Oscars 2016 -- The Awards

Best Original Screenplay 

We've renamed this category "Gifted Hands".  Not so much for the talented writers who produce this material, but rather for Doctor Ben.  In a category that always contains a few "sleepers", the good doctor is always on our minds.

• Bridge of Spies
• Well done, particularly so because you know the major plot points going in.  
• Spotlight
• Another "basics known" storyline, but the revelations (biblical reference accidental, but happily noted) about how the story unfolded and the Globe's handling of it were brilliant.
• Ex Machina
• I LOVED this movie.  Quite a clever plot and believe it should (but won't) win something.  And this has NOTHING to do with Alicia Vikander.  Nothing at all.  Jennifer who?
• Inside Out
• Biased by our official capacity as mediocre middle class parents, this is our sentimental choice.  It doesn't win -- the idea is they're thrilled to be there (which is what Vicky Craig said to me in 1977 -- I know, Vicky.  Know ya lied!)
• Straight Outta Compton
• The guilt felt by the old, white men who nominated only....nah.  No way those closet-Trump-supporters even saw this one.  'Shame, because this was one of our big sleepers this year.  We expected nothing and received tons.

Hope Springs Eternal

Best Adapted Screenplay

My wife said "'The Big Short' was based on a book?  So what do they get an Oscar for?!?" She has a point.  Some people will want to make a Socialism joke right here.  For me, it was more reminiscent of how most of the people who've ever worked for me must've felt.  Let's concentrate our focus on:

• The Martian
• They'd have to cut the statue in half and give 6.5" of it to the Cuarons, because this be Gravity, 2: Red Planet Farmer.     
• Carol
• We didn't see it.  Not because we didn't want to (or because Donna has a sister who is a giant....LOVELY, lovely human being.  Why oh why did I tell these people the URL to these pages?)  
• The Big Short
• Winner, winner, economy-wrecking-chicken-dinner!  Like Too Big to Fail, you have to be prepared to be sick to your stomach as it causes you to relive the Global Financial Crisis of 2008 and also because you come away with some clarity.
• Room
• Several people commented that they couldn't watch this because of the subject matter (a sexual slave kidnapping), but honestly, it's more touching than disturbing.  Absolutely loved both the writing and the acting.  Doubt it can win anything (maybe Best Actress), but brilliantly done.  Highly recommended.
• Brooklyn
• This was a sweet movie that both of us loved.  Nothing earth-shattering, but a well written and realistic human struggle.  No awards, but our eternal praise (unlike the actual Brooklyn).  
  

Best Picture 

• The Revenant
• Tough movie.  Great movie, but exhausting.  Haven't felt this way since There Will Be Blood (or since I managed a group of hipster technology architects).  You can't watch this one again.  Does that matter?  

• Mad Max: Fury Road
• Um...what?  Listen -- I'm a big fan of action movies.  And post-apocalyptic action movies.  I enjoyed The Road (but see the Daffy warning above on that one) and am addicted to The Walking Dead.  But Best Picture for Fury Road?!?  Did people just get overwhelmed with the fact that there was a genuine, discernible plot in a Mad Max movie?  Tickled to nominated-state because Mel Gibson didn't even make a cameo?  There hasn't been this big a surprise since Marisa Tomei was nominated for My Cousin Vinny (and, well, see below...of course that was before Jennifer who was before Alicia...)

• The Martian
• I'm much more supportive, here, than in the writing category because, well, plagiarism.  Highly entertaining movie.  Don't get why Matt Damon was considered a comedic actor.  If that's the case, then Tom Hardy should be nominated for a comedy award, too.  No win, though -- too soon since Sandra Bullock was stranded in space.  Now if THIS guy made a cameo...

• Bridge Of Spies
• I'm a sucker for a Cold War story.  Even have a piece of the Berlin Wall in my room (thanks, Michael).  Maybe it was an easier-to-understand world.  We had all of our facts wrong and miscalculated all over the place, but it made for sound bites you could consume (or, I was 12...one of those).  Good movie, great props to Mark Rylance (also funnier than Damon in Martian Farmer), but no awards.
• Spotlight
• Tough movie for a different reason.  I used to make the standard "hey, I was an altar boy and had breakfast with the Father at the rectory every morning.  What, I was too chubby for him?" joke all the time.  This is a reminder that this particular joke isn't funny.  Too far-reaching a scandal, too disappointing a cover-up, too late to fix it.  Hoping for a win or two here (and Ruffalo was incredible).
• The Big Short
• Another upsetting (albeit for a very different reason) movie.  Challenging to root for because you have a great guy (Steve Carrell) opposite a completely typical Hollywood asshole (Christian Bale).  But separating the work from the man (as we so often have to do), both were amazing (and Ryan Gosling could easily have been nominated, too -- also funnier than Damon in Martian Dirt Farmer.  Come to think of it, two of our three kids are also funnier than Damon in God's Green Gravity Earth...I mean Mars).  This should win.  But I think some of the old white men voting think the bear is real and will know if they voted for him or not.  HEY, OLD MEN: THAT'S THE GOVERNOR OF NEW JERSEY YOU'RE THINKING OF.  NOT THE CGI BEAR.  VOTE FOR...oh, crap, they aren't listening.  It's Viagra time.
• Room
• Brillian, clever, touching, tense.  What else do you want?  Oh, ok -- if they blew up the house at the end you'd like it.  Time to take your meds.
• Brooklyn
• Hey!  A movie with just a story about people.  Believable people who you root for (and against).  A plot without a killer twist or special effect or nested dream sequences.  No wins (except maybe Saorise) but so glad to see Hollywood producing this kind of stuff again.

Acting

Some great performances this year.  Here are our choices:

Best Actress

Jennifer Lawrence did not deserve a nomination here (sorry, sweetheart...but I haven't felt the same about you since American Hustle.  No it does NOT have anything to do with Alicia Vikander.  Well, not...NO.  Nothing to do with her.)  Saorise Ronan was brilliant and sympathetic in Brooklyn.  She'll be back for statues in the future.  This year, Brie Larson wins for Room.  You believed her in a very tough role.  Brie wins (and I get points for passing on the very obvious cheese jokes).

Best Actor

Cranston and Redmayne both had roles that could've gotten them an Oscar, but they phoned in their performances (and I'm a fan of both).  They'll rebound.  But Redmayne probably thought he had a lock with an historic role about possibly the first transgendered person.  As Bob Ueuker used to say, "Swiiing...and a miss."

I was most impressed with Fassbender as Steve Jobs.  We all know the character very well and fully expected the "genius, but an asshole" approach.  But Fassbender gave him real depth.  I wish he would win, but Alejandro Inarittu decided to treat Leonardo DiCaprio like shit for 4 months so he'd get his first-ever statue.  Leo was good, but Tom Hardy way overshadowed his acting in Revenant.  And it's hard to root for anything associated with Inarittu as he allegedly makes Christian Bale look like Mother Theresa.  Leo wins, but I'm not happy about it.  .

Best Supporting Actress.

Vikander and McAdams both gave great performances in their respective films, but Winslet was awesome (and, again, not a personal fan).  We didn't even know it was her for the first few minutes of her scenes!  This one's a lock.

Best Supporting Actor

THE most competitive category this year.  All 4 of the losers (Hardy, Rylance, Ruffalo, Bale) would win in any other year.  They were all magnificent and in all 4 cases, overshadowed the actual stars of their films.  But the sentimental choice will be Sylvester Stallone for Rocky Balboa in Creed.  It's a shame his award will be a little tainted by the lack of nominations of black people (including Michael B. Jordan as Apollo's son, Adonis) but Sly deserves it.  He was actually great!

And, still my favorite awards show moment of all-time.  This is one white person we want to keep around...and around:

Oscars Overview 2016

Black Oscars Matter

Where the Polynesians got their inspiration for Easter Island 

I titled last year's post "It's a Nice Day for a White Oscar".  There was so much publicity about last year's nominations being the "whitest since 1998", that we naturally assumed there would be some swing away from this embarrassment.  Yet, here we are with an all-white slate.  Even Straight Outta Compton (which my wife and I, hardly fans of the genre of music covered, enjoyed immensely) was only nominated for screenplay, written by...no need to wait for it...two white people.

This led to two questions:

• How are nominations even determined?
• How are they getting away with being "So White"?

The Nomination Process

I had never considered this before.  Largely because I'm not in the business, but mostly because...daily life.  We have 3 kids (one of each) and the lectures I give them don't apply to me. This complete lack of knowledge on the nominating process DOES, however, represent a very real blowback point when one of the 3 realizes I don't practice what I preach.  Since 2 of the 3 of them are certain to see this post, let me follow Thompson Theorem #4(a): 

"Holistic understanding will not occur without detailed knowledge of the underlying components and an uninterrupted supply of single malt."

This is how the nominations are determined (simpli-fied, predictably, since I'm a simple-ton):

1. Pricewaterhouse Coopers, without the use of any mayonnaise jars, makes a list of eligible movies:
1. A movie's Producer or Distributor submits an application including a list of credits.  The film must be:
1. at least 40 minutes in length
2. publicly screened (and not for free) in Los Angeles County for 7 straight days in 2015
3. premiered at a movie theater, not on DVD, Television, Smellivision, or the Internets (sorry, Mad Jack, Beyond Thunderbone)
2. The ballots are distributed to Academy Members.

Just kidding.  He's not in the Academy....he let his membership lapse.

    3. Members chose their top 5 in each category, in preference order.

The tabulation that occurs after that would make Rube Goldberg blush.  It's based on Instant Runoff Voting (IRV), a preferential voting system that is used to elect the President of Ireland, the lower house of Parliament in Australia and the city council of Berkeley, California.**

**-Draw your own chemicals-in-use conclusions.

So is the system bleaching the nominations?  Could be.  Take a look at this demographic of voters:

No, I swear that's not a profile of Trump/Cruz supporters (though they are likely to think the "whiteness" is the only good thing coming out of Hollywood these days).  These people are old white men.  But this is not the telling graphic...this is:

The punchline, it turns out, is that the racism (overt or otherwise) occurs in drama schools and casting rooms.  If they get the roles, minorities are nominated and win more often than whites:

• all minority actors land 15% of top roles, 15% of nominations and 17% of wins
• black actors convert 9% of top roles into 10% of best-actor nominations and win 15% of the time 

Alright, that's enough.  I watched Crash.  I know it's upsetting to hear a long tirade about racism, so I'll let Chris Rock handle the rest of the heavy lifting.  Some general thoughts before I get into the categories:

• Meryl Streep Earns Her .... Nothing!
• She probably wasn't even going, but now that all of the non-Chris-Rock-black-people are boycotting, there are extra seats available (I said I'd stop, didn't I?)  She actually had a legitimate role last year (no, not Ricky and the Flash -- Rick Springfield.  'Nuff said, right?) as Emmeline Pankhurst in Suffragette, a true story about the women's rights movement in the U.K.  Even had Carey Mulligan and Helena Bonham Carter in it. She'll be back next year, though, for her docu-drama on the rampant spread of disease in the porn industry, Streep Throat.  

• The Death, Rebirth, and Death...er, Re-Death?...of Movie Theaters
• My lovely wife predicted two years ago that we would be able to do our annual quest to see the nominated movies online in January and February.  NONSENSE, screamed the cinephile technology geek!  I attended the funeral of the traditional theater house when I saw an X-rated movie at the Brunswick Theater in Trenton in 1979.
  
   (Before you heap your derision on me, imagine MY trauma -- those screens are 70 feet wide.  I have only in the last few years recovered my self-esteem.)  The modern theater has reclining seats; entertaining employees; drinks; reserved reclining entertaining sleep-inducing seats; and so much more!  But this year's effort (81.4% of major noms viewed...our best year since 2007!) included 13 movies streamed at home.  The major difference this year seemed to be VUDU (peer-to-peer streaming service acquired by Walmart in 2010).  They are making a concerted effort to get top movies first.  This is a little upsetting to me because, A) Walmart; but more importantly I prefer the hassle of the movie theater visit -- at least for the top 10 (or so) pictures.  The children still exist and, oh boy do they want.  And there is no end to the siren song of the glowing rectangle, so the endless "pause it...I just have to respond to this one text" really takes the flow out of a movie.  Oh, and VUDU's app (or strategy) sucks -- Tivo shows a movie as "available" on VUDU, even if it's a pre-order offer that won't kick in until weeks after the Oscar show.  You can't find this out until after you log all the way into the service.  Walmart.

Now, after the jump, the awards (our choices, not our predictions, in bold...and, 'no', 'not' is not a prediction just because I bolded it.  Sheesh):  click here