No I haven’t made my final picks
yet, but with a full week now elapsed since the nominations were announced, I
felt my thoughts starting to logjam.
Best to get them down in digital form for the sake, at least, of filing
them. I came away from reading the nod
list feeling first, not that an individual or even a film had been snubbed, but
that the audience had. I’m still not
quite sure how I feel about this whole “up to ten” Best Picture nominations
switch, but four years in I’m surprised that this was the year to only put up
nine films for the industry’s highest honor.
Most of us are smart enough to know that only about three films each
year actually have a chance, and with critics in near unanimous agreement that
2012 was a good year for movies, why not fill each available spot? Would it be a transparent ploy to get more
viewers of the telecast? Yes. Does Oscar
care? No. High moral standards don’t
come around these parts often…at least not in this regard.
One area that they do seem to hold up
in – not that this is a bad thing – leaves me a bit incredulous though. Like everyone who writes about movies, and
the Oscars in particular, I have my favorites.
This year, though I’ve tried to convince myself otherwise (probably
because I want to hate Bradley Cooper, but can’t), Silver Linings Playbook tops my list of personal favorites (my #2, Prometheus, got only one nod, for visual
effects, and Life of Pi seems to have
that all wrapped up). While I have a
number of reasons to believe that Silver
Linings’ producers won’t walk away with the gold statue, one stands
out.
It
took more than 40 years from the release of The
Jazz Singer in 1927 for the “F word” to make its debut in mainstream
American cinema, which it did with M*A*S*H
in 1970. I looked over the list of Best Picture winners from 1970 on; convinced
I wouldn’t remember a single instance in which a female character in any of
those films uttered that four letter combination. I was wrong, at least twice. It’s said, nay screamed, by Annette Bening in
American Beauty (1999) and yes, she’s
saying it in that way. It is also, while not totally audible in my recollection,
let loose by Helena Bonham Carter in The
King’s Speech’s montage sequence. I’m
willing to believe that it’s escaped the lips of other actresses in Best
Picture winners as well, but these were the two cases I remembered immediately.
Now consider the character of
Tiffany in Silver Linings. Played by Jennifer Lawrence (who I think will take home a statue), she says that
word in a way (yes that way, again)
that is fabulous, remarkable, the way I’d want to say it if I were a woman who’d
gone through what Tiffany has. And yet I
have a sneaking suspicion that the Academy isn’t ready, or ready yet again, to
award its highest honor to a film in which a female character uses the word to
such effect. Of the two instances I
remembered, both were played for humor, the comic outburst of women who have,
for their reasons, held it in and now feel liberated by it. Tiffany says it like it’s part of her everyday lexicon.
In
the Kodak Theatre (now I think it’s called the Dolby Theatre), where the Oscar
are held, the name of every Best Picture winner is chiseled into the massive
stones that line the stairs. Etched into
those rocks are titles that, rightly or wrongly, have achieved movie immortality. The voters often don’t pick the film that
will last in our minds, but those stones tell a different story, and will
likely last much longer than I will. I
don’t think Oscar is yet willing to put Jennifer Lawrence’s “F-word” into granite. I can think of performances, some worthy and
some questionable, that have garnered Best Actress gold which portrayed much more
devious actions, as well as some words, than what we see from Lawrence’s
Tiffany. But I think that when it comes
to the Best Picture category, for this year at least, the revisionist gender
politics that her performance, and the way in which she uses that word,
insinuate won’t help Silver Linings
in Oscar’s biggest category. David O.
Russell will win the consolation prize of Best Adapted Screenplay, and the
Oscars will continue their tradition of honoring only the words, controversial
as they may be, of the year’s best film, and not how they were captured on
screen. (See 1941 and 1994 for eaxamples.)
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