Every year, I find the Academy Awards are a lesson in the films I didn’t or couldn’t watch.
The Academy Award nominees for this year were announced Tuesday morning and I could probably county on one hand the number of movies that were nominated in the big categories that were shown either here or Weyburn.
It’s not the fault of the theatre here. They go where the major audiences are, and they do a very good job of bringing in films and documentaries of local interest.
Put into the simplest of terms, films that are released to big audiences are often either big budget, big special effects explosion-fests, or they’re slow moving pieces where the director weaves an emotional tapestry where characters learn a Very Big Lesson, often about race relations, personal relationships with family members, or about how great the human spirit is.
Guardians of the Galaxy 2 touched on some of those themes, yes, but it also had a wisecracking raccoon and a dancing twig. Name me an Academy Award winner with a raccoon in a key role.
Also, for movies like The Post, I’m going to watch to watch that in the comfort of my own place, where going to get a snack means I can just pause it. It’s going to be a complex plot where I don’t need someone’s 11-year-old asking if they can go to the bathroom. Meanwhile, when I watched The Last Jedi, having it on the big screen meant a bigger level of excitement when stuff happened on the screen.
But sometimes a film will slip so far under the radar until awards season begins, it’s like someone just threw a dart at a map to get a random city, or threw random words together, attached formerly nominated director and actors and just made up a film. Zero Dark Thirty? Winter’s Bone? Brooklyn? Phantom Thread? Not a clue what any of these films are about.
This year is no exception. Given who the president of the United States is, its not surprising that race relations are going to be the focus of some of these nominees. I assume, at least. I presume Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri is not actually a documentary about the struggle to keep billboards in small town America updated and is about something to do with race. Equally, I believe Lady Bird is not a new superhero movie about a female avion. Even my youngest child should know by now the there is no shape for The Shape of Water, because water takes the shape of its container.
Mary J. Blige was nominated as Florence Jackson in Mudbound a movie neither you nor I have ever head of. Canadian acting legend Christopher Plummer was nominated for All The Money In The World, a movie I only heard about because the original actor who played John Paul Getty in the movie was Kevin Spacey and director Ridley Scott did some mad re-shoots in order get that guy out of it when Spacey’s controversy hit. It takes a great actor to get nominated for an award for a film he wasn’t even in until after it was first cut.
I stand to be corrected but I believe three of the animated feature films were shown here: Coco, Ferdinand the Bull and The Boss Baby. Being the parent of young children over the previous few years, it wasn’t at all uncommon to see far more of these movies than Best Picture Academy Award nominees. January to March would be catch-up time on various video on demand platforms after the kids were in bed.
So let’s all agree that we’re going to give these quieter, slower moving dramatic pieces like the ones I mocked earlier the same amount of energy and time as we do the porgs in The Last Jedi. I personally vow to watch Lady Bird by Greta Gerwig with the same amount of enthusiasm as the most recent Star Trek film.
But if The Avengers: Infinity War doesn’t get nominated next year for a bunch of stuff, I may start throwing things.
