Personal Film Awards/Will The Academy’s 2012 Leave a Film Industry Legacy?

A mere nine hours from now, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences will have awarded Argo its top prize, making it statistically one of the weakest winners in the history of the Oscar ceremony. It heads into the Best Picture race without a foreground position in other key categories, most notably without a Best Director nomination.

Only three other films in the 85-year history of the Oscars have reigned supreme over their respective year without a Best Director nomination; Wings (1927/28), Grand Hotel (1931/32) and–most recently–Driving Miss Daisy (1989/90). Argo will become only the fourth exception to the Director nomination/Picture win rule, but lacks the cultural relevance and staying power of those it joins the ranks of. By next week, after Argo‘s rental profits are raked into their respective hawker’s pockets, the film will fall into obscurity, becoming notable only for the reasons it won Best Picture versus its legs as a quality film. Argo‘s legacy is already sealed as a film that made a late-season sweep at the biggest industry pity-party on record. The “snubbing” of the film’s helmer, Ben Affleck, has unfortunately translated into industry backlash against the Academy’s Director’s Branch, which simply didn’t think his work was strong enough to warrant a nomination. If he’d made it into the category, would Argo still win Best Picture? The 2012/2013 Awards Season would appear vastly different if so, with Lincoln likely taking top honors at precursor ceremonies and guild awards alike. This year’s Oscar race is reaffirming only in the sense that Ben Affleck’s likability within the industry, strong enough to guarantee his subpar film the industry’s top honors, will prove beneficial to continuing his transition from mega-star to definitive auteur. Affleck’s skills as a director are undeniable. The Town and Gone Baby Gone reek of quality craftsmanship which, to some degree, is partially why Argo is such a disappointment. Where the two Boston-set pictures reflect a director with a keen sense for location (Affleck is personally connected to the city), culture, and dramatics, Argo feels like a massive exercise in painting-by-numbers, with easily interchangeable direction without a personal mark. Argo will be forever known as the procedural that could, a film with merits based only on the misfortune of its director, who really didn’t deserve anything in the first place. The film’s successes tonight will be empty, remembered only for the pitiful circumstances surrounding them.

What we must remember, however, is that the Academy’s decision is not binding–at least in a cultural sense. Crash might have trumped Brokeback Mountain in 2005, but where the latter gave a nation perspective, the former gave us a  Showtime series cancelled after the first season. The Kings Speech might have been the perfect frame for its actors to shine, but The Social Network held a mirror to a generation. The Academy has a tendency to make in-the-moment decisions that don’t necessarily highlight the “important” films of their respective eras. Audiences and academia have embraced such films as the “better” offerings of their respective years, making them the unofficial “Best Picture” in their own right. We remember Brokeback Mountain and The Social Network–hell, even Black Swan, Juno, There Will Be Blood, Mulholland Drive, etc. have all taken on more prestige and cultural prevalence than their respective year’s Academy-designated Best Picture.

Which films from 2012 will we have to look for to fortify the year’s presence for future generations? Films like Beasts of the Southern Wild and Amour are too small-scale with little commercial appeal, as they’re difficult to grasp in many ways (Beasts for its artistic oddities, Amour for its insistence on eliciting negative reactions combined with a complex structure). Django Unchained will be remembered as an interesting blip on Tarantino’s map, but withstanding little beyond that. Lincoln is a film drawing more on an audience’s affections for its real-life subjects than its strengths as a film, and Les Miserables is eye and ear candy with built-in nostalgia, forgotten beyond the late-night rooms of aspiring drama majors until the next incarnation of the it-needs-to-die-already musical comes along in 15 years. This leaves us with Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty, and Life of Pi. Silver Linings Playbook and Life of Pi are both based on previous works of fiction, already with built-in audiences. Both films offer fresh takes on their source material (crafting “cinematic” casings for them) and yielding high box-office returns (both grossing over $100 million domestically). They’re quality productions and will prove popular at retailers after their DVD releases, but Zero Dark Thirty will emerge as 2012’s crowning achievement as future generations look back. The film is notorious for its depiction of our government using torture as a means to gain information, but it doesn’t lead to much. The only thing the death of Osama bin Laden proves–at least in the world of Zero Dark Thirty–is that steady enduring unrest doesn’t have a solution solvable by putting a bullet into human flesh. So, then, where you “want” to go (as a nation, as a society, as a world power) becomes an issue, as there is no foreseeable place to go. The next target gives us no time for celebration, and the uncertainty of the United States’ position in the world is a questionable state of reality future generations will be living as they reflect back on Kathryn Bigelow’s film.

It’s difficult to accept the Academy as a cultural preservator for this reason, or maybe films that withstand years and decades have simply disappeared from production slates. When was the last time we saw a Bonnie & Clyde, a Sunset Boulevard, a Casablanca, a Psycho? Only time will tell if our spectacle-laden society has actually produced anything worthy of standing the test of time next to such classics, but Argo and its industry pity-win will be lost in the shuffle come April.

I’d also like to present my personal film awards for the prior cinematic year. Every film I’ve seen (released in the United States from January 1st through December 31, 2012) had its fair shot at breaking into one of the categories I’ve designated below. I’ve limited the number of nominees in some categories and expanded them in others (*makes jack-off motion at Academy*), but for the most part I’ve kept the numbers pretty standard. The bolded people and films are the winners. Enjoy.

Motion Picture

1 – Zero Dark Thirty

2 – Beasts of the Southern Wild

3 – The Master

4 – Silver Linings Playbook

5 – Celeste and Jesse Forever

6 – Holy Motors

7 – Seven Psychopaths

8 – Life of Pi

9 – Django Unchained

10 – The Impossible

Close Calls: Flight, Rust and Bone, Amour, Your Sister’s Sister, The Sessions, The Dark Knight Rises, Looper, Prometheus, Magic Mike, Damsels in Distress, The Grey, Pitch Perfect, The Deep Blue Sea, The Hunger Games, Les Miserables

Actress

Jennifer Lawrence – Silver Linings Playbook

Jessica Chastain – Zero Dark Thirty

Quvenzhane Wallis – Beasts of the Southern Wild

Rashida Jones – Celeste and Jesse Forever

Naomi Watts – The Impossible

Close calls: Marion Cotillard (Rust and Bone), Rachel Weisz (The Deep Blue Sea), Emmanuelle Riva (Amour)

Actor

Hugh Jackman – Les Miserables

Denzel Washington – Flight

Denis Lavant – Holy Motors

Joaquin Phoenix – The Master

Matthias Schoenaerts – Rust and Bone

Close Calls: Daniel Day-Lewis (Lincoln), Jack Black (Bernie), Colin Farrell (Seven Psychopaths), John Hawkes (The Sessions), Bradley Cooper (Silver Linings Playbook)

Supporting Actor

Phillip Seymour Hoffman – The Master

Dwight Henry – Beasts of the Southern Wild

Christoph Waltz – Django Unchained

Matthew McConoughey – Magic Mike

Tom Hiddleston – The Deep Blue Sea

Close Call: Guy Pearce (Lawless)

Supporting Actress

Sally Field – Lincoln

Kelly Reilly – Flight

Anne Hathaway – Les Miserables

Emily Blunt – Looper

Rosemarie DeWitt – Your Sister’s Sister

Close Call: Ari Graynor (For a Good Time, Call…)

Director

Benh Zeitlin – Beasts of the Southern Wild

Paul Thomas Anderson – The Master

Kathryn Bigelow – Zero Dark Thirty

Leos Carax – Holy Motors

Quentin Tarantino – Django Unchained

Close Call: Gary Ross – The Hunger Games

Screenplay

Silver Linings Playbook

Celeste and Jesse Forever

Zero Dark Thirty

Amour

Your Sister’s Sister

Seven Psychopaths

Close Calls: Flight, Django Unchained, Beasts of the Southern Wild

Cinematography

The Master

The Impossible

Rust and Bone

Life of Pi

Beasts of the Southern Wild

Close Calls: Django Unchained, The Hunger Games, Les Miserables

Production Design

Anna Karenina

Beasts of the Southern Wild

The Impossible

Les Miserables

Prometheus

Close Calls: The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Lincoln

Visual Effects

Life of Pi

Prometheus

Looper

Rust and Bone

The Impossible

Costume Design

Anna Karenina

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Django Unchained

Lincoln

Les Miserables

Close Calls: The Girl, Life of Pi

 

Hair, Makeup, Prosthetics

Holy Motors

Hitchcock

Lincoln

Les Miserables

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey

Close Call: Prometheus

Editing

Silver Linings Playbook

Holy Motors

Zero Dark Thirty

The Master

Django Unchained

Foreign Film

Rust and Bone

Holy Motors

The Deep Blue Sea

Amour

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Leos Carax brings “Holy Motors” to Pittsburgh

Kylie Minogue and Denis Lavant in Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors.”

The Three Rivers Film Festival continued this week with a screening of Leos Carax’s “Holy Motors,” an eternally perplexing film whose presence at this year’s festival is a testament to Pittsburgh’s standing as an up-and-coming hub for the arts.

The print was introduced as one of the only copies in the country, with a 35mm print having not reached U.S. shores as of Wednesday’s screening at the Harris Theater, downtown.

In line with previous screenings at the festival, however, the night didn’t go without its share of technical hijinks. Halfway through the film, buffering issues plagued Carax’s gorgeous film, forcing flustered employees to nervously inform a jeering audience that they may not be able to see the conclusion to “Motors.” Telling an auditorium full of pretentious film buffs they can’t see the end of a film like this is like telling a mother she can’t keep the precious results of the last twelve hours she spent in labor. Some were calm, some were up in arms. But, alas, the wonderful staff at the Harris Theater made sure those who chose to stay for the thirty or so minutes it took to fix the print went home happy.

The film itself eludes description—or “fair” criticism for just that matter. It is a film perfect in its artistic execution, catharsis in its purest form. It feels unfiltered, unburdened by a studio’s overarching creative control, but not lacking a thematic direction. It tells the story of a man, “Mr. Oscar,” given the task of completing various fantastical “appointments” throughout Paris which include masking his own identity to become someone—or something—else within various staged vignettes. Each of the scenarios sees Mr. Oscar applying makeup, full body suits, wigs, weapons, even “dying” a few times, all for the sake of crafting pure spectacle for an audience—not any specific one, simply the “idea” of “the audience” that lies at the core of any performance, filmic or non. “Holy Motors” is laden with elements Film Studies classrooms spend entire semesters reviewing; intertextuality, self-reflexivity, and conflicts between diegetic/non-diegetic aspects all come into play. “Holy Motors” is a film major’s wet dream, an act of defiance against contemporary cinema’s willingness to gloss over the dark (juicy) bits of reality that places the audiences in a position to respond versus passively “receive” at all times.

Edith Scob dons her “Eyes Without a Face” costuming in “Holy Motors”

It’s frustrating, confusing, intense, elaborate, something, nothing, and everything Leos Carax wants it to be all at once. Even in its most irritating portions of reluctance to let “the audience” in, “Holy Motors” is a film which can’t be faulted. After all, dreams can’t be wrong, can they? As a midnight excursion your brain may endure, the film is in a constant state of evolution, deconstruction, and re-imagination; destroying ideologies and scenarios pre-established only moments prior. There are countless references to films–classic and modern–that make “Holy Motors” a veritable treasure trove of cinematic and pop cultural history. Edith Scob reprises her role from “The Eyes Without a Face,” Kylie Minogue plays someone who is not Kylie Minogue in a film where Kylie Minogue music plays at a party, characters from other Carax films (“Tokyo!” in particular) make appearances as if they’ve never had a camera on them before. Scrapbooking for scrapbooking’s sake, I suppose. But not without purpose; this is a film which questions identity, performance, consciousness, and reality. Things taken for granted whilst commuting to work or seeing a concert, but pondered with precision and caution in dreams and cinema, the most pure forms of expression, which collide with dazzling results in “Holy Motors.”

When the print of the film lagged and skipped around thanks to the aforementioned buffering issues, one audience member (proud of himself for having such a brilliant thought) proclaimed (loud enough so the whole audience could hear) “I think the jump-cuts are intentional. This is brilliant.” While fancying himself a modern day Godard, he was shot down not only by the staff’s “fixing” of the “jump cuts,” but also by the one constant thematical message which runs throughout “Holy Motors”. The audience is a cog in a giant machine, victim (and, at times, willing participant) of the cinema’s ultimate power over any who relinquish their conscious state and hand it over to the all-powerful medium of film. He was wrong, but I’m sure Carax would appreciate his earnestness.