So, last Thursday the nominees for the 87th' Academy Awards were announced. How many of you actually saw any of them? I saw one of the nominees for Best Picture, and despite it being absolutely worthy of the honor, I can't shake the suspicion that it only got in because if it didn't this would look even more like the whitest Oscar lineup in decades. Lindsay Ellis recently called the early year deluge of awards shows "fantasy football for film buffs", and I can definitely see where she's coming from. At the end of the year, many of us put together our best of the year lists and our prediction lists, and yet many of these shows are not taken very seriously as actual appraisals of artistic merit.
The Oscars in particular have the problem of being seen as out of touch with the movie going public. They romanticize themselves and their show as "a group of seasoned experts nobly gazing down from on high at the world of cinema and carefully selecting the best of the best". Whereas many people see them as more of a bunch of retired film snobs looking for the best middle brow dramas they can find while instinctively looking down on the fantastic, rarely taking animation seriously, and taking an apathetic attitude to the technical side of film making. Whereas much of the online film press is made up of film students and geeks in their thirties for whom the idea of a serious film about super-chimps or Lego or built around some crazy camera trick isn't some insane alien concept. When you add all that to most people getting their movie news online and/or saving their disposable income for big exciting spectacle, the Oscars look more and more like an excuse for insanely rich people to give each other gold statues all night while the entire world watches.
Yet, there's something to be said for the pageantry of it all, and at the end of the day I'm sure its nice to be given a trophy and told that you did better than everyone else. For me it provides something to joke about with friends and on social media, so before I go off on how Selma was inevitably robbed of it's tiny golden man, I've decided to watch every film nominated for Best Picture, so my opinion is an informed one.
Nearly three hours later...
I halfway regret starting this little series off with Richard Linklater's Boyhood. On one hand, it's likely going to take home Selma's Oscar (along with several others) because Linklater is well liked by the industry, especially among the snobs that make up much of the Academy's voters, and they can't help but be impressed by him taking so much sweet time to make it. On the other hand, it should not like it takes over a decade to actually watch the results.
In telling the story of a child growing up in suburban Texas in the early 21st' Century, the closest Boyhood comes to a hook is that rather than casting a different actor for any age he wishes to represent, writer/director Richard Linklater picked his cast in 2002, shot for a couple of months, and then did that again annually for twelve years as the cast aged in real time. I'm impressed that he was able to pull that off, I'm impressed that he got twelve years of funding to make it, I'm sure that he and all those involved poured their blood, sweat, and tears into making this movie, I just wish that it added up to anything more than just a pretty decent pseudo-biopic.
Do any of you remember me saying that The Best of Me was like a really good Lifetime movie? If that's true, then Boyhood just is a Lifetime movie, and that's probably being too nice to it. The Best of Me is far from a good movie, but at least things happen in it, and there was that scene with the shotgun where it briefly came to life. In Boyhood, there is no gradual progression of audience investment as we spend time with this family and get to know them, instead we get Richard Linklater showing us his vacation footage going "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened..."
"But wait!?", I can hear some of you saying. "It's like that because real life is like that, and Linklatter was trying to capture real life by not having a finished script." Here's my answer to that. This is not a documentary, this is not a vlog, this is not a real-life version of The Truman Show. This is a piece of narrative storytelling in the form of video, and stories generally need to have a point in order to be worth a damn. If anything, Boyhood is a clear example of why you finish your script before starting production, because when you don't you end up with a dull, tedious, and meandering slog.
I realize that this comes off like I hated Boyhood, and I'd like to think that I don't. I wanted to like this, although that might have been because I grew up in the time and place it was made, but even that aspect of it did nothing for me. It will likely become background fodder on cable once the Oscars have come and gone, and that makes it almost definitely taking Best Picture from Selma even more infuriating.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
Yet, there's something to be said for the pageantry of it all, and at the end of the day I'm sure its nice to be given a trophy and told that you did better than everyone else. For me it provides something to joke about with friends and on social media, so before I go off on how Selma was inevitably robbed of it's tiny golden man, I've decided to watch every film nominated for Best Picture, so my opinion is an informed one.
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| Directed and Written by Richard Linklater |
I halfway regret starting this little series off with Richard Linklater's Boyhood. On one hand, it's likely going to take home Selma's Oscar (along with several others) because Linklater is well liked by the industry, especially among the snobs that make up much of the Academy's voters, and they can't help but be impressed by him taking so much sweet time to make it. On the other hand, it should not like it takes over a decade to actually watch the results.
In telling the story of a child growing up in suburban Texas in the early 21st' Century, the closest Boyhood comes to a hook is that rather than casting a different actor for any age he wishes to represent, writer/director Richard Linklater picked his cast in 2002, shot for a couple of months, and then did that again annually for twelve years as the cast aged in real time. I'm impressed that he was able to pull that off, I'm impressed that he got twelve years of funding to make it, I'm sure that he and all those involved poured their blood, sweat, and tears into making this movie, I just wish that it added up to anything more than just a pretty decent pseudo-biopic.
Do any of you remember me saying that The Best of Me was like a really good Lifetime movie? If that's true, then Boyhood just is a Lifetime movie, and that's probably being too nice to it. The Best of Me is far from a good movie, but at least things happen in it, and there was that scene with the shotgun where it briefly came to life. In Boyhood, there is no gradual progression of audience investment as we spend time with this family and get to know them, instead we get Richard Linklater showing us his vacation footage going "and then this happened, and then this happened, and then this happened..."
"But wait!?", I can hear some of you saying. "It's like that because real life is like that, and Linklatter was trying to capture real life by not having a finished script." Here's my answer to that. This is not a documentary, this is not a vlog, this is not a real-life version of The Truman Show. This is a piece of narrative storytelling in the form of video, and stories generally need to have a point in order to be worth a damn. If anything, Boyhood is a clear example of why you finish your script before starting production, because when you don't you end up with a dull, tedious, and meandering slog.
I realize that this comes off like I hated Boyhood, and I'd like to think that I don't. I wanted to like this, although that might have been because I grew up in the time and place it was made, but even that aspect of it did nothing for me. It will likely become background fodder on cable once the Oscars have come and gone, and that makes it almost definitely taking Best Picture from Selma even more infuriating.
Have a nice day.
Greg.B
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