Looking back at the Oscars

That’s right – because this year’s Academy Award ceremony took place 2 March, weeks away from my cruelly-imposed print deadline, you know who won this year’s top Oscars, while I have no idea, as I type this (wrap THAT time-travelling conundrum around your head). 

Whatever the outcome, what follows is my opinion of some of the Best Picture nominees. I apologise that the list isn’t comprehensive, but a) not all the films in question reached our shores in time for me to natter about them and b) I can’t watch everything. 

(Seriously, there’s tons of films out right now. Most of them rubbish. And there’s no way I’m missing out on my HBO shows in favour of some half-baked rom-com or actioner). 

Captain Philips

Gravity

American hustle

12 Years a slave

Her

Because rage is more fun than happiness, let’s start with the films that really pissed me off this year. American Hustle was a stupid, over-produced, over-directed mess that felt improvised through and through. It was like a carnival costume with no occupant. David O. Russell’s expose of an ethically questionable FBI sting operation – involving scam artists Christian Bale and Amy Adams – may have come with detailed and convincing 80s trappings and ‘vigorous’ turns by its ensemble cast, but the end result just felt like a poor man’s mash-up of Martin Scorcese (world-weary narration, a ‘tense’ story that blurs the lines between the legal and the illegal worlds, a cameo by Robert de Niro) and Paul Thomas Anderson (‘Hustle’s sympathetic depiction of desperate wannabes brings Boogie Nights to mind). 

‘Hustle’ is a baggy collection of scenes, all of which strain to please the audience with a put-upon swagger that never burrows deeper than the surface. So I remain puzzled as to why it rated so highly on the Academy’s barometer. 

I’m significantly less surprised, however, about why Steve McQueen’s tough-to-watch epic 12 Years a Slave raked in the accolades, but I still remain uneasy about this fact. 

The film is certainly uncompromising and exacting in its quest to depict the horrors of American slavery, and packs in some fantastic performances – most notably from its lead, Chiwetel Ejiofor – but McQueen betrays his origin as a visual artist when he refuses to wrench a properly dramatic story out of the memoir which serves as its source material. Instead, he piles on one violent or miserable set piece over another, and the effect somewhat ends up resembling Mel Gibson’s The Passion of the Christ. Read: it’s a painfully self-important film whose violence becomes numbing rather than attention-grabbing, because it’s just so repetitive. 

As far as Oscar-nominated based-on-a-true story flicks go, I would much rather give my vote to the Malta-filmed Captain Phillips. Starring a never-better Tom Hanks, the sea-bound thriller in which the titular Captain is forced to defend his crew from Somali pirates – led by the tetchy Muse, who is played with intense, prickly panache by first-time actor Barkhad Abdi – is a sly piece of political commentary as well as being a very satisfying nail-biter. Director Paul Greengrass makes sure you notice that unfair distribution of wealth is a big part of what enables modern piracy. 

Seriously, there’s tons of films out right now. Most of them rubbish. And there’s no way I’m missing out on my HBO shows in favour of some half-baked rom-com or actioner Teodor Reljic

As far as thrills go, however, it’s going to be hard to beat the space-bound spectacle of Alfonso Cuaron’s Gravity, in which George Clooney and Sandra Bullock play astronauts who find themselves adrift outside the Earth’s orbit. Though it’s certainly admirable that Cuaron never cuts back to the home planet for explanatory scenes, and neither is the film’s status as a technical masterpiece ever placed into doubt, it’s hard to think of the film as anything other than a dazzling rollercoaster ride. There is an existential underpinning to Bullock’s journey, but this arrives far too late and feels tacked on. 

But it’s been a good year for science fiction, because the Spike Jonze-written-and-directed quirky romance Her is also in the running for a Best Picture gong, and deservedly so, if this cranky, jaded Oscar-observer may say so. In a near-but-far future, Joaquin Phoenix’s Theo falls in love with his operating system (voiced by Scarlett Johansson) who reciprocates his love in kind. Though the greatness of Jonze’s film is down to how he doesn’t present this relationship as some kind of creepy oddity, but as a genuine meeting of hearts and minds, the complications that do ensue are both familiar and curious. A superbly acted feat of the imagination that is also emotionally devastating, Her deserves the lion’s share of the accolades. 

That’s not to say that Martin Scorcese’s The Wolf of Wall Street doesn’t deserve some attention too. By all accounts an excessive film about excess (it runs over three hours in its quest to depict the debauched life of unrepentant Wall Street fraudster Jordan Belfort), it’s impressively commited to its task. Scorcese resolutely does NOT act his age, giving us a film that appears to run on the same engine as Goodfellas, only souped-up for accelerated torque. It’s brash, hilarious, and politically incorrect to a hilt. Which is probably why it won’t be looked at kindly by the prissy Academy. 

So, dearest readers... I won’t make any predictions, but I think my prejudices have been made quite clear. On a scale of one to ten, how pissed off will I be in a few weeks time, do you think? 

Oscar fun facts 

The films with the most Oscar wins are Ben-Hur, Titanic and Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King, each winning 11 Oscars from 12, 14 and 11 nominations respectively. 

In total, the Middle-earth series (The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring (2001), The Two Towers (2002) and The Return of the King (2003) - and the The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey) won 17 Oscars out of 33 nominations. 

Daniel Day-Lewis has won the most Best Actor awards, with 3 awards (1989, 2007, 2012). 

Jack Nicholson leads the Best Actor Academy Award category with wins from 11 nominations, followed by Laurence Olivier, nominated 10 times and receiving one Best Actor award, and then Spencer Tracy with nine nominations resulting in two awards. 

Meryl Streep had more Best Actress nominations than any other actress; 14 in total, leading to 3 awards. Katharine Hepburn received 12 nominations for Best Actress and won 4 Academy Awards. 

Shirley Temple is the youngest performer to receive an Academy Award; in 1934 she received a Special Award when she was only five years old. 

The first animated film to be nominated for a Best Picture Oscar was Disney’s Beauty and the Beast, in 1991. The award went to Silence of the Lambs but Beauty and the Beast won 2 Oscars: Best Original Score and Best Original Song. 

In 1937 Disney won a special Oscar for the first full-length animation: “Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs.” 

Keeping it in the family 

Carmine Coppola won Best Original Dramatic Score, The Godfather in 1974; Francis Ford Coppola won Best Original Screenplay for Patron (1970), Best Adapted Screenplay, The Godfather (1970), Best Picture, Best Director and Best Original Screenplay, The Godfather: Part II (1974), and Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation won for Best Original 

Screenplay in 2004; Nicholas Cage, Francis Ford Coppola’s nephew, won Best Actor for his role in Leaving Las Vegas, in 1995.