Editor’s Note: In advance of Sunday’s telecast, former SW theater critic Steve Wiecking, now based in L.A., again joins his former colleague in assessing this year’s Academy Awards hype and hysteria.
Brian Miller The old adage is that the Oscars are the Super Bowl for people who don’t watch sports. But you know what? I watched exactly one football game this past season (the Super Bowl, obvs), and I say bring on more Katy Perry and her dancing sharks! Also Kanye West to pull a Grammy and startle some poor sound editor by yanking away his award for Beyonce’s sake. NPH seems too tasteful and sedate a host for our culture—someone your mom would like. Can’t we have more of a rowdy, populist, tailgate-and-facepaint Oscars for once?
Steve Wiecking I’m down with Neil. It’s the only thing he really does well, and I’m happy for him. The guy spent nine seasons on How I Met Your Mother trying to convince us he was a pussy hound. You want facepaint, watch the SAG awards. Emma Stone looked like the kid from Powder, and Michael Keaton was sprayed orange. I know you’re a frontrunner for an Oscar, but, geez, Mike, let’s keep the gold on the statue. Speaking of which, are we really down to him (in Birdman) and Eddie Redmayne (The Theory of Everything) for Best Actor, or is all the last-minute American Sniper hype happening here in Hollywood going to pull a Bradley Cooper surprise on us? You know how they like to sneak in an Adrien Brody every now and then.
BRM Cooper does die, which usually helps one’s awards prospects, but only off-camera. Brody was the hero of a Holocaust movie. And pacifist Academy members vote blue, not red. Sniper’s victory is at the box office: $250 million and counting. But on that subject, will anyone have the guts to call out that movie for its insane hard-on for guns? We can honor our troops and care about PTSD, sure, but the terrible irony to that picture is overwhelming: Traumatized gun nut kills traumatized gun nut in the end. So maybe it’s the guns at home, not the wars abroad, that are the real problem? Is Clint Eastwood smarter and more subversive than we give credit?
SW Eastwood is at home talking to a giant invisible rabbit, Brian. And showing it Play Misty for Me.
BRM For me, in the top-tier acting derbies, this is another disappointing Year of Affliction. Redmayne with ALS. Julianne Moore with Alzheimer’s (in Still Alice). Do these talented performers really sign up for such parts with Oscars in mind, or is just their handlers who steer them to malady movies?
SW I think actors and agents are in collusion on that one. To be fair, Redmayne and Moore did give the best performances in their respective categories—Redmayne transformed himself, and Julianne does wrecked grace better than anyone. But, yeah, getting sick, ugly, or crazy is still “Bingo!”
BRM I’m not saying that being gay is a handicap, but Benedict Cumberbatch going homo in The Imitation Game seemed dull and routine. Basically he was an emasculated, sexless Rain Man, a high-functioning Asperger’s case who helped win WWII. There was more gay content in The Interview, if you ask me.
SW Ha! Oh, yeah, there’s an unappetizing Rogen/Franco sex tape somewhere, I’m sure, and we’ll see it once James finishes tweeting photos of himself hitting the boy bars with Zachary Quinto. Live long and prosper, Spock, you lucky bastard. As for Cumberbottom, neither he nor Imitation Game really went gay, which is why neither deserved a nomination. That film had decades of can’t-miss controversy as source material, but scrubbed it of all outrage. I’m glad people now know who Alan Turing is, but the most affecting part of that film was the written epitaph at the end which finally explained why we should care.
BRM Yes, the postscript about his suicide was a dagger in the heart: another war hero, not unlike like American Sniper’s, killed by our uncaring culture. (Though “today we call them computers” was awfully clunky.) But I refuse to believe that Turing and all those Oxbridge dudes, confined for years together in the barracks, didn’t have some same-sex fun. This movie’s Turing, like so many of the Best Actress/Actor nominees, was too recessive—everyone’s so pent-up and constricted. Only Keaton (in Birdman) and Reese Witherspoon (in Wild ) were any fun. The rest were a noble, suffering snooze. Whatever happened to good old-fashioned c-c-c-razy?
SW There were exceptions. Steve Carell borrowed Nicole Kidman’s nose from The Hours and went all Peter Sellers with his bad self for some stellar crazy, don’t you think? My question for you: How many people were actually awake watching that film? And back to gay—did you think Carell’s character was literally humping Channing Tatum on the wrestling mat? Because it divided the house I saw it with.
BRM Yes, dry humping, then emission in his wrestling pants, which Tatum’s jock registers with equal parts disgust and sympathy. I thought Tatum was good, though he didn’t make the cut in the Supporting pack, where the races are always super-stacked and competitive. I have no problem with J.K. Simmons (Whiplash) and Patricia Arquette (Boyhood), both guaranteed to win. Yet both those wins will seem institutional—rewarding long careers in the trenches. Where’s the ingenue or fresh face this year? Or has Anne Hathaway spoiled that notion forever?
SW Hathaway has spoiled every notion she’s touched forever. I haven’t been so annoyed at having to call someone an Oscar winner since the days of Mira Sorvino. I wouldn’t be surprised or disappointed if Stone sneaks in an underdog win for Birdman, though. You know what fresh face got robbed? Miles Teller. That kid was better than Simmons in Whiplash. And while we’re at it, please explain how David Oyelowo got left out.
BRM Too many Brits (Redmayne, Cumberbatch) already in the top five. I honestly believe the Academy has a secret quota system, the way the Ivy League used to keep out the Jews. But if we can talk about Original Song, those will presumably be performed by the nominees (Common, John Legend, etc.). But poor Glen Campbell has been locked away in a memory ward with Alzheimer’s since completing the doc Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me. Does that mean that he, like Moore, will win?
SW No, and If that awesome Selma song “Glory” doesn’t take the award, you’ll get your Kanye moment.
BRM Another detour: The memorial reel for those Hollywood luminaries who died during 2014, Philip Seymour Hoffman perhaps being the most prominent. Is it wrong that this is my favorite part of the show? I feel like it’s the only time the Academy thinks about history and posterity: Look, Clooney and Jolie: this, too, will be your dusty fate. And who will you mourn the most? Harold Ramis hit me hard. Especially with another Ghostbusters coming this year.
SW Oh, that’s always the best part. When they do it right, I’m in tears. I miss James Garner—great actor, good liberal. But on a more cheerful note, what about the ads for the studios’ big forthcoming movies? I want to see teasers for all 18 movies Tom Hardy has coming out. That guy works as much as Franco, but he can actually act. And you?
BRM I want to see promos for the next Star Wars, Mad Max: Thunder Road, and the Point Break remake. (No more Judi Dench movies, please, unless she gets blown up in the Australian outback or a distant galaxy.) But let’s consider the serious nominees now. First, Best Director. Bennett Miller (Foxcatcher) and Morten Tyldum (Imitation Game) do not belong in the Group of Five. Boring, well-crafted movies, both of them. But Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu for Birdman? That guy did some work. Deserves to win, will win, or do you differ?
SW I really want Linklater to win for Boyhood. But, yes, Inarritu pulled off a true technical feat—hammy, to be sure, but loose and risky. He might pull an upset, and I wouldn’t be upset.
BRM Best Picture: I am so torn. I loved Boyhood for its 12-year humanistic commitment to craft, family, process, and the small-but-enormous moments we experience in quotidian life but have never been presented so artfully. Linklater is one of those filmmakers I’ve met several times and admire tremendously: a first-class dude. And I am forced to admit that Grand Budapest Hotel, though twee, is a great movie (or a great movie-in-a-bottle is more like it). But for me Birdman takes it: weird, watchable, human, unpredictable, and a technical marvel. Boyhood made me wet in the eyes, but it was a camera-on-the-tripod experience.
SW
Birdman was a director’s film, and I liked it, but Boyhood was the one that really flew for me. Anytime someone tells me that nothing happened in Boyhood, they go down a notch in my estimation. It’s like someone adoring Love, Actually. But enough about love—what Oscar omissions stir your righteous indignation, Brian?
BRM Those Belgian bastards who didn’t submit Two Days, One Night from the Dardenne brothers. Why, apart from cinema and cyclocross, does that country even exist? They should drop the “be” from Benelux. But so far as Oscar spectacle is concerned (again, I’m of the more-is-better camp), what award would you like to see added to the interminable evening?
SW The Tom Cruise Award for Most Convincing Run From an Explosion. There are dozens of such scenes every year, but Cruise is still the master.
bmiller@seattleweekly.com
