In Contention

Tag: A Beautiful Mind

  • Debating historical hiccups in ‘The King’s Speech’

    Unless you really haven’t been paying attention, you’ll have noticed by now that a few people have taken issue with the history lesson given by “The King’s Speech.” Or more specifically, with the one not given: that George VI supported British PM Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement towards Adolf Hitler, while his brother Edward VIII was an outright Nazi sympathizer, none of which is acknowledged in the film.

    Writing for The New Republic, Isaac Chotner took the film to task both for “grossly misrepresenting real events and people” and for shortselling its own dramatic potential through these omissions, while none other than Christopher Hitchens raised the same issue in a recent Slate essay, damning the film as “a major desecration of the historical record.”

    Whatever my own issues with the film, its historical filleting hasn’t been high on the list. As much as I think the gray political alliances of the Royal Family would make for a far richer narrative, the bottom line is that screenwriter David Seidler was more interested in George VI’s personal struggles — as a dramatist, it’s his right to frame the story as he wishes, free of the obligation to furnish the audience with every historical detail.

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  • LIFE WITHOUT OSCAR: 2001 and 2002

    Catch up with the idea behind this series here.

    After being overlooked in 1995, Ron Howard finally got a pat on the back from Oscar in 2001 for “A Beautiful Mind,” which was Russell Crowe’s second Best Picture winner in a row. If that wasn’t bad enough, the inaugural Best Animated Feature award went to the unwatchable “Shrek,” making this one of the more dubious overall years in Oscar history.

    In my opinion of course. “Chicago” isn’t much better but 2002 at least threw us a nice curveball when Adrien Brody became the youngest Best Actor winner in history and Roman Polanski became the oldest (and fugitiviest) Best Director for “The Pianist.”

    At four hours and 23 minutes, the 2001 ceremony is the longest ever, made worse by the fact that Whoopi Goldberg was in charge of it. At least they got Woody Allen to show up for the first time ever for a post-9/11 tribute to New York. I’d suggest the entire ceremony be relocated to New York if it meant Woody would host.

    Steve Martin came back in 2002 and trimmed things up by almost an hour. Way to go, Steve! He also delivered what might be my favorite Oscar joke ever- “In “About Schmidt,” Jack Nicholson plays a retired insurance executive who climbs into a hot tub with Kathy Bates. But hey, who hasn’t?”

    Also, Eminem!

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  • PGA nominates documentaries

    Via press release, the nominees are:

    “Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer”
    “Earth Made of Glass”
    “Inside Job”
    “Smash His Camera”
    “The Tillman Story”
    “Waiting for Superman”

  • THE LONG SHOT: Bait, switch

    Whether you choose to believe them or not – and speaking for myself, I don’t quite – the media powers that be have currently reduced the 2010 Best Picture race to just two titles: “The Social Network” and “The King’s Speech.” That’s entirely (and hopefully, lest things get too dull too soon) subject to change over the next four months, but given what we’ve seen at this point, it’s difficult to devise a could-win theory for many of the films most fancied for the remaining eight slots, be it “Inception” or “Another Year.”

    I don’t really blame those in the blogosphere who are narrowing things down to this pair of films: after a lackluster Toronto fest failed to turn up a hidden dragon along the lines of “Slumdog Millionaire,” the slate of contenders looks much as it did before the fall festival season began. With expectations for “Network” and “Speech” pegged high all along, meeting them was enough to seal frontrunner status.

    Moreover, the temptation to pit David Fincher’s modish Facebook story and Tom Hooper’s tony royalty porn against each other is hard to resist, given how conveniently the films are opposed: both acclaimed biopics after a fashion, but one concerned with present-day American youth, the other with British aristocracy of yore. “It’s the time-capsule piece versus the time-warp piece,” snarked one friend of mine recently, anticipating a narrative that will likely run all season, even if other frontrunners enter the fray.

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  • Check the figures

    Russell Crowe in A Beautiful MindA few things puzzled me about this Variety piece in which Iain Blair takes on a familiar chestnut of a topic: the box-office divide between public favorites and Oscar contenders.

    The first is that he considers the “disparity between art and commerce” to be “accelerating” — a curious argument to make at a time when “Avatar,” “Up” and “Inglourious Basterds” (none of which Blair mentions) look likely to feature on the Best Picture list. Blair’s argument is well-tailored to last year’s Oscar race, but reads somewhat stale now.

    The second is, well, this entire paragraph:

    Sure, “Titanic” grabbed a ton of Oscars and racked up the biggest box office in history. But more recent critically acclaimed best picture winners such as “Shakespeare in Love,” “A Beautiful Mind” and “Chicago” did middling to poor business. And “Crash” and “The English Patient” simply crashed and, well, burned at the box office.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Don’t look back in anger

    Jake Gyllenhaal in Brokeback MountainFor all the movement in the awards game this week – Jeff Bridges leap-frogging into contention, the animation race swelling to five nominees, “Precious” continuing to gather momentum – my head hasn’t really been in it this week.

    That’s partly because we’re all still making blind prognoses until four unseen juggernauts – “Nine,” “Avatar,” “The Lovely Bones,” and “Invictus” – finally deign to show their faces. And partly because I’m only looking forward to one of those titles with sincere movie-fan enthusiasm, as opposed to professional curiosity. Sometimes you just get the wholly subjective feeling that it isn’t going to be ‘your’ Oscar season – and while I’m not there yet, the fear is setting in.

    So, with no current awards developments getting me particularly enthralled or incensed, I’ve spent most of my time lately in a reflective state. With ‘best of the 2000s’ lists already coming thick and fast, and my DVD trawl through the decade’s leftovers for my own list in full swing, Oscar’s own performance over the last 10 years has been on my mind.

    As I discussed in this space a few weeks ago, it’s been a slightly schizophrenic decade of Oscar winners, one that has blurred long-held definitions of “Oscar-bait.” One does have to wonder about the identity or cultural relevance of any group that can alternately celebrate such disparate achievements as “Slumdog Millionaire,” “Gladiator” and “No Country for Old Men.” Who are these people, and what do they know?

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  • THE LONG SHOT: Critical condition

    Gabourey Sidibe in PreciousAhead of its U.S. release this week, there is a wave of mild surprise in the blogosphere over the fact that “Precious,” the film deemed by some (yours truly included) to be the present Best Picture frontrunner, is currently sitting on a lowly Metacritic score of 57. Fitting neatly with the largely media-fabricated talk of a backlash against the film, some commenters are citing this rather arbitrary number as a debit against the film’s chances.

    As much as I’d personally like that to believe that — and as relieved as I am to see that I’m not the only person who didn’t respond to the film – such talk will doubtless be short-lived, given the paucity of reviews making up the current score and the likelihood of raves to come. If anything, public support is more crucial than critical consensus to this film’s campaign – if audiences don’t turn up to see this grim, minority-oriented indie, many Academy members won’t feel compelled to either.

    That said, it looks increasingly possible that “Precious” (I refuse to use that lumpy subtitle all season, by the way) could turn out to be a more critically divisive item than might have been expected following an ecstatically received festival run.

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  • THE LONG SHOT: What is an “Oscar movie” these days?

    George Clooney in Up in the Air“God, that thing’s just going to shit Academy Awards out of its ass next year, isn’t it?,” I overheard a journo behind me remark to his companion, as I made my way out of the “Up in the Air” press screening on Sunday. “It’s such an Oscar movie.”

    Two things struck me as interesting about this throwaway remark, both relating to the lack of care with which both Oscar pundits and “serious” film lovers tend to regard the Academy Awards.

    The first was that, isolated and in print, the guy’s words appear dismissive of “Up in the Air,” yet they actually capped a mostly enthusiastic response to the film. His tone dipped almost apologetically as he applied the “Oscar movie” label, as if it somehow sullied an otherwise fine effort.

    More to the point, however, the remark seemed indicative of the transitive stage the Academy Awards seem to be in at the moment, as simultaneously resistant and vulnerable to industry change as the protagonist of Jason Reitman’s film – and facing a similar crisis of purpose. For 15 years ago – if not necessarily 15 years before that – “Up in the Air” wouldn’t have been decreed an “Oscar movie” at all.

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  • The new millennium Oscars?

    Viggo Mortensen in The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the KingLooking back over the previous Oscar winners for Best Picture since 2000, the start of a new century (and a new millennium), I find myself wondering sometimes what the hell the Academy was thinking.  It’s no secret I disagree with the Academy a lot, but I can also admit that when they get it right, they get it right.

    But since 2000, their Best Pic choices have run the gamut from incredibly ridiculous, “Gladiator” and “A Beautiful Mind” being just goofy, to bang on, with “The Departed” and “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.”  I am told the Academy is moving in a more progressive direction, willing to take more risks, and I suppose some of these winners do just that.  But they could have gone further.

    Year by year, here’s a quick look, with some thoughts about who might have won, and who should have at least been nominated…

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  • Can Ron Howard give ‘Frost/Nixon’ the edge it needs?

    Ron HowardIn 2000 I remember reading a post on Ain’t It Cool News by Harry Knowles.  Having seen an unfinished cut of “How the Grinch Stole Christmas,” the Ron Howard film based on the beloved Dr. Suess story and animated program, Knowles believed that the film would redefine Howard as a filmmkaer, elevate him to a higher level and be the film he would be remembered for.

    Knowles felt it was a greater achievement than “Apollo 13” and pretty much anything else the director had done, that Howard had given us the fantasy film we had been waiting for. Admittedly the effects were incomplete, but Knowles was confident what he saw was a masterpiece.

    Granted it was Harry Knowles, but then, of course, the film was released, critically crucified, reasonably successful before hitting DVD where it is not even regarded as a Christmas classic. You know why? Because it was not very good.

    Whatever Knowles saw, and I am sure he saw something he felt was exciting, did not transfer to the final cut. Instead we had a busy film with a massively over-the-top performance from Jim Carrey and these bizarre little creatures with odd makeup called “Whos.” Christine Baranski was in heat for the green misanthrope, though she had not seen him since he was a wee Grinch, and the town’s mayor was still the pompous windbag he had been in school when he had humiliated our hero and sent him off to the mountain where he now resides.

    They searched the continent of North America to find the right little girl to play Cindy Lou Who, and I suppose Howard thought they had found her.  Wrong.

    One year later Howard won the Academy Award for ” A Beautiful Mind,” one of those wildly over-praised films that somehow win Oscars over better efforts like “The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring” or “In the Bedroom,” or the un-nominated “A.I. : Artificial Intelligence.”

    For my money, Ron Howard has struck gold just once, with the brilliant “Apollo 13,” a superb piece of filmmaking. The Academy awarded the film with nine nominations, but stunningly, despite having won the Directors Guild Award for Best Director, Howard was not among Oscar’s list of helmers. What a terrible slap in the face that must have been!

    In the years since “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” Howard has matured as a director, giving us a superb western that nobody saw called “The Missing,” with outstanding performances from Cate Blanchett and Tommy Lee Jones, and the extraordinary “Cinderella Man,” for which he and Russell Crowe should have earned Oscar nominations.

    If this generation of directors has a filmmaker that resembles Frank Capra, I suppose Howard is the closest we have, though I am not suggesting he is in the same league. Howard is a good director, not a great one.

    Which brings me to my point: I wonder if he can bring the edge needed to make a film like “Frost/Nixon” work?

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