Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Oscar Nominations (and "F-words"): How I see it




            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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