[UPDATED March 5, 2009]
NOTE: I may update this post after seeing Avatar this afternoon. I doubt it, but maybe.
And the historic ex-husband/wife deathmatch nominees are:
- Kathryn Bigelow for Watch My Movie, Then Read What My Budget Was. I Think We're Done Here.
- James Cameron for I'm a Sanctimonious Hack Who's Really Good With Technology But Couldn't Come Up With an Identifiable Story With Sympathetic Characters Written Above an 8th-Grade Level if a Gun Were at My Head
- Lee Daniels for Not Very Good With Details
- Jason Reitman for I Try to Say I Love You, but My Self-Serious Bloviating Gets in the Way
- Quentin Tarantino for I'm a Fucking Badass
And the Oscar should go to...
Look, this is a no-brainer.
Again, full-disclosure: I haven't seen Avatar. But I have seen most of Cameron's body of work, and I've seen enough clips of Avatar to make me relatively confident in my assessment. James Cameron is a technical wizard. His eye for visuals possibly unparalleled. Creating the spectacles that he does, from Terminator to Titanic, is nothing to sneeze at, and nobody does what he does better. But a film is much, much more than visuals. What Cameron absolutely CANNOT do is come up with a storyline and characters that aren't laughable, and he absolutely ABSOLUTELY CANNOT write them in a way that isn't laughably, gut-bustingly shitty. He also isn't good at eliciting quality performances from his actors. Watch Titanic again. Kate Winslet is milquetoast and bland, and Kathy Bates is campy and over-the-top. We're talking about KATE FUCKING WINSLET and KATHY MUH-FUHN BATES here, people. If they can only achieve mediocrity in the same film, one has to wonder if something is foul in the state of Denmark. And it is. That thing is James Cameron. So far what I've seen of Avatar indicates it is Titanic 2.0--a spectacular visual and technical achievement that will re-orient the way things are done, but is ultimately lacking any heart.
[UPDATE]: So I finally saw Dances with Fern Gully and...well, I'm softening A LITTLE BIT. Now just relax. God. Here's the thing: Cameron's visual work in this film really is as spectacular as everyone says, to the extent that it will literally be the game-changer we've been hearing about. It is absolutely amazing--and I'm not easily impressed by mere visuals. He deserves every bit of the applause he's receiving for his technical work. Kudos.
But, Cameron's previous attempt at melding visual wizardry with heartfelt "depth", Titanic, he's come up short. Like Titanic, the story is banal, platitudinous and didactic, the script hokey and artless. Like Titanic, Cameron managed only to elicit performances that are wooden and transparent--including the likes of Sigourney Weaver, one of our finest actresses. (I'm excepting Zoë Saldana from this--since she's nothing but pixels from start to finish, it's hard to call. I laughed out loud at some of her line readings, but I didn't feel as if Saldana's work was the problem, rather that it didn't quite match up with the visuals--the whole thing looked a lot stranger than I'm sure she or anyone else realized.)
All in all, I think he's deserving of his nomination--but only his nomination. If I've said it once, I've said a thousand times: a film is more than pretty pictures.
As I've said in previous posts, I loved Precious: Based on the Hoodly-Hoo-Hah Whatevs, and if anything is crystal clear about director Lee Daniels it's that he has one hell of a knack for eliciting terrific performances from actors--even from Mariah Carey who is, no joke, revelatory in this film. But all that said, Precious: Longest Most Awkard Film Title Ever is rife with problems: a spectacular amount of continuity issues, boom mics popping up in frames and, most importantly, a directorial decision not to alter author Sapphire's book, despite its overwrought lackings. If God is in the details, Precious: Blah Blah Blah is a damned heathen.
Jason Reitman is, frankly, a self-serious blowhard and he drives me crazy. I think he's a good filmmaker--I don't care what all the overly cynical hipsterati say, Juno was a delight, and Thank You for Smoking is one of the past decade's cleverest cinematic romps. (Plus, hi, Aaron Eckhart. Who frankly should have been nominated for an Oxscar for his performance. And needs to report to my bed immediately.). However, his directing in Up in the Air (and Juno, for that matter) is hobbled by his own sanctimony and love for "depth", which I guess is a longhand way of saying he tries too hard. Up in the Air is another example of a film that, while wonderful, doesn't quite reach its full potential because its writer and director is just ever-so-slightly too convinced of his own brilliance to be able to see where his operation is lacking.
For my money, post-modernist genius doesn't get any better than Quentin Tarantino. You're going to laugh at this, but I'm serious: I love Tarantino for one of the same reasons I love Madonna. NOW SIMMER DOWN AND JUST LISTEN. Madonna is the sort of gal who has some kind of weird screw loose that allows her to, say, combine Weimar Berlin, A Clockwork Orange, and Sly and the Family Stone, even though they have nothing whatever to do with each other, and the end result turns out to be a cohesive bit of awesome instead of a random mess. Yes, yes, Madonna, from a technical standpoint isn't good at anything, whereas Tarantino is. Fine. I'm talking about both artists' intellectual and conceptual approach to their work, and their unique focus on referencing a million disparate things that came before them. In Inglourious Basterds, Tarantino takes Spaghetti Westerns and 1940s war films, tosses in some 21st-century historical irreverence, renders gorgeous tableaux, splatters them with cringeworthy viscera, tosses in a grinning Groucho Marx-south-of-the-Mason-Dixon Brad Pitt, stirs and bakes. The result is an off-the-wall romp that is funny, thrilling, suspenseful and even, despite expectations, poetic. On the other hand, Brad Pitt's performance is distracting in its schlockiness--an unexpected event of Tarantino going juuuuuust a touch too far--and there are moments when things don't quite seem to gel, and we're left briefly scratching our heads saying, "Wait...what are you actually going for here?" A bit more restraint would have served Tarantino well.
All things considered, this is an easy call to make.
What Kathryn Bigelow accomplished with The Hurt Locker is extraordinary. Every moment of the film is "just enough"; Bigelow never overshoots or underperforms, nothing is overwrought or underdeveloped. While the film has a very distinctive look--the camerawork is spectacular--it never gets in the way, and when Bigelow does put her self-restraint to the side and really go for arresting visuals, the results are pure genius--as arresting emotionally and intellectually as they are visually. Better yet, The Hurt Locker is like a master class on how to subtly, viscerally build suspense. (Her use of slow-motion in the film's first few minutes is something I rewound over and over and over again.) Most of all, though, Bigelow chose to make a film about war without an agenda or a viewpoint. She was smart enough to know that everything we need to know is already inherently there in the situations the camera captures, and putting us in the midst of it all is vastly more effective than adding her two cents. (Can you imagine what would have happened if Reitman had directed this one? Jeebus.) It's frankly heroic--and that's before you take into account that all of this was done for just $16 million.
Plus, who doesn't want to see Cameron beaten down by his own ex-wife.
WILL WIN:
I don't think it's necessarily a lock of Mo'Nique or Christoph Waltz proportions [UPDATE: especially having seen Avatar, which is just the sort of game-changing technical achievement that will distract plenty of the Hollywood establishment] but, you have a better chance of, like...I don't know, I've run out of implausible scenarios of sufficient pith and humor to make comparisons with, but Bigelow has won every director award so far and she's winning this one so suck it, Cameron, etc.
Further reading:
A terrific rountable series with this year's Best Director nominees at the Los Angeles Times's The Envelope
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