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December 12, 2007

There Will Be Fighting

I guess I will throw my twenty cents into the tempest in this week’s teapot… the self-consciousness with which critics groups give out awards.

I’ve had a private dialogue all week with the great Bob Koehler, whom I keep reminding that he is Pope pure as critics go. He really is the kind of guy who says things like, “They gave the award to Amy Ryan for the wrong picture… she’s much better in Before The Devil Knows You’re Dead.” God bless him for that. It makes talking to him about movies both absolutely thrilling and inevitably frustrating every time.

Scott Foundas is also a serious guy… but not quite in the Pope class. At a relatively young age, Scott has managed to move into position as one of the leaders of the Serious Next Gen of film critics. I feel he has earned everything he has, and I suspect, that he will get in the future.

But Scott’s defense of how LAFCA behaves is both completely fair… and quite instructive in explaining why there is not an assumption of purity when it comes to critics giving awards.

Trying to predict the LAFCA and NYFCC awards is idiotic on its face. These groups do meet in a room and discuss/fight over the winners. They have different voting procedures, but year after year, people go in thinking one thing and something altogether other comes out. And really, great! I honor Jack Mathews resigning from NYFCC because he is offended by the voting system. But whatever these groups want to do, so be it. It is theirs to give, however they decide to make their decisions.

But… the groups are made up of human beings. And human beings have human natures. And critics have critics’ natures.

The conversation I had last week in private a half dozen times about the two major early-voting critics groups was, “It’s No Country and Blood… both could go for Blood… no chance both will go for No Country… if one does, the other will go the other way, with the outside chance that NY will go for a local oddity like Lumet’s Devil or Schnabel’s Diving Bell.”

It’s not that complicated a game. I am not claiming some superhuman insight… and you will note, I did not publish any prediction in anticipation. As much as I am tagged as a prognosticator, I have always said, it is not a carny game. I am not guessing. I am attempting to report where things are at a given moment, through the season. And it changes. Every week, I see some of our Gurus and others swaying with the wind of the moment… and most of those winds are real. Attention can be bought with ads. Importance can be taken on for a moment when a group hands you and award. But in the end – and I think this is the genius of the now-shortened Oscar season – the 6000 who vote in the big show can be told to watch a movie, but they will decide whether they love the movie… or not.

And to some degree, the same is true with critics’ groups. Critics think “award” by embracing the palette narrowed by a long season the same as everyone else, whether they want to acknowledge it or not. And that critics’ group palette has been down to No Country, Blood, Zodiac, Diving Bell, Devil, Into The Wild, and I’m Not There for a while now. So is it hard to figure that the big groups will end up going for the one that seems sure to be Best-Picture-nominated and the one that some people still think can be BP nominated because it is SO GOOD even though even its biggest fans seem to acknowledge, goes off the rails so hard in the end that it has only the smallest chance (which is still more than some). The only outside shot that really threatened was Zodiac… and the feel of a wasted vote, which also is a major issue in Academy voting, overwhelmed early passion.

But back to Foundas…

First, I am not saying that the unmitigated passion – however misguided, in terms of lack of mitigation – for There Will Be Blood is false. I believe that Scott really thinks that Blood, “send(s) shock waves through the very landscape of cinema, that instantly stake(s) a claim on a place in the canon. Often, such vanguard works fail to be fully understood or appreciated at the moment they first appear, as some of the initial reviews that greeted Psycho, 2001 and Bonnie and Clyde attest. There Will Be Blood belongs in their company, and I consider myself fortunate to belong to a group with the foresight to recognize it in its own moment.”

It is that peculiar form of ego that makes There Will Be Blood a critic’s wet dream. There is some brilliant filmmaking in the movie, moving the language forward, as it is completely derivative, but completely fresh in how it brings modern tools to those images and ideas. But the “underdog that we can put in the canon” schtick is raw meat to underfed jackals.

But it’s not just that. It is also clear, clean love.

I guess it might be like really loving your wife and really being hot for her at the same time. Sometimes you want to share important and intimate things. Sometimes, you look at her and just want to objectify her brain out… even if you love that synapse-heavy brain. These are not mutually exclusive feelings.

The same kind of issue can be attached to the awards for 4 Months, 3 Weeks & 2 Days, which is a great film, acclaimed for month after month. There is no denying that it is deserving. But there is a certain joy for a critic to “going off the reservation” and embracing films that no one else will love quite the right way.

It’s not one or the other.

The seduction, for people who care about awards season, to start getting so myopic that the forest is not only unseen, but burned to the ground so they can get a better look at the trees, is also human nature. I can tell you, with 99% certainty, 7 of the HFPA’s 10 Best Picture picks tomorrow… and the other 3 are like 30% certainty.

But WHO CARES?

I don’t. I will report on the nominations. And I will try to put them in the perspective they deserve. It will be a lovely honor if Knocked Up gets a Best Comedy nomination… and it will have no chance of winning or being Oscar nominated for Best Picture. The beginning and the end. There Will Be Blood has a chance of being a Globes nominee… but it will likely get pushed out by The Great Debaters. Talk about shockways for Scott! So is one film better for having been nominated? And does the fact that neither could win HFPA make them inferior to the eventual Drama winner?

There is nothing wrong with enjoying a good wank or a passionate debate about serious films that your group wants to honor. Vanilla, chocolate, and Antiguan Passionfruit Mosquito Flan… the film world is expansive.

Scott says in a comment on his piece, “The awards handed out by the members of LAFCA serve a single and solitary purpose, which is to recognize those achievements that our members deem to be the most significant in cinema in the previous 12 months. We are doing, I think, a good service to those films.”

But “doing a good service to those films” IS another motive. It’s a good motive, I think. But it is an additional motive to the “single and solitary” one. That’s just human nature.

One of my “sins” in covering all this is that I questioned whether NYFCC was doing the right thing by awarding a film that is well into its DVD life for Best Foreign Language for a second straight year. I do understand that they have the right to do as they like. But Foreign Language and Documentary are really the two areas where critics still have the chance to have a major function in changing the box office fates of films… particularly locally. A foreign language film that will be released in NY in the next six months would be truly advantaged by a NYFCC citation. All it will be for the great The Lives of Others is another trip to NY for Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck on Sony Classics’s tab (if they’ll pay for it). I will always find that unfortunate. Sorry.

One thing is true of the entire season – right after the reality many of us have accepted for decades, that Oscar is not a real definition of “best,” but only of “best for that unique 6000 people, who have very strong age and taste boundaries” – is that it is all taste and it is very, very rare that one movie MUST be the movie for any critic or any group. Maybe Scott and others feel that way about TWBB this year. But like a Top 10 or a favorite film list, moods change, it’s hard to compare films that are so different in tone, and there are hundreds of shades of gray in every opinion not involving Michael Bay.

Human nature. Catch it!

Posted by poland at December 12, 2007 04:36 PM

Comments

Posted by: MASON at December 12, 2007 06:39 PM

Posted by: movieman at December 12, 2007 08:36 PM

Posted by: LYT at December 13, 2007 01:21 AM

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