The Oscar night is also the Oscar-bashing night. It was always the night (or morning, in our time zone) of constant bemoaning and condescension, because the Academy voters, like most voters, always get it wrong, at least to million others around the world who believe, in our collective delirium, that we have a stake in this pageant taking place somewhere in Los Angeles. Things have taken a turn for the worse with the snap judgement made possible by social media; now the outrage and disbelief are so raw since they're aired in real time, on Facebook and Twitter, like I did last year when I was convinced that it was against every law of nature that Birdman, a well-crafted display of pretension and self-obsession, won over the more delicate Boyhood.
The Look Of Silence, showing at SF CentralWorld now, is up for Best Documentary.
But then again, Citizen Kane didn't win (How Green Was My Valley won in 1941) and Taxi Driver didn't win (Rocky won in 1977, a strong year). Much more shocking, to give another stinging example, was when The King's Speech beat out The Social Network in 2010, a joke that only grew worse when the nonsense of it all sunk in. Who'd even want to watch that film now even if it was shown on TV, where it belongs in the first place? Cinematic injustices litter history like other injustices.
Somehow the Oscars inspire such passionate sense of involvement because their nominations (or absence, such as Carol -- were they on drugs not to nominate the film and director Todd Haynes?) are the common indices of global culture, of the way taste informs and influences the stakeholders, meaning us. The Oscars -- for all its worthy and ridiculous winners of the past 87 years -- is a triumph of the middlebrow. Art is too high and kitsch is too low (in fact the highbrow and the lowbrow are having a conference, since they both claim the right to snobbery in their own ways). So as it happens more and more, the "respectable" wins the Oscars -- the films with no risk, the films that can rally support through campaigns and lobbying among Hollywood voters. As it is, the Oscars are the most democratic awards of all since they're decided by ballots cast by a large number of people -- curiously the same system that may make Donald Trump the next President of the US, and Trump is not even as respectable as the grizzly bear that chews off Leonardo DiCaprio in The Revenant. Those who vote for Trump should be eligible to vote for the Oscars -- now that would be interesting.
In this race to become the most respectable and the least offending, The Revenant emerges as the front-runner, dear God, for I don't wish to become a moaner for the second year in a row. This is strictly a middlebrow enterprise, which is not a negative quality in itself, only when it gives all the appearance of being something more, loftier, holier, than it actually is and can be. The craftsmanship is commendable, a distraction from the empty core. And now it happens that the main obstacle that may prevent director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu from winning again is the fact that he already won last year -- no director ever made it back to back at the Oscars -- a historical and sentimental deterrent that has nothing to do with the value of the film.
On the respectability department, I would vie for Spotlight, a solidly crafted journalism drama that pushes no envelope and yet has the classical element of old Hollywood. But it won't be fun if Spotlight wins -- in truth, the Oscars have long stopped being fun -- and thus I lay my card on the red carpet. In the Best Picture and Best Director, I root for the wild desert ride of Mad Max: Fury Road, followed by the wild Wall Street ride of The Big Short. At least these two don't spend much time worrying about respectability, films of spontaneous vitality rather than pseudo-sophistication, films that are, well, slightly crazy, and most of all they are films that weren't conceived with Oscar glory in the marketing plan.
There's no way Mad Max will win Best Picture -- it would be too frivolous for the tuxedoed voters -- but there's a chance that George Miller may win Best Director. Mad Max harks back to that pure, primeval quality of cinema: it's all about framing, editing, motion, the heedless thrust of the narrative and the momentum. Hailing from the Australian desert, it is also the least self-important film in the nomination, and that alone merits its place among the narcissists.
The major categories shouldn't yield any surprises, and even the Best Foreign Language race -- the Academy's idea of "world cinema" -- seems like a lock. The bets are all on Son Of Saul (opening in Bangkok this week in limited cinemas), a Hungarian holocaust drama whose technical bravado is undeniable and yet its calculating effort is transparent. My personal pick would be Embrace Of The Serpent from Columbia, again because it's a slightly crazy film about the invisible wounds of colonialism, religious zealots, and Amazonian magic plants. Like Mad Max, it's a road movie guided by a shaman, only that it's a canoe here, gliding along a trippy voyage into the heart of darkness.
It's a joke, which sounds like a cliché, which in turn sounds like a fact, that the best film rarely wins the Oscar. In the documentary department, the best film is Joshua Oppenheimer's The Look Of Silence -- that it has made the cut already restores our faith in the Academy! This is the second part of the harrowing investigation into the insane killings of "communists" by paramilitary assassins during Suharto-era Indonesia. The first part, The Act Of Killing, also in the final five last year, was a baroque theatre in which the executioners proudly act out their gruesome murders for the camera. The Look Of Silence, which is showing at SF CentralWorld, is a sober, heartfelt and even more chilling film in which the family of the victims confronts the killers. True to form, this film isn't a front-runner -- the bookies put their money on the Amy Winehouse's bio-docu Amy and the Tex-Mex drug saga Cartel Land (both were released here).
Injustice, cinematic or otherwise, litters our history. The Look Of Silence perfectly reminds us of that fact, and the injustice shown in the film carries far heavier weight, morally, physically and spiritually, than whatever injustice Oscar night will perpetrate on its stars and audiences.
