Film bloggers Adam Goodall and Judah Finnigan began their coverage of the 2014 Oscars here. Here's part two, kicking off with the screenplay gongs.
Adam: Adapted Screenplay and Original Screenplay are tough categories to care about, too often approached as consolation prizes for films that were just a bit too quirky or challenging for Best Picture. They’re usually precursors for disappointment, from Citizen Kane's 1941 win for Best Original Screenplay all the way down to The Social Network's win for Adapted Screenplay in 2010. This year didn't do much to change the pattern – while John Ridley deservedly took home the Adapted Screenplay award for 12 Years a Slave, Spike Jonze's Original Screenplay award for Her fits the pattern all too well, ten years after Jonze's erstwhile collaborator, Charlie Kaufman, upheld the pattern by winning for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (full disclosure: I haven't seen Her yet – New Zealand's distribution issues pinch centres like Dunedin hardest of all). That said, though, there's something hilarious in how Steve Coogan's first Academy Award nomination is for something that The Trip's vainglorious version of Coogan would've killed to make.
I know you got to Her before we wrote this, Judah: what’d you think of the way the Screenplay awards went down?
Judah: I was also pleased to see Spike Jonze receive due credit for his inventive, earnest scribing for Her, even though it was somewhat unfortunate that that's where it ended for him. I can't really complain at all with John Ridley's win either, so powerfully battering was his work, but a large part of me would have loved to have seen Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy and Ethan Hawke take the stage for their brilliant trilogy-capper Before Midnight, distinguished as the only adaptation not sourced from an existing memoir or book; instead marking the apex of an eighteen-year evolution for two of the most complex, fully-formed, lived-in characters I've seen at the movies. Even failing to mention the exhilarating wall-to-wall patter one could scarcely pen more organically, I strongly felt the cinematic achievements of Jesse and Celine and their mythology were totally worth commending, but at least we aren't talking about Philomena right now, so whatever. I'm good.
- Acting
Judah: Returning to Her for a second (sorry Adam and Dunedin), Scarlett Johansson's disembodied husky timbre (playing the voice of an operating system opposite Joaquin Phoenix) was the only notable omission I could think of from the Best Supporting Actress race. The presence she managed to conjure without any visual screen-time was one of the few performances from the year I would unreservedly call sublime, so it's a bit of a bummer to see it excluded. But let's not split hairs: that award totally belonged to Lupita Nyong'o and her devastating work in 12 Years A Slave, and to see her beaming on stage, in radiant baby-blue Prada, sermonising on the validity of everybody's dreams was one of the ceremony's most thoroughly pleasing moments (sorry Jorn Tromolto). Still, there was plenty to love in that category – June Squibb's irreverent scene-stealing, Sally Hawkins' sincere humanising of blue-collar caricatures, Jennifer Lawrence's Picasso of passive-aggressive karate, Julia Robert's potty-mouthing her way back into my heart - and had Nyong'o not been in another league entirely, it might have been a difficult batch to call favourites with.
But in fact, I think I would have been fine with 12 Years A Slave sweeping every acting category in which it was nominated. Jared Leto's win was expected, and for a solid performance at that, but I had hopes for Michael Fassbender thieving it for his sinister plantation owner (cue that scene with him in the nightgown, cradling the child). How'd you feel about the Support this year, Adam?
Adam: I felt pretty good about one of the supports, not so good about the other. Like you, I was hoping for Nyong'o to take it away; her performance is marked by years of pain and struggle, but it's also full of fierce energy and a world-weariness that acted as a sharp counterpoint to what Chiwetel Ejiofor brought to the film. And while I hadn't seen Nebraska or Blue Jasmine (the former because of poor scheduling, the latter because I feel Woody Allen's recent films have been almost uniformly disposable), I can say that at least two of Nyong'o's competitors were nowhere in her league. Roberts was solid in August: Osage County, curdling in the way Tracy Letts’ wildfire script intended, but she was dwarfed by an ensemble of better actors doing better work (a nomination for Margo Martindale or Julianne Nicholson would have been so much more deserved); likewise, Lawrence was fun and snarky but the character felt like a tool, a cog in the narrative machine, and, for me, Lawrence failed to make her something more.
As for Leto, yes, it was expected. The same can be said of Matthew McConaughey, who won Best Actor for the same film. Their victories were expected. And I can't fault McConaughey's win, really – his performance as redneck-turned-medicine smuggler Ron Woodroof resists deifying the man and resists making a show of physical transformation. He's thin and frail, but he moves like a big dude, a dude who'll break a bottle over your head if you give him enough reason, and it never feels like a put-on. I did have favourites in that category – I was rooting for Chiwetel Ejiofor's impassioned resistance against a force that would crush him, and Leonardo DiCaprio's livewire performance in Wolf of Wall Street was straight up more dynamic and visualthan anything that's been nominated in years - but McConaughey's win is hardly unjustified.
But we go back to that word. Expected. The Academy has a reputation for making spectacle out of transformation - losing weight (Bale in The Fighter; Hathaway in Les Miserables), gaining weight (Clooney in Syriana), 'making down' (Cotillard in La Vie en Rose, Theron in Monster), portraying trans* people (Huffman in Transamerica, Swank in Boys Don’t Cry). I can’t help but feel that this ‘proud tradition’ got both Leto and McConaughey over the line. Leto especially: his performance too often felt like a set of mannerisms in search of emotional truth, shallow and only approaching honesty towards the end. Perhaps I'm just baffled the Academy could favour Leto over my favourite, Barkhad Abdi and his layered, lived-in performance in Captain Phillips; but 'transformation’ plays well, is expected to play well, even when emphasising it treats trans* identity as a grotesque acting exercise.
But what did you think about the Dallas Buyers' Club sweep in the male categories, Judah? And, for that matter, what were your thoughts about Best Actress?
Judah: Yeah, I totally agree about the Academy's fetishisation of physical transformations and cultural hot potatoes. Like you, I could totally see the merit in McConaughey's scrappy, scrubbed-down cowboy with AIDS (in fact, the aforementioned pair of performances was where the merit of Dallas Buyers Club began and ended for me) but I think he's actually doing far more complex, mesmerising work on HBO's True Detective currently and would prefer to reserve what celebration I have for the McConaissance until his hopefully-inevitable Emmy win. I too thought Chiwetel Ejiofor most deserved the Oscar – plenty could deliver a line like "I don't want to survive, I want to live" with the rawest of conviction but few could conjure the agonising ache Ejiofor did with his silences – but would have been equally ecstatic with a win for Leo, whose loopy, livid portrayal of broker-asshole Jordan Belfort was actually served by the precocious boyishness he's been trying to shake off for the last decade.
The Best Actress race had fewer defensible positions: Cate Blanchett's towering portrayal of a deluded, fracturing psyche in Woody Allen's Blue Jasmine dwarfed the others from Day One (Adam, I'd recommend giving that film a whirl: hardly perfect but certainly the most purposed and consequential of his films since Match Point) and no number of backflip rotations in Space or daring exhibitions of side-boob ever really threatened that for me. Also, I treasure Streep and Dench as much as the next, but can't we let some fresh blood wash over proceedings for a bit? I know eligibility is always a significant factor, not to mention the Academy's recurrent tendency to shut out independent and foreign efforts, but there really was a surplus of stellar turns to consider this year (Adele Exarchopoulos, Julie Delpy, Brie Larson, Berenice Bejo, Luminita Gheorgiu and Greta Gerwig all spring to mind) and the Best Actress race could have proved a hell of a lot more interesting with any of those thrown in, regardless of whether or not Blanchett's victory was locked. I guess Adam's opening spiel more or less summarises the frustration.
Adam: I found much to like in the nominees this season, but you're right, Judah. This year was full of strong female leads in independent and foreign cinema, complex characters given entertaining, empathetic portraits from breakthrough actresses young and old, and yet every single Best Actress nominee had been there before. We could be talking Exarchopoulos' unvarnished, open performance (and grade-A ugly crying) in the otherwise-juvenile Blue is the Warmest Colour; we could be talking Gerwig's energetic and keenly-observed portrayal of twenty-something aimlessness and the fear that comes with it in Frances Ha; we could be talking Waad Mohammed's charm and fire in Wadjda; we could be talking Luminita Gheorgiu’s mother-on-a-mission in Child’s Pose, the kind of performance that could net a nomination on one scene alone; we could be talking (and god I wish we were) Brie Larson's incredible work in Short Term 12. But we're not, and it isfrustrating that, in an industry that's renowned for being unfriendly to women coming up, the Academy so doggedly shut out names without cultural cache or studio backing.
Judah: Moving on to our final talking points, how did you feel about the distribution of Best Director and Best Picture, Adam?
- Best Director and Best Picture
Adam: I was really happy with the distribution here. Good directors can be undone by terrible scripts (case in point this year: Pacific Rim) but great directors can make a terrible script seem amazing in the moment. For 90 minutes, everything about Gravity, including the script, seemed amazing. And yeah, the script is not good, full of clunky dialogue and casual sexism, but Gravity represents such a formidable, cohesive, beautiful technical achievement that it's hard not to admire Alfonso Cuarón's skill as a director - as manager of hundreds of disparate people working on tiny parts of a galactic canvas. Cuarón's work here seems to have something in common with master-craftsman and Academy favourite David Lean - their visual, technical and performative achievements were formidable, regardless of whatever shit was being translated to screen.
It's the script being not good that would've given me pause if Gravity had won Best Picture, in the same way that it would have given me pause if Lean's Doctor Zhivago had won in 1965. So I'm glad 12 Years a Slave won, even if I share some of Buzzfeed writer Ayesha Siddiqi's reservations about it actually meaning anything about Hollywood (I refer back to my point about the Oscars seeming about loving the machine at the expense of the cinema). 12 Years a Slave was one of the most provocative, challenging films I've seen in years, a statement about the history of blood and suffering that Western civilisation is built on spoken with anger and poetry. Many of the films vying for the top spot were great, but nothing was as straight-up powerful as the tale of Solomon Northup.
Judah: Well, I could barely put it any better myself, so I won’t bother (except for LOL at American Hustle hustling itself no awards).
Adam: Haha, yessss.
Judah: Cheers all.
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