I am trying to understand what it means to be a success at something so intangible as the Arts, especially with movies. What makes one movie better than another? Is there a standard for judging apart from personal taste? I don’t know. Which is why I don’t understand the Oscars on a basic level.
In every other area of (my) personal interest, it’s easy enough: either one is doing a good job and the results show it, or one isn’t. It’s empirical, it’s measurable, it’s clear. Adding two figures and getting an answer that is “wrong” is simply not opinion, it is fact. Whether or not the “adder” is a likable person makes no difference—which, incidentally, is just about the only reason I will abide a jerk.
In the Arts and what I call the “soft sciences”, personality occupies an immense if not central role. An ability to sway audiences with rhetoric or whatever else apart from actual empirical capability takes the cake. There is no better example of this than El Presidente Body Odor.
Another exemplary fact is how many of our politicians today are lawyers; quite apart from the idea that we’re being led into a yawning pit of a future at warp speed by a Congress mostly comprised of ex-“poli-sci” and history majors (ie. All those lazy SOBs in college who partied more often than studied), lawyers play a next-to-useless part in any real interpretation of a civilized society with the distinct exception of Chairman Ann. I’m going to paraphrase Plato’s assertion that you can judge a society from how it treats its prisoners and say that you can judge the depravity of a society by how many lawyers it has within its borders.
This little aside is not so much a rant against lawyers however, although I know what I’m talking about from experience, as much as it is a rant against a lack of standards in modern society. Gone are the days when one could even utter the phrase “the best and the brightest” without either laughing wildly afterwards—it’s just a joke, people!—or being laughed off the stage, if one is lucky to escape without claims of racism or worse, a fruit storm. That term has no meaning anymore because practically, there’s no such class of people.
The other day at a lunch “event,” I received a certificate of appreciation (which did not carry any remuneration—I mean get real, I’m a civil servant) for work I’ve been doing on a project. Mine was the first name called. Followed by a million others, some of whom did nothing more than show up for planning meetings and even worse, actively worked to derail the project. So I sat there watching this and thinking how utterly worthless that made the decorated piece of paper I had started doodling on with my spaghetti sauce stained finger. It means nothing if everyone’s special.
Humans by nature categorize, it’s an innate trait and in fact is one characteristic of one critical measure of species adaptability and intelligence. If an artificiality is introduced into this basic categorization process such as is being done every day in this once great country; if we are forced to accept without judgment, if judging itself is wrong, what do we have? A nation in which sub-prime mortgages can lead to the credit crisis currently ruining our economy, a nation in which an Oscar can be given to such a movie as Slum Dog Millionaire and Rachel Getting Married can be “critically acclaimed” with an Oscar nomination for Anne Hathaway and horrors, an actual Oscar to Penelope Cruz.
Slum Dog Millionaire is of the ilk of Indian Bollywood movies that captivated an entire generation of Nigerian kids living in Benin city in the 80s when somehow, the local TV station was able to get reels of famous Bollywoodia. I grew to know Amitabh Batchan and others as they shimmied and popped their shoulders this way and that across my small black and white screen singing in god knows what language, drums beating out that peculiar and uniquely Indian Bollywood beat. It was what it was: the filmic equivalent of eating Bonbons on a wet Saturday afternoon. Utterly enjoyable crap, but still crap.
So blow me down to find such a movie, however technically dressed up, winning critical acclaim; there was no more cringe-worthy TV-watching moment for me as seeing Slum Dog’s English screen writer and director clutching that statue. The English, it seems, can still find colonial gold by plumbing the depths of the Indian subcontinent.
Basically a middling love story, Slum Dog’s Indian setting (read: severe and despicable poverty) seems to have been the necessary ingredient for Oscar. People were so overtaken by pity for those Slum Dogs, I expect, that such things as acting ability, story content, pacing, mood, structure, and drama, took a firm position miles behind quality.
Penelope Cruz winning an Oscar for playing a screaming Harpie should give hope to screaming bitches everywhere, I guess. I am wholly disgusted enough to let that sentence speak the volumes I could write about that role in yet another silly movie by the once great Woody Allen. And for god’s sake, Woodster, enough with the voice-over! If I’d wanted to read a novel, I would.
Last night, and the real reason for this long post, I finally saw Rachel Getting Married. WOMBAT (look it up). This is a disaster of a movie, remarkable only as a cautionary tale for movie makers. Don’t do anything this movie does. Don’t hire anyone in this movie. Don’t even make a movie. Yes, I vote to impose a moratorium on movies this year because ‘Rachel’ was made.
Anne Hathaway is a recovering drug addict—even though once you actually stop taking drugs for at least 9 months, one could validly be called “cured” but whatever. That’s a topic for another post. She’s been transported to Connecticut for a wedding ceremony: her sister Rachel is getting married—to a Nigerian, no less. That’s the point of the movie. Yup, that’s it.
We have no theme, no reason for this movie, nothing apart from Anne Hathaway’s Kym attends a wedding that takes place over a weekend and that very action seems to regurgitate angry feelings on everyone’s part because, you see, Anne was a drug-addled teenager that drove a car off a bridge and killed her brother.
Left unsaid and unexplored is why, in this wonderful family, is a 16-year-old girl that fucked up. No, instead we watch as a borderline mental case (AKA Daddy) takes on his future son-in-law in a competition to see who can pack more dirty plates into a dishwasher. All this to a background of incessant (no shit, really, INCESSANT) live music, rowdy Hippie Commune bullshit, a mini United Nations gathering and (fuck me!) Fab Five Freddy. Throw in a record for the fastest utterance of “Hello” to outright sexual intercourse outside a brothel and you will agree there was simply NO POINT TO THIS MOVIE.
And then, as it things could stand to make EVEN LESS sense, the bride and groom are decked out in Indian garb. None of them are Indians mind, just it looked “cool” I guess and besides, India was really big in 2008. Well perhaps I’m being unfair, there is a point to this movie: it teaches the movie-going public that a very real and completely suitable punishment for drug addiction and killing one’s siblings is being made to put on a Sari and attend a fucking shitty wedding in Connecticut.
Standards. What is that again?
