What a frenetically busy weekend it was in the handing out of shinies and sparklies and mantel-trinkets to chronically underappreciated movie people, who at other times of the year often have to survive for weeks without winning anything. Critics’ groups in Los Angeles, Boston, and San Francisco announced their honorees, as did online critics in New York; conclaves in Detroit and Houston revealed their lists; and the American Film Institute named its 10 best movies. That’s a lot of noise! All of these simultaneously live-tweeted prizelets are microtwitches in the Oscar race, and it’s true that come ballot time, no Oscar voter is going to find himself frozen in indecision, his pen hovering above his ballot as he frets, “But dare I go against Detroit?” However, it’s still possible to pull some larger trendlines from this surge of hyperbolic over-celebration of film achievement. And if it’s not, let’s pretend it is.
In thinking about the race for Best Picture this week I found myself drifting unhappily back to the 1980s, specifically to a stretch during which the Oscars reacted to an uncertain (i.e., post-Raging Bull) period in high-end American moviemaking by retreating to a safer, more virtuous and conservative definition of "prestige" films. In a period of just seven years, Best Picture Oscars were won by Chariots of Fire, Gandhi, Amadeus, Out of Africa, and The Last Emperor. Some of those movies were good, and all of them had their virtues. But collectively, all they told us about the world and times in which they were made is that apparently nobody in 1980s Hollywood wanted to think about 1980s America.
This year’s Best Picture contest is starting to feel afflicted by a similar sense of what I would call belligerent nostalgia. The two movies to win high-profile prizes so far, The Artist and Hugo, are both being hailed as odes to the early days of cinema. But really, they’re not. The Artist tells you everything it knows about the painful transition from silents to talkies in its first 10 minutes: It’s an undeniably charming but extremely slight comedy-drama that mimics the most basic elements of silents (They were black-and-white! The screen wasn’t wide!), but seems more engaged by their poignant quaintness than by the visual language, wit, beauty, complexity, or psychological richness of the movies it purports to honor. And as enchanting as it can be to enter the glittering, hermetically sealed but vividly three-dimensional toy chest/train station universe that Martin Scorsese has created in Hugo, there is something slightly self-adoring about the story it tells. Hugo is not a valentine to the dawn of movies — it’s a valentine to people who send those valentines, a halo placed lovingly atop the heads of cinephiles and film preservationists. (And, not incidentally, film critics and Oscar voters.)
Conventional wisdom says that, in times of economic uncertainty, audiences will seek the escapist comforts of light, edgeless movies — your Paul Blarts, your Smurfs, your Hangovers. So, as the New York Times wonders today, with a third Great Depression looming, what are the marketers at Warner Bros. to do with this fall's Contagion, the new Steven Soderbergh movie in which half the world dies from bird flu? Well, they certainly have one pretty good idea! To follow last month's trailer, wherein we learned that Gwyneth Paltrow's character — spoiler! — loses her battle with the disease, WB has released this new poster for the film (see it in full here), which features a pale, sweaty, bug-eyed Paltrow fighting for what are presumably her final breaths, promising moviegoers that on September 9 they'll be able to check their own troubles at the ticket counter and thrill to the sight of the GOOP editrix expiring from H5N1. Marketing crisis averted!
Does any of this strike you as vaguely familiar? If so, maybe you saw last year's Onion News Network video "Iron Man 2 Buzz Heats Up Over Rumors Gwyneth Paltrow Gets Punched In Face," a fake-news piece that jokingly suggested audiences might be excited to see Paltrow injured onscreen. Maybe they were on to something. Watch the Contagion trailer and the Onion video after the jump.
Put off by Gwyneth Paltrow’s trademark entitled breeziness? Her casually smug musings about the rigors of raising her rockstar children in an English mansion? Her sudden singing career? Her GOOP? Has Steven Soderbergh got a movie for you!
