What Should’ve Won That Could’ve Won: 2007

The Year: 2007
What the Nominees Were: Juno, Michael Clayton, No Country for Old Men, Atonement, There Will Be Blood
Other Movies That Should Have Been Considered: Nope, that’s a great list.

What Did Win: No Country for Old Men
How It’s Aged: It’s brilliant, one of the best movies of the 21st century. Certainly one of the most chilling villains ever presented. And yet…

What Should’ve Won: There Will Be Blood
How Hard Was the Decision: Extremely hard. How could I take away such a deserving Oscar win? But There Will Be Blood is even better. If I could move either of these by a year either way, they would both easily win.

Director: Paul Thomas Anderson
Writer: Anderson, very loosely based on the novel “Oil!” by Upton Sinclair
Stars: Daniel Day-Lewis and Paul Dano

The Story: In 1898 silver prospector Daniel Plainview discovers oil instead and shifts focus. When his shady practices kill one of his men, he adopts the man’s toddler son, H.W. Later H.W. is deafened in another accident, and his relationship with his father becomes more and more strained. Meanwhile, Daniel gets into an longstanding struggle with a preacher named Eli Sunday, resulting in a death-by-bowing-pin.

Any Nominations or Wins: It won Actor and Cinematography, but lost Picture, Director, Adapted Screenplay, Art Direction, Editing and Sound Editing.
Why It Didn’t Win: The Academy had unwisely passed over Fargo and now the Coens were overdue, so this movie just couldn’t compete with No Country for Old Men.

Why It Should Have Won:

1. Anyone whose read “The Jungle” won’t be surprised to hear that, in Sinclair’s novel, the anti-drilling heroes turn to socialism, but Anderson eliminates all that here (as well as all reference to the real-life Teapot Dome scandal). Instead, Anderson crafts a story similar in feel to that of a different muckraking novelist, Frank Norris, whose “McTeague” became the legendary silent movie Greed. Ultimately, Anderson was right to make the story his own. No one in the movie has the moral standing to heroically denounce Daniel, but the viewer sees enough to do that ourselves.
2. Usually, when I walk out of movie talking about its intrusive score, it’s because I didn’t like it (I’m looking at you, Hans Zimmer). This is one of the rare movies where the score is very noticeable and I actually loved it. Radiohead’s Johnny Greenwood makes the whole movie weirder and more discordant than it would have been, which is all to the good. (Anderson gives Greenwood a great showcase by having no dialogue in the first 15 minutes, which have a similar feel to a previous winner of mine, 2001: A Space Odyssey.)
   
3. Noted Hollywood asshole Quentin Tarantino recently picked a fight with this movie for no reason, claiming that it was ruined by a bad performance from Dano. I have no idea what he’s talking about. Dano is brilliant. Yes, it’s hard to compete when you have every scene opposite a never-better Day-Lewis, but Dano’s counterforce keeps those scenes crackling with life.
   
4. Wikipedia takes Daniel at his word when he says that he only adopted H.W. to make himself more appealing when he showed up to buy people’s land, but I don’t believe it. Daniel spends the whole movie looking for family, and it’s only when H.W. rejects him for the last time that Daniel lashes out with that claim. Yes, Daniel is an utterly evil psychopath, but that doesn’t mean that he doesn’t desire love and belonging as much as the next man, though he’s incapable of receiving it.
5. My favorite line from the movie is when Eli asks Daniel for money at the end and then adds “plus the five that is owed to me, with interest.” In the war of humiliations that has escalated between the men, Daniel had previously been “forced” to make a five thousand dollar donation to Eli’s church, but of course, it turns out he never paid it, because we all know that the secret of getting rich in America is to never pay your debts. And you scarcely even need to bury to succession of dead bodies you leave behind. No Country for Old Men may be an equally good movie to this one, and it’s got a great villain, but I find Daniel even more compelling, and I think he speaks to our real life national pain better, so I’ll give it to this one.