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The
2006 Shotgun Oscar Wrap-Up
By Eric Barker
“I do have some sad news to report. Bjork couldn't be here tonight, she was trying on her Oscar dress and Dick Cheney shot her.”
- first belly laugh during Jon Stewart's opening monologue
“We are a little bit out of touch in Hollywood, every once in a while. It's probably a good thing.”
- future Academy president George Clooney, accepting his first Oscar
Dateline...Wednesday...March 8, 2006...
Yes, they did it again: the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, oldest award-giving body in all of cinema, faced with one of the best years in American film in over a decade, responded by nominating four of 2005's finest releases for Best Picture, throwing in a fifth that wasn't even in the same class with the others, and then bestowing their ultimate prize on the least deserving movie. Leave it to the Academy to root out and honor the film that could have been great over the movies that really were great.
I'm speaking, of course, about Crash , director Paul Haggis' Altmanesque ensemble piece about racism in the dense melting pot of Los Angeles, which was the “surprise” Best Picture winner at the 78th Oscars this past Sunday night. For months, prognosticators and critics had been telling Academy voters they would give all their major awards to Brokeback Mountain , or that they should, and apparently the majority of voters just said, “To hell with that” and gave it to the one nominated film that not only had Importance written all over it, but actually declared itself Profoundly Edgy, Too, in every exchange of dialogue for its entire, excruciating, one-hundred-fifty-three minutes. Well, Billy Wilder did warn us that subtlety in movies is allowed, as long as you make it obvious.
Before continuing, let me just say that I do not totally despise Crash , as I have some Best Picture winners in the past that triumphed over their betters. It's not a terrible movie, not even a bad one, it has some good things in it. But from a purely aesthetic point of view, it's got problems that the other nominated films don't have, chiefly its monotonous substitution of good/bad paradoxes for characterization. Gimme a break.
Anyway, many Brokeback Mountain supporters were crying homophobia almost before Haggis and Cathy Schulman, one of his several co-producers, finished their acceptance speech. Sorry, but this is a ridiculous claim based purely on conjecture; there's no place on earth gays are more likely to find themselves welcome than in Hollywood. Meanwhile Crash supporters maintained, archly, that the win was simply a case of the better, more mature and moving film convincing Academy voters.
Yeah, whatever. The fact is, if we'd just known a couple-three things prior to the ceremony, then we all could've aced the Oscar pool at work: turns out Crash 's distributor Lion's Gate mailed out 130,000 DVDs of their film at the start of awards season, and a whopping 110,000 of those went to Screen Actors Guild members. Obviously, not all SAG members are in the Academy, but the largest voting block by far is the Actors Branch, people who love a good emotionally-wrenching-plus -provocative scene, something Crash has in hysterical abundance. The sheer quantity of DVDs insured that every voting actor got a copy of the film, while Brokeback 's distributor went for a more low key approach to their campaign. Lesson one: don't rely on the jokey entertainment press to make your case for you, dimwit, carpet bomb those Academy members with free DVDs of your film so they don't have to leave the freakin' house.
The second thing may seem trivial to casual observers, but I'm still banging my forehead over missing this statistic and it's something I won't forget anytime soon: no Best Picture winner in the past 25 years - that's no Best Picture winner - has failed to get a nomination for Film Editing. Why is this is significant? For one thing, on average no more than three Best Picture nominees are also nominated in this category, meaning there's really never more than three films that have a shot at the night's biggest award. Even more obscure and deceptive, the editing award often goes to a visually hyperactive film that isn't nominated in any of the major categories.
No wonder it slipped by me; here all this time I've been looking at Director and Screenplay, you know, the juice, the categories everyone thinks are most important to the final product. But it makes perfect sense. Anyone who's made their own film knows that editing is the final draft of any movie, that's where it all comes together or not, regardless of length, cast, script or director. It only makes sense that, again, actors, whose performances depend on film editors, would know it, too.
So there it was, for all crystal gazers to see and contemplate: Crash , nominated for editing; Munich , nominated for editing; Brokeback Mountain , Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck ., not nominated. It struck me as odd when I first looked at the nominations in that category, then I just shrugged it off. So, Crash wins film editing, so what?
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Oscar #78 was the typical plodding, glitzed-out, three-and-a-half hour show, the granddaddy that has now been imitated so thoroughly and from so many points of view that any real luster or weight the ceremony might've had has long been stripped away. Although, truth be told, the Academy has never had a tradition of awarding the year's genuine best picture, and anyway, who really knows what that is or how to calculate it? And still I watch. If you let go of the idea that true excellence will be honored, then it's fun and fascinating to see the two hundred biggest Hollywood players of any given moment gathered in one room, performing live and under pressure from their own popularity contest.
I was pulling for Jon Stewart to succeed as master of ceremonies and it seemed to me that he did, although I thought the same of Chris Rock and Dave Letterman, only to find out later they weren't well received. But the L.A. Times buzz on Stewart is good, and if anyone knows, it's the home town paper. It wasn't love at first sight for the Academy, because Stewart is only hilarious if you're used to his unique style and delivery, while his Comedy Central viewership is actually pretty small, primarily made up of young people who universally find Oscar stodgy and dull. But Stewart came prepared, starting slowly, soldiering through the initial duds, striking a vein of hilarity about three minutes in and knocking them dead the rest of the night. Especially in retrospect, the faux Oscar campaign commercials, à la
The Daily Show and complete with portentous Stephen Colbert voiceovers, were Stewart's most brilliant bits.
Otherwise, there were absolutely no surprises among the major winners of the evening, some of them well chosen and laudable, some of them pedestrian, obscure and predictable for months. Most interestingly, no film took home more than three Oscars, an oddly welcome development harkening back to the earliest days of the ceremony, before the idea of sweeps set in, when the awards were merely a large, industry dinner party broadcast over the radio, and they tried to spread the wealth around. Why, it makes the Academy seem positively divided, just like the rest of the country. Maybe that's why Crash appealed to enough voters to trump four better movies - it's a divisive film, masquerading as hopeful while smuggling in an essentially nihilistic message.
Now, I like nihilistic messages as much as the next fella: Dr. Strangelove, or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964) is one of my all time favorites. Oh, yeah, that one's funny, though.
A couple of weeks ago I was ranting against Crash to a friend when I described it as a quasi-Robert Altman film, because of its multiple storylines, only written with a hammer. This was not meant as a compliment. Imagine my “Ha!” when I heard that Altman was getting a life achievement Oscar on Hollywood's night of nights. Then Crash won Best Original Screenplay, and its co-author Paul Haggis pontificated thusly: “Bertolt Brecht said that art...is not a mirror to hold up to society, but a hammer (with) which to shape it. And I guess this (award) is ours.”
Not really a Brecht fan myself, and I don't believe art shapes society nearly so much as do politicians and corporate overlords. I remain a Shakespeare loyalist: art is a mirror, dammit, not just of society but of life, inside and out, and its job is at least half ethereal, beyond definition. In the meantime, will somebody in Hollywood remind Haggis that Harry Cohn said, “If you wanna send a message, call Western Union.” Remind the Academy, too.
It would be too much to hope for that Haggis might've heard Robert Altman, just a few minutes earlier, describing what he has learned about art and the movies after thirty-five years:
“I've always said that making a film is like making a sand castle at the beach. You invite your friends and you get them down there and...you build this beautiful structure, several of you, and then you sit back...have a drink, watch the tide come in and the ocean just takes it away. And that sand castle remains in your mind.”
That's really all we can hope to get from movies, a few worthy memories, some potent images or piercing lines that we carry away with us. The movies themselves only exist in real time, as they're being projected, the least tangible of any art form (see Bernardo Bertolucci's The Dreamers , 2004). On balance last Sunday's Oscars, as socially conscious as they were, still went mostly to American films made by adults who are quite aware of this phenomenon.
Below you will find a listing of the winners, with some further opinions inserted where I personally disagreed, plus a few interesting facts.
Oscar Winners for Films Released in 2005
Best Picture: Crash
Should Have Won: any of the other four nominees - Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck., or Munich .
Best Actor: Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote
Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon in Walk the Line
Should Have Won: among these nominees, Reese, she stole the entire film and the category. But she deserved better competition.
Best Supporting Actor: George Clooney in Syriana
Should've Won: Any of the five would have been a great and deserving choice.
Best Supporting Actress: Rachel Weisz in The Constant Gardener
Should've Won: either Amy Adams (Junebug ) or Michelle Williams (Brokeback Mountain )
Best Director: Ang Lee, Brokeback Mountain
first Asian born victor in this category
Best Original Screenplay: Crash
Should've Won: either Good Night, and Good Luck. or Match Point
Best Adapted Screenplay: Brokeback Mountain
Best Cinematography: Memoirs of a Geisha
Should've Won: Batman Begins
Best Film Editing: Crash
Should've Won: Munich
Best Animated Feature: Wallace & Gromit in The Curse of the Were-Rabbit
Best Dramatic Score: Brokeback Mountain
Best Song: “It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” from Hustle & Flow
Not, as some have said, the first rap song to win, but the first one actually performed at the Oscars
Best Foreign Language Film: Tsotsi , submitted by South Africa
Best Documentary Feature: March of the Penguins
Best Art Direction: Memoirs of a Geisha
Should've Won: King Kong
Best Costume Design: Memoirs of a Geisha
Best Sound Mixing: King Kong
Best Sound Editing: King Kong
Best Visual Effects: King Kong
Best Makeup: The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe
Honorary Award: to Robert Altman for “a career that has repeatedly reinvented the art form and inspired filmmakers and audiences alike.”
Miscellany
Best Dressed: George Clooney, Nicole Kidman and Salma Hayek
Best Presenters: the comedy team of Lily Tomlin and Meryl Streep
Most Reliable Winner: Nick Park. Nominated five times, now winner of four Oscars, the only time he's lost was to himself, in 1991, when Creature Comforts bested A Grand Day Out with Wallace and Gromit
Best Acceptance Speech: Clooney: “We're the ones who talked about AIDS when it was being whispered and we talked about civil rights when it wasn't really popular...this group of people gave Hattie McDaniel an Oscar in 1939, when blacks were still sitting in the backs of theatres. I'm proud to be part of this Academy, proud to be part of this community, and proud to be out of touch.”
Best Robert Altman Films: M*A*S*H (1970), Thieves Like Us (1974), Nashville (1976), The Player (1992), Short Cuts (1993), Gosford Park (2001)
First Foreign Born Director Winner: Frank Capra, 1934.
Best Reason to Campaign for Best Picture: According to the L.A. Times, Crash jumped overnight from #103 on Amazon's top DVD sellers to #23. Lions Gate estimates the DVD sales could take in another $10 million, which sounds like an understatement.
Movies Not Nominated for Editing That Won Best Picture Anyway: It Happened One Night (1934), The Life of Emile Zola (1937), Hamlet (1948), Marty (1955), Tom Jones (1963), A Man for All Seasons (1966), The Godfather, Part II (1974), Annie Hall (1977), Ordinary People (1980)
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