Tag Archives: Academy Awards

And the Oscar Goes to Oscar

The most newsworthy element of today’s Academy Award nominations was that these Oscars will be the most irrelevant in the modern era.

Need proof? Quick: Which film are you pulling for to win Best Picture?

As we begin to emerge from the pandemic, we’re going to see which businesses caught a nasty bout of COVID-19. In the case of the movies, the virus may prove fatal.

Certainly, theatrical moviegoing officially joined the Endangered Species list Monday: Note that not one nominated film was offered to the public in 2020. Instead, all are available through on-demand or streaming services.

That was a quick war. Only a couple years ago, streamers like Netflix, Amazon and Hulu fought over scraps in the Best Picture race, and no streaming film had ever won the top prize. Now, they are the top dogs.

And say what you will about snubs and surprises this year. The biggest stunner was the Best Picture dismissal of Tenet, the time-bending Christopher Nolan thriller of summer that was Hollywood’s only real attempt at getting butts in theater seats. Not only did the quarter-billion film struggle to make $50 million in the U.S., but the Academy shunned it as the year’s only avatar for old school film viewing: on a 20-foot screen and at a quarter a kernel.

Which makes this year’s show kind of meaningless. The Oscars have always been Hollywood’s final backslap of the year, and that self-congratulations won’t stop because of a silly thing like a pandemic.

But if you had no investment in going to the movies, how many people are going to want a show that serves as a tribute to that very act?

The pandemic has tested, again and again, what we can live without. The Oscars — and the struggling industry they represent — must pull a hero’s escape to prevent this Academy Awards show from turning into a closing credit.

To be continued…

The Beauty — and Plagiarism — of The Shape of Water

 

It’s either a sign of Guillero del Toro’s genius or the lackluster slate of films (or both, of course) that Shape of Water has become the film du jour in Hollywood’s pre-Oscar hysteria.

The odd fairy tale has already racked up seven Golden Globe nominations, a raft of other nods, and it’s expected to be among the titans when the contenders for the Academy Awards are announced are announced January 23. After seeing the film’s trailer, Kevin Smith tweeted he was embarrassed to call himself a director. It even received what is surely del Toro’s proudest honor, a HollywoodBowles Oughttabe for The Most Beautiful Film of 2017.

But in all fairness (despite what President Orangutan tweets, most media prefer truth), we must admit: As beautiful and worthy as Water is, it’s still the most blatant ripoff in Oscar’s history since Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan for Best Picture.

That’s not to say Water doesn’t deserve the praise — or the laurels —  it will inevitably garner. Being derivative doesn’t make entertainment any less worthy. If anything, it’s more remarkable, for it’s elevating a genre whose path has already been cut.

And del Toro, an avid and open nerdboy (he owns more action figures than I do, somehow), is absolutely blunt about his love of The Creature of the Black Lagoon, the 1954 film that he concedes was the inspiration for the monster in his own movie.

What he failed to mention was that its sequel the next year, The Revenge of the Creature, laid the foundation for everything else, from aesthetic to attitude.

I wouldn’t have noticed it myself, had I not been such a fan of Mystery Science Theater 3000, the 10-year series that made fun of awful films (in some ways, the boys at MST3K were the snarky harbingers of social media).

MST3K is my Ultraman, my TV American cheese food, the crap that slops over my entertainment nachos. Confession: If given the choice between a documentary on the universe’s creation or a rerun of MST3K, I’ll often choose the latter. Frighteningly often.

And it was in that embarrassing choice the realization came. The guys were riffing on Creature one evening when two epiphanies struck:

  1. This actually isn’t a bad movie (it features Clint Eastwood in his big-screen debut).
  2. This is The Shape of Water, with but a single plot twist.

The twist, of course, is something of a whopper (spoiler alert): The creature and the beauty want to be together.

Aside from that, though, there is frightening little that separates the two movies. They monsters look near identical. The creature in both films wears an oversized, near-comical chain preventing love. Creature and beauty have  the same meet-cute, through the pane glass of a makeshift aquarium, both are allegories for a Cold War paranoia.

And it’s easy to see how go del Toro got the inspiration; with a simple question of movie logic:  What if King Kong and Fay Wray liked each other? We all know twas beauty that killed the beast. But what if they just wanted to get it on?

What if, indeed? Screw originality. We live in a nation that wants to reverse the old-fashioned, outdated principles of overthought and inner debate.

Long live the beautiful heist.