Films/DVD Asylum

Posted by Harmonia (A) on March 27, 2005 at 13:23:37

In Reply to: Re: You don't have to be one of the religious right to dislike M$B posted by RGA on March 26, 2005 at 19:31:14:

Especially a certain kind of fuzzy-brained scmaltz - I hated Life Is Beautiful and A Beautiful Mind - heck, I don't even like ET.

It was rather sad, but not surprising that the soft/silly Finding Neverland was nominated instead of the excellent Vera Drake. This year, I was rooting for The Aviator, which I though was a fine piece of bravura filmmaking. But sentimental it ain't, and sentimental is an easier sell to AMPAS. It's obscene to me that Kevin Costner and Mel Gibson each have a directing Oscar, and Clint Eastwood two, and Scorsese none.

OTOH, Marty is in good company - many of the greatest directors of all time never won a directing Oscar, including Hitchcock, Chaplin, Kubrick etc. Indeed, there are far more great films that didn't win for BP or BD than there are great films that did.

To be fair, that's not what Oscar is about. The Academy Awards actually have little to do with the "best film" of any given year, whatever the heck that is. (I personally feel you need time and distance to ultimately determine that.) Oscar is an industry award, geared toward a rather narrow range of commercial cinema, especially U.S. studio product. It's more about film business than film art. And that's fine, as long as we remember that the Oscars are a Hollywood popularity contest and nothing much to do with art for the ages.

As much as I love theater (and I really do, although I don't perform anymore, I do get to local productions, Chicago and NY fairly often) I expect theater and film to use different language - each medium is equally thrilling but different in nature. As far as commercial theater, I loved Steel Magnolias off Broadway with the original cast, but didn't muich care for it conflated to an all-star chick-flick. (You can't get much more sentimental than that.) However, my favorite drama on stage - Shakespeare, Stoppard, Ibsen, Shaw, Moliere - is hardly sentimental either. (In fact, I don't quite understand how a stage background makes one more accepting of falseness in film.)