Oscars 2015 falls for flashiness, ignores beauty: Why Birdman and not Boyhood won The Best Film Award by Deepanjana Pal Feb 23, 2015.
How many of you just knew that Birdman was going to sweep the most important awards at the 87th Academy Awards? Although it didn't win much early on in the show, when the showstopping categories were being announced, Alejandro Inarritu's film about a fading actor who wants to recapture his former glory, unfurled its mighty wings much like the title character does in the eye-popping scene near the end of the film, when Riggan unleashes Birdman upon New York City. Birdman won the Oscars for best film, direction, cinematography and original screenplay. Each one was a blow to the indie heart because it pushed Richard Linklater's Boyhood further and further away from the spotlight. Awards are the darnedest things. Ask sociologist Pierre Bourdieu, who studied (among other things) culture and its dynamics. Bourdieu observed that while lists offered different levels of prestige, prizes or awards impose a more bipolar perspective. If you've won the prize, you're excellent. If you haven't, then you get lumped with (at best) the mediocre and (at worst) the bad. There's no respect for also-rans in this setup, no matter how many Oscar winners go up on stage and tearfully say that they dedicate their award to fellow nominees. Uncle Oscar is going home with only one of them, dedications be damned. For those who loved the languorous beauty of Boyhood more than Birdman's flamboyance, the Academy's decision to virtually ignore Richard Linklater's magnum opus verges on criminal. This snub relegates Boyhood to one of the many films that came out last year, rather than acknowledging how special it was and the quiet audacity that characterised it. Isn't the fact that Linklater shot this film over a decade and created a story that moves as seamlessly as life itself reason enough to give him the Oscar for best direction at the very least? Apparently not. However, it's not just Boyhood that was treated like a stepchild, or like the pirates that Ethan Hawke likened the indie gang of Boyhood to when he was asked by a red carpet reporter how it felt to be in the competition against Birdman. Nightcrawler and The Grand Budapest Hotel lost the Oscar for best screenplay to Birdman, which is a travesty because as clever as Birdman may be, it doesn't have the nuances and complexity that the other two screenplays do. "We don't belong here," Hawke had said, with a charming grin. Except technically, they do. Boyhood, Nightcrawler, The Grand Budapest Hotel and every other film, whether indie or pulpy, has a place at the the Oscars. These awards are supposed to be about rewarding excellence in cinema, but over the decades, "excellence" has proved to be a loose term. From nominees to winners, the way the Academy thinks and chooses has often been perplexing. For instance, what sense does it make that Babe got a Best Picture nomination and Dead Man Walking didn't (both came out in the same year)? Today we take for granted that the Oscars will love anything that's historical even if it's just about mediocre -- take The King's Speech, for instance -- and yet, back in 1992, Oliver Stone's JFK barely got any love while The Silence of The Lambs walked away with five Oscars, including the one for Best Picture. This might be irritating for cinephiles, but it isn't necessarily a bad thing. The fact that the Oscars are decided by an elite group of peers who aren't precisely representative of the real world of cinemagoers could be helpful. On paper, it means anything could get nominated, as is obvious from the number of nominations an sweet but silly film like Heaven Can Wait got (nine, including those for best actor, picture and director). However, in recent times, the Oscars have become increasingly predictable. So much so that Gabriel Rossman and Oliver Schilke actually wrote a paper for American Sociological Review in which they decoded and studied "Oscar appeal". The bottom line is this: there is such a thing as Oscar bait. It changes, gradually, over the years, but if you study the films released and those nominated over a period of time, as Rossman and Schilke did, then you'll see there are patterns made up of details like time of release, type of distributor and genre prove that make up an Oscar favourite. The formula doesn't always work, but it does apply to a lot of examples. Even without all that academic rigour, one quick look at the Best Picture nominees and winners, and you'll notice trends. The 1980s, for instance, was the age of the exotic. The Last Emperor, Gandhi and Out of Africa were among the films on which the Oscars shone its spotlight. There was a curiosity about the unusual that was fed by these films as well as favourites like Rain Man and Driving Miss Daisy, which were stories about breaking with convention. From the 1990s onwards, there's been a surge of love for sad biopics and historical films, with films like Braveheart, Elizabeth, Schindler's List, Titanic and Shakespeare in Love winning nominations and Oscars. As you enter the 2000s, the historical is still preferred, but instead of being about fraternity and relationships, the focus of the films starts narrowing to close in on a single hero. Gladiator, Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker, The King's Speech, Argo, 12 Years a Slave - these seem like very different films, but stripped down to their basics, they're all about one man overcoming obstacles that no one thought he would. Unlike the films of the 1990s, these heroes don't do their heroic deeds for any higher cause like art or the greater good of society. They do whatever they do for their own sense of self. Last year, Alfonso Cuaron won the Oscar for best directing, for Gravity. It was a magnificent film, about a lonely woman who went a little bit nuts (to the point where she started talking to herself and hallucinating) and finally soared through the skies, to a new life. This year's Best Director, Inarritu, made Birdman, a film about a lonely man who goes a little nuts (to the point where he starts talking to himself and hallucinating) and finally soars through the skies. Perhaps a new recipe for Oscar bait is being cooked up as in the 2010s? Less facetiously, there is a trend that's painfully obvious in this year's Oscars. The Academy is thoroughly charmed by flashiness. It noticed the elaborate prettiness of The Grand Budapest Hotel's costumes, make-up and costume design, but it didn't notice the elegy to beauty and freedom in the film's screenplay. The thoroughly flawed script of The Imitation Game was given the Oscar for best adapted screenplay -- because a film shining its light on a man who was forced to hide his homosexuality seems like a politically correct pick? -- even though Whiplash was infinitely tighter, sharper and better written. The obvious effort that went into Eddie Redmayne becoming Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything was prized over the fluent spontaneity of Michael Keaton in Birdman. At least the contest between Emmanuel Lubezki clever camerawork in Birdman and Dick Pope's gloriously artistic cinematography in Mr Turner is a fair one. It seems for once, the Academy opted for the more modern aesthetic. Actually though, all the Academy seemed to have voted for when it pushed Birdman for the high-profile awards was the flashier, more flamboyant film. Ever since the Oscars' nominations were announced, everyone's been talking about the contest is between Birdman and Boyhood. Both films circle around a solitary hero who must tackle the challenges that his age poses before him; only Boyhood's hero is a kid while Birdman's is a middle-aged man. The way the two directors approach these challenges is dramatically different. Linklater opts for simplicity, choosing to fill every scene with powerful acting and writing that radiates quiet insight. Boyhood unfolds like life, unspectacularly but deliberately. It's awe-inspiring when you think about how much has gone into creating the illusion of the mundane in every frame, but you do have to think about it. Boyhood doesn't parade its own brilliance. It waits for you to notice. Inarritu, on the other hand, is full of tricks, conceits and effects that are intended to dazzle the viewer. Following the frenetic beat of Birdman's superb drumming soundtrack, the film doesn't just want to tell its hero, Riggan's story. It also wants to impress how brilliant the film is upon the audience, which is why there are obvious flourishes like the illusion of the entire film being a single shot and the mysterious ending. And that's what the Academy decided was the definition of excellence this year. If there was ever a time to sit down and watch The Grand Budapest Hotel and Boyhood, it's now. 3 26 0 AA RELATED STORIES Boyhood review: Despite the royal snub at Oscars, Richard Linklater's film is fabulous Feb 23, 2015 11:11 IST Oscars 2015: JK Simmons bags best actor in supporting role for Whiplash Feb 23, 2015 8:06 IST Oscar special: Outstanding acting and direction make Whiplash a masterpiece Feb 19, 2015 14:38 IST 1 Comment READ NEXT STORY Beautiful oscar mornings: B-town wakes up to the award ceremony results, hails Birdman Feb 23.
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