Oscar Best Movie Poll - Who *Should* Win

[Admiral Yi]

The article really is Onion caliber.

[celedhring]

As did Boyhood, a film I had a lot of white supremacist reservations about, even though I loved it.

Wat.

Look it up, there are a bunch of pages on it featuring on google.

I see, people take exception at a white cast and the Mexican worker storyline.

I don't get the whole "white savior" criticism. She just tells the Mexican dude he's too smart to just do menial work, he takes the advice and later we see he's succeeded. How is that a negative portrayal? It's just echoing her whole arc as a white trash mom that ultimately gets a degree and fends for herself. He succeeds by himself, she just gives him advice.

[Ed Anger]

When I read the Guardian, this pops up in my head:

http://youtu.be/ykwqXuMPsoc

It makes more sense.

[The Brain]

The Guardian.

[Valmy]

I don't get the whole "white savior" criticism. She just tells the Mexican dude he's too smart to just do menial work, he takes the advice and later we see he's succeeded. How is that a negative portrayal? It's just echoing her whole arc as a white trash mom that ultimately gets a degree and fends for herself. He succeeds by himself, she just gives him advice.

Is that all it takes to be 'white supremacist'?  Show a white person interacting with a non-white person in someway that is not harmful?  Man it sure takes a lot more effort to not be 'white supremacist' anymore.

So basically NPH acts too straight, Sean Penn said something, and Selma only won for its song so therefore Hollywood is racist?  One would think the fact there are not more movies with non-white leading actors would be more of a thing than that tripe.  Preferably ones where the subject is not slavery or civil rights or something.

Hollywood has an uneasy relationship with racism, feminism and militarism because it will exploit all of them to keep making money. It is not concerned with diversity or economic justice, except to the extent it can feign interest in any of them to perpetuate its own power

Wait you mean corporations with responsibility to their share holders care more about making money than being NGOs?  Next he is going to be outraged there is no Santa Claus.

[Martinus]

And here's the New Yorker's Whine:

February 23, 2015
Oscar's White Night

By Anthony Lane

Do, another opportunity missed. If Lady Gaga can appear in a shimmering silver gown and sing "Climb Ev'ry Mountain," playing it absolutely straight, why can't Julie Andrews come out dressed in lamb chops and raw steak? Didn't Sister Maria have a single tattoo of a trumpet on her underarm? Even a lonely little goatherd, inked on the summit of her butt? That was the story of last night's Oscar ceremony: nice try, but could have been so much sweeter.

In a way, the whole evening misfired before it began, with the omission of "Selma" from many of the nominations. I happen to think that we should wipe the word "snub" from any discussion of awards; it comes loaded with ludicrous hints of conspiracy and cabal, as if folks in the movie industry—or in any industry that likes to pat itself on the back—have the time, the willpower, and the logistical clout to call around and organize a shutout. How can you get fired up about wicked whispers in a smoke-filled room when there aren't enough rooms left in Los Angeles where you can actually smoke? Nonetheless, there remains a grim and galling possibility: Might not some Academy voters be under the vague illusion that, having so lavishly handed out the prizes to "12 Years a Slave" in 2014, they have, you know, done that? Whatever the case, their semi-dismissal of "Selma" is an embarrassment (would anyone have objected, in all honesty, if Ava DuVernay had quietly taken the spot from the guy who directed "The Imitation Game"?), and somehow the shame of it was deepened, not mollified, by the eager atonements of last night. The more that poor David Oyelowo, who played Martin Luther King, Jr., was ogled by the wandering cameras—we were privileged, at one moment, to keep track of his tears—the more egregious his absence from the list of nominees became.

We didn't stop there. Indeed, although Neil Patrick Harris wore the increasingly sombre look of a man who wished he had stayed home and mended that leak behind the dishwasher, the crack in his opening speech, about "the best and whitest," had done its work. Slowly but unstoppably, a breeze of mild radicalization wafted across the audience, blowing through the jasmine of their minds. Some of this was preordained by the producers, but not all of it. They knew that Common would cry, "That's why we walk through Ferguson with our hands up," as he belted out the Oscar-winning song "Glory"—the line is there in the "Selma" soundtrack—but nobody could have predicted his win for sure, nor foreseen that his fellow-composer, John Legend, would seize the moment with this, in the midst of his acceptance: "There are more black men under correctional control today than there were under slavery in 1850." Whether any of yesterday's guests were sufficiently moved by this startling fact to skip the Vanity Fair party, or whether any of the nominees, in the top categories, pledged at once to donate their gift bags, each worth a hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars, to the cause of prison reform, has not yet been established. We at home were still trying to get our heads around "John Stephens and Lonnie Lynn," as Legend and Common were referred to as they strode up to accept their statuettes. Since when must performers be reminded, before a global public, of their discarded birth names? Did the Best Actor award in 1936, for "The Story of Louis Pasteur," go to Frederich Meshilem Meier Weisenfreund, rather than plain Paul Muni? I think not.

The "Selma" effect was contagious—probably more so, by a pleasing irony, than if it had earned a higher number of nods. Winners of all kinds struck a campaigning note: Julianne Moore, rightly, spoke of Alzheimer's, and Eddie Redmayne of motor-neuron disease; there were two references to teen-age suicide; Alejandro González Iñárritu, the big victor of the night, praised "this incredible immigrant nation," in tones of which Barack Obama will have approved; and Paweł Pawlikowski, who collected the Best Foreign Film award, for "Ida," earnestly exhorted his friends back home in Poland to get drunk, if they weren't already. By far the fiercest impact, however, was made by Patricia Arquette, the winner for her supporting role in "Boyhood," whose demand for female wage equality—"It's our time"—was rendered all the stronger by her decision to come dressed as a five-foot pint of Guinness. It was this unambiguous call to arms, I think, that brought Meryl Streep to her feet, rather than Arquette's no less heartfelt endorsement—complete with Web site—of "ecological sanitation." As John Belushi would have said, if he were around today, Man, that is some good shit.

What's important is how this went down, not at the home of Ted Cruz—I imagine that he sent his daughters out of the room at the first mention of the words "Edward Snowden," thus saving them from the sight of Sean Penn—but at the headquarters of ABC. The network's business is ratings, not sanitation or correctional control, and the signs for yesterday's broadcast, from early Nielsen estimates, are not looking healthy—down by ten per cent from last year. For every viewer who perked up when Streep, onstage, quoted Joan Didion, or when Iñárritu name-checked Raymond Carver, there will be a hundred who asked plaintively why "American Sniper"—perhaps the only Best Picture nominee that they caught this year—appeared to be locked in a cupboard for the night. How come somebody put all the guns away? Of the six hundred and twenty million dollars made, in total, by the eight movies up for Best Picture, Clint Eastwood's film racked up more than half. The triumphant "Birdman" has earned less than thirty-eight million. None of this matters, I guess, if you care for the movies that were touted and lauded at the Dolby Theatre, but it's nevertheless hard not to be saddened by the near-complete sundering between two branches of film. Only down among the technical awards did we stumble across the titles that crowds of Americans paid and surged to see; the five films, for instance, that jockeyed for Best Visual Effects, ("Guardians of the Galaxy," "Captain America: the Winter Soldier," "X-Men: Days of Future Past," "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes," and the winner, "Interstellar"), clawed in a cool one billion two hundred and twenty-three million bucks. That's an awful lot of Birdmen.







Hence, perhaps, the nostalgia that swept over the auditorium when the hills, all of a sudden, came alive. "The Sound of Music" pulled people back, if only briefly, to the age of pre-sundering—to a prelapsarian time when everybody watching the Oscars on TV could tell you exactly what a resourceful nun could do with unwanted drapes. As I tried to suggest, when writing about my own enslavement to "The Sound of Music" in the pages of this magazine, the film is here to stay in our cultural marrow, whether we like it or not. We didn't need the montage of clips from it last night; the makers of the show, seeking a trim, could have leaped straight from Scarlett Johansson's preamble to Lady Gaga, filling her lungs among the silver birches. The mood in the room, which for long stretches of the evening was about as green and rolling as a salt flat, began to bloom, bursting forth when Andrews showed up to the party. The expression on the face of Felicity Jones (who may crave some uncomplicated bliss after the hard, if satisfying, graft of "The Theory of Everything"), as she gazed up from the front row, was identical to that of Disney's Cinderella, when the Fairy Godmother began to strut her stuff with the pumpkins. Bibbidi-bobbidi-boo!

But why did the guests, arrayed before Andrews, look quite so relieved? Because they were secretly confident that, for the next two minutes, at least, they would be given nothing to feel guilty about? Because Maria, whatever the song says, is not a problem? Or could it be because the two women up there, the Lady and the Dame, being unmistakeable pros, could be relied upon to hold and work the room? (Decades before the former was born, the latter was starring in "Humpty Dumpty," onstage in London, in 1948. She played the egg.) Their combined ease, before a live audience, offered all too striking a contrast with most of the movie stars, who as a rule, when confronted with a sea of real faces, tend to cling to their autocues and their memorized scripts as if to a passing lifebelt. John Travolta's inability to cope with a name, even then, was toyed with last night, and the joke—in which he manfully, or uncomprehendingly, joined—looks set to run for many ceremonies to come. Still, from one year to the next, the discomfiture of celebrities, as they trip over the tiny fences of their own words, becomes, for all their physical splendor and their customized grooming, dismayingly difficult to watch. I always stagger to the end of the night feeling like the typist in "The Waste Land," who, in the wake of her joyless and mechanical seduction—"unreproved, if undesired"—remarks to herself, "Well now that's done: and I'm glad it's over."

If you truly can't stomach the prospect of the Oscars anymore, however, there is an alternative. You can always get your fill of cinema, and of its nourishing history, at the Governors Awards. These take place in November, thus jump-starting the mania for prizes, and we always get a few enticing clips of them during the Oscar ceremony itself; without fail, they are more impressive than the main event, and more crammed with the sorts of names that ardent movie lovers can, without equivocation, revere. Last night, for instance, we got a few, precious moments of Maureen O'Hara, a muse of John Ford, now a resplendent ninety-four; of the Japanese animator Hayao Miyazaki, who spoke of making movies "with paper, pencil, and film," furrowing the brows of the folks who made "Big Hero 6"; of Harry Belafonte, seen for a second in historical footage of the walk from Selma to Montgomery; and of Jean-Claude Carrière, who adapted, among other things, "Belle de Jour" and "The Unbearable Lightness of Being." By way of a bonus, we were also granted a quick shot of Carrière standing proudly with a group of older men. You just had time to pick some of them out—Wilder, Buñuel, Cukor, Wyler, Hitchcock—before it was back to the Oscars of now. But that little glimpse of heaven was enough, and it made me wonder: Who will the Governors get together next?

As for the Oscars of 2016, we should be dreading them already; and yet, for once, my hopes are unexpectedly high. And why? Because of those gift bags. The treasures reportedly hidden within are designed to enchant and soothe, and frankly, after her experience in "Wild," Reese Witherspoon more than deserves that "luxury train ride through the Canadian Rockies." Millions of women around the world would, one presumes, be happy to join Eddie Redmayne on his "glamping trip worth $12,500," although his wife might file an objection. But the real draw, available to all acting and directing nominees, is the twenty-thousand-dollar gift certificate, which will—oh, my Lord—pay for Olessia Kantor, the founder of Enigma Life, to fly out in person and meet each of the lucky winners (and grumpy losers) to "discuss their 2015 horoscope, analyze dreams, and teach them mind control techniques." Good luck controlling the mind of Robert Duvall, Olessia, but still: armed with such helpful strategies, and with freshly analyzed dreams, the luminaries of the motion-picture industry will arrive at next year's Academy Awards in a place of wholeness, at one with the creed of themselves. Stars will be led by the stars. And the winners will be all of us. Peace.

[Valmy]

I was under the impression Selma was not a good film.  Anybody seen it want to comment?  Should it have swept everything?

[Martinus]

And as a counterpoint, here is an actually good piece from New Yorker - a review of Ida. I have not seen the movie but it seems to me the reviewer "gets it".

May 27, 2014
"Ida": A Film Masterpiece

By David Denby

We are so used to constant movement and compulsive cutting in American movies that the stillness of the great new Polish film "Ida" comes as something of a shock. I can't recall a movie that makes such expressive use of silence and portraiture; from the beginning, I was thrown into a state of awe by the movie's fervent austerity. Friends have reported similar reactions: if not awe, then at least extreme concentration and satisfaction. This compact masterpiece has the curt definition and the finality of a reckoning—a reckoning in which anger and mourning blend together. The director, Pawel Pawlikowski, left Poland years ago, for England, where he linked up with the English-born playwright Rebecca Lenkiewicz. After making documentaries for British television, Pawlikowski began directing features in English, including "My Summer of Love" (2004), with Emily Blunt, then unknown, and "The Woman in the Fifth" (2012), with Ethan Hawke and Kristin Scott Thomas. "Ida" is a charged, bitter return. Set in 1961, during the Stalinist dictatorship, the movie pushes still further into the past; almost every element in the story evokes the war years and their aftermath. The filmmakers have confronted a birthplace never forgiven but also never abandoned.

In a majestic convent, an orphaned young woman—a novice named Anna (Agata Trzebuchowska)—is ordered by her Mother Superior to visit her aunt in Lodz before she takes orders. A beautiful eighteen-year-old with a broad Slavic face, a composed, devotional manner, and a tantalizing dimple, the girl has never left the convent before and knows nothing of her family. In Lodz, wearing her habit, Anna enters the apartment of a forty-five-ish woman, who is puffing on a cigarette and waiting for the guy she picked up the night before to leave. A minor state judge and Communist Party member, Wanda Gruz (Agata Kulesza) tells her niece that her real name is Ida Lebenstein, and that she's Jewish—a "Jewish nun," she says. Abrupt and dismissive, Wanda enjoys attacking the girl's ignorance. But Wanda has mysteries of her own and scores to settle: Ida's mother was her beloved sister. The two agree to go to the village in which the parents were hidden by Christians and then betrayed—the village where Wanda grew up.

"Ida" becomes both an investigation of sorts and an intermittent road movie, featuring a dialectically opposed odd couple—Catholic and Communist, innocent girl and hard-living political intellectual, lover (of Christ) and hater (of the Polish past). Yet neither is a type, and what happens to each has to be understood as both an individual's fate and a Polish fate. Ida's faith and disciplined simplicity will be jostled by experience, and Wanda will be tested, too, as her own buried sorrows come back to life. Sardonic comedy lurks within the strange pairing. At first, Wanda can't stop taunting Ida's indifference to sex, and, about the village, she says, "What if you go there and discover that there is no God?" Yet Pawlikowski doesn't favor one point of view over the other: the two women are equal in their isolation and their need to pull together the shards of identity in a country that has been almost entirely broken.

Between 1939 and 1945, Poland lost a fifth of its population, including three million Jews. In the two years after the war, Communists took over the government under the eyes of the Red Army and the Soviet secret police, the N.K.V.D. Many Poles who were prominent in resisting the Nazis were accused of preposterous crimes; the independent-minded were shot or hanged. In the movie, none of this is stated, but all of it is built, so to speak, into the atmosphere: the country feels dead, the population sparse, the mood of ordinary conversations constrained by the sure knowledge that many who survived have committed acts of betrayal or indulged willful ignorance.

How can you capture a nation's spirit by telling a singular story? By making every shot as definitive as an icon. "I'm not emotionally excited by the power of cinema's tricks anymore," Pawlikowski has said. The director and his fledgling cinematographer, Lukasz Zal, shot the movie in hard-focus black and white; they have produced images so distinct and powerful that they sharpen our senses. "Ida" might be called static were it not for the currents of emotion from shot to shot, which electrify the women's relation to each other throughout. Clearing away clutter, Pawlikowski almost never moves the camera; many of the scenes are just long-lasting shots, fed by a single light source that often puts the faces in partial shadow (what we understand of these two women will always be limited). Sometimes the figures are positioned at the bottom of the frame, with enormous gray Polish skies above them, as if the entire burden of a cursed country weighed on its people. Both beautiful and oppressive, the bleakness of the landscape in winter suggests something uncanny in the air, as if we were watching a horror film without ghouls.

One can trace possible influences—Carl Theodor Dreyer, very likely, and Robert Bresson, and European art films from the sixties and early seventies like François Truffaut's "The Wild Child," and also Polish movies made in the period in which "Ida" is set. But I can't recall anything major that looks quite like this movie. Pawlikowski is not after commonplace realism but something you would have to call minimal realism, in which the paring away of cinematic junk makes our attention to what remains almost rapt: the clinking of the nuns' spoons at a silent convent dinner, some gentle country sounds, the transfixing boredom of long drives through the flat landscape. Yet there's one significant sign of life: in a provincial hotel ballroom, young musicians play Western-style Polish pop and American jazz. A handsome young saxophone player (Dawid Ogrodnik), who loves Coltrane, takes a respectful but persistent interest in Ida. The jazz, with its breaking patterns, suggests a possible opening to the West, an eventual end to Stalinist drabness, a hint of the very different Poland of 2014.

Fans of the movie have been debating who is the more interesting woman: promiscuous, alcoholic Wanda or faith-endowed Ida. On first viewing, Wanda struck me as one of the great movie characters in recent years. Agata Kulesza, a veteran Polish stage and movie actress, has short black hair, dark eyes, and an almost comically intense frown; her stare could shear the fender off a car. Earlier in her life, Wanda was a player—"the Red Wanda," a Stalinist state prosecutor who sent "enemies of the people" to their death for the good of the revolution. As she questions peasants in her town about their acts at the end of the war, she's both a Jewish avenger and a woman who has her own guilt to bear. Ida can't possibly understand, but Wanda tells her of her past in brief fragments, and Kulesza does more with those fragments—adding a gesture, a pause—than anyone since Greta Garbo, who always implied much more than she said.

Without too much trouble, we can create a past for this brilliant woman. She was a member of the Young Communist League in the thirties; she escaped the Nazis by going underground and fighting in the resistance and emerged in 1947 as a true believer. It is well known that some of the Jews who survived the Nazis (often by fleeing to Moscow) entered the state service in the secret police, which, to put it mildly, was not a popular move among Polish anti-Communists (or among Polish anti-Semites, either). Wanda, we gather, was smarter than many of the others, but by 1961 she has lost her faith. Her world was not born again in revolution; it suffered a long, debilitating, and shameful aftermath to the war. Red Wanda has been twice betrayed—by the slaughter of the Jews and Polish anti-Semitism, and then by Stalinism, which she enabled. By 1961, very little keeps her going—a good apartment, surviving instincts of command, a few acid jokes, Mozart's "Jupiter" Symphony, booze, and sexual hunger. She's intensely likable, a tough woman too clear-headed to lie about anything, especially to herself. "Ida" may be a small story of two particular women seeking identity, but Wanda, we can't help thinking, is Polish history, both grieved over and unredeemed.

At first glance, Ida is not as interesting—or, rather, she's guarded, even opaque. When Wanda tells her she's Jewish, Agata Trzebuchowska stares back, unblinking, unresponsive. Ida has nothing in her head that she can connect to Wanda's revelations, and, for a long time, she looks at the world evenly, steadily, without much emotion. Her lustrous hair covered, her face framed by a hood, Trzebuchowska has a preternatural calm and self-sufficiency, so it's amusing to hear that this first-time actress is actually a feminist and hipster discovered in a Warsaw café by a director friend of Pawlikowski's. She didn't particularly want the part; Pawlikowski, who had auditioned many young women without finding anyone he liked, had to argue her into it. The results are mixed: we get an extraordinary-looking woman, but we miss the skill of a trained actress. Trzebuchowska can't suggest what's churning around inside Ida, yet her opacity must be what Pawlikowski wanted, and it has its uses: it keeps mystery alive. Will Ida, exposed to the world in all its bewildering complication, maintain her faith and her desire to be a nun, or will she accept herself as a Jew? Back in the convent for a while, she prostrates herself on the stone floor, apologizing for sins that she hasn't committed.

"Ida" is only eighty minutes long, but Pawlikowski takes his time. As the two women question farmers and townspeople in Wanda's old village, they stop to talk things over, fight each other, or just stare silently. The investigation is urgent emotionally yet desultory in action, as such quests are in life, and the relation between the two, established and strengthened by the strategic positioning within the frame, keeps shifting, evolving, reaching a kind of emotional finality. Pawlikowski must have stripped away dialogue, too, since not much is stated: what we infer is what ultimately matters. Concentrated and expansive at the same time, "Ida" keeps the audience working hard, gathering clues, trying not to come to conclusions too quickly. As David Thomson put it in The New Republic, the movie "[dares] to omit essential actions because they have been delivered indirectly." The violence, after all, was long in the past. What matters in 1961 (and now) is the attitudes of those who committed or suffered crimes. Without giving up judgment, the filmmakers establish that during the war, everyone in Poland was in trouble. Acknowledgment, not revenge, is the movie's driving force.

Pawlikowski has complained about critics who see the movie solely as a meditation on the Holocaust or Poland, and, of course, he's partially right, since "Ida" is certainly a story of identity; it's certainly a spiritual journey, too. His irritation may be caused by a certain hostility in Poland to an exiled filmmaker who returns bristling with ideas about the country. (Pawlikowski may want to work there again, and needs to sweeten the atmosphere.) Whatever he says, he's made a movie that breathes history in every frame, and his annoyance reminds me of D. H. Lawrence's remark, "Never trust the teller, trust the tale. The proper function of a critic is to save the tale from the artist who created it." All right, then: again and again, "Ida" asks the question, What do you do with the past once you've re-discovered it? Does it enable you, redeem you, kill you, leave you longing for life, longing for escape? The answers are startling.

Funnily enough, here in Poland the movie got criticised by both anti-communist right wingers (as being anti-Polish) and Jewish organisations (as being anti-Jewish). That is something.

[celedhring]

I was under the impression Selma was not a good film.  Anybody seen it want to comment?  Should it have swept everything?

It hasn't come out in Spain yet. Will probably check it out when it does to see if all the fuss is warranted or not.

[Habbaku]

And Penn's penultimate moment of the broadcast was

Always funny to see "professional" writers misuse words that they think will impress.

[CountDeMoney]

I was under the impression Selma was not a good film.  Anybody seen it want to comment?  Should it have swept everything?

What I've read has been a lot of kick-back on how both MLK and LBJ are portrayed from a political POV:  that the film dismisses MLK's innate political acumen, and that LBJ is portrayed as a hesitant and risk-averse politician--both of which are dead wrong. 

I think the problem with this sort of film is that there are far too many people still alive with far too much invested in the events surrounding the film that you can't separate reality with the act of storytelling (please see: sniper movies, realistic portrayal of snipers in and sniper movies, Siegy bitches out realistic portrayal of snipers in).

[Valmy]

Yeah you couldn't have released Braveheart in 1320.

[Barrister]

I was under the impression Selma was not a good film.  Anybody seen it want to comment?  Should it have swept everything?

I thought it was a very good movie, and very moving (though Oprah was jarring to me in every scene she was in, but thankfully she only had a bit part).  It did a good job at humanizing MLK, not making the film into a hagiography (though he's still obviously the hero of the story).

Oscars are so political, though, I can't really comment on whether it should have won a bunch of awards or not.  Oyelowo's performance as MLK seemed very good to my eyes, but I can see how he's too "new" to "deserve" a nomination in the Academy's eyes.

One thing though the only award it did win, for the song Glory, had nothing to do with the actual movie!  The song just played over the closing credits.

So - I don't know if it deserved to sweep everything, but nominations for best director, best screenplay, best actor would not have been out of place.

[Valmy]

Ah gotcha.  Well....now that I know it slanders a great Texan I am not sure I should see it...but I am glad to hear it is the outrage is at least justified a bit.

[Admiral Yi]

$125,000 gift bags for winners is kind of a mind fuck.