Nobody wants to get caught looking unpatriotic these days, least of all the film industry, so come March 24 and Oscar night, Hollywood’s celebration of its favorite image of itself, expect to see at least a few flags flying. And a more than usual measure of self-criticism and self-censorship. The perennial scapegoat for all that’s wrong with America (insider pundits ranging from Robert Altman to Arnold Schwarzenegger have blamed on-screen violence for the onslaught of terrorism — no wonder the Taliban banned movies in Afghanistan), Hollywood on this occasion will likely renounce ambiguity, irony, and all things dark and wacky and instead embrace those old standbys: chauvinism, exploitation, hypocrisy, and kitsch.
That’s bad news for Memento, Mulholland Drive, The Royal Tenenbaums, The Man Who Wasn’t There, L.I.E., and the other bold ventures that might have shone in an Oscar year like 1996, when Shine, Secrets and Lies, and Fargo had their day. The more challenging films of this year did do well with the critics organizations and even earned a Golden Globe or two. Yet they all but vanished in the voting of the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild, and the Screen Actors Guild, and that’s a surer indicator of where Oscar is heading.
It could have been worse: had it opened a few months later than it did, I might be writing about Pearl Harbor. Instead I’m trying to get a grip on what it is about the travesty known as A Beautiful Mind that has brought ordinarily sane people to their knees. Maybe it’s because people go to films not to escape what scares them but to transform it. Genius, paranoia, the rampant power of governments, the unstoppable progress of science, the threat of lurking, unimaginable terror — what better way to face such nightmares than in a trite, manipulative, feel-good Ron Howard dream? No wonder the Golden Globes (Best Picture) and the Guilds have gushed all over it.
Sure, there are those who castigated A Beautiful Mind for its shameless omission of almost every detail of John Nash’s life, the schizophrenic (oops! I gave away the twist ending — and the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, too) mathematician who overcame his hardships to win a Nobel Prize. But these are mostly indignant movie critics (not one group gave it a nod, unless you count the Broadcast Film Critics) and rival studios envious of its Oscar chances. As it turns out, such make-believe is exactly what people love about the movie. The pointy-headed nay-sayers had their day with American Beauty in 1999; this year, in America the Beautiful, A Beautiful Mind will snag nominations for Best Picture, Director (Howard), Actor (Russell Crowe), and Supporting Actress (Jennifer Connelly following in the noble tradition embodied by last year’s winner, Pollock’s Marcia Gay Harden, of long-suffering nursemaid to Troubled Genius).
So much for Science — what about Art? In the same way that A Beautiful Mind is an unthreatening counterfeit of the former, so is Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge a sham tribute to the latter. Hacked to glittery bits in the editing room so that its Disney-esque clichŽs about Truth, Beauty, and Love have the look of profundity, Rouge is High Art for the middlebrow, and that’s why it’s racked up points with the Globes, the Producers Guild, the Directors Guild and the SAG. Best Picture and Best Director nominations are assured — but Kidman for Best Actress? See below.
Okay, the tribulations of individual genius are all fine and dandy, but there is a war on. Fortunately, the year saw the release of a rousing, brilliantly realized action adventure about a heroic and vastly outnumbered crew of volunteers who venture into alien territory and take on all comers against all odds to save civilization. No, I’m not talking about Black Hawk Down. It’s too vague about its patriotism, its issues, its purpose — are we supposed to thrill to the graphic violence or feel horrified and reverent? That it has topped the box office suggests the former, but neither the critics groups nor the Globes nor the Guilds (the Directors Guild did nominate Ridley Scott) have given it much credence, and neither has it roused much of a rabble (Bush saw it recently and then made some weird comments about America’s soft culture) in the cause of the War against Terrorism.
No, I’m referring to The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, Peter Jackson’s doughty rendition of J.R.R. Tolkien’s epic fantasy, which benefits not only from a base of rabid fans of the book but also from its parallels to our ongoing conflict with the latter-day Sauron, Osama bin Laden. Far more so than A Beautiful Mind, it is the defining film of the times and will deservedly pick up nominations for Best Picture and Director; what’s more, in the battle of the wizards, Ian McKellen will beat out Harry Potter’s Richard Harris for Best Supporting Actor.
But mere victory against evildoers is not enough after the outrage of September 11; we want revenge, goddamit. Or better yet, disguise that desire in murky righteousness and psychological fulminations, as Todd Field does in In the Bedroom. Some might point to this modest but wrenching melodrama as proof that Hollywood still honors viable independent efforts, but when you look below the gritty surface of this splendidly acted and meticulously detailed tale of crime, punishment, and family values in a small town, you find something like Mike Leigh directing Dirty Harry. Pretending to art while satisfying the basest impulses? Sounds like a Best Picture nominee to me, with Sissy Spacek a shoo-in for Best Actress and Marisa Tomei for Best Supporting Actress in yet another year honoring beleaguered wives and mothers, and Tom Wilkinson for Best Actor in yet another year honoring benighted husbands and fathers.
Which brings us to another sly disguising of the pleasures of vengeance: Robert Altman’s Gosford Park. It’s a paean to one-upsmanship and the vindication of the snubbed. Not only do the servants upstage the masters, with a Ken Lay–like capitalist villain done in in the process, but American filmmakers outshine the Brits at their own genre.
Had Altman kept his mouth shut, he’d have a Best Director nod sewn up. As it is, with his remarks noted above about movie violence and his later comments about the country and its present administration ("stupid" and "I’m glad I live in Paris" are two highlights I recall), he’s managed to offend the entire political spectrum. He did say some flattering things about actors when accepting the Golden Globe for Best Director, and that was smart, since actors are the biggest branch in the Academy, which votes as a whole on the Best Picture nominations.
Unfortunately, he probably won’t win the hearts of the Academy’s directors branch, which alone votes on the Best Director nominations, and which seems to have indicated its distaste by omitting him from the Directors Guild nominations. Not so Helen Mirren, who got a nod from the SAG, and Maggie Smith, who should have, the downstairs and upstairs representatives of Park who will likely both take Best Supporting Actress nominations.
Anyway, I’m thinking that this year we’ll have the unlikely scenario of two Best Picture nominees not represented in the Best Director category, with Altman and the invisible Todd Field (not even a Golden Globe nomination) the exceptions. Taking their places? Could David Lynch sneak in with his unfathomable Mulholland Drive, which was spurned by TV but revived by Hollywood?
Forget it — this is the year of A Beautiful Mind, not a disturbed mind. Or is it? Christopher Nolan’s Memento and Ridley Scott’s Black Hawk Down are films that mirror the prevailing mental disorders of our times — short-term-memory disorder and the inability to think within a historical context. Both men got Directors Guild nominations and should get Oscar nominations as well.
Disturbed minds should rule the Best Actor nominations as well. In addition to Crowe’s Brain Man and Wilkinson’s Strained Man, there’s Sean Penn’s Shame Man; he should sneak in with his embarrassing portrayal of a retarded father in I Am Sam, a surprise SAG nominee. One slot should go to a father who is morally, not mentally, retarded, and the choice seems to be between Gene Hackman in The Royal Tenenbaums, winner of numerous critics prizes and a Golden Globe, and Kevin Kline in the maudlin Life As a House, another last-minute SAG shocker. The tenor of the times may oppose such flakiness, but Hackman should edge out Kline. As for Denzel Washington’s tour de force as a righteous villain in Training Day, it just goes to show he’s been wasting too much time playing saints like Malcolm X and Hurricane Carter.
So our minds are disturbed, we feel victimized, and we feel good about it. For one thing, trauma puts women in their place. No more the high-flying antics of last year’s heroines in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, or the uppity single moms of Erin Brockovich, Chocolat, and Traffic. Instead, we’ll have grieving mom the whiner with Spacek, grieving mom the groveling slut with Halle Berry in Monster’s Ball (her nomination and Washington’s a token effort at redressing Oscar’s racism), beleaguered mom as wrecking crew with Tilda Swinton in The Deep End, and maybe bereaved mom as control freak with Nicole Kidman in The Others. Or should that be Nicole Kidman as trollop with a heart of gold in Moulin Rouge? I think the Academy might have the same problem making up its mind as did the SAG, which ended up nominating her for neither role.
Instead, perhaps we’ll see this category’s answer to Crowe, Judi Dench with her performance as the brilliant novelist Iris Murdoch losing out to Alzheimer’s disease in Iris. And just for fun, let’s take a shot at the career girl who is humiliated for her professional ambition and failure to get married and nominate RenŽe Zellweger in Bridget Jones’s Diary.
Actually, just for fun is the reason they have the Best Supporting categories (note that previous winners Cuba Gooding Jr. and James Coburn are currently starring in Snow Dogs). If the Best Actor and Actress nominees tend to represent idealized images of what men and women are expected to be (or not), these Supporting nominees tend to express more pathological fantasies, getting their careers ruined in the process.
Thus the masochistic martyrdom of Connelly’s wife in Mind, of Marisa Tomei’s abused spouse in Bedroom (and here’s a chance for the Academy to drop the other shoe on Tomei, whose career is just now recovering from being Best Supporting Actress for My Cousin Vinny), and of Mirren’s maidservant in Park. On the sadistic side, look for Park’s deliciously mordant dowager Maggie Smith and Cameron Diaz’s chimerical tormentor in the much-abused Vanilla Sky. And why not go crazy and include the seven-year-old dominatrix in I Am Sam, the SAG-nominated waif Dakota Fanning? Well, we do have an image to maintain.
Whereas the Supporting Actresses follow a Freudian bent, the Best Supporting Actors might look like a who’s who of Jungian archetypes. In addition to McKellen’s wizard, there’s Jim Broadbent’s trickster in Moulin Rouge, Ethan Hawke’s initiate in Training Day, and Jude Law (they love him in this category!) as polymorphous Pan in A.I.: Artificial Intelligence. And, of course, the irrepressible Ben Kingsley in Sexy Beast, a reminder that no matter how much Oscar tries to control its image, irony, ambiguity, and exuberance will prevail.
