With the 80th Academy Awards just a couple of weeks behind us, I figured that this was as good a time as any (because it’s my first post for the NYFA) to evaluate this year’s Academy Awards. Let’s forget for a few minutes that every individual’s love of film is a subjective matter and perhaps giving awards to movies proclaiming the best this and that doesn’t necessarily make it so to the general public. After all I bet you could find a few people who have said that their favorite movie of the year is National Treasure 2: Book of Secrets and those very same people probably find most of the films nominated for Academy Awards to be utterly insignificant in their lives.
That being said, often times those with ballots seem to pick the award winners based on politics and appeal to that same general public, choosing the nominee that would make the best story come Oscar time. Perhaps the best example of this trend was several years back, when Julia Roberts took home the Best Actress nod for Erin Brockovich over an astonishing performance by Ellen Burstyn in Requiem for A Dream. The issue here isn’t necessarily that Burstyn’s performance was exponentially better than Roberts, (even though in my estimation it was) but that everyone and their mother knew that Roberts was taking home that statuette due to Roberts’ status as America’s sweetheart and the fact that she had been denied two previous times.
The fact of the matter is that Hollywood likes to play favorites and while this time was no different, as there were certainly favorites heading into the Oscar ceremonies; the major award winners were favorites not because of who they were but more so because of what they had done. With each scene in No
Country For Old Men, Javier Bardem’s every move left the audience wracked with tension, so much so that it was hard to recognize that he was an actor playing a role. Ditto for Daniel Day-Lewis, whose mesmerizing turn as Oil prospector Daniel Plainview in There Will Be Blood carried an entire film on it’s shoulders. There was no running subplot that these guys should win because they’d been there before. They simply won because they had done their jobs and done it well. They lost themselves in their roles and we got lost with them…and maybe became a little scared of them at the same time.
On the female side of the acting categories there were two nominees that seemed to have a potential storied path to Oscar glory in Ellen Page of Juno.and The Savages’ Laura Linney. Page, A young actress in her breakout role was semi-destined to take home Oscar gold. Everyone marveled at the fact that she was such a young actress who turned in an above average performance in an overly smart-alecky film. Barbara Walters tried to illustrate the chasm in the generation gap between Page and the rest of America by quizzically pondering about her ability to understand the music of the Moldy Peaches. Laura Linney’s story was that she was that of Oscar spotlight veteran faced with her 3rd nomination and thusly the 3rd time must in fact be a charm. More than lost in the shuffle of all
of that were Marillon Cotillard and to a lesser extent Julie Christy. Both Cotillard’s portrayal of Edith Piaf and Christy’s turn as a woman struggling with Alzheimers were scarcely seen within the North American border. However, that didn’t stop the voters from recognizing truly unique performances and sterling acting ability. In the end relatively unsung Cotillard came away with her first statuette.
When it came down to it for the biggest awards of them all, Best Picture and Best Director maybe it wasn’t such as surprise or shock that No Country For Old Men took home the coveted bald guy honors as it was nearly universally predicted as the odds on favorite. However, this wasn’t a case of a mega-grossing movie such as Titanic that earned a statuette because of its astronomical box office performance and universal epic appeal over movies that were perhaps all around better films. No Country For Old Men took home Best Picture, simply because of the fact that it’s a timeless meditation on right and wrong, good and evil, and the price we pay for being even slightly on the wrong side of that line. Above all, it was simply a great movie and that’s what the Oscar’s are supposed to do: Focus on giving out awards to great performances and great movies not to the circumstances surrounding them.
This post was written for the NYFA Film Industry Blog by Evan Kessler.
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