locker is hunting down an incredible restaurant in a back alley to dine with the person you love. I can see why one of these experiences is going to be more popular to your average Joe. You just can’t tell me it’s the more rewarding of the two.
It’s all down to the Substance vs Style question (The Australian was a little kinder with their explanation, calling it a showdown between “the experience” and “the story”). Avatar is certainly an accomplishment, and it deserves to make a shitload of money. It just doesn’t deserve to be named the best film of the year. It would be like a hunk of Styrofoam winning a cake contest, because it had incredible icing and the biggest candles. Had the Academy bought into all of the hype and awarded Avatar the Oscar for best film, then style would have won over substance, and the Oscars would no longer hold any more weight with me.
As it happens, The Hurt Locker won. My Academy Awards interest survives for another year, and I’ll be tuning in come March 2011.
Like pretty much all award institutions, the ceremony is a garish and, well, kind of wanky affair. The actual winners themselves can raise an eyebrow or two, as politics take precedence over quality in the deciding process. For me it has always been about the after effects of the awards, to see the ripple effect it has on those who win. Many unknown directors, producers, animators and sound technicians have gone on to bigger and brighter things because of the accolades. It seems to be a little more random when it comes to actors though, with winners falling into four separate groups:
Big time careers stay big time: eg Denzel Washington
Floundering careers hit the big time: eg Geoffrey Rush
Floundering careers stay floundering: eg Mira Sorvino, Marisa Tomei
Big time careers flounder (aka the Oscar’s curse): eg Cuba Gooding Jr
I sat through Channel Nine’s entire Oscar telecast last year. The time difference meant that the initial showing was on the Monday morning, but they put a repeat on that night which I sat and watched. My favourite film for that year was The Wrestler, so I wanted to see that do well and for Mickey Rourke to pick up the Oscar for best actor. Slumdog Millionaire was also an excellent film, and I was quite happy for that to reap some rewards (which it did), and had a passing interest in Heath Ledger’s Best Supporting Actor nod.
I read up on the Oscar telecast the following day, and realised that I missed a lot of interesting moments (Ben Stiller’s last minute idea to do a mock Joaquin Phoneix presentation, acrobat Philippe Petit accepting his award and then balancing it on his chin to name a few) because of Channel Nine’s truncated approach to the Ceremony. Nine had chucked their Oscars repeat on at the late time slot of 9:30pm, obviously considering Monday night too precious to waste on such frivolous garbage as the Academy Awards, and filled the earlier time slots with Two and a Half Men reruns (as usual). Because of the late airing, it meant they had to ditch at least 90 minutes of the show, and as such lose about half a dozen award presentations in the process.
To be fair, the Academy Awards is a very long haul, and Nine had rightfully decided that your average viewer couldn’t be fucked sitting through four hours of this stuff. I decided to give most of the ceremony a miss this year – one thing I had learnt from the 2009 telecast was that you could sit through two and a half hours of shitty jokes and boring dance numbers, only to miss decent stuff that hit the cutting room floor.
I was actually at a barbecue on the Monday of the Oscars (it was a public holiday here in South Australia), and got my fix of Oscar updates by checking the web site every hour or so, a much simpler form of intel. A lot of my barbecue peers found my interest in the Oscars to be quite amusing, and more than a few declared my interest an obsession. The irony being that my update process consisted of hitting the refresh button on the list of winners page a total of three times for the entire afternoon, while my detractors would soon be clocking up ten hours a week on their fantasy teams once the football season starts at the end of the month (those crazy cats).
I guess it was also the wrong crowd for Oscars interest. This was a meeting of school friends, many of who had been breeding like rabbits in the last few years. I shit you not, there were hundreds of kids and babies crawling around the backyard of this social gathering. (I found a baby chewing on a clothes peg at one point, and yanked it out of it’s mouth before it choked. True Story.) Cinema excursions were few and far between for this crowd, and even then it would be for the latest Ice Age or Madagascar sequel to keep the rug rats happy. Why would they care about this year’s line up of nominees?
The Oscars has always had a bit of a stigma surrounding it. Pretty much everybody has their own story of watching their preferred film of the year lose out at the Oscars, get the sulks up, and have turned their backs on the ceremony ever since.
For me, the Oscars has always trod the tight rope between reputable and complete horseshit. As far as Awards ceremonies go, you have the bullshit at one end (the Blockbuster and MTV awards), the prestige at the other end (Cannes and Sundance), and the Oscars floating somewhere in between.
On a personal note, this Oscars was going to be the decider of whether I continued to follow the awards in future years, or whether I would declare the institution a pile of shit. Like so many others who have turned their backs on the most famous of awards ceremonies, it was down to the best picture award.
The interest in the Academy Awards has been slowly dwindling over the last few years, as the older generation dies out and the younger one takes centre stage, and viewing figures have been on a sliding demise. The I-pod generation can’t be fucked with a four hour ceremony, a fact that doesn’t really surprise anybody, and so the Academy Awards have tried to counter this problem with various measures. One such “measure” they installed last year, and continued this year, is to put the spotlight on popular younger actors, such as the High School Musical and Twilight kids. Actors who should not be within several hundred miles of the Academy Awards (I’m looking at you Miley Fucking Cyrus) are taking to the stage to present awards.
A more extreme measure was to expand on the most popular of the awards: best film. Many of the awards of the night are surrounded by disinterest (Best Costume Design goes to that Victorian Era period piece nobody saw, and there is ALWAYS a Victorian Era film at these awards) or just plain confusion (Best-Sound-Editing-What-Now?). To counteract this, they have taken the number of Best Film Nominees and doubled it to the kind of stupid figure of ten.
The silly thing here, is that they threw ten titles out there, and then declared it a race between just two films: Avatar and The Hurt Locker. This was a marketing strategy to garner interest, as fans were divided in a David and Goliath battle between the most profitable Oscar nominee of all time, and the least profitable. That the two directors were once married to each other only helped fan the flames of interest.
It was a shame that the main drawcard had come to this show down, as a few very good films fell to the way side in the process such asDistrict 9 and Inglourious Basterds (Up is also a fantastic film, but I think we are still a few years off Pixar taking home best picture nod - that got best Animated Feature anyway). However, it was the Avatar vs Hurt Locker affair that made this the deciding Oscars ceremony for me. It was a style vs substance battle, and if style won, I would declare the Oscars a ”load of shit” and not bother with the 2011 ones – my passing interest would devolve into no interest at all.
Before anybody gets shitty with me, I want to point out that I think Avatar is a good film. I saw it during the Christmas holidays with a bunch of relatives, and found it to be an engaging experience. Although it was almost three hours long, I was happy to sit and watch the adventure on screen.
Yes, Avatar is a “good” film, but it is not a “great” one. When I start to point out Avatar’s faults in conversation, everybody stares at me like I broke into a child’s birthday party and took a shit on the cake, but I’m not trying to be a spoilsport on this one. If Avatar is going to be thrown into the ring for the “Best Movie” accolades, then I feel that my hand has been forced and that all cards should be shown.
As I pointed out in my Golden Goose series (a set if posts I one day hope to finish), I’ve never been a fan of films high on budget and low on substance. Avatar sure is a pretty thing, but the story and characters are decidedly lacking.
The overall story feels like something you would find in a notebook, one belonging to a 14 year old girl who has just discovered the joys of recycling and environmental awareness. In between the puffy Unicorn stickers and “I Heart Zac Efron” scrawling, lies the highly unoriginal (South Park best sums it up: Dances with Smurfs) love story set in an alien world. The horribly nasty corporate scum (“Fuck it, let’s blow up that giant tree and kill those pesky aliens”) fight the honourable blue cat people (who can plug their hair into the trees and animals to connect with them spiritually, sorry but that’s fucking dumb), who in turn team up with a few stupidly heroic humans (for absolutely no reason at all, Michelle Rodriguez’s soldier character, who has had next to no contact with the Na’vi, decides to go on a suicide mission against her own unit to help the aliens).
This all happens because the humans want a precious mineral called “unobtainium” (I wish I was kidding, but that’s what’s it called), located under the Na’vi’s home.
Throw in a wooden performance by Sam Worthington (there’s a reason this guy only get’s action film roles), and a host of forgettable paper-thin characters and predictable plot points, and what you have is a colourful, yet ultimately empty experience.
There is the argument that because of the spectacularly ground breaking effects, the film doesn’t need a well thought out plot or character arcs. However, it is possible to have an effects driven film without forsaking story and character development (off the top of my head: The Empire Strikes Back, Starship Troopers, The Lord of the Rings Trilogy...). Besides, Avatar’s effects are a decent step in CGI development, but they are not the huge leap we were promised; the best quote I read on the effects was by the critic Devin Faraci ”I was whelmed by the effects”. Not overwhelmed, not underwhelmed. Just ‘whelmed”.
I feel like I might have lost a few of you kids, so to reiterate: Avatar is a fun, visually exciting film. But it has an unoriginal plot, with weak characters and phoned in performances. Just because you and your silly-ass friends enjoyed it, doesn’t mean it should win an Oscar for best film. It would be like giving the fourth place runner in the 100 metre sprint the gold medal, because he had the best sneakers.
On the other side of the coin, we have The Hurt Locker. It wasn’t my favourite film of last year (I’ll post my top 15 of 2009 in a few weeks), but it is still an exceptional accomplishment. A tight script, with tense scenes and incredible performances shot on a low budget – it’s everything Avatar is not.
Avatar is like having a birthday at McDonalds with all of your friends, while Hurt Locker is hunting down an incredible restaurant in a back alley to dine with the person you love. I can see why one of these experiences is going to be more popular to your average Joe. You just can’t tell me it’s the more rewarding of the two.
It’s all down to the Substance vs Style question (The Australian was a little kinder with their explanation, calling it a showdown between “the experience” and “the story”). Avatar is certainly an accomplishment, and it deserves to make a shitload of money. It just doesn’t deserve to be named the best film of the year. It would be like a hunk of Styrofoam winning a cake contest, because it had incredible icing and the biggest candles. Had the Academy bought into all of the hype and awarded Avatar the Oscar for best film, then style would have won over substance, and the Oscars would no longer hold any more weight with me.
As it happens, The Hurt Locker won. My Academy Awards interest survives for another year, and I’ll be tuning in come March 2011.
posted by Beef at Saturday, March 13, 2010
<< Home