So you see every day, every week, every month and every year of my life, my hero's always 10 years away.

Oscar Winners 2014

That the biggest event of this year’s Oscars ceremony is a selfie probably says it all (and that it’s already been parodied into the ground probably says even more). Until they get a presenter in with enough disrespect for the whole bloated behemoth that passes for evening’s entertainment, Oscar is consigned to being an annual damp squib/endurance test. As with last year I got the big one wrong, but a tally of 16 out of 24 isn’t at all bad. My random guesswork may be improving (only 11 right in 2013).

Best Picture

Winner: 12 Years a Slave

I called Gravity, partly on the grounds of Cuarón being a lock for director. Surprisingly (as in, it’s not that common) the Academy picked a movie that didn’t get Best Director, as per last year. The uber-rich, pampered elite soothed their troubled consciences by giving the gong to a worthy picture this time out, one that can join the ranks of Gandhi, Schindler’s List and er… Crash as really being about something important. It’s the sixth winner since 1990 not to also take Best Picture. Did it deserve the award? I don’t think it’s as remarkable as some attest, but aside from The Wolf of Wall Street it’s probably the closest to a good fit. Also of note, and perhaps a harbinger of things to come, it joins last year’s Argo was a Best Picture winner amassing only three Oscars in total. The only other Best Picture winner since 1976 to share so few is Crash.

Best Director

Winner: Alfonso Cuarón

As noted, a shoe-in. I think his work on Children of Men is more interesting (it helps that it’s a much better movie), but there’s no doubting the virtual virtuoso skill of Gravity’s director.

Best Actor

Winner: Matthew McConaughey

McConaughey’s on a high, and this was an easy call despite the sterling competition. His acceptance speech was quite a feat of self-promotion (along with God-promotion, creating nearly as many column inches), as wittily noted by The Colbert Report.

Best Actress

Winner: Cate Blanchett

The Woody worry didn’t end up losing Cate the title. With two awards she’s probably close to sealing the deal as the new Meryl. Not that the old Meryl’s gone anywhere.

Best Supporting Actor

Winner: Jared Leto

This is one award I expect to do zero for the winner’s cachet. A bit like Cuba Gooding, Jr.

Best Supporting Actress

Winner: Lupita Nyongo’o

Lupita has already gone on to bigger and better things. Exhibit A: Non-Stop. Nice to see Jennifer Lawrence (ain’t she adorable?) having fun with losing too.

Best Original Screenplay

Winner: Her

I was surprised by this (I called American Hustle, which didn’t really deserve it). There haven’t been a whole lot of really great winners in this category in the last decade (exceptions are Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and Midnight in Paris, both idiosyncratic tales like this). I should go and watch it I suppose, so I can actually give an informed opinion.

Best Adapted Screenplay

Winner: 12 Years a Slave

Oohhh. Controversial. Not for winning, but for the evident ill feeling between John Ridley and Steve McQueen. Never incur a writer’s wrath. Although, unless you’re writer-director, it’s kind of inevitable.

Best Cinematography

Winner: Gravity

Lubezki’s sixth nomination, so a win is well overdue. I’d have given it to him for The Tree of Life or Children of Men (or both).

Best Costume Design

Winner; The Great Gatsby

Shiny pretty duds won out. Not a great shock.

Best Sound Mixing

Winner: Gravity

What’s to say? Space is a noisy place.

Best Film Editing

Winner: Gravity

Good editing here, even when there isn’t any (like one long, continuous take). I went with Captain Phillips. Big mistake.

Best Sound Editing

Winner: Gravity

For Gravity, see Sound Mixing above. For my pick, see Film Editing above.

Best Visual Effects

Winner: Gravity

But of course.

Best Make-up

Winner: Dallas Buyers Club

A reward for invention on a ridiculously low budget, which is always nice to see.

Best Production Design

Winner: The Great Gatsby

More shiny, shiny, pretty, pretty.

Best Original Song

Winner: Frozen

Apparently smart money was on Bono’s borefest (he looked nonplussed) I thought it would be Pharrel Williams. Instead they went for Disney by-numbers. It seems as if they always bag it, but the last example was Tarzan in ’99 (from baldy Collins no less). Prior to that it was just embarrassingly regular (’89, ’91, ’92, ’94, ’95).

Best Original Score

Winner: Gravity (Steven Price)

Price’s first nom and first win there.

Best Animated Short

Winner: Mr Hublot

Disney didn’t get it! Count me shocked, if I could muster such a response in the animated feature category.

Best Documentary Short

Winner: The Lady in Number 6: Music Saved My Life

Always bet on the Holocaust.

Best Live Action Short

Winner: Helium

The Voorman Problem lost out to heartwarming. Heartwarming’s good, I guess.

Best Documentary Feature

Winner: 20 Feet from Stardom

Fuck knows what happened here. Perhaps the Academy thought they’d done their bit for worthy subject matter and wanted to celebrate something close to their entertainment marrow. Or perhaps they tried to make it through the director’s cut of The Act of Killing.

Best Foreign Language Film

Winner: The Great Beauty

I’ve seen this now, and it very much is the Academy’s idea of a European art movie; an easy choice to festoon with garlands. It is actually very good, though.

Best Animated Feature

Winner: Frozen

Perhaps shockingly, perhaps not (since the award has only existed since 2001) this is the first “straight” Disney winner (rather than Pixar). One in the eye (that would be Mike Wazowski’s cyclopean eye) for Lasseter land, since Monsters University (rightly) didn’t even get nominated.

Comments

How would Horatio Alger have handled this situation?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) (SPOILERS) Gilliam’s last great movie – The Zero Theorem (2013) is definitely underrated, but I don’t think it’s that underrated – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could easily have been too much. At times it is, but in such instances, intentionally so. The combination of a visual stylist and Hunter S Thompson’s embellished, propulsive turn of phrase turns out, for the most part, to be a cosmically aligned affair, embracing the anarchic abandon of Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo’s Las Vegas debauch while contriving to pull back at crucial junctures in order to engender a perspective on all this hedonism. Would Alex Cox, who exited stage left, making way for the Python, have produced something interesting? I suspect, ironically, he would have diluted Thompson in favour of whatever commentary preoccupied him at the time (indeed, Johnny Depp said as much: “ Cox had this great material to work with and he took it and he added his own stuff to it ”). Plus

No matter how innocent you are, or how hard you try, they’ll find you guilty.

The Wrong Man (1956) (SPOILERS) I hate to say it, but old Truffaut called it right on this one. More often than not showing obeisance to the might of Hitchcock during his career-spanning interview, the French critic turned director was surprisingly blunt when it came to The Wrong Man . He told Hitch “ your style, which has found its perfection in the fiction area, happens to be in total conflict with the aesthetics of the documentary and that contradiction is apparent throughout the picture ”. There’s also another, connected issue with this, one Hitch acknowledged: too much fidelity to the true story upon which the film is based.

He’s so persistent! He always gets his man.

Speed (1994) (SPOILERS) It must have been a couple of decades since I last viewed Speed all the way through, so it’s pleasing to confirm that it holds up. Sure, Jan de Bont’s debut as a director can’t compete with the work of John McTiernan, for whom he acted as cinematographer and who recommended de Bont when he passed on the picture, but he nevertheless does a more than competent work. Which makes his later turkeys all the more tragic. And Keanu and Sandra Bullock display the kind of effortless chemistry you can’t put a price tag on. And then there’s Dennis Hopper, having a great old sober-but-still-looning time.

But everything is wonderful. We are in Paris.

Cold War (2018) (SPOILERS) Pawel Pawlikowski’s elliptical tale – you can’t discuss Cold War without saying “elliptical” at least once – of frustrated love charts a course that almost seems to be a caricature of a certain brand of self-congratulatorily tragic European cinema. It was, it seems “ loosely inspired ” by his parents (I suspect I see where the looseness comes in), but there’s a sense of calculation to the progression of this love story against an inescapable political backdrop that rather diminishes it.

You were a few blocks away? What’d you see it with, a telescope?

The Eyes of Laura Mars (1978) (SPOILERS) John Carpenter’s first serial-killer screenplay to get made, The Eyes of Laura Mars came out nearly three months before Halloween. You know, the movie that made the director’s name. And then some. He wasn’t best pleased with the results of The Eyes of Laura Mars, which ended up co-credited to David Zelag Goodman ( Straw Dogs , Logan’s Run ) as part of an attempt by producer Jon Peters to manufacture a star vehicle for then-belle Barbra Streisand: “ The original script was very good, I thought. But it got shat upon ”. Which isn’t sour grapes on Carpenter’s part. The finished movie bears ready evidence of such tampering, not least in the reveal of the killer (different in Carpenter’s conception). Its best features are the so-uncleanly-you-can-taste-it 70s New York milieu and the guest cast, but even as an early example of the sub-genre, it’s burdened by all the failings inherit with this kind of fare.

To survive a war, you gotta become war.

Rambo: First Blood Part II (1985) (SPOILERS?) I’d like to say it’s mystifying that a film so bereft of merit as Rambo: First Blood Part II could have finished up the second biggest hit of 1985. It wouldn’t be as bad if it was, at minimum, a solid action movie, rather than an interminable bore. But the movie struck a chord somewhere, somehow. As much as the most successful picture of that year, Back to the Future , could be seen to suggest moviegoers do actually have really good taste, Rambo rather sends a message about how extensively regressive themes were embedding themselves in Reaganite, conservative ‘80s cinema (to be fair, this is something one can also read into Back to the Future ), be those ones of ill-conceived nostalgia or simple-minded jingoism, notional superiority and might. The difference between Stallone and Arnie movies starts right here; self-awareness. Audiences may have watched R ambo in the same way they would a Schwarzenegger picture, but I’m

What do they do, sing madrigals?

The Singing Detective (2003) Icon’s remake of the 1986 BBC serial, from a screenplay by Dennis Potter himself. The Singing Detective fares less well than Icon’s later adaptation of Edge of Darkness , even though it’s probably more faithful to Potter’s original. Perhaps the fault lies in the compression of six episodes into a feature running a quarter of that time, but the noir fantasy and childhood flashbacks fail to engage, and if the hospital reality scans better, it too suffers eventually.

The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.

Hustlers (2019) (SPOILERS) Sold as a female Goodfellas – to the extent that the producers had Scorsese in mind – this strippers-and-crime tale is actually a big, glossy puff piece, closer to Todd Phillips as fashioned by Lorene Scarfia. There are some attractive performances in Hustlers, notably from Constance Wu, but for all its “progressive” women work male objectification to their advantage posturing, it’s incredibly traditional and conservative deep down.

One final thing I have to do, and then I’ll be free of the past.

Vertigo (1958) (SPOILERS) I’ll readily admit my Hitchcock tastes broadly tend to reflect the “consensus”, but Vertigo is one where I break ranks. To a degree. Not that I think it’s in any way a bad film, but I respect it rather than truly rate it. Certainly, I can’t get on board with Sight & Sound enthroning it as the best film ever made (in its 2012’s critics poll). That said, from a technical point of view, it is probably Hitch’s peak moment. And in that regard, certainly counts as one of his few colour pictures that can be placed alongside his black and white ones. It’s also clearly a personal undertaking, a medley of his voyeuristic obsessions (based on D’entre les morts by Pierre Boileau and Thomas Narcejac).

You don’t know anything about this man, and he knows everything about you.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s two-decades-later remake of his British original. It’s undoubtedly the better-known version, but as I noted in my review of the 1934 film, it is very far from the “ far superior ” production Truffaut tried to sell the director on during their interviews. Hitchcock would only be drawn – in typically quotable style – that “ the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional ”. For which, read a young, creatively fired director versus one clinically going through the motions, occasionally inspired by a shot or sequence but mostly lacking the will or drive that made the first The Man Who Knew Too Much such a pleasure from beginning to end.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

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