Run Up to the 2011 Oscars

What a contest this year:  11 nominations for Scorsese's HUGO, and 10 for Michel Hazanavicius' THE ARTIST--a 3-D movie up against a black-and-white silent film (mostly silent, anyway) for Best Picture.  Here's spectacularly visual triumph from the director that the Academy loves to snub (TAXI DRIVER lost to ROCKY/John G. Avildsen, RAGING BULL lost to ORDINARY PEOPLE/Robert Redford, and GOODFELLAS lost to DANCES WITH WOLVES/Kevin Costner--seriously, fuckin' *Costner*?...) in one corner, in the other corner a crowd-pleaser in two "out-dated" formats, silent film and b/w.  Much more so than in years past, I'm not sure which way the voting will break.  I could see it either way.

Both of these front-runners love movies, and if they end up splitting the Best Picture vote then I'd say the one to come from behind would be Woody Allen's MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, another love letter to a bygone era.  MONEYBALL and THE DESCENDANTS are very solid films as well.  All in all, there's a lot to watch for in this year's contest.  Here's a brief rundown of the entries that I managed to squeeze in this year:

MIDNIGHT IN PARIS, Woody Allen
   I consider Woody Allen to be the best filmmaker this country has ever produced (one of my more controversial opinions), so I was disappointed in this light, breezy comedy.  It was entertaining, and very funny at some points, but I expected more from the creator of PURPLE ROSE OF CAIRO and ZELIG.  Here's someone who can do magical realism, and give it a good underpinning.  This time around, though, the story only really works on one level, which seems to be a lot of name-dropping about the literary scene in 1920's Paris.  And he has fun with that, having Owen Wilson meet luminaries such as Hemingway, F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Dali, and Gertrude Stein.  But the central character arc results in the realization that you can't live in an idealized past--which is kind of thin, but then again these characters aren't very fleshed out to begin with:  it's obvious from the opening scene that Inez (Rachel McAdams) is all wrong for Owen Wilson's Gil.  Watching them drift apart is pretty dull, then, compared with Gil's scenes in Paris, past or present.
   But it's funny in enough parts, and the movie is winning enough.  It's Woody Allen's highest grossing film to date, and I'm not one to begrudge its success.  I'd say it stands a good chance at winning Best Original Screenplay, since I don't think THE ARTIST was all that hot because of its story--though I hear good things about A SEPARATION, so I won't be stunned if that's what ends up winning.

HUGO, Martin Scorsese
   Yes, Scorsese has made a movie for kids.  Sort of.  At least there's nothing objectionable here, and a lot to behold.  I'm not a big fan of 3-D, though I loved (the look of) AVATAR, this is what great filmmakers do with a new medium.  The first hour, which shows young Hugo running around a Paris train station in breathtaking detail, is dazzling enough; but the second hour, which delves into the life of George Melies (Ben Kingsley), is just mind-blowing.  I think this one will sweep the technical awards, and will give front-runner THE ARTIST a good run for the money.  I'll put my money on this one for Best Picture. 
MONEYBALL, Bennett Miller
   Here's one I liked more than I thought I would.  I don't follow baseball, and didn't know anything about the Oakland A's, so I watched the movie not knowing how their 2002 season would play out--I got caught up in it.  I was told by a co-worker that the book is all about statistics, he thought it was unfilmable.  It certainly helps when your screenwriters are Aaron Sorkin (who won last year for THE SOCIAL NETWORK) and Steven Zaillian (who won for SCHINDLER'S LIST).  You certainly don't need to know much about baseball, either the game or the professional sport, to follow the story, and they keep the math in the background.  All in all, I found the movie very engaging, and is further proof that Brad Pitt is an excellent actor.  He could have walked through this movie, relying on his star power and good looks; as it is, he turned in a nuanced, understated performance that was fun to watch.  And Jonah Hill should get credit as well:  their scenes together really work. 
   Now, I've been following the Oscars since 1979, and eat Oscar trivia and stats, but I don't always get to see all of the nominated movies to make my own direct comparisons between them, so you could say I'm applying my own Sabermetrics to predicting the winners.  Which leads me to say that unfortunately, Jonah Hill doesn't stand much of a chance in the Best Supporting Actor race, which will go to one of two 82-year-olds (Christopher Plummer for BEGINNERS, or Max von Sydow for EXTREMELY LOUD AND INCREDIBLY CLOSE, neither of which I've seen).  Then again, I've found the supporting acting categories to be the real wildcards, very difficult to predict.

THE DESCENDANTS, Allen Payne
   This may be the very definition of "dramedy":  a quasi-humorous take on an outright tragic situation, as George Clooney plays a wealthy Hawaiian real estate attorney whose wife ends up in a coma with too much brain damage to ever recover, so he has to take her off life support.  Realizing that he is now going to be a single parent to his two daughters is hard enough; when his oldest tells him that his wife had been having an affair, he determines to meet the guy, both to see who had his wife's affections, and to let him know that she is about to die. 
   That's tough material, and this could have gone wrong in any number of different ways.  But writer-director Allen Payne finds just the right tone, navigating this just right.  The story and the actors never step wrong, and the result is a lot of good, honest laughs right along with poignant moments all around.  I'm putting my money on Clooney to win Best Actor, since I was most impressed with his performance (the front-runner is Jean Dujardin for THE ARTIST).  I wouldn't be disappointed if this picked up Best Adapted Screenplay over MONEYBALL.
THE ARTIST, Michel Hazanavicius
   I have to say, this one may depend on just how cynical you are about moviegoing.  If you're one of those--and I can sympathize--who balks at silent film, if you don't have the appreciation--or at least the patience--to watch old-school film, then skip this one.  Though this movie is beautiful in every way, and has a seductive charm, I honestly don't think it would necessarily win over someone who isn't already disposed to its subject matter:  early Hollywood filmmaking.  But, for those willing to take the movie on its own terms, it's a wonderful (and not overly long) story set in the time when film was going from silence to sound.  (Many have pointed out the similarities between this story and SINGIN' IN THE RAIN, but I have to confess to never having seen that, so I can't rightly say.)  Sure, the story is melodramatic and fairly predictable--this movie hasn't seen as many movies as you have--but its innocence and simplicity are integral to its character.  Unlike MAN OF THE CENTURY, a very amusing and wry attempt to bring an old-time movie character into the present, THE ARTIST plays within its own universe, never winking at the audience with any present-day sensibility.  It wants to evoke the cinema of the 1920's--and it succeeds wonderfully.  The photography is perfect, and along with the costumes and production design the movie is a marvel to behold.  And although I'm still more impressed with HUGO, I wouldn't be disappointed if this one took top honors.

THE TREE OF LIFE, Terrence Malick
   You know those European avant-garde films from the 50's and 60's, where you'd have something like, say,  a shot of three people sitting in a room, not looking at each other, while a voiceover morosely intones "Love is a dog from hell", which then cuts to a ball bouncing down some stairs, then a cut to the sun being eclipsed by clouds?  All very self-consciously bold and artistic?
   That's TREE OF LIFE.  Or, more appropriately, that's how modern viewers are going to see it:  as a disjointed and confusing but visually stunning meditation on life and death and...something something.  While the movie is very accomplished, and I have no doubt Terrence Malick got exactly what he was going for, I think the audience might not, since the end result is less like 2001:  A SPACE ODYSSEY (to which it is being compared), and more like the acid sequence in the cemetery at the end of EASY RIDER.  2001 at least had a plot, as difficult as its final act was to puzzle out; here, Malick dispenses with plot and continuity altogether, and offers a pastiche of past, present, and cosmic.  This movie deserves its nominations, but I can't see a KOYAANISQATSI-type film winning Best Picture or Best Director.  It's up for Cinemtography (Emmanuel Lubezki), and has a good shot there, though I don't get the sense there's much momentum for it.