ON FILM: For critic, awards are lots of la, la, la

My favorite description of La La Land, which this week tied the all-time record for most Oscar nominations for a single film, comes from writer-director Mark Thiedeman, who called it "a film about how hard it is to not be famous yet."

That doesn't necessarily mean I disagree with the Academy voters who decided to give the movie 14 nominations. I think it's probably a better film than Titanic, which got 14 in 1997. (I don't think it's as good as All About Eve, which got 14 nominations in 1950, but some of that is because Eve was introduced to me as a certified classic. I don't think I've ever seen it on a big screen. So it's less a movie than a kind of benchmark, which means I pay it more respect than it's due. But still, it's Bette Davis.)

Once you accept, as most grown-up people do, that the Oscars are more about Hollywood babbitry than recognizing the finest artists working in the medium of moving pictures (because how are we going to do that?), then you cease to get upset about the movies the Academy honors and those it snubs. It's certainly no shame not to be nominated for an Oscar. The movies I like best rarely are.

But I didn't hate La La Land. I didn't even dislike it, although I certainly understand why some people wince at its assumptions. It's perfectly fair to examine how director Damien Chazelle frames the argument for a purer kind of jazz -- at how he positions the inarguably white Ryan Gosling as the defender of the faith and pop star John Legend as the corrupting sellout. On the other hand, most people don't care about jazz, and a lot of those who do aren't really interested in the racial politics implicit in the music. I could draw a line between the jail-breaking art of Louis Armstrong and the style with which Jackie Robinson attacked the base paths. I could make the case that jazz was one of the ways black style was codified and smuggled into the mainstream, and that it's important to understand it as less a set of rules than as a mode of subversion. I could argue that Gosling's character's attitude was all wrong. But then I'd only be engaging in the sort of critical entanglement that puts some people off film criticism.

Most people just want to see if he gets the girl.

La La Land is what it is, a crowd-pleasing musical made more endearing by the not-quite-professional quality of the performances of its stars. (See The Umbrellas of Cherbourg, an overt influence, and Woody Allen's Everybody Says I Love You, a possibly covert one.) It's charming, but I'd warn against setting your expectations too high before seeing it.

And two nominations for Best Song really seems excessive.

Of the movies nominated for Best Picture, my favorites are Moonlight and Manchester by the Sea, and I'm happy Hell or High Water got a nod. I hope Isabelle Huppert wins Best Actress for her work in Elle. I'd probably pick Mahershala Ali (Moonlight) or Lucas Hedges (Manchester) as Best Supporting Actor; and Viola Davis (Fences) as Best Supporting Actress (I preferred Michelle Williams in Certain Women, but she was very good in a very brief role in Manchester.)

I'm surprised that Hacksaw Ridge -- the only Best Picture nominee that I've yet to see -- got as much attention as it did. I'm disappointed that Loving didn't do better (although Ruth Negga's Best Actress nomination was as welcome as it was unexpected). All in all, there were six black folks nominated for acting awards, along with Anglo-Indian Dev Patel. And while you can count on some people to call it an over-reaction to the #OscarsSoWhite campaigns of recent years, I don't fault any of the choices. (Hidden Figures isn't my favorite movie, but it's no worse than The Help.)

Lots of stuff to hot-take about, if that's your thing: Meryl Streep didn't deserve it this year. Sausage Party and Martin Scorsese and Annette Bening got snubbed. O.J.: Made in America is really a television series. I might believe some of that.

Even so, I don't expect to pay much attention to the awards ceremony, though I'll probably watch most of it.

I understand why my friends like it and why there's so much interest in predicting the winners. We'll probably do that in these pages again this year, because it's fun and because I'm always amazed at how well our panel can tell what the Academy will do. But the Oscars are to film culture what fantasy football is to real football -- there's little correlation between who wins an Oscar and who makes really fine movies.

Email:

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

blooddirtangels.com

MovieStyle on 01/27/2017

Upcoming Events