ACHIEVEMENTS IN POPULAR FILM? SAY WHAT?

Last Wednesday, the Motion Picture Academy released a press briefing concerning some upcoming changes in their organization: first, Oscar telecasts would be held to a three hour time limit, with some awards being given during commercials with a highlight reel of those awards to be shown later in the broadcast.  This makes perfect sense: ratings for the show have been in decline for years, with many viewers complaining about the show's often four plus hour length.  And let's face it, many of the awards are given to people who worked on films that the vast majority of the viewing audience have never seen or heard of (like Best Live Action Short Subject), or for technical things that are difficult to understand (there are two separate awards for sound editing and sound mixing!).    While the people who worked on those films should win awards, cutting down the broadcast time given to their wins  should make the show more entertaining and accessible.
The second part of the press release is far more interesting, and potentially controversial.  A new award for “outstanding achievement in popular film” has now been announced, with details to be forthcoming. It would appear that this is an attempt to broaden the show's audience by giving a major award to a block buster.  In other words, the Academy is  trying to make a people's choice award, one that reflects the tastes of the main stream movie going public more than the supposedly elevated tastes of the Academy members.  This is not the first time that the Academy has made this kind of move: in 2009, when the box office hit THE DARK KNIGHT did not get nominated for Best Picture, the Academy expanded its Best Picture Nominees from five films to ten, making room for more hit movies.  This led to films like 2015's MAD MAX:FURY ROAD getting a Best Picture nomination, something that probably never would have happened if the nominees had been held to five.  Apparently, even that move wasn't seen as enough to placate the rabid fan boys who flock to the latest special effect explosion movies, and who feel disrespected by the Oscars.
But is this just pandering?  By implying that big money making movies are somehow in a different category than the ones that are usually nominated, they almost seem to be lowering popular films, saying that they are only worthy of winning in  a separate  category (although a film could be nominated for both an Outstanding Achievement in Popular Film award and Best Picture, like when Toy Story 3 was nominated for Best Animated Film and Best Picture).
Once upon a time, popular films were almost always at least nominated for Best Picture, but in recent years, mainstream Hollywood movies have mostly gotten louder and dumber.   Playing to the lowest common denominator, giving that all important young male demographic just what they want, while keeping stories simple to appeal to the ever growing world wide audience, has become Hollywood's stock in trade for some time now, and, to be fair, they have reaped enormous financial rewards from doing that.  But should that cynical, sequel and reboot driven style that turns the cinematic art form into the equivalent of Big Macs, really be given an award for artistic achievement?  Aren't the technical awards for things like special effects, editing and production design enough?  (Really, when you get down to it, it's those technical people behind the scenes who create those special effects that do the real work for so many blockbuster movies, as the screen writers cough up cliches and the actors stand in front of green screens).  
As an avid moviegoer who mostly avoids mainstream Hollywood films until the "Oscar bait" movies start getting released late in the year, I don't like the idea of this new award; let the popular films make money and the "good" ones win awards.  At the same time, I understand why the Academy chose to do this; generally speaking, when more popular movies are nominated, more people watch; they can point to high ratings for the  years when TITANIC,  THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING and AVATAR were nominated.  But it's been nine years since that AVATAR broadcast, and the viewing habits of the American public has changed.   This new award may do little to end what is a growing trend for most TV viewers, who prefer streaming formats that allow for more flexibility in their viewing habits.  (The fact that the Super Bowl and the Grammys have also seen their ratings drop in recent years reflects this.)   Sure, there's something exciting in watching events unfold live, but a lot of people would just rather watch the best parts on You Tube afterwards so they don't have to wade through the endless commercials and dull parts.  Adding a new award will probably not buck this trend, and in the long run, I think it cheapens the Academy by forcing it to reward things like super hero movies and inane comedies. 

A DISTURBING TREND

(There are spoilers for the movie HEREDITARY here, you've been warned)

The low budget horror film HEREDITARY, written and directed by Ari Aster opened just last weekend and got a decidedly mixed reception: while critics highly praised the film (it rates an impressive 92% on the Tomato meter) audiences surveyed on the way out gave it a lowly D+ grade.  As someone who is sick of super hero movies and loves independent movies, whenever critics and the general public disagree, I'm usually with the critics, but not this time!  Putting it bluntly, I actively hated this film and almost walked out on it in the first half hour.  Now understand, I not someone who can't stand horror movies,  (I loved GET OUT from last year, and THE BABADOOK from 2014), no,  my problem with HEREDITARY stems  from one of the most difficult things to portray on a movie screen: violence against children.

Stories for children, have, of course, often featured children in dangerous situations in which they are threatened by evil adults, from THE WIZARD OF OZ to HARRY POTTER, but these stories have inevitable happy endings and are light hearted in tone despite the moments of danger.  And more serious, realistic examples of children being threatened can work when handled in the right way, as in the powerful scene in SCHINDLER'S LIST in which children hide in out houses to avoid being sent to a death camp.  No, what bothers me are recent  films like HEREDITARY that are made for adults and that consciously seem to be pushing the audience's tolerance level by amping up the violence against children.  Last year,  Darren Aronofsky's fever dream film MOTHER (which I had some admiration for) ended with a baby being eaten.  Another film, THE KILLING OF A SACRED DEER, (which I also hated), showed two young children slowly wasting away from a hideous curse that eventually makes blood pour from their eyes.  

That brings us to HEREDITARY, in which, in a harrowing scene, a 13 year old girl suffering from an allergic reaction, sticks her head out of a careening car window and is literally decapitated.  The moment itself is over briefly, but in the aftermath, director Aster chooses to show a long, realistic, lingering shot of her severed head on the road, being eaten by ants. Why did he choose to do this?   That shot has no purpose in the plot, making its repulsiveness completely unnecessary. It's a terrible choice, in my opinion, and even though it lasts a few short seconds, it  casts a pall over the rest of the film. (In case you were wondering, this was the moment that almost made me walk out). 

Any time a director decides to put an image like that in my head, the movie needs to justify it, and this film falls far short of that in my opinion: although it starts out like a serious family drama, HEREDITARY eventually degenerates into a standard issue ghost/possession story with the usual scenes of people having crazy nightmares, stumbling into dark spooky rooms and choosing to do things that defy logic.  Sure, there are some good performances and well shot scenes, but nothing that compensates for that horrific image.  

There's been a lot of praise for the performance of Toni Collette as the long suffering mom in the film, and while I think she is very good, digging into big emotional moments with a ragged intensity,  it's a better performance than the film deserves.  In fact, the raw emotion she  brings to the dramatic parts of the film wind up seeming silly when contrasted with her character  doing things like floating in the air and speaking in a possessed voice.  In a serious dramatic film, her realistic performance would work perfectly, but here it just winds up seeming ridiculous.

I've already mentioned that I loved Jennifer Kent's THE BABADOOK, which was also about malevolent spirits and possession, and also had a child put in danger.  But in that film, the endangered child was  central to the plot, and Kent handled it effectively and tastefully.  And as for the aforementioned baby eating scene in Aranofsky's MOTHER,  that film had become so completely surreal and metaphorical at that point in the film, that the baby eating seemed like an inevitable part of the story. You see, it's not the threatening of children that I necessary object to, it's the context in which it is handled in the film, and I think Aster handled it terribly here.  There really is no context for me that justifies seeing a young girl's severed head being eaten by ants!

THE SHAPE OF WATER (2017)

When Guillermo del Toro's THE SHAPE OF WATER won the Best Picture award for 2017, it was not a big surprise; del Toro's movie had been nominated for a whopping 13 awards, and had already won 3 (for del Toro's direction, its production design and its score).  On the other hand, there had never been a science fiction film that won Best Picture before (somewhat amazingly, Stanley Kubrick's 1968 film 2001:A SPACE ODYSSEY was not even nominated for Best Picture!), and there was quite a bit of buzz about some of the other films nominated, like 3 BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI and GET OUT.  Still, the Academy resisted having another upset like they had had the year before when MOONLIGHT defeated LA LA LAND, and they awarded the expected winner this time.  Personally, while I find del Toro's film undeniably lovely to look out and well acted, I think it falls short of greatness, especially in its predictable screenplay.

In 1954's cult monster film classic THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON, there's a striking moment when the film's lovely leading lady goes for a swim in the Amazon waters, and the film's titular creature (also known as the gill man) starts to swim below her.  But instead of attacking her, it follows her motions beneath her, without her knowing, copying her, clearly carrying out a sort of mating dance.  Up until then, the creature had only been shown as a fearsome beast, but in that moment, its awkward desire made it seem almost likable.  For a lot of adolescent boys just discovering girls but feeling too, well, monstrous, to act on their desires, it hit home.  One of those adolescent boys was Guillermo del Toro, who was a horror movie obsessed, monster loving kid, that would go on turn those childhood obsessions into movies.  Beginning with his first feature film, 1993's interesting vampire reimagining CRONOS to THE SHAPE OF WATER, every film he's directed has some kind of monster or ghost running through it.  He says he first got the idea for THE SHAPE OF WATER while talking to writer David Kraus in 2011, and he also considered directing a straight up remake of THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON for Universal (allegedly, the studio passed on his pitch for the film when he wanted to end it with the gill man and the female lead ending up together!).  Del Toro eventually wrote the film as a love story, and immediately wanted English actress Sally Hawkins (who had been so likable in 2008's Mike Leigh film HAPPY GO LUCKY) to play the lead.  Octavia Spencer, Micheal Shannon and Richard Jenkins, excellent actors all, were cast in supporting roles.  Del Toro finished the script with help from TV writer Vanessa Taylor and shot the film for a relatively low twenty million dollar budget in 2016.  Powered by word of mouth as much as Oscar nominations, the film would eventually gross around one hundred and ninety million dollars, making it one of the most financially successful Best Picture winners in recent years.

Set in Baltimore in 1962, it tells the story of Eliza (Hawkins), a mute, orphaned cleaning woman, who lives in a modest apartment building in which she has befriended her lonely, gay, recovering alcoholic neighbor Giles (Jenkins).  At work, she and her friend  Zelda (Spencer) are cleaning out a government lab in which a scaled, man sized fish creature has been housed by security manager Richard (Shannon).  Eliza finds herself drawn to the creature, despite the fact that it has bitten off two of Richard's fingers.  She starts to feed it, play music for it, and teach it sign language.  When she discovers that Richard plans to kill and dissect the creature, she sneaks him into her apartment with the reluctant help of Zelda and Giles.  Slowly, she finds herself falling in love with the creature, and they began to have an unusual sex life. Giles also finds himself drawn to the creature and he discovers that the creature has magical healing powers. Meanwhile, Richard, enraged at the creature's disappearance, eventually tracks him down on the same night that Eliza plans to release it into the sea.  Before she can, Richard shoots both her and the creature, but the creature resurrects himself and kills Richard.  Then he carries Eliza off into the water, both healing her and giving her the ability to breath under water.  The two of them swim off together.
From it's lovely opening tracking shot that glides through a water flooded apartment and ends on Eliza, reclining in the water like sleeping beauty, while Jenkins's narrator character on the soundtrack refers to her as "a princess without a voice", de Toro establishes that this story is a modern, adult fairy tale, and throughout the film cinematographer Dan Lausten and production designer Paul D. Austerberry give the film a surreal green tinged look (even the food and the cars are green) while still realistically recreating Baltimore in the 1960's.  And that fairy tale quality is extended in both Alexandre Desplat's excellent score and the use of old jazz tunes on the soundtrack, which contrast with the odd squacking noises that the creature makes.  (Pat Friday singing "I know why" has never sounded so haunting!)  I love the slightly crazy scene in which Eliza imagines herself singing in an old black and white Astaire-Rogers style musical with the creature making an unlikely dance partner.  Since those movies were themselves often like fairy tales, it doesn't seem out of place and keeps with the overall tone of the film while giving de Toro a chance to put in an unexpected homage to old Hollywood.

However, playing out like a fairy tale makes the plot  too simple at times for my taste; this is a film where I could guess almost every beat of the story from just having seen the preview beforehand.  From Eliza bonding with the creature and sneaking it  out, to the killing of the evil Richard at the end before the inevitable happy ending, there are no plot twists in this film that could be called surprising (although I must admit that I did not foresee an actual Communist spy being part of the story, but I also found that subplot pointless).  Along with being a like a fairy tale, the movie also resembles a number of films that came out back in the 1980's (like ET, SPLASH and STAR MAN), in which innocent alien or magical creatures were threatened with horrible government experiments; at times I couldn't help but feel that I've seen this story before, right down to the creature's magic healing powers and resurrection abilities that resemble ET's.  There are also questions of plausibility in the story, with a human sized fish creature somehow getting around a crowded city without anyone noticing (he even takes a trip to a movie theater!).  Even fairy tales have to make sense.  And I would have like to know a little bit more about the creature, especially regarding whether there are any more like it out there. 
Still, this film is certainly never boring to look out, and that's especially true of the magnificent job done by the effect and makeup crew on the creature, turning the old gill man from THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON into a modern marvel.  Del Toro has said designing him was one of the most difficult things he's worked on in all of his years of film making, and it shows.  It's a monster that can be both frightening and beautiful, threatening or pathetic.  And clearly they learned one of the important lessons of ET: audiences will care for an alien creature as long as it has big, soulful eyes.  Also, credit must be given to Doug Jones, the man in the suit, who has been working with de Toro since 1997's MIMIC; his years of playing monsters and training as a mime  pay off in the way that the creature's thoughts are often conveyed with a simple gesture or turn of the head. For a monster performance, it's often subtle.

As for the other performances, most of them are very good.  In Eliza, Giles and Zelda, we get a trio of lovable misfits, the kind of people who weren't always welcome in the era of the early 60's as the film often makes clear.  Sally Hawkins as Eliza is extremely endearing; with her simple beauty and broad, expressive eyes, she doesn't need to talk to carry the film; from the early moment when we see her kindly bringing breakfast to her neighbor Giles, to the way she taps her feet on the floor as she walks down the hall, mimicking the tap dance routine she just saw on TV, we're completely on her side.  One intriguing question arises concerning her character:  we hear that she was found alone and abandoned in the water as a baby, and she has a scar on her neck that resembles a fish's gill.  Therefore, one has to wonder,  is she herself half fish creature and half human?  That would explain why she's almost immediately drawn to the creature, even after she knows that it bit a man's fingers off.  The movie never says she is, but it's an interesting idea  Richard Jenkins as Giles is also very good as an unhappily closeted gay man;  I love the  wistful nature he has when he finds himself confessing to the creature that he feels alone too, and he's also often funny (at one point he asks of the creature "Now, is he a god? I dunno if he's a god. I mean he ate a cat, so I don't know!").  Octavia Spencer as Zelda is fine, but she really doesn't have a lot to do in the standard role of the African American faithful friend to the main character type.  Still, I do enjoy her reaction in the scene in which Eliza mimes out exactly how she and creature can have sex!
And then there's Micheal Shannon as the vile Richard; with his tall frame and harsh features, Shannon is usually typecast as a villain, so his casting here is no surprise.  But the script gives him no dimension whatsoever, he's just a sneering, leering horrid person in every scene; even when he's at home with his family or buying a new car he seems creepy.  Even worse,  I find his one note performance more and more grating as the film goes on and he gets more and more despicable. (There's even a scene involving him torturing someone for information; it's ugly and unnecessary, and I wish Hollywood would get over the need for such scenes in movies and TV shows)  I understand that fairy tales always have wicked characters, but it wouldn't have hurt to have given him a few moments of sympathy.  While I have enjoyed Shannon in other roles over the years, the best thing that I can say about this one is that he's not quite on screen enough to ruin the film, but he definitely damages it, in my opinion.

SO DID THE ACADEMY GET IT RIGHT?

I think it's clear that I admire this film without loving it (it's not even my favorite Del Toro film, I enjoyed 1996's PAN'S LABYRINTH more).  I think that nominated films like Jordan Peele's GET OUT and  Martin McDonagh's THREE BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI  were better, and films that weren't nominated like Dee Rees's excellent post war drama MUDBOUND,  Craig Gillespie's deliriously entertaining I TONYA and Lee Unkrich's and Adrian Molina's delightful COCO were also superior.  Still, De Toro is a likable Hollywood personality who's been making (mostly) good films for 20 years, so I'm not exactly upset about the Academy's choice.

THE 2017 NOMINEES, FIRST IMPRESSIONS

The nominees for the Academy Awards for 2017 have just been announced, and there aren't a lot of surprises, the films that are up are mostly ones that have done well at The Golden Globes and won other awards.  Still, I personally did not expect that the leader in the number of nominations would be Guilllermo De Toro's THE SHAPE OF WATER, with thirteen nominations.  Could this oddball romance become the first science fiction movie to win Best Picture?  We'll see.  I certainly am amused by the fact that a modern Oscar nominated film could be so heavily influenced by the 1954 B-movie THE CREATURE FROM THE BLACK LAGOON!
The controversial 3 BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI  is also up for an impressive seven awards, and while I imagine that the wonderful Frances McDormand will almost definitely win for Best Actress, I doubt the Academy will want to give a Best Picture award to a film that has inspired some pretty angry backlash about its racial politics.  Personally, I think one of the two World War 2 set prestige movies  (they would be DARKEST HOUR and DUNKIRK) have the best chances of winning, because one should never bet against any movie that bashes Nazis.  At the same time, Stephen Spielberg's THE POST is a film about the power of the press, and with the nation lead by a president who has referred to the non conservative news media as "enemies of the people", it might be a good way for the mostly progressive Academy to stick a finger in his eye.  Still, the fact that the film has only one other nomination (Meryl Streep is up for Best Actress, as usual) shows that there probably isn't much support for the film overall. The rest of the Best Picture nominees probably have little chance:  PT Anderson's PHANTOM THREAD is probably to strange for the Academy, despite another great performance by Best Actor nominee Daniel Day Lewis.  CALL ME BY YOUR NAME, the gay romance, is probably too arty for the Academy, while horror satire GET OUT is too dark.  And Greta Gerwig's LADYBIRD is a low budget, realistic look at a complicated relationship between a teenage girl and her mother, hardly the kind of movie that wins Best Picture, although I'm glad to see that Gerwig is up for Best Director. 
As for the films left out, I personally loved Craig Gillespie's I,TONYA, and I think it should have been nominated for Best Picture, but at least it got acting nominees for it's two female leads, (Margot Robbie and Allison Janey) so there's that.  I also would have liked to see Micheal Showalter's highly entertaining romantic comedy THE BIG SICK get a Best Picture nominee, but its great screenplay is up, so again, that's something.  Overall, this a good, interesting mix of films that spreads love to both big budget films and low budget indies.  So what will win?  Well, despite it's 13 nominations, I think THE SHAPE OF WATER will mostly win technical awards, and with 3 BILLBOARDS OUTSIDE EBBING MISSOURI being too hot right now, I'm thinking that DARKEST HOUR (which has 5 other nominations besides  Best Picture) has a good chance, seeing as how it's in similar territory as 2010's winner THE KING'S SPEECH.  But of course, I thought LA LA LAND was going to win last year, so what do I know?