Every year, when the Academy announces nominations, critics and movie buffs have something to outrage about because a few deserving films, or more, ultimately get left out. If it’s not about films that got left out, it’s about films that didn’t get their due and some that got more than they deserve.
This year’s nominations largely celebrated underdog arthouse filmmakers with Alejandro González Inárritu’s Birdman and Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel leading the pack with nine nominations each, followed by Morten Tyldum’s The Imitation Game with eight and Richard Linklater’s Boyhood getting six. Never mind veteran Clint Eastwood’s American Sniper getting seven nominations, what’s significant is that the Academy this year wasn’t in the mood for big-budget spectacles. How else can you explain Christopher Nolan’s Interstellar not making the cut for Best Picture or Director?
Academy members, reportedly over 63 and largely male (77 per cent, in fact), seem to be tired of the Nolans and Finchers and in the mood to celebrate the usually overlooked. However, that didn’t stop outrage about the ‘snubbing’ of Selma and the ‘celebration’ of American Sniper described by many as a US Military recruitment video.
But take a closer look at the Best Picture nominations and you will see that the Academy isn’t trying to say that it prefers white heroes over black or soldiers over astronauts. It just owned up to celebrating men. Or heroes. The genius of wheelchair-ridden Stephen Hawking ( The Theory of Everything ), pioneering scientist Alan Turing ( Imitation Game ), war-hero Chris Kyle ( American Sniper ), civil rights champion Martin Luther King Jr ( Selma ), disciplinarian Terence Fletcher ( Whiplash , based on the director’s music teacher), an artist craving for validation in Riggan Thomson ( Birdman , a meta-narrative where Burton’s Batman Michael Keaton plays the angst-ridden protagonist), the adventurous custodian of a forgotten era Monsieur M. Gustave ( The Grand Budapest Hotel ) and a ordinary boy called Mason becoming a man ( Boyhood )... all kinds of men. Geeks, scientists, soldiers, teachers, artists, gentlemen and even a boy. Irrespective of colour and sexual orientation.
When Spike Lee was asked to react about the Selma snub (though it was nominated for Best Picture, it fetched no nomination for its lead actor David Oyelowo or Director Ava DuVernay), he told The Hollywood Reporter : “Anyone who thinks this year was gonna be like last year is retarded… Once every 10 years or so, I get calls from journalists about how people are finally accepting Black films. Before last year, it was the year (2002) with Halle Berry, Denzel (Washington) and Sidney Poitier.”
Amanda Berry who runs BAFTA (British Academy Film and TV Arts) reportedly said that Selma was delivered only in November and there were only three screenings for voters. “I get quite upset when people say it was a racist snub,” she told The Guardian .
Hence, it’s quite possible that Paramount messed up their Oscar campaign or that the members who voted for David Oyelowo or ranked him a little lower than they did for the other actors in fray — all equally deserving. It’s possible that the weakest in the category, Steve Carell, edged out Oyelowo because of the campaign about the hours he spent getting make-up done for the role.
Selma wasn’t the best-directed film in any case to merit a nomination in the Best Director category, given how silly the FBI logs superimposed on the film read. So the argument that the Academy has been racist this year holds very little water. After all, Selma did make it to a rather lean list of eight films, ahead of Gone Girl and Interstellar , directed by Academy favourite directors.
If at all the nominations suggest anything, it is that this is the year of Birdman . The list of nominations is an acknowledgement of Alejandro González Inárritu’s critique of Hollywood’s obsession with comic-books and pornography. It’s a film that clearly seems to have made the Academy reconsider their choices. No superhero film this year. No big-budget spectacle. No disaster porn. Just art and great character journeys.
It is also possible that the Academy is swayed by the commitment of Richard Linklater to make a Boyhood over 12 years. All for the sake of art.
These two much-discussed and loved films might have brought in the change of mood, even if it’s just seasonal.
Hence, it wouldn’t be a surprise then if the Oscars just turn out to be a Boyhood versus Birdman clash and every other film was just there to prop up the list and honour real life heroes and exemplary men.
This year’s choices are not political. In fact, they suggest a triumph of art over commerce. And that, surely a step in the right direction for the Academy.
How is it that nobody outraged when The Hurt Locker beat Avatar a few years ago? Because a woman called Kathyrn Bigelow made an indie (even if it was a malecelebratory film about a war hero) film, while her ex-husband made a big-budget spectacle (even if it was a female-as-protector-of-nature, tree-hugging film celebrating preservation). The Hurt Locker and American Sniper aren’t very different. Even structurally. Both films are about their heroes defusing a tense war situation in enemy territory every few minutes with increasing levels of difficulty, like any video game. American Sniper is a sitting duck because it is helmed not by Bigelow but by Clint Eastwood. The original Dirty Harry, the guy Michael Moore loves to hate. Also, it’s based on an autobiography of the same name by war veteran Chris Kyle who did four tours adding up to a 1,000 days of war and registered over 160 kills. Trust Eastwood to do full justice to the subject matter. This is a film seen through the eyes of the soldier and the veteran filmmaker chooses to spend the last 13 minutes of American Sniper (or should we say the climax) to show us the posttraumatic stress disorder of the soldier (his reflex is to attack his playful dog to protect his child; the war had changed him into a violent, disturbed man) and that’s a lot more than what The Hurt Locker did. The makers agreed to change the original ending of Kyle murder (he was shot in a firing range by another disturbed war veteran) on request by his widow, thus putting the filmmaker in a spot; he couldn’t show the ending he wanted. One that would have given the film its moral. It still does so subtly but, in he absence of the scene, critics are quick to take a potshot at perceived pro-war trigger-happy stance. Because, public memory is short. Less than a decade ago, Clint Eastwood made Letters from Iwo Jima, his companion piece to Flags of our Fathers, and showed us the other side of the story. But you just cannot expect Eastwood to make every war film from both sides. Because this was a biopic based on a book written by a man who was convinced by his father that there were three types of people in the world: sheep, wolves and sheepdogs (the rare breed of sheep that confronts the wolf). This was a story of a man who put ‘God, country, family’ in that order. And pays the price for it. To show it any other way would have been of great disservice to the subject matter. People protesting the film have a problem with the heroics of a sniper who remains hidden (‘cowardly’, as Moore calls them) and often fire at sitting targets. And hating Chris Kyle and American Sniper is just a manifestation of that bias.
