A Plethora of Choices: A (Semi) Knee-Jerk Reaction to the 2012 Academy Awards

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US-ENTERTAINMENT-FILM-OSCARS

“Argo fuck yourselves” indeed.

 

“Do you want to be happy? I suspect that you do. Well, here’s the first step to happiness: Don’t get pissed off that people who aren’t you happen to think Paris Hilton is interesting and deserves to be on TV every other day; the fame surrounding Paris Hilton is not a reflection on your life (unless you want it to be). Don’t get pissed off because the Yeah Yeah Yeahs aren’t on the radio enough; you can buy the goddamn record and play “Maps” all goddamn day (if that’s what you want). Don’t get pissed off because people didn’t vote the way you voted; you knew this was a democracy when you agreed to participate, so you knew this was how things might work out. Basically, don’t get pissed off over the fact that the way you feel about culture isn’t some kind of universal consensus. Because if you do, you will end up feeling betrayed. And it will be your own fault. You will feel bad, and you will deserve it.” – “Cultural Betrayal”, Esquire 2005, Chuck Klosterman

Well, the Academy Awards happened on Sunday night (the 24th of February in the Year of Something or Other 2013), ostensibly celebrating the year in movies that was 2012. It was not a clean sweep, something that has become a little rarer in recent years, much like Bengal tigers and Bengals playoff visits. The last time I can think of where one movie solidly dominated the goings-on in Los Angeles was Return of the King in 2003. (Well, 2004, but it was a group of movies that were mostly released widespread in 2003. At least, in theaters in NY and LA near you.) Returning to last Sunday’s evening, we were treated to Daniel Day-Lewis turning into a stand-up comedian, tasteful musical numbers, tasteless musical numbers, show-stopping numbers and numbers that almost literally dragged the bloated carcass that is any awards behemoth into the ground. (Thank you, Les Mis, but it’s impossible for a bunch of mostly talented white people who seem otherwise charming to truly follow the awesomeness that erupted from Jennifer Hudson’s mouth. It’s almost institutionally unfair.)

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Alex’s Thought on the Cinema of 2012 Part One: Or, Argo is a Mediocre Thriller in the Guise of an “Important” Film and its Oscar Victory was Vapid Bullshit

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Ugh.

I’ve been putting off summing up my experience of the year 2012 in cinema for a while now.  It just seems that I never see enough to really pass judgment on a year until 1/6th of the next one has passed. Part of that is just the general lethargy of me not seeing half of what I want to on time. But there’s also a big part of me that doesn’t want to write an article like this until I can bitch about the opinions of others, namely the voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. So I will get to my overall thoughts on the cinema of 2012 in a second article, first I have to get rid of my venom in this one.

In specific I want to tell you, dear readers, that the Academy gave its highest honor, the Oscar for Best Picture of the year to a film that is wholly undeserving of such praise. Now this is not an unusual occurrence. In the past ten years I have agreed with the Academy’s choice all of once, when the Coen Brothers won top honors for their 2007 Western/Noir/Existential Philosophy Think-piece No Country for Old Men. That’s not to say that I hate every Best Picture winner. I have absolutely no complaint with The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, The Departed, The Hurt Locker, or even The Artist winning it all. There were movies I preferred to all those films, but they are all good to great films that deserve to be seen and stood out against the films they competed against at the Oscars. That’s not something that I can say for Argo, the film that was named Best Picture of 2012. I know my esteemed editors here on The Addison Recorder have sung the praises of Ben Affleck’s Iran Hostage thriller in their own 2012 pieces, but my opinion runs rather dramatically counter to theirs.
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The Academy Awards Live Blog…by Andrew and Company

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TWENTY-FIFTH

Sorry. that was just way too surprising.

The way Jack Nicholson says “Amour” is beautiful.

Argo wins Best Picture. Travis takes ten hard-earned dollars from me. And…I have no problem with this. There were three/four better movies this year, but this film is going to be studied better and more in years to come…and why is Kristen Stewart sitting behind Spielberg?…and Affleck, who does not get played off…I’m sorry, he is so humble, and he is an outstanding director who ranks with Bigelow…who wore the dress everyone should have worn tonight…

The final number: MacFarlane and Chenoweth sing about the losers. It’s very astounding that they never cut to the audience (who might be leaving) and I still think that Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty should have WAY MORE OSCARS than they did. But that’s for posterity.

Good night, everybody!
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Oh, Holy Shit, Hello!

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If you’re arriving here at The Addison Recorder because of the link in Todd VanDerWerff’s essay over at The A.V. Club we just want to say hello! So…hello! Personally, I’m sort of flipping out that our little blog, with a readership that probably maxes out in the dozens and has a mere 71 Facebook fans,  was linked to by the publication that the four of us are all sort of aspiring to emulate on here. It might just be me, and it might just be because I am running on only a few hours of sleep because my dog is sick, but this feels like a big deal.

Anyway, please do have a look around. Our “Welcome” post from when we started off last summer is a good place to get to know the writers on here, and we’ve done a decent job of filling this site up with words since then. So dip into the archives, tell us what we’re right (like my thinking that The Master is some kind of classic) or wrong about (like Travis insisting that baseball is an exciting sport worth caring about).  I know for certain that this weekend Andrew is planning on liveblogging the Oscars (I may join him in this endeavor), and I’ll probably write my own accounting of the cinema of 2012 within the next few days, and we’ll have even more articles coming your way in the future.

Thanks for visiting!

Hope Springs Eternal: MLB Spring Training Preview

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aroldischapman

It’s that time of year again. The snows on Wrigley Field have receded, leaving watery trails as the only traces of the ravages of winter. Geese are starting to think about their migrations back north, away from their seasonal homes. As we speak (or, more specifically, as I type this), Major League Baseball’s pitchers and catchers have already been in their camps for almost a full week, working on PFP (Pitcher’s Fielding Practice) and bullpen sessions, shaking loose the rust from well-rested arms. Millionaire superstars and struggling prospects alike are converging upon Florida and Arizona, eager to earn their place on a team’s roster and the chance to contribute to the annual push towards a world championship and all the glories that come attached.

Spring training is upon us.

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Andrew and Alex Talk Oscar Nominations, Part Two

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ANDREW

So with ten days to the Oscars and voting for the actual awards almost over, I am absolutely confident in saying…Daniel Day-Lewis will win Best Actor.

And that’s it.

Here’s why I’m completely unprepared to go any further, Alex. It has to do with my top five movies of the year, as I had gone on record stating that Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty were two masterpieces, almost flawless. But a few weeks after that pronouncement, this is how my Best of 2012 list finished, and this does not include Amour, Holy Motors, or Life of Pi, none of which I’ve gotten to see yet…

1. Lincoln

2. Silver Linings Playbook

3. Argo/Zero Dark Thirty

4. The Master

In short, Hollywood unveiled four of the greatest movies I’ve seen in my lifetime (plus one of the most complex and intelligent artistic mind**ks ever in one season), and they’re all up for Best Picture.

Now I breathe with excitement about the 24th…good…then continue.

The brilliance of Silver Linings Playbook and Argo has to do with their meeting one of my favorite cinematic maxims, as pronounced by Robert McKee: “Give the audience what they want, but do it in a way they don’t expect.” Zero Dark Thirty was a film that brilliantly met every expectation of mine. Lincoln met them, then surpassed them. David O. Russell, Ben Affleck, and Chris Terrio flipped my expectations on their heads with the intelligence and emotion they poured into their films, especially the former quality. These are two very, very smart motion pictures, which adhere to conventions of style and genre while traveling to places not many movies go.

Saying more inappropriate things than appropriate things.

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A Year Watching Pictures: The Best Films of 2012

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lincoln

The past year has been discussed as a marvelous year for cinema, one that showcased some of the finest work that’s been done since the banner year of…2007. That’s a five year gap between epic years of celluloid, with ’07 bringing forth such spectacles as No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, Into the Wild, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Longest Movie Title in History, Ratatouille, Juno, Sweeny Todd: The Demon Barber of Tim Burton’s Mind…okay, so the first two were fantastic, and there were a bunch of other great movies, and something about a guy who can only blink through the entire movie, but his blinks are in French! which makes it awesome. Oh, and that was also the year that gave us Academy Award nominee Norbit.

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Not Just Anybody: A Reflection on “Zero Dark Thirty”

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(This piece should only be read by people who have either a, seen the movie, or b, don’t particularly care. It will cover the plot from beginning to end, so be forewarned.)

 

“Do you think I’m just anybody, Ali? Do you?”  – T. E. Lawrence (Peter O’Toole), Lawrence of Arabia, 1962

 

“I’m the motherfucker who found this place.” – Maya (Jessica Chastain), Zero Dark Thirty, 2012

 

 

Zero Dark Thirty is a film at once thoroughly of its time and promising an enduring timelessness, the sort of picture which will be taught in colleges and universities for decades to come as a model to aspire to, but will also be enjoyed and remembered by those who see it. “Enjoy” may not be the right word, for the level of positive feeling in the film is minimal and even when it comes carries with it a sense of uncertainty over whether we the audience should be unequivocally happy by the events. Zero Dark Thirty is riveting…it holds attention from the very first sounds we hear and keeps one gripped until the concluding image, an almost terrifying calmness over two and a half hours of storm. [Read more…]

One Last Ride on the Wheel of Time: Review of “A Memory of Light”

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A-Memory-of-Light

Imagine, if you will, that you are cordially invited to the opening of a new theme park. Let’s say for the purposes of this metaphor that this new wonderland of amusement is called “Robert Jordan’s Fantasyland”. You arrive at this theme park eager to check out all of the new rides, having been to previous such parks as Middle-Earth, Narnia, and the World of Shannara. In this particular theme park, there are fourteen rides and one ducky pond (helpfully titled “New Spring”) for your enjoyment, but while visiting this park, you must ride the rides in a prescribed order, so as to fully maximize your experience. At the same time, some of the rides are continually under construction, so you don’t really have a choice except to follow the park’s guidelines (even though you can see some of these rides from a mile off and already know what’s up). Also, each ride has a boarding cost of $7.99, except for the mysterious ride #14, which is $34.99, but from what you can see from the street, looks incredibly awesome.

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Alex and Andrew Talk Oscar Nominations: Part 1

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I am guessing that we will all be missing Emma Stone when he hosts solo.

Alex:

As I sit down to start our conversation about this year’s Oscar nominations nearly 48 hours have elapsed since Seth MacFarlane and Emma Stone announced them. This break between the announcement and our analysis wasn’t necessarily by design, I just got quite sleepy last night. But it has allowed the nominations to sink in a little more, which can only be a good thing, right?

Anyway, even with the break I don’t quite know where to start in our assessments. The biggest news from the nominations, and certainly the biggest shock, is what the Best Director category looks like. Best Director nominations are a necessity for any film to win Best Picture (only Driving Miss Daisy has won it all without a Directing nomination in the past 80 years or so), which means that yesterday morning saw a dramatic shake-up of the race. The Academy snubbed Kathryn Bigelow’s masterful work on Zero Dark Thirty and did the same to the extremely popular Ben Affleck for his direction of Argo. I don’t even know how to convey the seismic upheaval that those misses represent. Both Zero Dark Thirty and Argo were tipped by myself and most others as major dark horses. Either could have snuck past Lincoln and win Best Picture. Without Directing nominations though, both suddenly appear to be dead in the water. I’ve seen a lot of chatter in the wake of the snubs that suggests some other films are stronger than we suspected and could win (most prominently Silver Linings Playbook, which improbably became the first film in 31 years to get nominated in all seven major categories). I don’t really buy that line of thinking right now, though. Until the industry awards start getting really wild, I think that these nominating snubs have essentially cleared the path for Lincoln to win without much of a contest.
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