View from the Cheap Seats is kind of an extension of the newsroom. Whenever our three regular reporters, Calvin Daniels, Thom Barker and Randy Brenzen are in the building together, it is frequently a site of heated debate. This week: What did you think of the recent Oscar winners?
Happy Max missed big one
I’ve only seen four of the Best Picture nominees. Actually, about three-and-a-third, that’s how bad Mad Max was. I’ve only seen one of the performances nominated for Best Actor and none of the Best Actress performances. For Best Director, Best Original Screenplay and Best Adapted Screenplay, I’ve watched two, three and one of the movies respectively. And those are about the only awards I actually care about, and I am using the term “care” very loosely.
Really, I have no business weighing in on the subject of bad (or good) Oscar results.
However, this is “View from the Cheap Seats” not view from the educated, objective seats.
I am very happy that Mad Max did not win any of the biggies, which to my mind are the ones I mentioned above. Mad Max is, for me, everything that’s wrong with filmmaking today. It is frenetic, special effects-driven, fantasy crapola. Its popularity suggests to me a significant portion of the public suffers from ADHD. Its ability to convince the Academy that it is deserving of any recognition whatsoever says the Academy has lost touch with what film should be about and that is story-telling.
Speaking of story-telling, that is what Spotlight, the eventual Best Picture and Best Original Screenplay winner, excelled at. It was compelling, emotional, smart, funny and well-paced. Whether it was better than the five Best Picture nominees I haven’t seen, I don’t know, but they would have to be exceptional movies indeed to best this Best winner.
I guess that’s all I have to say. I kind of wish I had seen The Revenant because everything I’ve heard about it has been bad. I’m happy for Leo DiCaprio. He is an excellent actor, and even if this was not his best performance, he had to win an Oscar sooner or later. From what I’ve heard, though, the fact this was his year may be indicative of a very weak field for 2016. Certainly, Matt Damon’s performance in The Martian although fine, was not overly compelling.
I look forward to seeing the women. Apparently that field is very strong this year and they are the kinds of films I generally likes.
—Thom Barker
Choices belittle awards
The 2016 Oscars have been under a cloud for months, ever since the finalists were announced and it was felt by many African Americans were under-represented.
Whether that is a slight, or simply a situation where the roles African Americans starred in is actually a difficult thing to determine.
However, how good would an actor needed to be to be better than Leonardo DiCaprio in the Revenant.
Perhaps DiCaprio was due an Oscar for best crawling in a movie, or maybe a dual win with one for best grunting.
But acting, please.
Granted it’s hard to blame DiCaprio for a bad acting performance in Revenant, a movie with some breathtaking cinematography, and little more. The plot was plodding, carried along on a healthy dose of blood splatter, coming to a typically expected final ‘Hollywood’ fight scene.
Then there was Mad Max: Fury Road. The film won six Oscars, all in categories that mean something to the industry and little to the rest of us; makeup, sound editing, film editing etc.
But some were actually lamenting this thing was not Best Picture.
Really aren’t the best pictures supposed to have a story, a plot, maybe a role or two that took some acting to pull it off.
Thankfully the Academy did not make that mistake, one which would have forever tainted the process to the point of total irrelevance.
The Academy actually did a credible job of Best Picture in awarding the Oscar to Spotlight.
While a movie few are likely to see, it is a story with much merit.
Spotlight is a biographical crime drama film directed by Tom McCarthy and written by McCarthy and Josh Singer. The film follows The Boston Globe’s “Spotlight” team, the oldest continuously operating newspaper investigative journalist unit in the United States, and its investigation into cases of widespread and systemic child sex abuse in the Boston area by numerous Roman Catholic priests. It is based on a series of stories by the actual Spotlight Team that earned The Globe the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Public Service.
Still the Oscars increasingly are only notable for movies you should avoid, or sadly will only see on late night TV where often the best movies finally get wide distribution - so watch for Spotlight.
- Calvin Daniels
Not awards watcher
Some big awards show was held recently and some famous people won some sort of award for acting and whatnot.
At least, that’s my take on The Oscars, because I really don’t care about the event in the first place. I think it’s pointless. Why should they have an awards show for doing their job as actors? The answer: so some people can stroke their ego. That’s it.
The people who make the decisions on who wins the awards also have no clue what’s going on. Leonardo DiCaprio winning the Academy Award for Best Actor in ‘The Revenant’ is an absolute joke. He did nothing in that film that was remarkable. In fact, you could cast ANYONE from any walk of life to take on that role and they’d nail it, so long as they could stand up and fall down a lot and breathe heavily and raspy.
The film ‘Mad Max: Fury Road’ winning six Academy Awards is also a joke. Sure, some were warranted, like Best Costume Design and Makeup and Hairstyling, but to give such a subpar film that many awards is ridiculous.
The fact that Brie Larson won Best Female Actor is also a joke. Larson is a terrible actor. If anyone should have won that award, it should have been Blake Lively for her role in ‘Age of Adaline’ (by the way, that movie should have won several awards as well).
In the end, although some decisions annoy me simply because they’re unwarranted, in the grand scheme of things it really doesn’t matter who won and who didn’t. The Academy Awards are a joke, just like every other awards show (other than the Nobel Peace Prize stuff, because the recipients actually do something to better the world).
—Randy Brenzen
