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.

DRIVE ANGRY 3D

DRIVE ANGRY 3D is a brilliantly crass grind-house movie.  If you want to see a hot chick beat the crap out of a naked chick who's just been caught fucking the first chick's fiancé, then this is the movie for you. Or if you want to see a bad-ass smoking a cigar, fully clothed, fucking a naked woman in a motel room, while simultaneously shooting six assholes dead, then this is your flick!  The plot is ridiculous - obviously. Nic Cage plays a dude called John Milton (Paradise Lost, people!) who escapes Hell to chase down a cult-leader called Jonah (Billy Burke) and save his baby grand-daughter from having her head ripped off. Of course! He is helped by a smokin' hot waitress played by Amber Heard, and is in turn chased down by a mean guy called The Accountant dressed in a Men In Black style suit and played by William Fichtner. 

I'm not sure if it makes any sense to seriously review a movie who's every component justifies an exclamation mark, other than to say that director Patrick Lussier and writer Todd Farmer (MY BLOODY VALENTINE 3D) have succeeded in making a movie as ridonkulous and vulgar as CRANK.  It's great as far as it goes and I really loved it for the first hour, but after that, the relentless car chases wore me down. Still, in this age of post-modern detached cynicism, you've got to love any movie that tries so hard to have a balls-out good time.  And, from a technical stand-point, in an era of retro-fitted piss-poor 3D, you've got to embrace DP Brian Pearson's wallowing in the schlock-entertainment factor of the medium.

MY BLOODY VALENTINE is on release in the UK, US, Bosnia, Germany, Hungary, Israel, Kuwait, the Netherlands, Canada, Estonia, Lithuania, Malaysia, the Philippines and Poland. It opens next week in Argentina, Egypt, the Czech Republic, Greece, Kazakhstan, Russia, Bulgaria, India and Armenia. It opens on March 25th in Uruguay, Belgium, France and Turkey. It opens in April in Peru, Brazil, Mexico, Italy, Spain, Panama, Venezuela and Singapore. It opens on May 13th in Iceland, on May 26th in Portugal and on August 6th in Japan.

Random DVD Round-Up 4 - THE SWITCH

THE SWITCH is not half as bad as I thought it would be. From the marketing campaign, I'd written it off as one of those Hollywood romantic-comedies featuring an actress too old to really be playing the ditzy chick, given a new shot at features with plots featuring getting knocked up. (Think J-Lo in THE BACK-UP PLAN). Worse still, having been bitten too often by risible, banal Jennifer Aniston rom-coms - distracted by her botox and repelled by the smell of desperation coming off the screen - I was simply in no mood for it. But I have to say that, basically thanks to a rather restrained performance by Jason Bateman, I rather liked it! 

 Directed by Josh Gordon and Will Speck (BLADES OF GLORY) the movie starts off as a crude frat-boy gross-out comedy but morphs into something altogether more thoughtful. The opening scenes take us through the mechanics of the set-up with a sort of knockabout humour that entirely failed to connect with me. Kassie (Jennifer Aniston) has a party to celebrate getting artificially inseminated by hunky Roland (Patrick Wilson). Her best friend Wally (Jason Bateman) thinks she's making a mistake, gets drunk, accidentally knocks over Roland's semen and replaces it with his own. Years later, Kassie moves back to the city with her little kid - an introspective odd-ball, and as Wally and Kassie tentatively rekindle their friendship, he starts to realise that he's the kids father. We then get what is actually some rather touching character-driven drama as Wally opens up about his own childhood to the kid, and breaks Kassie and Roland up. 

There's a lot of mono-dimensional character-writing in the film, to be sure. Poor Patrick Wilson has little to do except be buff - Juliette Lewis' balls-out craziness is entirely unused - and Jeff Goldblum is the cliché promiscuous but basically lonely older sleazebag. But somehow, underneath all that, we get Jason Bateman's character really baring his soul. And yes, I think on balance, watching this film is probably worth it for Bateman. 

THE SWITCH was released in Autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 3 - GOING THE DISTANCE

Documentarian Nanette Burstein (AMERICAN TEEN, THE KID STAYS IN THE PICTURE) makes her debut feature with the like-able and sometimes authentic romantic-comedy GOING THE DISTANCE. Drew Barrymore and Justin Long - perhaps two of the most charming light-comedy actors currently working - play a couple who meet and have a fun fling knowing she's about to relocate from New York to San Francisco. Trouble is, they really connect, and so attempt to do a long-distance relationship. I love the honesty of it. Lots of scenes will feel familiar to anyone who's tried this. The financial strain of buying plane tickets - the jealousy of "friends" who are closer by - the justification to friends of why it's worth it - the struggle to weigh up career-choices versus life-partners. And the great thing is that Geoff LaTulippe's script handles it all very lightly. I can't say much bad about the script. It's well acted, contains consistent laughs and I genuinely cared about what happened to the characters. There may be a few rom-com cliché moments (do we really need the crude, OTT tanning salon scene?), but so many as to detract from the overall vibe. Basically, it's all good!

GOING THE DISTANCE was released last autumn and is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 2 - GROWN-UPS

GROWN-UPS is an alleged warm-hearted comedy that utterly fails to entertain on any level. 

The conceit is that four school-friends, now grown-up, come together at the funeral of their beloved school sports coach, and spend the weekend together in a vacation home. Their lives have taken them in different directions. Adam Sandler's character has turned into a big name Hollywood name, and is married to a glamorous fashion designer (Salma Hayek). Meanwhile Kevin James' character has ended up a small-time employee, much to his own shame. The movie is meant to be about how these friends rediscover their friendship and what really matters in life. It's meant to be about how our kids have become spoiled by Tivo and video games and need to just run around in the mud sometimes. All laudable aims. 

But in terms of execution, the fact that this flick was directed by Dennis Dugan (YOU DON'T MESS WITH THE ZOHAN, BIG DADDY, HAPPY GILMORE) and co-written with Fred Wolf (THE HOUSE BUNNY, LITTLE NICKY) tells you all you need to know about the crass humour and crude narrative arcs that the characters are sent on. I didn't invest in any of the characters, and so didn't care about their enlightenment. I didn't buy into the fashion designer ditching her Milan show - her heart melting with surprising ease. Even worse, I hated the so-called attempts at comedy. What happened to Maria Bello's career that she takes a part where her only job is to provide a "gag" about her toddler still drinking breast milk? Am I really meant to laugh at a grown man falling into mud? And what dirt do SNL has-beens David Spade and Rob Schneider have on Adam Sandler that he keep casting them in his films? 

 Still, it's far more watchable than COUPLE'S RETREAT. 

 GROWN UPS was released in summer 2010 and is available to rent and own.

Random DVD Round-Up 1 - COUPLES RETREAT

COUPLE'S RETREAT is a truly piss-poor alleged comedy starring Vince Vaughn, Jason Bateman, Jon Favreau and Faizon Love as middle-aged men frustrated by middle-aged family life. So they and their wives (Malin Akerman, Kristen Bell, Kristin Davis, Kali Hawk)) take off for a tropical island and a weekend of intense marital therapy run by a spectacularly mis-cast Jean Reno. I just don't know where to begin in terms of reviewing it. It's a movie so devoid of comedic inspiration that it simply falls flat in every scene. I didn't care about any of the characters. I didn't find any of the verbal or physical humour funny. And I wanted the film to end. Quickly. Save yourself the trouble and rent Favreau and Vaughn's genius early pic, SWINGERS instead, and remember a time when they were able to create genuinely sympathetic characters and laugh-out-loud funny lines.

COUPLES RETREAT was released in autumn 2010 and is now available to rent and own.