Oscars 2011: Keeping Sh*t Irrelevant for 83 Years and Counting!

Jesse Eisenberg should have stuttered more. And the rest of the cast should have been British. Maybe, then, the right film would have won Best Picture and not the obvious one. Because the reasons that The King’s Speech won Best Picture are just as arbitrary. The 83^rd annual Academy Awards went down with about as much surprise as one would come to expect from a group of cats, distracted by the film that was most recently bouncing a laser pointer against the nearest wall; it’s cute that they never learn, but my God, THEY NEVER LEARN.

The night started off promising, with ABC promoting an interview with Charlie Sheen that contained what is easily the greatest quote of 2011 and it’s only March: “I am on a drug – it’s called ‘CHARLIE SHEEN’!” But knowing this had pretty much nothing to do with the show kept my expectations tempered. Right out of the gate, AMPAS was quick to remind the free world that they are grossly out of touch with popular culture, kicking off the show with a filmed segment of hosts James Franco and Anne Hathaway going all Inception on Alec Baldwin and using that as a tool to jump in and out of famous scenes from this year’s nominated films, including some other surprises. The segment was charming enough, but I liked it the first time I saw it, back in 2003 at the MTV Movie Awards. Feeling the strange necessity to keep things stagnant, another video segment featured clips from various movies that were auto-tuned and cut to music. It’s as if one of the Oscar producers walked past his teenage daughter’s room while she was watching Antoine Dodson and had an epiphany. Auto-Tune the News is a brilliant hit to be sure, but it has been years since it was new and creatively exciting. The hosting in general was very blah, which is a larger criticism of the writing than the hosts themselves (though I’m pretty sure Franco dipped into his last bit of Pineapple Express before show time).
The awards themselves were just as awkward and uninsipired, as the “entertainment” segments surrounding them and did very little to make the show appeal to younger demographics, which is why Franco and Hathaway were chosen as hosts and films like Inception and Alice In Wonderland were up for awards. While all of the acting awards given out were pretty much locks, it was gratifying to see Natalie Portman, Christian Bale, and Colin Firth accepting their awards after years and years of churning out revelatory performances that were overlooked by the Academy. Aaron Sorkin’s win for The Social Network was also all but guaranteed, but again, was arguably the most deserved award of the night; Sorkin’s script is a work of art unto itself and will be eternally referenced and pored over by writers and scholars in the way that Casablanca is today. The producers of the show should be ashamed of themselves that they tried to play Sorkin off-stage via the orchestra after only 20 seconds of talking. Out of everyone in that theater, the one person whose words YOU SHOULD LISTEN TO AND FOCUS ON was getting the hook. Ridiculous.
The biggest surprise of the evening was the win pulled off by Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross for their score for The Social Network, which was an innovative, haunting masterpiece of sound and drama. With a little luck, this will embolden the duo to continue their work scoring films after their next team up with David Fincher via his remake of The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. And David Fincher. Oh, David Fincher. This was, without a doubt, the biggest upset of the night. That the prize for directing was not given to a director who had a persistence of vision, who took a story that existed in the ether and made it his own, but was given to the man who doled out a stiff, standard, glorified Masterpiece Theater film is a travesty that will not soon be forgotten. It is tantamount to the Academy nominating Moulin Rouge! for Best Picture, but not nominating Baz Lurhmann for Best Director. Or not nominating Christopher Nolan, for that matter, who has shown time and time again that he has greater control over his visuals and performances than grasp of the narrative and dialogue (the narrative and dialogue of which he DID get nominated for. WTF?). By randomly searching for any interview with Aaron Sorkin speaking to his experience working with David Fincher, he will humbly recall time and time again how Fincher took his “script” and turned it into a “movie” and you know what? He’s right. Fincher’s loss sadly falls into the political aspect of the Oscars; he’s known to be an iconoclastic, take-no-prisoners director. And there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s inspiring to see people like Fincher and Darren Aronofsky refusing to kowtow to the elite, to play the Hollywood game. They are mavericks working within the system, and they are sadly paying for their perspective on the business.
The King’s Speech’s win in the Best Picture category was all but a foregone conclusion for the last few weeks. The picture swept every guild award, which are more of an inclusive barometer than the Golden Globes will ever be. And after the SAG awards, the writing was on the wall. The epic faux pas of the evening (other than forgetting Corey Haim in the In Memoriam sequence) was the video segment put together to announce the Best Picture nominees; a thoughtfully constructed but ultimately huge F-U to every film BUT The King’s Speech. The segment belittled the nine other nominees by showing clips of the various films wrapped around the epic final speech scene from The King’s Speech. By burying all the other films in the piece under The King’s Speech, the Academy producers more or less screamed out “THIS IS OUR FAVORITE MOVIE EVAR!” and made it blazingly obvious that there is really no thought that goes into choosing winners, rather they go with what is comfortable or standard. It’d be like Fox, during the airing of the Super Bowl this year, putting together a big halftime montage showing the year in football highlights that kept cutting back to the Packers every 2 seconds, playing favorites through the power of editing. To be fair, if they did that with ANY of the films, it still would have been favoritism and in poor taste. People within the industry are going to be talking about this for years.
In my previous Oscar Picks article, I mention that The Social Network could be considered the Citizen Kane of this generation and I still defend that statement, particularly after its loss. Whether it was scripted or not, Spielberg said it best, stating that the “losing” films would be in the same company as The Grapes of Wrath, The Graduate, Raging Bull, and Citizen Kane amongst others, proving that the immediacy of an award is not always the real prize. That comes with a film’s legacy, something that The King’s Speech will likely be without, while The Social Network will thrive for decades to come, and that’s the real victory.