What the Nominees Were: Elizabeth, Life is Beautiful, Saving Private Ryan, Shakespeare in Love, The Thin Red Line
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Wes Anderson’s Rushmore and the Coen Brothers’ The Big Lebowski. Over in Denmark, the Dogme film movement hit a high mark with Thomas Vinterberg’s The Celebration, which certainly deserved a nod.
What Did Win: Shakespeare in Love
How It’s Aged: Personally, I like it a lot. A delightful little pastry combining 90s Rom Com tropes with a highly fictionalized version of the life of Shakespeare. A good movie that suffered from being named Best Picture, a bar it shouldn’t have had to clear.
How It’s Aged: Personally, I like it a lot. A delightful little pastry combining 90s Rom Com tropes with a highly fictionalized version of the life of Shakespeare. A good movie that suffered from being named Best Picture, a bar it shouldn’t have had to clear.
What Should’ve Won: Rushmore
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. It’s universally considered to be one of the great Oscar injustices that Saving Private Ryan didn’t win, so I just rewatched that movie…and I really hate it. “Greatest Generation” macho fan fiction, in which the only one who follows the Geneva conventions of course turns out to be a sniveling coward in battle, uselessly quivering as the German soldier they spared comes back and kills several of them. Way too long (three hours!), terrible score, very dated acid-washed color timing, gloopy acting from Hanks…Compare this to a vastly superior movie, The Big Red One (which I reluctantly passed over back in 1980), which tells a similar story, but this time written and directed by an actual veteran, and there’s a world of difference. Fuller has the genuine humanity that Spielberg sorely lacks. So that left Rushmore and The Big Lebowski. Believe it or not, of the two, I prefer this one. Lebowski is great, but a bit too shaggy-dog to rank up there with the Coens’ best, in my eyes.
How Hard Was the Decision: Hard. It’s universally considered to be one of the great Oscar injustices that Saving Private Ryan didn’t win, so I just rewatched that movie…and I really hate it. “Greatest Generation” macho fan fiction, in which the only one who follows the Geneva conventions of course turns out to be a sniveling coward in battle, uselessly quivering as the German soldier they spared comes back and kills several of them. Way too long (three hours!), terrible score, very dated acid-washed color timing, gloopy acting from Hanks…Compare this to a vastly superior movie, The Big Red One (which I reluctantly passed over back in 1980), which tells a similar story, but this time written and directed by an actual veteran, and there’s a world of difference. Fuller has the genuine humanity that Spielberg sorely lacks. So that left Rushmore and The Big Lebowski. Believe it or not, of the two, I prefer this one. Lebowski is great, but a bit too shaggy-dog to rank up there with the Coens’ best, in my eyes.
Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson (!)
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Olivia Williams, Bill Murray, Brian Cox
Writers: Wes Anderson and Owen Wilson (!)
Stars: Jason Schwartzman, Olivia Williams, Bill Murray, Brian Cox
The Story: Max Fischer is a scholarship student at an elite private school, where he runs all the clubs but neglects his grades. He strikes up a friendship with a school funder, Mr. Blume, and develops a crush on a Kindergarten teacher, Ms. Cross. When the dean kicks him out, Max ends up in public school, but he continues his schemes to get Ms. Cross. Instead, she falls for Bloom. Max tries to get revenge, but ultimately helps get them together and finds a girl his own age.
Any Nominations or Wins: Nothing! Not even Murray! Not even screenplay! Truly shocking. It won Independent Spirit Awards for Director and Supporting Actor for Murray. Murray was also nominated for a Golden Globe.
Why It Didn’t Win: This year is infamous as the year that Harvey Weinstein’s influence peaked and the dubious win of Shakespeare in Love has his fingerprints all over it. (Weinstein remains one of the most thanked people in the history of the awards) If Miramax had distributed Rushmore, would they have given this one that push instead? That’s an interesting “what if.”
Why It Didn’t Win: This year is infamous as the year that Harvey Weinstein’s influence peaked and the dubious win of Shakespeare in Love has his fingerprints all over it. (Weinstein remains one of the most thanked people in the history of the awards) If Miramax had distributed Rushmore, would they have given this one that push instead? That’s an interesting “what if.”
Why It Should Have Won:
- I fell in love with Wes Anderson when this movie was released and he’s still my favorite working filmmaker today. (If you were to ask Reddit to create a Mount Rushmore of the greatest directors working today, it would surely be Nolan, Villeneuve, Fincher, and Tarantino. Each of those four men has made at least one good movie, but I find it so depressing that the style they share is the dominant one.) Anderson has a strong personality that has only asserted itself more and more in the years that have followed this one. Some find it twee, but I find it delightful, and, like Kubrick, the man is precise. Every prop is bespoke and intentionally placed. And they both know where to put a camera.
- We passed over Groundhog Day, but I’m glad to get to award another legendary Bill Murray performance here. The movies are only five years apart, but they marked different phases of his career, going from cocky leading man to world-weary supporting player. I adore his line reading when he tells Max he was in Vietnam and Max knows just enough to ask “Were you in the shit?” Murray considers laughing in the kid’s face, but instead quietly responds, “Yeah, I was in the shit.”
- Out of every movie I’ve seen, I identify with this (frequently awful) hero the most. Like him, I was a precocious kid with bad grades and too much interest in extracurriculars. Like him, I always befriended adults, then felt easily betrayed by them. Like him, I became marginally less insufferable only due to some big humiliations. Schwatzman’s bluster is infectious, but it’s wonderful whenever it gets punctured a little, such as when he suddenly loses all confidence and meekly asks the dean, “Couldn’t we just let me drift by...for old time’s sake?”
- In good movies, the hero must always choose between goods or between evils, rather than choose between good and evil. That choice is the theme. The theme of this movie is ambition vs. acceptance. As always, the hero must ultimately choose one over the other, but not be sure if he is right. Max chooses to scale back his ambitions in the end and accept some things about himself (“I’m a barber’s son.”) but he’s still mounting a ludicrously over-the-top play at his new, more modest public school. For my checklist, I identified various things he says that might qualify as a “false statement of philosophy” in the first half and a “corrected statement of philosophy” in the second half, but I realized there’s one statement he never abandons. He finds that Ms. Cross has transcribed a Jacques Cousteau quote: “When one man, for whatever reason, has the opportunity to lead an extraordinary life, he has no right to keep it to himself.” That remains true of Max throughout.
- Max tries to seduce Ms. Cross by reading David Halberstam’s “The Powers That Be” in front of her, which doesn’t work, but it does wonderfully establish his metaphor family: Midcentury public intellectual (“May I see some documentation?” “I don’t want to tell you how to do your job, but…”, “I strongly agree with your views,” and my favorite, when he adds “and whatnot,” to the end of a sentence.)
No comments:
Post a Comment