NOMADLAND

NOMADLAND is a truly beautiful, affecting and rightly award-winning film featuring a stunning performance from Frances McDormand. She plays a 60 something woman called Fern, caught like so many of her generation with insufficient savings to retire in the wake of the Global Finacial Crisis, and no job when the town's factory closes down.  No longer able to afford a home, Fern becomes a Nomad - a person living in their mobile home, driving from town to town looking for seasonal work, forming a bond of kinship with other nomads on the trail.

I had no idea that modern day Nomads existed, but their life is depicted here as a melancholy one. Aside from the financial stress and alienation from family members still living a conventional life, there seems to be the pervasive discussion of death.  Sickness has to be born without financial support or maybe even familial support. The people here are either grieving for the sick or dealing with sickness and death themselves - one describes movingly the impulse to suicide.

And yet there is much to be said for the community that the Nomads form. There's mutual support, care, teaching and companionship as they meet and part and meet again. It's interesting to see that while Fern's friend (David Strathairn) does choose a sedentary life when offered the chance, the choice is not so straightforward for Fern. There's a kind of impressive endurance and nobility to a life lived away from the constraints of the small town dominated by a single employer.

The nobility and resilience is expressed in Frances McDormand's moving and vulnerable performance as Fern as well as the real life Nomads she meets.  Writer-director Chloe Zhao's decision to foreground the real community, and to straddle the line between fact and fiction is an inspired one. It affords the marginalised visibility and dignity and McDormand is the perfect entry into that world given her empathy and curiosity as a performer. 

But I would also give special credit to cinematographer Joshua James Richard's beautiful depiction of the landscapes in which the Nomads live. The endless shifting-coloured sky - the feeling of fresh air and expanse. Maybe it's because I've effectively been at home for a year but I can see the appeal of a life of apparent freedom, if hardship, as so eloquently described by Nomad activist Bob Wells. 

NOMADLAND is rated R and has a running time of 107 minutes. It played Telluride, Toronto, Venice and London 2020.  It was relased in the USA in February and will be released in the UK on April 30th.

AMERICAN FACTORY

AMERICAN FACTORY is a chilling and provocative documentary, perfectly timed for our times.  It comes against a backdrop of a US-China trade war; suspicion of anyone who looks remotely Asian sneezing in earshot; and Andrew Yang running for President solely on the issue of the coming replacement of blue-collar workers with Advanced Robotics and white collar workers with AI and machine learning. More generally, we are living in a time where blue collar workers around the world are expressing their anger that they gained nothing from decades of globalisation other than lost jobs, stagnant real wages, and the contempt of the political parties that were supposed to be representing them. All of these issues and more are explored in this fascinating documentary - brought to us by husband and wife directors Steven Bognar and Julia Reichert, and the Obama's production company. The ironies abound in that. After all, Obama was a so-to-say left-wing president but he took globalisation for granted and did nothing to reverse the damage it inflicted on blue-collar workers.  And it becomes rapidly clear that this "American" factory is nothing of the sort - it's Chinese through and through.

As the movie opens, a Chinese global glass company called Fuyao re-opens a former General Motors assembly plant in Ohio.  The workers are happy. When GM closed during the Global Financial Crisis they lost their jobs, homes and dignity.  But the venture is a disappointment all around.  The Chinese are frustrated with the US workers apparent lack of work ethic and their constant need for praise. They seem to either be ignorant of, or have contempt for, local health and safety regulations.  And they take every action necessary to prevent the workers from unionising - from sacking the agitators, to hiring a lobbying company to persuade them to vote against unionising. Indeed the workers are dispensable: the most chilling final scene is one of advanced robotics replacing actual people. 

On the other side of the coin, the American workers are similarly disappointed.  They refuse to work the long hours and compromise their safety, or indeed environmental standards.  They want to understand the reasons for being asked to do something, rather than just following an order blindly. And they want to be in a culture where good work is rewarded - not just with a living wage, but also with simple thanks. 

This culture clash speaks to a deeper colonial racism, and the fact is that this is the first time in a long time when white people are being dominated by non-whites*.  All the racism that the European and North Americans expressed toward other races - all the economic exploitation - is now working in reverse.  So we are shocked to hear a Chinese manager say that American workers are like donkeys, and need to be placated to avoid them kicking - or that the Chinese managers have to benevolently steer the American workers because the Chinese are clearly wiser.  But this is no different to how American or European managers would've viewed Mexican or Indian workers in colonial times (and maybe not that different to how they view them today.)

I guess the real shock of this film for many viewers is that it's a really tangible example of how America is no longer the world's foremost economic power. And adjusting to being condescended to is a rather painful process for all involved.  But frankly, I found our new robot overlords far more chilling than the Chinese.

AMERICAN FACTORY has a running time of 110 minutes. The movie played Sundance where it won the Documentary Director award, Tribeca and Sheffield DocFest 2019. It is available to watch on Netflix.  *I'm thinking the Muslim conquest of Spain was the last time?

GREEN BOOK

I started watching GREEN BOOK minded not to like it. Sure, I think both Viggo Mortensen and Mahershala Ali are fine actors, and I love biopics. But I had been awed by Spike Lee's BLACKKKLANSMAN and swayed by articles arguing that GREEN BOOK's more old-fashioned anodyne depiction of 1960s race relations was regressive and worse still potentially racist. How could the story of an incredibly talented African-American musician be centred on the story of his white driver?  Wasn't this just another tale of a white person coming to enlightenment at the expense of a wise black side-kick?  Wasn't this THE HELP, or DRIVING MISS DAISY?  All of this criticism was heightened when GREEN BOOK surprisingly won Best Picture at the Oscars, ahead of BLACKKKLANSMAN, THE FAVOURITE or even ROMA. Wasn't this just another example of the Oscars proving themselves to be old fashioned and out of touch?

Well yes and no. Is GREEN BOOK better than the BLACKKKLANSMAN? Clearly not. That is a movie that balances comedy and righteous anger with such perfection and fury that it sears the imagination.  But GREEN BOOK *is* a handsomely made, more delicate film, that in its suspiciously easy rhythm hides a rather subversive look not just at race relations but also homophobia. It's beautifully acted and constructed, incredibly watchable, and really quite lovely.  

Mortensen plays real life Italian-American nightclub bouncer and all-round swaggering macho-man, Tony Lip. (Interestingly the real life Tony turned up as an actor in THE SOPRANOS many years later.) Down on his financial luck, he takes a job chauffering Dr Donald Shirley (Ali) on a tour of the deep south.  It is made very clear to Tony that he's not being hired for his driving skills - Shirley's management expect racial violence in the South and need Tony's muscle. And so what develops is a really lovely and convincing odd-couple buddy road movie. Tony's rough, crude manner is contrasted with Shirley's courteous, gentlemanlike manner.   Over time, Tony becomes less racist, although it seems like he was already rather pragmatic on the issue of homosexuality.  

I rather like the delicate way in which profound issues are handled.  The risks attendant on Shirley's homosexuality are handled in a single scene, and seeing Ali cowering naked in a bathhouse conveys so much so swiftly.  I also like the way in which Shirley's conflicted position vis a vis his own race is portrayed: like Nina Simone he is more comfortable in the world of classical music but forced to play popular music because that's what the market expects of him.  Moreover, Shirley defies all racial stereotypes much to Tony's disappointment, but also earning him the mistrust of his fellow African Americans. I even like the way in which the movie shows the differing styles of racism across America.  It may have been more explicit in the South - with bars on entrances, where you can eat, where you can sleep, whether you can be out after dark. But that doesn't mean that the north is a nirvana.  The subversive racism - the epithets, the subtle refusing to drink from a black man's cup - it's all still there. 

GREEN BOOK is rated PG-13 and has a running time of 130 minutes. The movie is on global release.

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME?

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME? is a lovely film about a rather unique story that works essentially as a two hander between its award-winning stars, Melissa McCarthy and the ever-glorious Richard E Grant.  McCarthy plays one-time successful biographer Lee Israel, who has fallen out of fashion and into alcoholism and squalor.  One day she chances on a genuine letter from Fanny Brice of FUNNY GIRL fame, and through small steps begins to make money by forging letters from famous writers with just the right amount of wit and salaciousness to fetch the very highest prices.  To do this didn't just need a loose grasp of ethics and a facility with vintage typewriters but genuine literary taste and skill. One of the saddest moments of the film is when Lee realises that this is her most popular work in years, and it's not even in her voice. Of course, soon the collectors start to realise that her work is fake - she's "finding" too many letters, and some question whether Noel Coward would really have been so overt about his homosexual advances.  The FBI contact her dealers, and she has to get her fellow alcoholic, the roguish, charming Jack Hock to fence the letters for her, making him an accomplice.

What I love about this film is the genuine chemistry between McCarthy and Grant as Israel and Hock and the contrast between her misanthropy and his boyish charm and glee.  Underneath both there's a story of expectations dashed and a live that hasn't lived up to their hopes - and in Hock's case in particular the sadness over fading looks, the inability to talk one's way out of travel. Both are victims of a faster, prettier world.  And while aware that their schemes are wrong, don't really see the harm in it. It feels like a schoolyard jape, just like the prank calls they make.  The final scene between the two has a quiet pathos - self-awareness, of mortality, crime, art.  The reality of what they did and are. It's desperately moving.

I also love the beautiful recreation of early 90s New York and the milieu of those bookshops that deal in first editions and collectibles. There's a certain look and indeed smell to those stores (I frequent them!) and this film somehow just captures that particularity and person. 

Finally, I admire the light touch, but never evasiveness, with which screenwriter Nicole Holofcener and director Marielle Heller treat Hock's dying of AIDS, and indeed both characters' homosexuality. The result is delicate, elegant, and more moving for it. 

CAN YOU EVER FORGIVE ME has a running time of 106 minutes and is rated R. The film played Telluride, Toronto and London 2018. It was released last year in the USA and is currently on release in the UK.

A STAR IS BORN (2018)

What an absolute surprise to find that Bradley Cooper's remake of A STAR IS BORN is so well-made, so well-acted, so desperately moving and watchable! I approached it with caution, a sense of wonder that it was necessary at all, but all my fears were over-turned by this beautifully naturalistic, painfully raw depiction of an ingenue tragically in love with a traumatised, alcoholic old showman. 

As in the other versions of the film (see below) the film begins with a meet-cute between the two artists. The first is the alcoholic country rock star Mason Craine, played by a grizzled Cooper, and fairly close in tone to Kris Kristofferson's interpretation of the role.  Cooper adopts an accent that's so deep and southern I sometimes struggled to hear him through his mumbling, but later realised this was to make his being Sam Elliott's younger brother credible.  It's a superb impersonation.  Cooper doesn't hold back at all from showing the true depths of drug abuse and depression, and the rare moments when his eyes light up seeing Ally (Lady Gaga) sing are genuinely delightful.  We know that, as in other versions of the tale, he isn't jealous of her at all. Rather it's a relationship founded on the idea of a jaded, cynical, weary man, falling in love with is art again through the genuine joy of his protégée making the same journey he once did. I utterly believed in his character, and despite knowing how every beat would play out in this version of the film so faithful to the 1976 predecessor, I was genuinely tense at the set pieces.  And I really loved the fact that movie shifted its centre of attention a little from the leading lady to the man's story.  Kudos to Cooper as screenwriter for giving us this backstory. 

Lady Gaga is truly a revelation as Ally (the screenwriters have finally ditched the name Esther - a shame!) Stripped of the make-up and bleach blonde hair of her stage persona, Lady Gaga is truly beautiful, and delivers a performance of real nuance, strength and charisma.  But there's an added bizarre-o aspect as we see Gaga essentially act out the beats of her own career - the first experience on a big stage, the first Grammy nominations. There's also a meta discussion about Ally refusing to "pretty up" and then acquiescing to further her career. In all this I remain surprised that Gaga herself, reflecting on her experience making this film and how stunning she looks on screen, continues to market herself as a persona.  After all, she is not credited under her actual name but as Gaga. And she went back to blonde as soon as the film was over.

The meta narrative continues with a final reflection from Mason Craine - that the artist only plays with the same 12 notes over and over, and all he can do is offer up to the world his interpretation of them.  This is essentially what Cooper is doing with this well-worn material. But in centring it on a story of childhood trauma, rehab, youtube videos and SNL sketches, he has both made it contemporary and more profound. 

A STAR IS BORN is rated R and has a running time of 136 minutes.  It is on global release.

You can read reviews of the previous versions of A STAR IS BORN here:

The 1937 version starring Janet Gaynor and Fredric March [link]

The 1954 version starring Judy Garland and James Mason [link]

The 1976 version starring Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson [link]

A FANTASTIC WOMAN

Marina and Orlando share a life together. They are in love. Then one day Orlando has a heart attack and dies, sustaining bruises as she tries to get him down the stairs and to the hospital. Marina is in a deep state of grief for her lover, but it's a grief that is not permissible or acceptable in contemporary Santiago, and maybe anywhere yet.  The doctor tells her to wait outside the treatment area, Orlando's family won't permit her to attend the funeral. The police think the relationship might've been commercial, or abusive. They demand and invasive examination to be sure. Marina and Orlandos' love is seen as perverse; something that can't be seen in front of the children; Marina as unreal. And finally, their love is something to be physically punished, Marina brutalised. And through all this we have Marina, quiet, enduring, emotional trauma etched on her face, forced into the margins of her dead lover's life. No wonder she escapes into a beautiful fantasy world where she exudes strength, beauty and confidence, where she can still see her lover.

That this film is as powerful as it is owes much to the quiet nobility of trans actress Daniela Vega's lead performance, and the superb direction of Sebastian Leila (GLORIA) that mingles clean sharp-coloured Santiago with a more wonderful neon-lit disco dream world. This contrasts with a script that is very matter of fact, linear, straight forward. It's a film that centres us on Marina and the thousand small cuts of cruelty she suffers - the power is cumulative and quite devastating. 

A FANTASTIC WOMAN has a running time of 104 minutes and is rated R in the USA and 15 in the UK for strong language and discriminatory behaviour. The film played London 2017 and won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film. 

THE BIG SHORT

We here at the blog formerly known as Movie Reviews For Greedy Capitalist Bastards have often taken a rather contemptuous tone with movies covering the financial sector.  Too often they have unintentionally glamourised the very profession they purported to condemn. And with very few exceptions they have failed to show the reality of what to many of us is life in financial services.  Away from the yachts and the blow and the strippers of cinema, most bankers are just insecure over-achievers, suckered into aligning their self-worth with a big-name brand, running on a treadmill where the big bonus is never as much as the next guy, increasingly doing twenty hour days, working weekends and trapped in a one percent bubble.  There was systematic fraud in the last crisis and plenty of people new their was a gigantic conflict of interest. But a lot of junior bankers were just people trapped in a complex system trying to do optimise their profit and impress their boss.

STILL ALICE

You can listen to a podcast review of this film below or subscribe to Bina007 Movie Reviews in iTunes:

STILL ALICE starts Julianne Moore in as Oscar-winning turn as Alice Howland - a successful College professor diagnosed with early-onset Alzheimer's Disease.  The first half hour of the film sees Alice suspect that something serious is behind her sudden memory loss and come to a diagnosis. The second half hour sees the family come to terms with her rapidly deteriorating condition - their bickering, frustration, love but lack of understanding.  The final third of the film focuses on Alice's relationship with her youngest daughter, played by Kristen Stewart - a relationship that was fraught when Alice was well, but finds a new sympathy in her illness.  Alice herself is alienated from herself and much of the rest of her family. This is the true cruelty of Alzheimer's Disease and in that sense the title of the film is ironic. When you take away a woman's intellect, her memory, her job, her sense of self, what is left?

Oscars 2014 - Who Should Win; Who Will Win

The Oscars a grimy political business - studios shelling out PR campaigns that appeal the voting demographic that skews old, conservative and ex-actors.  You start seeing nasty little negative stories planted in The Hollywood Reporter and the more obvious than usual pimping out of the 'talent' at minor award ceremonies who's only real value is as a predictor for the big event.  The Oscars are not a judge of merit - just look at the iconic pictures that have been unrecognised. But they DO add to the bottom line.  And so, we Greedy Capitalist Bastards simply have to take them seriously.

This year there seem to be three main contenders: AMERICAN HUSTLE, GRAVITY and 12 YEARS A SLAVE. I loved the raucous slippery energy of HUSTLE but was left wondering if it's gonzo kitsch was intentional or not.  GRAVITY was a technical tour de force and pure in intention but, of course, has to fight charges that it contains little else.  12 YEARS - ah 12 YEARS - I loved the courage, the artistry, but was left cold by the inclusion of Pitt and the epilogue.  So it's pretty much even stevens.I guess my overall feeling is that liberal Hollywood will go for 12 YEARS for behind the lens but that HUSTLE will win out in front of the lens, with GRAVITY pulling the Technical awards.   Also, BEST ACTOR is a sentimental tie between Bruce Dern and a form-busting Matthew McConaughey.  The only egregious inclusions are PHILOMENA, which was schlocky at best. The pleasant surprise was Sally Hawkins for BLUE JASMINE.

So here we go: who was nominated, who shoulda been nominated, who will win, who should win.  "Will" is marked with an asterisk, "Should" with a cross. Also, I should point out that I haven't seen DALLAS BUYER'S CLUB or HER yet. 

BEST PICTURE: 12 Years a Slave*; American Hustle; Captain Phillips; Dallas Buyers Club; Gravity; Her; Nebraska+; Philomena; The Wolf of Wall Street.

BEST DIRECTOR: David O Russell, American Hustle; Alfonso Cuarón, Gravity; Alexander Payne, Nebraska+; Steve McQueen, 12 Years a Slave*; Martin Scorsese, The Wolf of Wall Street

BEST ACTOR: Christian Bale, American Hustle; Bruce Dern, Nebraska+; Leonardo DiCaprio, The; Wolf of Wall Street*; Chiwetel Ejiofor, 12 Years a Slave; Matthew McConaughey, Dallas Buyers Club.

BEST ACTRESS: Amy Adams, American Hustle*; Cate Blanchett, Blue Jasmine+; Sandra Bullock, Gravity; Judi Dench, Philomena; Meryl Streep, August: Osage County.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Barkhad Abdi, Captain Phillips; Bradley Cooper, American Hustle*; Michael Fassbender, 12 Years a Slave+; Jonah Hill, The Wolf of Wall Street; Jared Leto, Dallas Buyers Club.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Sally Hawkins, Blue Jasmine; Jennifer Lawrence, American Hustle*+; Lupita Nyong'o, 12 Years a Slave; Julia Roberts, August: Osage County; June Squibb, Nebraska.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: American Hustle*; Blue Jasmine; Dallas Buyers Club; Her; Nebraska+.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Before Midnight; Captain Phillips; Philomena; 12 Years a Slave+; The Wolf of Wall Street*.

BEST FOREIGN FILM: Broken Circle Breakdown (Belgium); The Great Beauty (Italy); The Hunt (Denmark); The Missing Picture (Cambodia); Omar (Palestine).

BEST DOCUMENTARY: The Act of Killing; Cutie and the Boxer*; Dirty Wars; The Square; 20 Feet from Stardom.+

BEST ANIMATION: The Croods; Despicable Me 2; Ernest and Celestine; Frozen*+;The Wind Rises.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG: Alone Yet Not Alone, Alone Yet Not Alone; Happy, Despicable Me 2; Let It Go, Frozen*+; The Moon Song, Her; Ordinary Love, Mandela: Long Walk to Freedom.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: The Grandmaster; Gravity; Inside Llewyn Davis; Nebraska+; Prisoners.

BEST EDITING: American Hustle; Captain Phillips; Dallas Buyers Club; Gravity*+; 12 Years a Slave.

BEST SOUND EDITING: All Is Lost+; Captain Phillips; Gravity*; The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug; Lone Survivor.

BEST SOUND MIXING: Captain Phillips; Gravity*+; The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug; Inside Llewyn Davis; Lone Survivor.

BEST MAKE-UP AND HAIR: Dallas Buyers Club*+; Jackass Presents: Bad Grandpa; The Lone Ranger.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: The Book Thief;  Gravity*+; Her; Philomena; Saving Mr Banks.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: American Hustle+; Gravity*; The Great Gatsby; Her; 12 Years a Slave.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Gravity*+; The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug; Iron Man 3; The Lone Ranger; Star Trek Into Darkness.

BEST COSTUME DESIGN: American Hustle*+; The Grandmaster; The Great Gatsby; The Invisible Woman; 12 Years a Slave.

OSCARS 2013 - Nobody Knows Anything

“When I was your age, television was called books.”

The typical post-Oscar water-cooler conversation is a bitch-fest about who wore what and who gushed most.* But we here at Movie Reviews For Greedy Capitalist Bastards are, in fact, far more concerned with who won what, whether the predictions were right, and who on the Hollywood Power List wins and loses. Coming off of the London Film Festival, I’d strongly tipped Ben Affleck’s ARGO for Oscar gold, on the basis that while it was “just” a straightforward thriller, it showed Hollywood producers’ saving the day, thus pandering to the infamous narcissism of the Academy.  When the nominations were announced and Affleck was snubbed for Best Director, the movie became the sure winner for Best Film purely on the basis that it would attract the sympathy vote.  This left the Best Director award dangerously unpredictable. Would Steven Spielberg, often overlooked, benefit from Affleck’s omission? We can all agree that LINCOLN is basically a vehicle for some great performances and a superb script, but there’s something admirable and almost shocking in the fact that the Master Purveyor of Schmaltz had the balls to show America’s most iconic president as a vote-buying, devious tyrant. .

It turns out that, despite watching well over 300 films last year, reading all the trades, and trying to read the runes, that I was almost comprehensively wrong in my predictions. In the event, the Academy almost took the earnest, gold-plated film-making of LINCOLN for granted, and shied away from the controversy surrounding the veracity of ZERO DARK THIRTY. Instead, they awarded prizes to Anne Hathaway, maybe because she wanted it so damn much; to Christoph Waltz, because he’s so damn cool; and to Ang Lee for LIFE OF PI.  This last choice is the one that intrigues me the most.  LIFE OF PI is the quintessential art-house film. With no marquee names and an impossible-to-categorize plot, the film is almost willfully obscure.  Worse still for a voter demographic that skews old and conservative, the movie has a pronounced anti-religious message and an ending that is,  to put it bluntly, a monumental downer. And yet, this is the movie that won the most Oscars, not least Best Director and the most prestigious of the technical gongs, Best Cinematographer for Claudio Miranda.

So, to put it bluntly, how did we all get it so wrong?  (And by we, I refer to the loose fraternity of cinephiles, critics, bloggers and rune-readers). Well, I guess that in the words of the famous William Goldman, “nobody knows anything”.  Nobody knows if a movie’s gonna be a hit. Nobody knows if a movie’s going to make money. If there were any kind of science to this thing, movies wouldn’t be, after airlines, the easiest industry in which to lose money.  But nihilism aside, I suspect that moving Oscar voting online probably skewed the voter demographic younger and edgier. Anecdotally, the e-voting was glitchy and hard to work around.  More substantially, maybe there was a sympathy vote for LIFE OF PI because the CGI studio that did the spectacular work on the movie’s virtual star, the tiger Richard Parker, went bankrupt the week before the ceremony.

Or maybe, it's just another example of the triumph of the Hive Mind over elite judgment? PR company Way to Blue analysed over one million social media mentions in the week leading up to the Oscars, to find that the British cloud chatter correctly predicted the four Majors – Best Film, Director, Actor and Actress – in sharp contrast to most film critics.   The message from the Oscars, as with the US Presidential Election, seems to be that pundits claim to know everything but know nothing; while the Hive Mind claims to know nothing but knows everything.  Which leaves us with the following score-sheet:

Life of Pi 4; Lincoln 3.

Rousseau 1; Hobbes 0.

*I think we can all agree that most of the actresses in white looked like they were wearing wedding dresses; Nicole Kidman needs to dress her age; and that if we were married to a fashion mogul, we’d have dressed better than Salma Hayek. 

Oscar Surprises On The Upside

Gael Garcia Bernal stars in Pablo Larrain's superb Chilean
political dramedy NO - deservedly nominated for Best Foreign Language Film

This may well be the least controversial set of Oscar nominations in decades.  No obviously great works are missed, except in the Best Documentary category, where I would have expected to see WEST MEMPHIS THREE, MEA MAXIMA CULPA and CHASING ICE.  Similarly, the large set of nominations for LES MIS seems, frankly, bizarre, but this is more than offset by the utterly genius inclusion of Pablo Larrain's Chilean political dramedy, NO.  I'm sure it will be beaten by Haneke's AMOUR, but the nomination alone should raise awareness of this funny, politically astute and technically brilliant film starring Gael Garcia Bernal.

All this aside, the  key message was that the early lead established by Ben Affleck's superb thriller, ARGO, has been usurped by Ang Lee's imaginative and visually stunning LIFE OF PI, and Stephen Spielberg's mesmerizing LINCOLN.  I suspect LINCOLN may well sweep the major categories with LIFE OF PI, ARGO and maybe ZERO DARK THIRTY sharing the rest of the spoils.  However, of these first three major films, I'd be happy no matter who takes the Oscars, as all three are stunning pieces of work.  A true upset would be if SILVER LININGS PLAYBOOK won anything other than Best Screenplay or LES MIS got any awards at all.

As usual, you can see the full list of noms below. I've put the likely winner in UPPERCASE and placed an asterisk by the nominee I think deserves to win.

Ben Affleck's brilliant political thriller ARGO has lost its early lead to
LINCOLN and LIFE OF PI

BEST PICTURE: Amour; Argo; Beats of the Southern Wild; Django Unchained; Les Misérables; Life of Pi; LINCOLN*; Silver Linings Playbook; Zero Dark Thirty.

BEST ACTOR: Bradley Cooper, Silver Linings Playbook; DANIEL DAY-LEWIS*, Lincoln; Hugh Jackman, Les Mis; Joaquin Phoenix, The Master; Denzel Washington, Flight.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR: Alan Arkin, Argo; Robert de Niro, Silver Linings Playbook; Philip Seymour Hoffman*, The Master; TOMMY LEE JONES, Lincoln; Christopher Waltz, Django Unchained.

BEST ACTRESS: JESSICA CHASTAIN, Zero Dark Thirty; Jennifer Lawrence, Silver Linings Playbook; Emmanuelle Riva*, Amour; Quvenzhané Wallis, Beasts of the Southern Wild; Naomi Watts, The Impossible. 

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS: Amy Adams*, The Master; SALLY FIELD, Lincoln; Anne Hathaway, Les Mis; Helen Hunt, The Sessions; Jacki Weaver, Silver Linings Playbook.

Daniel Day-Lewis must be a dead cert for Best Actor as LINCOLN,
and should lead this film to the most Oscar wins.

BEST ANIMATED FILM: Brave, Frankenweenie, PARANORMAN, Pirates!*, Wreck-it Ralph.

BEST CINEMATOGRAPHY: Seamus McGarvey, Anna Karenina; Robert Richardson, Django Unchained; Claudio Miranda, Life of Pi; Janusz Kaminski, Lincoln; ROGER DEAKINS*, Skyfall.

BEST COSTUMES: Jacqueline Durran, Anna Karenina; Paco Delgado, Les Mis; Joanna Johnston, Lincoln; EIKO ISHIOKA*, Mirror Mirror; Colleen Atwood, Snow White and the Huntsman.

BEST DIRECTOR: Michael Haneke, Amour; Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild; Ang Lee, Life of Pi; STEVEN SPIELBERG*, Lincoln; David O Russell, Silver Linings Playbook.

BEST DOCUMENTARY: 5 Broken Cameras; The Gatekeepers; How To Survive A Plague; The Invisible War; SEARCHING FOR SUGARMAN*

BEST EDITING: William Goldenberg, Argo; Tim Squyres*, Life of Pi; Michael Kahn, Lincoln; Jay Cassidy and Crispin Struthers, Silver Linings Playbook; DYLAN TICHENOR AND WILLIAM GOLDENBERG, Zero Dark Thirty.

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM: AMOUR, No*; A Royal Affair, War Witch.

BEST MAKEUP AND HAIR: Howard Berger, Peter Montagna and Martin Samuel, Hitchcock; Peter Swords King, Rick Findlater and Tami Lane*, The Hobbit; LISA WESTCOTT AND JULIA DARTNELL, Les Mis.

BEST ORIGINAL SCORE: Dario Marianelli, Anna Karenina; ALEXANDRE DESPLAT, Argo; Mychael Danna*, Life of Pi; John Williams, Lincoln; Thomas Newman, Skyfall.

BEST ORIGINAL SONG: Before my time, J Ralph, Chasing Ice; Everybody needs a best friend, Walter Murphy and Seth MacFarlane*, Ted; Pi’s lullaby, Mychael Danna and Bombay Jayashri, Life of Pi; SKYFALL, Adele Adkins and Paul Epworth, Skyfall; Suddenly, Claude-Michel Schönberg, Herbert Kretzmer and Alain Boublil, Les Mis.

BEST PRODUCTION DESIGN: Sarah Greenwood and Katie Spencer, Anna Karenina; Dan Hennah, Ra Vincent and Simon Bright, The Hobbit; EVE STEWART AND ANNA LYNCH-ROBINSON, Les Mis; David Gropman and Anna Pinnock, Life of Pi; Rick Carter and Jim Erickson*, Lincoln.

BEST SOUND EDITING: Erik Aadahl and Ethan van der Ryn, Argo; Wylie Stateman, Django Unchained; Eugene Gearty and Philip Stockton, Life of Pi( Per Hallberg and Karen Baker Landers, Skyfall; Paul N J Ottoson, Zero Dark Thirty.

BEST SOUND MIXING: John Reitz, Gregg Rudloff and Jose Antonio Garcia, Argo; Andy Nelson, Mark Paterson and Simon Hayes, Les Mis; Ron Bartlett, D.M. Hemphill and Drew Kunin, Life of Pi; Andy Nelson, Gary Rydstrom and Ronald Judkins, Lincoln; Scott Millan, Greg P. Russell and Stuart Wilson, Skyfall.

BEST VISUAL EFFECTS: Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R. Christopher White, The Hobbit; Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott, Life of Pi; Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams and Dan Sudick; The Avengers; Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill, Prometheus; Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan, Neil Corbould and Michael Dawson, Snow White and the Huntsman.

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY: Chris Terrio, Argo; Lucy Alibar & Benh Zeitlin, Beasts of the Southern Wild; David Magee, Life of Pi; Tony Kushner*, Lincoln; DAVID O RUSSELL, Silver Linings Playbook.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY: Michael Haneke, Amour; Quentin Tarantino*, Django Unchained; John Gatins, Flight; Wes Anderson & Roman Coppola, Moonrise Kingdom; MARK BOAL, Zero Dark Thirty.

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN is an interesting story but a bad documentary.  Indeed, it's less a documentary than an anecdote. In the early 1970s, a Mexican-American folk singer called Sixto Rodriguez made two wonderful albums but achieved no commercial success in the USA. This mournful, self-effacing man then went back to hard manual labour and a hand-to-mouth existence.  Meanwhile, the album, with its anti-establishment lyrics, became super successful in apartheid riven South Africa, but the royalties and the recognition never found there way back to Rodriguez.  Finally, in the mid 1990s, some South African music lovers tracked Rodriguez down using the internet and staged a comeback concert tour.  Still, nothing much changed for "Sugar Man".  He remains, as he was, a modest, quiet, working man.

The documentary is a nonsense. It opens with urban legends about Rodriguez' supposedly outlandish suicide - rumours that it never tracks down to their source, and which Rodriguez seems reluctant to discuss. The doc also drops the ball on where all the royalties went - interviewing an irascible record exec and then just refusing to dig any deeper.  What we get instead is filler.  An investigative journalist doing not much investigating but looking things up on a map.  And concert footage filmed from 1998. It rather begs the question, "why now?" for this doc.  All in all, be aware of the anecdote and spend your  money on his albums rather than a ticket to this film, which doesn't even tell us if he's receiving royalties now.

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN played Sundance 2012 and is currently on release in the UK, Ireland, and the USA.  It opens in Sweden on August 24th, in Denmark and Australia on October 4th, in New Zealand on October 11th, in the Netherlands on December 20th, in Norway, France and Germany on December 27th, in Poland on February 22nd, and in Japan on March 16th. 

SEARCHING FOR SUGAR MAN is rated PG 13 in the USA and the running time is 86 minutes.

Ankle-frack Round-Up 1 - YOUNG ADULT

Forced into house arrest after a particularly nasty ankle injury, I have decided to finally get around to reviewing all those releases that I didn't get round to originally.  First up, YOUNG ADULT.....

YOUNG ADULT is a brilliantly scabrous tragicomedy from the writer and director behind JUNO. It's  about a narcissistic delusional writer of Young Adult fiction who returns to her home town to break up the marriage of her high school sweetheart. It's a testament to the nuance and bravery of Diablo Cody's script and Charlize Theron's lead performance that she allows Mavis to be quite unlikeable but that we still care about her emotional journey. Mavis can be deliberately mean-spirited - she is horribly rude to the disabled town geek (Patton Oswalt) and shamelessly uses him as a drinking buddy while she waits to pounce on her beloved Buddy (Patrick Wilson).  But she's at her most compelling when she's just plain disconnected - like when she asks the provincial sales assistant if the store stocks Marc Jacobs.  She's a girl who's ridden along on her good looks - she's trumpeted as the town's success - all the more tragic then that the books she writes aren't selling, and she's desperate for a family.  

YOUNG ADULT is gritty in a way that few movies dare to be.  DP Eric Steelberg (UP IN THE AIR) zooms in on Mavis itching her balding scalp and spitting into an ink cartridge to make it work.  It's a signal that this is a movie about the way our bodies betray us as - about the dangers of making a myth out of high school love. Then again, Cody's script doesn't dwell on that physical frailty long enough to beg our sympathy. There's a cool matter-of-factness to both Mavis and the movie.  The grittiness extends to the narrative arc.  Sure, there's a scene of "emotional catharsis" near the end, where key facts are revealed, but there's no easy redemption or new-found likeability.  And the relationship between Theron and the schlubby Matt goes no further than it would likely go, rather than giving us a nice rom-com pay-off.  In fact, now I think of it, there's little humour in the movie at all, and certainly very little that's do with the narrative arc. Rather, there are some very funny sly scenes where Cody winks at her critics who wonder how she writes like a "teen".

I loved YOUNG ADULT even though it didn't really make me laugh, never gave me any emotional release, and didn't really teach me anything I didn't know. There's just something refreshingly honest about a movie that dares to be disliked. It's like the pitch for Seinfeld - no-one hugs, no-one learns everything.  

YOUNG ADULT was released in winter 2011/2013 and is now available to rent and own. Charlize Theron was nominated for a Golden Globe.

Fear and loathing on the Oscar campaign trail

Superpac-sponsored TV spots pillorying Mitt Romney as a tax-evading French-speaking hippie have nothing on the dirty tricks campaigns being perpetrated against the front runner in the Oscars race: The Artist. Before the nominations, the negative campaigning focussed on Kim Novak's assertion that she felt "raped" by The Artist's composer, who had quoted from Bernard Hermann's Vertigo score.  This hysterical interview was pitiable as a comment on a once famous and now forgotten actress' desire to get back into the headlines by any means necessary. It was also a risible mis-reading of a film whose exact purpose is to repackage Tinseltown's history.

Post nominations, the campaign stepped up a notch. The Artist had only been surpassed by Martin Scorsese's "Hugo" in the number of noms, but this was offset by the fact that "Hugo" didn't have anyone competing in the major acting categories. Evidently Berenice Bejo wasn't going to unseat La La Land's darling, Meryl Streep, but Jean Dujardin was becoming a real threat to "Gorgeous" George Clooney, nominated for The Descendents.  The response was swift: PR agency prepared talking points urging the Academy to vote American.  Counter-publicity reminded voters that despite the nationality of the leads The Artist remained a US financed film with a US crew, US extras and US sets.

Protectionism, while unsavoury, is mild compared to the deliberately generated frenzy doing the rounds in LA this week. Campaigners have accused Dujardin of misogyny, citing posters publicising his forthcoming US film release, "Les Infideles", feature a leering Dujardin peering through a woman's long be-stockinged legs.  Once again, this is a spectacularly moronic mis-reading of the film and its poster. Loosely translated as "The Players", it's a comedy that satirises the typical boorish unreconstructed French man, rather than celebrating him. Moreover, in the nastier strains of LA gossip,  Jean Dujardin is now being equated with Dominique Strauss-Khan: the former IMF Chief infamously perp walked to prison on what turned out to be flimsy allegations of rape. In the batshit crazy logic of the negative campaign, scratch the surface of any Gallic charmer and you find a sexual harrasser.

All of this low-rent nastiness is far from edifying and stands in stark contrast with the carefully manicured conservative glamour of the Oscar ceremony itself.  That said, this contradiction works well as an analogy for Hollywood, and the wider LA media industry.  Dining at Capo in Santa Monica or Fig and Olive in West Hollywood or at Bazaar at the SLS in Beverly Hills, this week, I was shocked anew at the dangerously forced beauty of the diners putting on a show around me. They reminded me of that line in F Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is The Night, referring to Violet McKisco "all the prettiness had been piped to the surface of her".  That's La La Land in a nutshell: a desperate and delusional battle to affect apparently effortless success.

On the narcissism of the Academy.....

Winning an academy award is no different from winning an election in any mature democracy. You have to a) appeal to an electorate that skews old and is conservative with a small “c” and b)  spend a ton of money on advertising.  And, just as in a normal election, the best man (read integrity, vision, talent) rarely wins.  Rather, the film that wins is typically the most banal, the least offensive, that harkens back to some mythical golden age – with Harvey Weinstein taking the role of Karl Rove, blanket-bombing DVD screeners and arranging friendly articles in the trade mags.  How else do you explain DR STRANGELOVE losing to MY FAIR LADY? The triumph of SHAKESPEARE IN LOVE and DRIVING MISS DAISY? Or BROKEBACK MOUNTAIN being snubbed?

Still, for all that, the Oscars do matter, just not as arbiters of taste. Rather, they matter because an Oscar nomination, let alone a win, undoubtedly boosts the box office of the winning films, and adds a million or so to the salary of the individual winners.  And as we here at Movie Reviews for Greedy Capitalist Bastards are all about the phat cash, it would be hypocritical not to admire someone like Harvey Weinstein who so brilliantly games the system.  Any investment banking analyst looking to corner the bonus pool could do worse than study his playbook.

Bearing all this in mind, it comes as no surprise that the Academy has narcissistically and indulgently nominated movies that are nostalgic for the history of cinema – HUGO (11 nominations); THE ARTIST (10 nominations) and MY WEEK WITH MARILYN (2 nominations) – the latter two also pimped out by Harvey.  HUGO is a particularly commercial pick, as the movie involved a respected auteur using 3D, a technology that badly needs reinvigorating and upon which the studios are depending to stymie piracy and boost ticket prices. 

It also comes as no surprise to see the Academy overlook provocative, daring, pioneering movies such as SHAME, DRIVE and TYRANOSSAUR, not to mention compelling performances from Michael Fassbender in SHAME, Albert Brooks and Ryan Gosling in DRIVE, Olivia Colman in TYRANOSSAUR, Tilda Swinton in WE NEED TO TALK ABOUT KEVIN, Vanessa Redgrave in CORIOLANUS...  And in the documentary category, where is SENNA?

The full list of nominations is below. I have underlined those that I think will win. I suspect THE ARTIST will pip HUGO at the post in the major categories, but that as with THE AVIATOR, Scorsese will be fobbed off with all the technical awards, except for a couple handed out as “end of series” commemorations to HARRY POTTER.

I haven’t bothered indicating who I think should win, as so few of the nominees would make my final cut.   Most of the people and films here are harmless. But I do find the nominations for THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO, THE DESCENDENTS, WAR HORSE and MONEY BALL particularly wrong-headed.  In terms of positive surprises, it was good to see Woody Allen get a directing and Best Picture nom for MIDNIGHT IN PARIS.

Overall though, one can but think this is a pretty mediocre list coloured by the Academy’s nostalgia and narcissism.  In twenty years time, I suspect the only three films that people will still be watching will be SHAME, TREE OF LIFE and A SEPARATION. The rest is just food for worms.

Best Actress in a supporting role: Bérénice Bejo, The Artist; Jessica Chastain, The Help; Melissa McCarthy, Bridesmaids; Janet McTeer, Albert Nobbs*; Octavia Spencer, The Help

Best actor in a supporting role:  Kenneth Branagh, My Week with Marilyn; Jonah Hill, Moneyball; Nick Nolte, Warrior; Christopher Plummer, Beginners*; Max Von Sydow, Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Best actress in a leading role:  Glenn Close, Albert Nobbs; Viola Davis, The Help; Rooney Mara, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Meryl Streep, The Iron Lady; Michelle Williams, My Week with Marilyn

Best actor in a leading role: Demián Bichir, A Better Life; George Clooney, The Descendants; Jean Dujardin, The Artist; Gary Oldman, Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; Brad Pitt, Moneyball

Best director: Michel Hazavanicius, The Artist; Alexander Payne, The Descendants; Martin Scorsese, Hugo; Woody Allen, Midnight in Paris; Terrence Malick, The Tree of Life

Best original Screenplay: The Artist; Bridesmaids; Margin Call; Midnight in Paris; A Separation

Best adapted screenplay: The Descendants; Hugo; Ides of March; Moneyball; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Best foreign language film: Bullhead; Footnote; In Darkness; Monsieur Lazhar; A Separation

Best animated film: A Cat in Paris; Chico And Rita; Kung Fu Panda 2; Rango; Puss in Boots

Best picture: War Horse; The Artist; Moneyball; The Descendants; The Tree of Life; Midnight in Paris; The Help; Hugo; Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close

Art direction: The Artist; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2; Hugo; Midnight in Paris; War Horse

Cinematography; The Artist; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Hugo; The Tree of Life; War Horse

Costume design: Anonymous; The Artist; Hugo; Jane Eyre; W.E.

Documentary feature: Hell and Back Again; If A Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front; Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory; Pina; Undefeated

Documentary short subject: The Barber of Birmingham: Foot Soldier of the Civil Rights Movement; God is the Bigger Elvis; Incident in New Baghdad; Saving Face; The Tsumani and the Cherry Blossom

Film editing:  The Artist; The Descendants; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Hugo; Moneyball

Sound editing: Drive; The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Hugo; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; War Horse

Sound mixing:  The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo; Hugo; Moneyball; Transformers: Dark of the Moon; War Horse

Visual effects: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2; Hugo; Real Steel; Rise of the Planet of the Apes; Transformers: Dark of the Moon

Make up: Albert Nobbs; Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2; The Iron Lady

Music (original score): The Adventures of Tintin: The Secret of the Unicorn; The Artist; Hugo; Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy; War Horse

Music (original song): The Muppets; Rio

Short film (animated): Dimanche / Sunday; The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr Morris Lessmore; La Luna; A Morning Stroll; Wild Life

Short film (live action):  Pentecost; Raju; The Shore; Time Freak; Tuba Atlantic

IN A BETTER WORLD

IN A BETTER WORLD is a pretentious, po-faced drama about the impotence of liberals in the face of brutality. It works by inter-weaving four examples of bullying that affect an earnest Medecins Sans Frontieres doctor called Anton (Mikael Persbrandt). 

In a medical camp in Kenya, Anton is forced to treat the savage gangster who has been brutalising the women of the village. He shows the liberals' reluctance to judge, treating the Bad Man as his Hippocratic oath demands, despite the objections of the villagers. Back in Denmark, Anton is bullied by a mechanic. Once again, Anton refuses to defend himself - literally turning the other cheek, in order to show his children that intelligence has triumphed over ignorance by refusing to stoop to its level. His words sound unconvincing. By contrast, young Christian (William Jøhnk Juels Nielsen), recently bereaved, returned to Denmark, and friends with Anton's son, Elias, puts up a more muscular response to bullying. On his first day at school, he makes a moral judgement and intervenes to help the bullied Elias. And faced with the impotence of Elias' father - an impotence Anton claims is the high moral ground - Christian once again takes matters into his own hands. 

What can we say about this film? It is well acted (particularly by the two children), beautifully photographed (DP Morten Søborg using a Red One), and moves at a swift pace. But the characters are archetypes rather than real people - they exist to make a point rather than to involve us in their distress. As a result, the emotional scenes between Christian and his father (Ulrich Thomsen) do not have the emotional power that they should. Moreover, writer-director Susanne Bier fails to create tension, so clumsily does she foreshadow her climactic scenes. I also wonder whether Bier intended to so thoroughly discredit the possibility of Liberalism in her film. And I wonder whether the Academy realised that is what this movie did when it voted it the Best Foreign Language Film of 2010. It is, of course, no such thing.

IN A BETTER WORLD won the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar in 2011, beating Biutiful, Dogtooth, Incendies and Hors de la Loi. It also won the Golden Globe for Best Foreign Film. IN A BETTER WORLD played Toronto 2010 and Sundance 2011. It was released in 2010 in Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Finland and Italy. It was released earlier this year in Hungary, Brazil, Estonia, France, Germany, Greece, Israel, Spain, the USA, the Netherlands, Portugal, Belgium, Canada, Australia, Turkey, Russia, Singapore, Poland and Argentina. It is currently on release in Japan, Ireland and the UK.

Are the Oscars relevant to anyone but Conde Nast?

Last night, the Oscars finally jumped the shark, with a televised ceremony in which the host, James Franco, looked as bored as the audience. Because, let's be honest, the Oscars have long-since been completely irrelevant for film-goers and an endurance test for television viewers - useful only insofar as you care about haute couture trends and selling advertising space in glossy fashion magazines.

The reality is that when it comes to rewarding good Cinema, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has always missed the mark. This is, after all, the voting population that gave an Oscar to Dances With Wolves over Goodfellas, and to How Green Was My Valley over Citizen Kane. But at least Kane was nominated. The Academy didn't even pay that respect to The Third Man; Brazil; Mean Streets; Last Tango in Paris; Easy Rider...The list goes on: iconic films that have become part of our cultural heritage, and all of them completely over-looked by the self-appointed arbiters of quality and success. Not only does the Academy have a shocking track record in rewarding quality, but they compound errors in judgement by trying to make amends in following years, further punishing that year's worthy candidates. The classic example of this would be Martin Scorsese, serially and criminally overlooked for his masterpieces - Mean Streets, Raging Bull, Goodfellas - only to have those slights "put right" with a sort of Lifetime Achievement Award in all but name with his Best Director Oscar for The Departed in 2006. Too bad for Almodovar, whose Volver surely deserved recognition.

The cause of this shambles is threefold: age, actors and alternative votes. First off, the Academy voters are OLD. Once you are invited to join, you are eligible to vote for life, resulting in an average voting age in the late 50s. And, as ageist as this might sound, old people are inherently more conservative than young people. And in an industry where cutting edge, pioneering, radical art will be produced by the young - and mainstream blockbusters are designed to be consumed by teenage boys - the Academy voter is left out-of-touch with both art-house and mainstream sensibilities. This is why you end up with sentimental, populist pantomime like Driving Miss Daisy and The King's Speech cleaning up, while more edgy material is left unrecognised. And if one wanted to be even more damning, that's why a movie like Brokeback Mountain, featuring explicit gay sex, never stood a chance.

Second, the Academy voters - made up of the leading lights of all the industry groups that bring movies to the screen - is dominated by actors. And actors basically vote for films that contain Big Melodramatic Performances. This is a key reason why so many Serious Dramas win Best Picture while comedies - especially group ensembles - tend to be overlooked. That's why Hilary Swank won two Oscars before Sandra Bullock got a nomination - and why everyone's favourite "girl next door" actress had to choose an Issues Film before she finally got recognition. And don't even get me started on how genre films - you know - the type of movies most of us take to our hearts! - get overlooked. If the Oscars really represented the best of 2010/2011, then Toy Story 3 would've won Best Picture, not just Best Animated Feature, and Kick-Ass would've been nominated too.

The final nail in the coffin is the Alternative Vote system of voting. What basically happens is that each industry group gets to vote for its own award - so the directors vote for the Best Director and the editors vote for the Best Editor. But in the case of Best Picture, everyone can vote and they have to rank all ten (count 'em!) ten nominees. If a nominated film fails to get at least 10% of the first-choice votes, it gets knocked out, and all the people who voted for that film have their second choice added to the ballot. So goes the knock-out process until a winner emerges. What this means is that you can easily have a film win without a majority, or even a plurality of first-choice votes, so long as most people think it's basically okay and rank it somewhere in the top third of movies. And, you guessed it, that favours films that are basically pretty harmless and banal and are unlikely to offend anyone.

The upshot is that, thanks to Age, Actors and AV, the Oscars never were and likely never will be a place where great pioneering provocative cinema is awarded. But just because the awards on offer have no credibility doesn't mean that the TV show has to suck. In theory, one could imagine a scenario in which, while the awards were nonsensical, the ceremony was spectacularly entertaining. And for years this is exactly what the Golden Globes managed to pull off, with its slightly anarchic, shambolic air, fueled by too much booze and a sort of wry amusement at the anonymity of the hosts. This trend reached its apex with this year's ceremony, featuring Ricky Gervais as a kind of schlubby avenging angel, speaking Truth to Self-Appointed Power. Gervais said what everyone was thinking but didn't have the balls to say. And what's more, he said it to their faces. Never before have I seen such a glorious spectacle - such a brilliant skewering of ego. But, alas, hackles up, Hollywood is never going to allow that kind of bat-shit crazy career suicide again.

And so we ended up with the debacle that was last night's ceremony. The awards roster was, as usual, bloated with technical awards that no-one except the industry cares about (who, outside the obsessives, even knows what an Art Director does? - who even watches short features anyway?) The winners were all the odds-on favourites - The King's Speech cleaning up the main awards, Inception taking the technical awards, and The Fighter and Black Swan rounding out the roster. Even Melissa Leo's F-bomb came across as pre-scripted - her faux-naivete and excitement a calculated move to garner column inches and, hey!, I too fell for it. The only real shock was just how uninvolved James Franco looked - merely cementing his art-house credentials as the guy too busy reading Kerouac to give a damn.

And so the endless speculation about the winners is over, and the real Oscar conversation - who wore what - can begin. Glossy pictures of stars in ball-gowns will sell magazines and drive unique page-views to the TMZ. And in a world where print media is dying and advertising is leaking to the internet - where movie studios are struggling to fend off piracy - maybe we shouldn't begrudge them their annual shameless cash-in. Fine. But all I ask is that we stop pretending that the Ocars have anything to do with a real discussion about what was good and admirable in the last year's cinema.