Today’s the day Academy Award nominations are released so I bet you all still have that at the top of your minds, but we’re going to avoid talking about who did (or didn’t) get nominated since there’s already a thread devoted to it.  Instead, I want to talk a bit why this silly, masturbatory ceremony means so much.  Not to denigrate it, but to hold it up as something of value even as it inevitably nominates and awards unworthy films (the PGA awards fill me with dread) and artists (not sure they can top giving an award to a rapist for his self-congratulatory garbage, but you know, positive thinking).

The Oscars, which were first presented in 1929 for films from 1927 and 1928, have long held the status as the most prestigious prize in film.  That ninety-year history also serves as an important historical time capsule for judging just how we view films over time, or at least how we view the concept of a great film.  We can watch it evolve from (perhaps All Quiet on the Western Front excepted) a more crowd pleasing, most impressive production sort of award into something more resembling the current award in the mid-1940s with films like The Lost Weekend, The Best Years of Our Lives, Gentleman’s Agreement, etc. that tackled serious social issues in a serious way.  There’s been a push and pull between the two (appealing to the popular demand and critical community) ever since and while not all those films (nominated or winning) have held up in either category, the longevity and continuous prominence of the award will always make any film nominated an essential part of the film discussion.

I’ve mentioned quite a few times the Sight and Sound Top 250 List and last week why it was an important goal for myself to see them all.  In short, it’s about as good a baseline into film knowledge for a serious film fan as there exists for any faults it has.  The Academy Awards offer a similar, imperfect place in history, chronicling the American film experience.  Sure, there’s a Foreign Language Film category and occasionally those films break out into other categories, but it still has a uniquely American perspective for better or worse.  The Best Picture winners have plenty of failures in there (from Cimarron and Cavalcade to Out of Africa and Crash), but for those looking to get into film, it’s still a heck of a starting place and thanks to its position in the American culture, it will be for a lot of people.

With the film conversation moving faster than ever and small films missing many locals, the great films tend to get lost in the shuffle, quickly disappearing under a wave of other titles.  There’s the deluge of end of year lists for film fans like myself to populate our watchlists with movies we missed, but none of them can quite capture the national attention like the Academy Awards.

The Academy Awards are the one time of year where the film industry can gather its notes together and put forth an annual review to millions of people.  A chance to make millions care about small titles that they never would have looked at once (let alone twice) otherwise.  To make them, if only for a second while they wait for the categories they care about, appreciate that there are a ton of things that go into making the movies they see.  To make people talk about Film and bring these serious issues like representation and depictions of minorities and women to the fore.  The event itself may be a tedious bore whose enjoyment is paradoxically decreased the more you know about the films, but I still argue that as both a historical document and cultural tool, it is essential.

That all brings me to this week’s topic, a positive one amidst all the surely inevitable talk about snubs and unworthy noms (talk which I will be struggling to hold back on), what’s a film that you discovered because of the Academy Awards?

For my answer, I’ll stick with a recent one in On Body and Soul.  There are so many well received foreign movies every year that I just can’t hope to see all of them (especially considering how few make it to a theater near me), but since I have made it a habit again to see every film I can on the Oscar ballot in recent years, it was a film I made time for.  I’m glad I did too because it managed to be one of my favorite films from 2017, telling a romantic drama about two lonely people that added enough oddness to appeal to me without going too far into the artiness with the exploration of its characters dream state for me to find it alienating.  It’s compelling in concept, visuals, and acting and well worth a look for those interested in a non-traditional take on the genre (Netflix).

Doc Pick of the Week

There were actually two notable documentary releases this week (see below), but since I chose to watch neither, I can’t put them in this trial section.  It’s been a very doc heavy week for me (in no small part because I’ve been going through my 30 for 30 DVDs) which makes picking just one difficult.  Not because there were a lot of great candidates, there really weren’t, it’s because none of the four relative highlights stood out all that much.

The only memorable one was 1957’s A Dancer’s World (1957) (Watch TCM) though I’ll admit that there’s not much to this short doc that runs only a half hour.  Aside from choreographer and teacher Martha Graham waxing poetically about dance and dancers occasionally, the film is merely dancers dancing to music in a studio and nothing more.  That dancing is immaculately and starkly shot however, and I found myself transfixed by it.  I guess if you are looking for something more substantive you can’t go wrong with Land of the Free (2017) (Starz) a doc about former convicts, but it just didn’t do much for me to differentiate itself from all the similar ones I’ve seen recently.

This Week in TCM

Sights and Sounds from the Critics Top 250

Last Year at Marienbad (1961) dir. Alain Resnais – (Critics Poll – 109, Directors Poll – 105):  Remember when I alluded earlier to the faults of the list.  Well, the list is filled to the brim with works that lean towards the experimental.  Sometimes it works, sometimes it just really tries my patience, but most of the time I’m just left as I am here.  I can appreciate what Resnais and writer Alain Robbe-Grillet were going for with their surrealism and ambiguity, and I can find plenty of the visuals absolutely gorgeous, all while remaining cold to the film as a whole.  A film I’m happy I didn’t try to understand so much as just wash over me, but I just didn’t click.  I’ll stick with Resnais’s previous title, Hiroshima Mon Amour.

The Week in Movie Reviews

– WTF ASIA 39: Pushpaka Vimanamu (1987)
– BnB Shame #8: DOA: Dead or Alive (2006)
– Millennial Malaise 02: Sneakers
– Movie Review: The Standoff at Sparrow Creek (2018)
– IO (2019)
– Awash in the Stream: Fyre Festival Double Feature Special
– Building Entertainment: The Animated Films of the Walt Disney Studio. Pixar Edition. Incredibles 2

Finally,

What have you been watching and what did you think of it?