The Oscars

[djrip]

Way more than one person:

Boyhood premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival[4] and was released theatrically on July 11, 2014.[5]The film competed in the main competition section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival,[6] where Linklater won the Silver Bear for Best Director.[7] It received universal acclaim from critics, with praise for its performances, Linklater's screenplay and direction, and subject matter. It was also nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, winning Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Arquette; five BAFTA awards, winning for Best Director and Best Film; and six Academy Awards, winning Best Supporting Actress for Arquette. On Metacritic, it is the most recent film to have a score of 100 out of 100 and is the best-reviewed film released in the 21st century thus far.

Note that this quote from Wikipedia gets it wrong, and I have deleted the mistake. Boyhood did not win Best Picture. (Birdman won it. Remember it?)

Here's the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyhood_(2014_film)

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Way more than one person:

Boyhood premiered at the 2014 Sundance Film Festival[4] and was released theatrically on July 11, 2014.[5]The film competed in the main competition section of the 64th Berlin International Film Festival,[6] where Linklater won the Silver Bear for Best Director.[7] It received universal acclaim from critics, with praise for its performances, Linklater's screenplay and direction, and subject matter. It was also nominated for five Golden Globe Awards, winning Best Motion Picture – Drama, Best Director, and Best Supporting Actress for Arquette; five BAFTA awards, winning for Best Director and Best Film; and six Academy Awards, winning Best Supporting Actress for Arquette. On Metacritic, it is the most recent film to have a score of 100 out of 100 and is the best-reviewed film released in the 21st century thus far.

Note that this quote from Wikipedia gets it wrong, and I have deleted the mistake. Boyhood did not win Best Picture. (Birdman won it. Remember it?)

Here's the Wikipedia article:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boyhood_(2014_film)

I do remember Birdman. Don’t remember ever hearing of Boyhood before this thread. I do also remember some disgruntlement at Birdman winning. Didn’t know why. I guess now I do.

 

[tenyari]

Damn, I thought from the title that someone was going to do a Lit version of the awards.

The Boneys? The Cummies?

ASSTR used to have something like that, the 'clitorides'... Back in the days of usenet. I think the award outlived Usenet and even ASSTR by some years but no idea who took it over in the end.

 

[tenyari]

Barbie was much more of a 70s and 80s nostalgia fest than I expected, and I think that was the audience being targeted (and their children and possibly grandchildren now). I was laughing and pointing out features in the background all through, to the spouse who was mostly oblivious. I swear Barbie's house made me feel like I was trapped in my cousin's bedroom at Christmas again...

Nostalia entries always get over hyped and over lauded. I guess Barbie and Stranger Things combined means we've FINALLY moved past boomer nostalgia and into Gen-X nostalgia. I've spent most of my life being exposed to boomer nostalgia that was often even being made about stuff that had only happened last week. Probably by next year we'll already be on Millennial Nostalgia.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Where might I sign a petition against him fucking up Brick Town? Damn, I hate billion airs coming here; bring that shit that doesn't belong here. We don't need one building that can accommodate half the population of OKC at one time.

I think New York has too many tall buildings. There are these weird super-tall but extremely skinny apartment buildings now. So called Billionaire's Row. Many of the units are not even occupied but purchased by wealthy investors.

The office buildings are just as bad. Since Covid, many of those are half empty too. Okay, I think I've drifted this thread far enough, but I was looking for some excuse to ask you about OKC.

 

[gunhilltrain]

Nostalia entries always get over hyped and over lauded. I guess Barbie and Stranger Things combined means we've FINALLY moved past boomer nostalgia and into Gen-X nostalgia. I've spent most of my life being exposed to boomer nostalgia that was often even being made about stuff that had only happened last week. Probably by next year we'll already be on Millennial Nostalgia.

Some magazine wrote about the "nostaglia crunch" or some such term. We keep getting fond for events closer and closer to the present. Didn't Saturday Night Live (itself a living tribute to late Boomer nostalgia) once have a gimmick about a yearning for things five years earlier? Now it's more like two years.

By the way, that whole "generation" concept is something else that has gotten out of hand.

 

[samhasstories]

Back in my day we didn't believe in nostalgia. Those were the days...

 

[SimonDoom]

Has nostalgia always been a thing? I recall as a kid in the 1970s that 50s nostalgia was a big deal, as epitomized by the popularity of Happy Days and Grease. The 50s were remembered as a more innocent and simpler time. But was nostalgia a thing before that? I don't recall that there was such a thing as 40s nostalgia during the 60s, or 30s or 20s nostalgia during the 50s. I wonder if it's a creation of marketing.

 

[MillieDynamite]

Boyhood was filmed over a few months a year through the formative years of the boy of the title. I've never watched and not sure I want to.

I do remember Birdman. Don’t remember ever hearing of Boyhood before this thread. I do also remember some disgruntlement at Birdman winning. Didn’t know why. I guess now I do.

 

[MillieDynamite]

It's a great place for me to live. How about them, Thunder? There is a two-way tie between my two NBA teams, Thunder and Nuggest, 45-20 for both. They are at the top of the Western Conference.

I think New York has too many tall buildings. There are these weird super-tall but extremely skinny apartment buildings now. So called Billionaire's Row. Many of the units are not even occupied but purchased by wealthy investors.

The office buildings are just as bad. Since Covid, many of those are half empty too. Okay, I think I've drifted this thread far enough, but I was looking for some excuse to ask you about OKC.

 

[Voboy]

Boyhood did not win Best Picture. (Birdman won it. Remember it?)

Birdman was beautiful, complex, and refreshing. It was different. It was that rare thing in movies: a new way to tell a story. I was not surprised it won.

Boyhood was filmed over a few months a year through the formative years of the boy of the title. I've never watched and not sure I want to.

It doesn't interest me even slightly, and I'll never see it. I respect the achievement, though. I read a lot about it at the time. I think it's a shame that @VallesMarineris says "they" did not "recognize" it: the nomination itself placed it among the top films of the year. That's no small thing.

 

[ElectricBlue]

ASSTR used to have something like that, the 'clitorides'... Back in the days of usenet. I think the award outlived Usenet and even ASSTR by some years but no idea who took it over in the end.

Clitorides ran last year. There's a thread on it somewhere in the AH archive.

It's got the same kind of groupie small clique feel as the Readers Awards do here, with the same people all over it, each voting for each other.

Someone nominated one of my stories for Clitorides once, which somehow got voted into third place in whatever category it was in. It made no discernible difference in traffic that I could see.

 

[tenyari]

Has nostalgia always been a thing? I recall as a kid in the 1970s that 50s nostalgia was a big deal, as epitomized by the popularity of Happy Days and Grease. The 50s were remembered as a more innocent and simpler time.

That's essentially the beginning of "boomer nostaligia". I was born at the start of the 70s so yeah - I remember those shows.

The phrase "innocent and simpler time" is often an aspect of nostalgia - but that is often because it's a one-sided memory. Hard to go further on that without turning this topic into "politics" and side tracking away from the Oscars...

 

[gunhilltrain]

Has nostalgia always been a thing? I recall as a kid in the 1970s that 50s nostalgia was a big deal, as epitomized by the popularity of Happy Days and Grease. The 50s were remembered as a more innocent and simpler time. But was nostalgia a thing before that? I don't recall that there was such a thing as 40s nostalgia during the 60s, or 30s or 20s nostalgia during the 50s. I wonder if it's a creation of marketing.

Yes, it was a creation of marketing. Some of the nostalgia for the 50s was actually about the early '60s (The Wanderers, American Graffiti). It wasn't truly a more innocent and simpler time. It only seemed good because America was about the only industrial nation to come out of World War II without being occupied, bankrupted or destroyed.

 

[SimonDoom]

Birdman was beautiful, complex, and refreshing. It was different. It was that rare thing in movies: a new way to tell a story. I was not surprised it won.



It doesn't interest me even slightly, and I'll never see it. I respect the achievement, though. I read a lot about it at the time. I think it's a shame that @VallesMarineris says "they" did not "recognize" it: the nomination itself placed it among the top films of the year. That's no small thing.

Birdman didn't do it for me, for some reason, but I'll grant that it was different and bold and creative, so I don't mind that it won. I never saw Boyhood, but I may give it a go at some point.

Birdman raises an interesting question: How many movies have you seen that purport to be a continuous shot? I can think of that one and 1917, which I liked a lot. I'm trying to think of any others.

Edit: Hitchcock's Rope. I think that was the first movie I saw that was made to appear as a single, continuous shot.

 

[SimonDoom]

What's your pick as the most UNDESERVING Best Picture award? Mine is Crash, which I thought was a dreadfully contrived and phony movie about race relations, and it beat Brokeback Mountain, which I thought was a strongly deserving and very moving film with great performances.

LA Confidential should have beaten Titanic, which was a fantastically directed spectacle with a lot of spotty writing and some weak characters.

I'm not one of those who genuflect at Citizen Kane, but it obviously should have beaten How Green Was My Valley.

 

[samhasstories]

Boyhood I thought was really interesting and well done. I feel like so much attention was paid to its filming process that it came to seem like a gimmick, but the movie itself didn't feel that way.

LA Confidential should have beaten Titanic, which was a fantastically directed spectacle with a lot of spotty writing and some weak characters.

Agreed. That's the one that jumps out at me immediately. I'm still annoyed about that, nearly 30 years later. Nothing against Titanic, but LA Confidential is an all-time great.

 

[SimonDoom]

Boyhood I thought was really interesting and well done. I feel like so much attention was paid to its filming process that it came to seem like a gimmick, but the movie itself didn't feel that way.


Agreed. That's the one that jumps out at me immediately. I'm still annoyed about that, nearly 30 years later. Nothing against Titanic, but LA Confidential is an all-time great.

Russell Crowe is such a charismatic actor that he soaked up a lot of attention, but Guy Pearce doesn't get enough attention for how good he was as the extremely ambiguous semi-hero Edmund Exley. It was a great role, greatly acted.

 

[OffNSFW]

Here's what's up with nostalgia now vs. nostalgia then, at least, as I understand it.

In the 1980s, the U.S. government relaxed the rules that corporations had to follow when marketing products to minors. You not only saw a sudden rise in toys being marketed directly to children, but a sudden rise in multimedia branding of children's entertainment. You no longer created a successful toy or a successful cartoon. You came up with a toy, a cartoon to go with it, t-shirts, games, guidebooks, you name it.

In effect, children born in the early/mid '80s ("geriatric millennials," according to the New York Times, and thank you for that) are the first generation to experience total immersion in child-specific advertisements starting from their earliest memories. The goal was to nurture an inextricable association between the joy and play of childhood and the corporate intellectual property they consumed.

That kind of psychological conditioning never goes away. Now people in that age group and the subsequent generation have grown up, and there's big money in exploiting their childhood association with successful brands. That's why almost everything that currently rules the roost in big entertainment is an adaptation of a previous movie, TV show, superhero, or video game from yesteryear.

This is also why so many of those adaptations, despite having their origins as children's entertainment, are so frequently directed at adults. Someone upthread observed that the Barbie movie isn't really for kids, and that is 100% on the money. Just look at the cast. Ryan Gosling and Margot Robbie are not gen alpha's icons. They're gen Y. Barbie is for millennials, whose brains have been primed to be susceptible to it for the last 30-some years.

Nostalgia has always been a powerful marketing tool. Just look at George Lucas, who not only landed an early strike in toyetic marketing with Star Wars in 1977, but who arguably set off the popularity of 1950s nostalgia with American Graffiti a few years earlier. But that was the Wild West. (The Wild West itself being an appeal to nostalgia, especially for people who lean conservative.) What we have now is futuristic, weapons-grade, lab-engineered nostalgia.

-

Anyway, to get back to the thread topic, I'm not a huge fan of the Oscars. They're "very local," as Bong Joon-ho famously said. They also have a habit of rewarding movies that have already been broadly successful (ex. Oppenheimer, Titanic), or movies with a strategically neutral social message (ex. Coda, Crash). Anyone who would see these movies has already seen them.

There's a lot of less palatable, more experimental movies that could really use the attention. But they go unrecognized, maybe because the kind of person most likely to be an Academy voter isn't interested in seeing them, is turned off by a movie that actually takes risks, or, sometimes, because it costs money to put together a marketing campaign for an Oscar contender.

 

[ShelbyDawn57]

Boyhood I thought was really interesting and well done. I feel like so much attention was paid to its filming process that it came to seem like a gimmick, but the movie itself didn't feel that way.


Agreed. That's the one that jumps out at me immediately. I'm still annoyed about that, nearly 30 years later. Nothing against Titanic, but LA Confidential is an all-time great.

Watched L.A. Confidential again just the other day. Will watch it again, too. Not so interested in seeing Leo drown again. Kind of speaks to the point. Of course, Kate Winslet nude was a nice plus...

Yes, I saw all the nudity in L.A. Confidential, too. But come one, Kate Winslet...

 

[AllenWoody]

I enjoyed the Oscars as a show, and it was the first time I watched from start to finish in decades. A few things stood out as particularly good direction:
- The panels for the best actor/actress and supporting performances. I loved the idea that each nominee received praise, had their moment in the sun before the reveal. So much more personal and meaningful than yet another clip of them in their role.
- The makeup Oscar. I LOVED the time lapse of the makeup being applied. It was so much more powerful than, yet again, a quick montage of the final product.
- Screenplays. Fantastic! I loved the Pica (?) lines appearing onscreen instead of just seeing the clips containing those lines. Brought home that those lines are written, not just performed.
- And I know they’ve done this for a while now, but I like best songs being performed throughout the show. Same for the best picture presentations being spread out.

 

[Voboy]

Anyone who would see these movies has already seen them.

Au contraire. I normally make a habit of watching the movies that do well at the Oscars, AFTER the Oscars.

Certainly, the marketing/politicking is unpalatable. Once you see how the sausage is made, the selections lose some of their luster. Still and all, the Oscars remain the gold standard of cinematic success, for better or for worse. They're like a story score here: flawed, but still a useful metric.

 

[EmilyMiller]

LA Confidential should have beaten Titanic, which was a fantastically directed spectacle with a lot of spotty writing and some weak characters.

LAC is a vastly underrated movie. Pearce was brilliant in it. As were all the cast.

I'm not one of those who genuflect at Citizen Kane, but it obviously should have beaten How Green Was My Valley.

Kane is weird. I find it kinda unfulfilling. We did it at college (nice way to boost my GPA and I love movies). People claim it introduced all sorts of visual language that we now take for granted in movies. I think it may have introduced some, but it certainly popularized things like zooming into a building through a window, even if earlier movies had already employed the same.

I can appreciate it as an achievement, but it’s not so satisfying as art. At least to me.

Emily

 

[SimonDoom]

Kane is weird. I find it kinda unfulfilling. We did it at college (nice way to boost my GPA and I love movies). People claim it introduced all sorts of visual language that we now take for granted in movies. I think it may have introduced some, but it certainly popularized things like zooming into a building through a window, even if earlier movies had already employed the same.

I can appreciate it as an achievement, but it’s not so satisfying as art. At least to me.

Emily

My reaction is similar. The most important part of a movie to me is the story: do I like the story? I found the story somewhat unengaging.

I saw a program by the movie reviewer Roger Ebert in which he walked through and commented on the entire movie scene by scene, and he explained all the interesting novel and creative ways that the scenes were designed and lit, and it gave me new appreciation for the film, but it still didn't make me that interested in the story.

I remember seeing Touch of Evil not that long ago, another film with Orson Welles, and I noticed that in one scene all the lighting was from below. It made the lighting interesting, I suppose, but I found it grating because it made no sense in the scene that the lighting would be coming from below. It was contrived. But the whole movie was like that.

 

[Voboy]

Critics like Kane because it really did revolutionize filmmaking, technically and narratively. Unfortunately, it's not that great a story.

How often is that repeated nowadays, though, eh? Look at any list of Best Picture Oscar nominees from any of the last twenty years and you'll see a handful of entertaining films among many, many other movies that are polished, excellent, innovative... but not all that much fun to watch.

It's fine. There's room in the industry for both art and entertainment. And, very occasionally, for both in the same picture!