ARTICLE: The Oscars - One Big Whinge

I find it very hard to care about the Oscars. And it isn’t particularly because they make bad decisions (they do, more often than not) or because they are so highly considered (they are, but just why is never clear). It is because they are unavoidable.

Level-headed film critics (few of those) always write and talk about the Oscars when they are closing in, always predicting that this film and this performance will make the nominations or get the award. Most reviews end up sounding the same, with a typical review of, say, 12 Years A Slave merely ending up a list of the Oscars that the critic thinks it will win. Lupita Nyong’o and Chiwetel Ejiofor are not so much acting as preparing acceptance speeches. And why not since the film is so geared to the Oscars with its For Your Consideration trailer of the people in the film that you might want to remember later to the long scenes of Oscar-friendly clips - Chiwetel Ejiofor talking about freedom and hope and Michael Fassbender going all method as a drunken lout, who is really only falling over and shouting.

Meanwhile, Lupita Nyong’o, who delivers a performance of some power and depth, is written about only as a newcomer who is sure to hit it off with the Academy, as if it wasn’t a performance in a film at all, but a carefully calculated career move – see also Anne Hathaway in Les Miserables. The same went for Barkhad Abdi’s performance in Captain Phillips, which had everyone writing about Oscars. And, to tell the truth, having seen both films before the hype really started to get moving, neither performance was particularly good. And certainly not the Top 5 in their category for the year, although Best Supporting Actress has had a fairly limited field in recent years.

It all reeks of a certain degree of stage-managing. Having recently read ‘Manufacturing Consent’ by Noam Chomsky and Edward S. Herman, it is hard not to get a sense that some publicist somewhere wrote that Lupita Nyong’o and Barkhad Abdi (and 12 Years A Slave, Michael Fassbender, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett and Sally Hawkins to name a few others) were deserving of Oscar attention. The first critics, with little to go on but the film’s press materials and their own opinions, which seem to be valued less and less in critics these days, end up rewriting what the publicists say, creating word-of-mouth about the very performances handpicked by the publicists and elevating them to the kind of attention that gets them the nominations. And the Academy takes note because they’ve made bad decisions in the past that has hurt their reputation and are constantly under scrutiny to pick a winner. Suddenly an average-to-good performance becomes exalted and it is impossible to watch the film without some awareness that the thing to look out for is Lupita Nyong’o, Barkhad Abdi, Michael Fassbender, Leonardo DiCaprio, Jonah Hill, Cate Blanchett or Sally Hawkins. Which means that the Oscars become predictable at a stage in the year when everything should be absolutely up in the air. Meanwhile, something like 12 Years A Slave (decent, not great) becomes ‘one of the greatest films ever made’ and a must-see, promoted blindly by critics trying to get in on the hype before there even is a hype, and destined to slowly but surely fall from grace until it becomes known as just another bad Oscar decision. Which, I believe, is detrimental to the film and unfair as well as being a total waste of time.

This is how some films can be elevated way beyond their station – for instance, Driving Miss Daisy over Do The Right Thing. One is a simplistic drama about race that hides some sort of message of tolerance in the presumably much more palatable tale of a rude old woman while the other is complex, controversial, realistic and left unresolved like the issues it addresses. Now, Do The Right Thing probably didn’t have the publicists that something like Driving Miss Daisy would have had. And it wasn’t such an easy sell to the Academy that liked Terms of Endearment (the ultimate “give me an Oscar” film) and Out of Africa (Meryl Streep’s most cumbersome accent) only a few years before. It was also a much more complete work – in other words, it couldn’t be broken down into that performance and that clip. Plus, it was stylistically experimental, which never helps. In other words, a film’s quality is second to whether or not that film can be easily marketed and endorsed as Oscar material.

Other big publicist moments include getting Martin Scorsese an Oscar (for The Departed but not for Who’s That Knocking On My Door, Mean Streets, Alice Doesn’t Live Here Anymore, Taxi Driver, Raging Bull, King of Comedy or Goodfellas) and awarding The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King with thirteen Oscars, not for the film but for the entire trilogy. Bruce Dern has finally got the recognition he deserved - as if only the Oscars can make a worthwhile tribute. The publicist can, hence, create a controversy around the Oscars, create a sense of a wound that needs to be dressed. Ever since Crash won over Brokeback Mountain, the Academy has intentionally sought out the less obvious choice, the more adventurous choice, in an effort not to make the same mistake again, picking The Departed, No Country For Old Men and Slumdog Millionaire over more traditional winners like The Queen, Atonement and The Reader. But it isn’t so much that these choices are better or worse, it is that they were wanted. There was a public pressure to give the Oscar to something less obvious. And it was the publicists that created it from absolutely nothing.

Public pressure created from nothing? Think about the Oscar mistakes as independently and truthfully as you can and then ask yourself whether you really care. Do you really care about Ordinary People beating Raging Bull? Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas? The English Patient over Fargo or Secrets & Lies? Shakespeare in Love over Saving Private Ryan? Crash over Brokeback Mountain? The loser in each case is almost invariably the more loved and the better seen. And also, crucially, the more influential, the Oscar loss never diminishing that film’s acclaim. Ultimately, in terms of film history, the Oscars mean absolutely nothing. Hazarding a guess, more people have seen Duck Soup or King Kong (neither even nominated) but not Cavalcade (which won that year). Out of Africa or Back to the Future. In short, the Oscars are insignificant and have pretty consistently failed to provide an accurate, or even worthwhile, insight into film history as it happens. Who really thinks Argo is the best film of 2012? Really? Deep down. So insignificant are the Oscars that it is the publicists who work to convince you that they matter – otherwise why promote their films to the Academy at all. They make up controversies where there weren’t any, because most people couldn’t care less.

This is not to propose that the Oscars should be scrapped, since the film industry has so few ceremonies that celebrate cinema. But, instead of wasting so much time trying to second guess the Oscars and repeating opinions endorsed by film publicists, wouldn’t it be more worthwhile to think about each film as a finished product and not a horse that has still got a race to run? To debate the merits of a film as a piece of art or entertainment or as the latest innovation without trying to give your arguments some kind of misjudged credence by writing about its awards chances. When, apart from during the Oscars, does anyone let a group of people you don’t know pick nine or ten American or British films at random for them to get excited about?

According to the Academy, the cream of US/UK cinema is 12 Year A Slave, American Hustle, Captain Phillips, Dallas Buyer’s Club, Gravity, Her, Nebraska, Philomena and The Wolf of Wall Street. None of these films are bad (I haven’t yet seen American Hustle, Her and Philomena) and there are at least two great ones, but it isn’t a particularly diverse or interesting list. It would suggest that cinema is healthy but fairly stagnant. These nine films are the fruits of the labour of the publicists, who managed to promote these nine films over edgier, more difficult, more interesting films. The Oscar choices ultimately ignore much more than they reward and they limit cinema to what is most easily marketed.

So ignore them and stop writing about them.

REVIEW: 12 Years A Slave (2014)

12 Years A Slave is the third feature film from artist turned director Steve McQueen, who is developing into a surprisingly mainstream filmmaker, following the somewhat esoteric Hunger and the challenging yet disappointingly conventional Shame. 12 Years A Slave is initially off-putting, being too much of an Oscar-friendly drama to fit easily alongside McQueen’s other work. In fact, it is when one forgets McQueen’s involvement that the film begins to work in its own right, an odd example of an auteur’s disappearance.

Based on a true story, the film follows Solomon Northup (Chiwetel Ejiofor), a free man in 1841 New York, who is kidnapped and sold into slavery. Over the next twelve years, he is passed between a variety of masters, learning along the way to keep his head down and tell no one about his previous situation. Northup thus leads a dangerous and precarious existence at the hands of white masters in the Deep South.

Steve McQueen’s films have always stridden a thin line between the art house and the multiplex. Hunger and Shame were both bleak and muted in a rather minimalist way and yet both remain fairly conventional in terms of story arcs. Shame fit neatly into a three-act structure and even offered rather simplistic explanations for its protagonist’s urges. It is difficult to see 12 Years A Slave as anything other than a Hollywood drama – something that is not helped by one traditional crane shot’s dodgy CGI landscape or by a few rather manipulative scenes. McQueen’s trademark long takes are still present, though they are much shorter and more embedded within the film’s storyline. Aside from some extreme violence, which is justified for the purposes of realism but which nonetheless represent a breaking from the tradition of the Hollywood drama, 12 Years A Slave is almost entirely conventional. The star cameos (Paul Giamatti, Paul Dano, Benedict Cumberbatch, Michael Fassbender and Brad Pitt) are often off-putting, their sudden appearance taking you out of the film just when you were beginning not to notice the mechanics of the screenplay and direction.

That said, the film's moral complexity confronts the audience, forcing them to question their own feelings about the action onscreen, suggesting that American slavery was not a battle between innocent slaves and the evil white slave owners. Benedict Cumberbatch's Ford is a less obviously loathsome character than Fassbender's Epps - but then he is all the worse for his moralising does not extend as far as the question of slavery. As compassionate as he is, he is happy to turn a blind eye to what cruelty and suffering when he needs to. Steve McQueen is too good a filmmaker to let Ford off the hook, but neither does he openly berate him, instead showing the more corrosive side to the evil of slavery. Meanwhile, other slaves hold the whips and openly collude with their evil bosses. As well as this, the film offers a much more violent and bleak representation of American slavery yet seen, McQueen refusing to look away in order to represent what slavery is like without any respite for the audience. As a result, the film can be depressing and suffocating but then what true representation of slavery wouldn't be?

The film’s primary focus is on how Solomon Northup survives his ordeal and the alterations in his personality that are required to do this. Initially, Northup is outraged and indignant. Soon realizing that his past could be dangerous to him, he must act like a normal slave and not allow his masters to see him as anything different. He is thrown into a series of morally compromising situations and is constantly in danger of losing any sense of who he was. The film also focuses on his despair and his decision not to give up in the face of his apparently hopeless future. The film requires a strong performance to bring across this character’s duality and it has one in Ejiofor’s work, which avoids big Oscar-friendly histrionics (where other actors in the film itself may not) in favour of a quiet pain and anguish that is all the more believable. These themes coupled with a great central performance ensures that 12 Years A Slave succeeds both as a drama designed for mass entertainment and as something more interesting.

It is interesting to note that, in Django Unchained, Tarantino tries to develop a similar idea of the adapting that Django must overcome in order to survive – though he fails since he is much more interested in film references, long bouts of monologue and exploding bodies. Conversely, it is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave and not wish for the kind of bloody satisfaction so gleefully though tediously doled out by Tarantino, although McQueen makes short shrift of the idea of violent revolution all too quickly and, it has to be said, convincingly. It is difficult to watch 12 Years A Slave so soon after Django Unchained – especially since one early scene in the former looks identical in terms of lighting and framing to the latter. 12 Years A Slave works in some ways as a riposte of Django Unchained, particularly in its much more honest focus on the victims of slavery, in their much more three-dimensional characterization and in the fact that Solomon Northup survives thanks to his own skills and not through the advice and assistance of a nice white man.

As a drama, 12 Years A Slave is most effective in its quiet moments, McQueen showing a flair for the more subtle drama of single scenes as well as in the more uncompromising scenes of institutional racism and brutality. As a whole, 12 Years A Slave moves through a variety of registers usually under the influence of its performers. Fassbender, Dano and Sarah Paulson overplay their scenes and the film seems over the top when they are centre stage, while it plays best when Ejiofor, Lupita Nyong’o and Adepero Oduye are given the space to act. Since it is tied so closely to its performances, 12 Years A Slave ultimately succeeds or fails on the quality of the work of its actors in individual scenes, making it a flawed and overblown yet effective and moving drama.