Over a recent meal with director Eran Kolirin, talk turned to tonight’s Academy Awards.
The subject didn’t arise simply because “The Band’s Visit,” his delicate pleasure about an Egyptian police band stranded for 24 hours in a backwater Israeli town, had been disqualified as Israel’s selection for the best foreign language category (too much of it takes place in English) in favor of “Beaufort.”
Kolirin had been musing on Jonny Greenwood’s score for “There Will Be Blood.”
“There Will Be Blood,” he began in his amply accented English, “This movie’s very good but, somehow, I feel. . . .” He paused. “This is stupid. . . . I didn’t feel it was about my life. It’s a very mythological story about America, about Christians, about moneymaking people.” (Of course, you could be American and feel Paul Thomas Anderson’s epic wasn’t about your life, either.)
Welcome to the peculiar joy of Oscar season. There is no shortage of opinion about films worth having an opinion about.
Some of it is honest and represents a wrestling with art and personal feelings.
And some takes the easy way out.
When the nominees were announced in late January, there was much carping about the dour tenor of the films. Reporters ran with the fact that “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” received the most nominations with eight each, skipping over the wrinkle that studio- backed, star-powered “Michael Clayton” garnered the most nods in categories that tend to matter to those who tune in to the show: best picture, best director, best actor and best supporting actor, female and male.
In a Washington Post piece, which carried the admittedly clever headline “The Oscars Fade to Bleak,” fashion/culture critic Robin Givhan bemoaned the intensity of this year’s nominees.
“Schnabel manages to elicit a few earnest chuckles out of this sad tale,” wrote Givhan of nominated director Julian Schnabel’s “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly,” “and for that miraculous feat alone perhaps he deserves an award.”
Finding desolation in Schnabel’s imagination-affirming adaptation of Jean-Dominique Bauby’s memoir is itself a feat of will. Especially when it’s followed later by: “Couldn’t someone from ‘Hairspray’ have been nominated just to ease the angst?” (In fairness to Givhan, she buries her most astute observations about cultural convergences in the latter half of the piece.)
What follows may strike some as an equally willful gesture: arguing for the bold light contained in tonight’s nominees for best picture.
Art illuminates. And to borrow from John Milton, many of this year’s contenders make darkness visible. Granted, the author of “Paradise Lost” was talking about hell.
But evil endures. And examining it is the work of artists, even those working with the magnificent machinery of this most popular art form.
There is not a film among the best picture contenders that cannot find an antecedent in cinema’s classics. That is not to belittle this slate’s vigor or freshness.
Dark and uncomfortable as they are, “No Country for Old Men” and “There Will Be Blood” are masterpieces that explore, more than exploit, our penchant for brutality.
And I will go to my grave (put down by pneumatic bolt gun, no doubt) arguing the heroics of “No Country’s” Carla Jean Moss (Oscar-neglected Kelly Macdonald) in the face of cruelty. Hers are the final acts required of humans, not the empty gestures of summer superheroes who appear more and more taken with their own angst. A woman who refuses to play the game of a killer. It won’t save her life, but it will not wound her soul.
The final shot of “Michael Clayton” is a pause for possibility. Sure the thriller issues an indictment of corporations behaving badly (no!). But it is this glimmer of a human behaving differently than he has in a long, long while that sent me into the daylight emboldened.
There is a kinship between Michael Clayton and Terry Malloy in “On the Waterfront.”
As as much as I honor “No Country,” I would sleep well if “Michael Clayton” defied expectations and won best picture tonight.
In a year when the writers fought hard, all five best picture contenders are powerfully wrought works, each a cut above last year’s winner, “The Departed.”
“Atonement” captures a different nation’s reckoning with its war-torn history. The shot of Robbie Turner arriving on the beach at Dunkirk is an exquisitely mournful remembrance of Britain’s most recent “greatest generation.”
There’s no coddling. Even the verbally spry pleasures of “Juno” don’t stoop to conquer. (Yes, I’m aware of the cranky backlash centering on abortion. No, I don’t agree.)
If you have doubts about what’s golden in this year’s nominees, ponder this.
Sitting in a LoDo restaurant that brisk Denver morning, Kolirin mentioned he’d seen “No Country for Old Men” with Marjane Satrapi, creator and codirector of the Oscar-nominated “Persepolis,” in New York City.
Typically when we hear about the impact of the American movies overseas, it’s in terms of box office.
So what a heartening image:Two young filmmakers — one Israeli, one Iranian — each having debuted this year with warm and winsome first features, hanging out in New York, taking in the Coen brothers’ parable, and loving it.
Film critic Lisa Kennedy: 303-954-1567 or lkennedy@ . Also on blogs.denverpostcom/madmoviegoer
80th Annual Academy Awards.
Jon Stewart hosts the almost-derailed awards show. While Oscar-related programming is on cable channels starting early in the day, the red carpet festivities on ABC begin at 4 p.m. The garden-variety fan can safely tune in at 6 p.m. for “Oscar’s Red Carpet 2008” followed at 6:30 by the big show. KMGH-Channel 7.
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Download an Oscar ballot to take to your Oscar party and come back this evening for red-carpet fashion galleries, clips of winning films and highlights from the awards ceremony
