Calling the Splits

Serious Film's Michael C. here to ask an inconvenient question. As predictions are being finalized around the web it becomes clear that a large bloc, if not a majority, of pundits are predicting a picture/director split with The King’s Speech taking picture but David Fincher claiming the director trophy. 

No doubt there is some wishful thinking at play by those still stinging from The Social Network’s flame out at the guilds awards. “Okay, maybe those Philistine voters will deny Social Network the big prize but how could they bypass an established master like Fincher in favor of Tom What’s-His-Name?”

The King Speaks. (The king being Fincher. His movies do rule.

I don’t mean to throw cold water on a plausible scenario that I would much prefer to a Speech sweep, but the burning question is this: When has a picture/director split ever been predicted? The answer: No time I’m aware of.

Here are the 6 times in the last 30 years picture director split along with the expected winners going into the ceremony:

2005 - Crash/Ang Lee
Brokeback Mountain was widely favored to win both prizes. There was, to be fair, an inkling of a Crash win here and there, but the vast majority called it for Brokeback early on.

2002 - Chicago/Polanski
The conventional wisdom that the only thing preventing a Chicago sweep would be the urge to give Scorsese an overdue win for Gangs of New York. Instead we got a Polanski win predicted by exactly nobody.

2000 - Gladiator /Soderbergh
Pundits thought they saw a spilt coming this year as most predicted DGA winner Ang Lee to repeat at the Oscars but popular favorite Gladiator to take top honors. They were half right. Traffic’s Soderbergh blindsided Lee. 

1998 - Shakespeare in Love/ Spielberg
Do we need to go over this one again? Private Ryan was thought to be a lock for both prizes.

1989 – Driving Miss Daisy /Oliver Stone – The smart money was on Born on the Fourth of July to take Picture along with director. Miss Daisy pulled an upset.

1981 - Chariots of Fire/Beatty
If anyone was going to upset the epic Reds in the top category it was assumed to be box office hit On Golden Pond, not tiny, foreign Chariots of Fire.

And here are two more widely predicted splits that never happened:

2006 - Little Miss Sunshine or Babel /Scorsese
Many imagined that voters would be satisfied looking elsewhere for picture after finally giving Scorsese his due. Nope. They genuinely loved The Departed.

1995 - Apollo 13/Gibson
The prevailing mood was that DGA winner Apollo 13 would take picture and, since Howard missed a director nomination, the acting branch would carry Gibson to a directing trophy. Braveheart took them both.

Fincher supporters can take solace in the fact that splits appear to favor big name auteurs in the directing category, or that we're due for a split since they seem to occur about every five years. Other than that, history suggests either the most obvious of outcomes or a wild card that nobody sees coming.  

My knowledge of what was predicted gets hazy before the 80's. Is there some precedent for a Speech/Fincher split I'm missing? Let me know in the comments.

Distant Relatives: Jaws and True Grit

Robert here, with my series Distant Relatives, where we look at two films, (one classic, one modern) related through theme and ask what their similarities/differences can tell us about the evolution of cinema. Please note that hereafter be SPOILERS AHEAD.

Three characters in search of a killer

If there’s one notable difference between the original 1969 True Grit and the Coens’ version, it’s the sense of nihilism and meaninglessness in the world the Coens create. Of course the Coens have long been the kings of nihilistic worlds, and it says something that True Grit provides one of their most meaning filled realities. Still when all is done, in the Coen version, we’re left wondering what it was all worth. The John Wayne version, which suffers in no small part from being surrounded by a sea of bleak late 60’s cinematic masterpieces, feels more like a tale of good guys an bad guys. And while the Coen version has good guys and bad guys it feels more like a tale of how reality itself, the natural world is out to get us all.
 
But we’re not here to compare two versions of the same story, we’re here to compare distant relatives. Which brings us to a film where the natural world is quite literally out to get us, in the form of Steven Spielberg’s antagonizing great white shark (nicknamed Bruce) as it terrorizes the citizens of Amity island. Jaws and True Grit present us with all kinds of similarities in terms of structure, character and the eternal theme of mankind’s struggle against the natural world.

Both are revenge films, though there’s something that doesn’t seem quite right about that. They’re not in the same company as Mad Max or Kill Bill because the singular intense insanity of the vengeance-seeker is not the most integral element of the story here. In fact, there isn’t a sole vengeance seeker. In both cases there are three individuals who serve different purposes and convey a wide scope of what could posses a person to go out hunting for “justice.”

Rub a dub dub
 
We can start with the characters who get to be the audience's surrogate. Jaws’ Chief Brody (Roy Schieder) and True Grit's Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) have to present some sort of righteous motive for us to get behind. Mattie’s detached desire to avenge her father and Brody’s obssessive quest to kill a shark don’t exactly invite us to cozy up. But it’s the amorality of others around them that throw new  empathetic light on their pursuits. Those who have the power to bring about justice and prevent future bloodshed have no interest in doing so. So we have to get behind Mattie and Brody. Theirs may not be the best way, but it’s the only way.
 
When we discussed Midnight Cowboy and The Fighter, we talked about the relationships between cinematic duos and how the straight man/comic relief model has had lasting influence. We find in these two films that our teams of three follow a similar mold. The hero is our center, the most rational of the characters, the one whose desires we are most likely to understand. He or she is flanked on one side by a man with more “noble” motives like science or avenging the death of a Texas Ranger. This man is snarky, sarcastic, rather full of himself and his noble goals, though underneath harbors a somewhat more base motivation, money or pure adrenaline. We may call him our uber-hero since in his own mind he’s far more worthy of his cause than anyone else. On the other flank of our hero is our anti-hero, a man with an obsession, usually courtesy a past trauma. Anti-authority, often drunk and wild, he is not hindered by the morality of the other two men. By standard anti-hero rules, he has none. He cares not for the means only the ends. Perhaps it’s going too far to suggest an id, ego, superego connection. But there it is. Quint, Brody, Hooper. Rooster, Mattie, LaBoeuf. Anti-hero, hero, uber-hero.

Into the woods

Both films follow a similar structure too. The first kill, the inciting kill, happens as a prologue, before the main title even appears. Then an act’s worth of gathering evidence, momentum, and a posse and it’s off into the water or wilderness. Here, the randomness of nature is the enemy. And while it might seem odd to compare the instincts of a predatory animal to the free will of a man, consider Tom Chaney when we see him. He is practically an animal; gruff, dim-witted, hairy, smelly and quite frankly, a disappointment. If Bruce the Shark, by lack of a frontal cortex is no Tom Chaney, then Tom Chaney by lack of chutzpah and screen presence is certainly no Bruce the Shark.
 
In both cases, we’re left with the uncertainty of a happy ending. In terms of the prevention of future attacks, the sparing of future victims, indeed both missions are a success. But what of it? Jaws is a happy ending with a question mark, one where our rejoicing is tarnished by remembering what was lost, who was killed. True Grit is a happy ending with ellipses, one that gives us justice served and then follows it with the pointless onward march of time, lives suddenly devoid of a vengeful goal falling into parody or banality.

So, is there a reason why in thirty five years, happiness’s cold side dish has changed from sacrifice to uncertainty? We can consider the films’ directors. For Steven Spielberg, child of World War II, the long sad road to the other side of the rainbow is a constant recurrence in his films. Jaws, made in the waning days of Vietnam asks of the quest for justice “what is the sacrifice?” The Coens, prophets of pointlessness and futility, coming of age in the cold war, coming to prominence during the war on terror, make a film about the quest for justice and ask “what is the point?”

Oscar "P"s and Best Pic Convo

I'm here to direct you to two articles elsewhere. This time of year my candle burns from both ends.

Over at Fandor, Nick Davis and I were invited to have a discussion about the Oscars so we did just that. It's nice to be invited to something publicly that you're always doing anyway privately. In The Big Picture on Best Picture we're talking about the "types" in Best Picture, box office results, how well we think they did at captureing the film year, and more. Hope you enjoy. Meanwhile, over at Tribeca Film, for my penultimate Oscar column, notes on Presenters, Parties and Predictions.

The Highs and Lows of Oscar Afterglow

Kurt here from Your Movie Buddy

Even barring the obvious perennial faves like Meryl Streep and Randy Newman, don't the Oscar nominations continually feel like class reunions? For every John Hawkes, there's an Amy Adams. For every Aronofsy, a Coen brother. Of this year's nominees in the eight major categories (that'd be producers, actors, directors and writers), 20 of them earned prior nominations within the last six years. Now, this is of course partly due to the fact many of these folks are indeed the best in the business (if Scott Rudin promises to produce a movie like The Social Network every year, I'll start digging a mine just for the purposes of throwing gold at him), but it also joins December's annual jam-packed awards-bait schedule as further proof that the Academy's short-term memory dictates much of their decision-making.

And that can yield some positive outcomes for Oscar-watchers. Harvey Weinstein's gag-me-with-a-doily campaign for The King's Speech aside, Colin firth deserves every bit of the praise – if not, perhaps, every freakin' award – he's received for his heroic star turn, and if his recognition for A Single Man helped that along, then all the better. Likewise, if a recent victory at the Kodak podium is what caused a performance like Javier Bardem's in Biutiful to derail a veteran bone-throw to Robert DuVall, I'm all for it.

YOU AGAIN: Bardem, Firth, Bridges

But then there's the issue of undeserved honorees who choke out the worthy competition because of who they are and how freshly familiar they are among the comfort-over-quality voters. I don't think there's any way Melissa Leo's LOOK AT ME!! white-trash theatrics weren't going to get the attention they demanded, so I won't waste sentences describing my personal distaste for the performance (I know Nathaniel feels differently)and the belief that a Frozen River paved her road. But how about Jeff Bridges? Isn't his Rooster Cogburn, however amusing, a rather snoozy portrayal that would have been passed over if not for the newly-Oscared man behind the eye patch?

The Coens: Oscar's power coupleAnd what about those Coens? It's thrilling that their richly deserved No Country For Old Men win has given them carte blanche in Hollywood, but did they really need to be in the running yet again? They already snagged a preposterous, space-filling Best Picture nod last year with their most outre effort to date, and now they've unseated Christopher Nolan, which they themselves have acknowledged with innuendos. What's it going to take for them to alleviate all the Academy swooning? A black-and-white, foreign-language documentary about black transgendered prostitutes? (Get crackin', boys!)

Of course, this whole phenomenon isn't new (one need only look at the careers of guys like Tom Hanks and Johnny Depp for evidence of Oscar's afterglow tendencies), but it does seem to be an increasing norm, and not just because the nominees are pros in their primes. Per the pattern, we don't exactly need a crystal ball to envision which of this year's hopefuls may well be back in 2012. David Fincher has The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo, which already has the combination of proven craft and surefire box office to make it a contender. If Like Crazy can ride the same Sundance-to-Oscar wave as Winter's Bone, then co-star Jennifer Lawrence could find herself in the discussion again. And we're certainly all familiar with James Franco's output. Who's to say he won't be the next to shine in the afterglow light?

Fincher, Lawrence and Franco: Future afterglow beneficiaries?

Do you think Oscar afterglow is good? Bad? Both? Some of this year's nominees will surely be benefitting soon.