In Medias Res: Defending the Oscars (Sometimes)

Sunday, March 02, 2014

Defending the Oscars (Sometimes)

It's easy to dump on the Academy Awards; doing so in practically a tradition, one that I've joined in with plenty of times. If you want this year's version, just to build up your snark in preparation for this evening's edition of the annual overblown spectacle, try here or here or here or here, or just Google some more of your own. But you know--sometimes the armchair critics are wrong. But there are at least two times when, as time has gone by and the negative critical consensus has built, I've had to say to myself: no, actually, I think the Oscar voters got this one right.

1. Chariots of Fire deserved the Best Picture award in 1982. This movie doesn't stand out as hated so much as ignored--but if you remind people that Chariots of Fire was nominated the same year as Raiders of the Lost Ark, the fury quickly mounts. A hackneyed, synthesizer-drenched pedantic morality play (or so the critics screech), winning out over one of the greatest adventure movies of all time! Impossible! Well, I disagree. Raiders is a tremendous film, a genre-defining thriller that never misses a beat--but Chariots was just as expertly realized, a careful unity of acting and cinematography and soundtrack that enlisted the viewers in a powerful act of myth-making. And a highly intelligent one too; Vangelis may have long since passed his sell-by date, but Chariots purposefully-overwrought-but-never-unreasonable depiction of class conflict, athletic dedication, religious devotion, ethnic pride, and patriotism still works, scene after scene.

There were, to be sure, crimes perpetrated at the Oscars that year--rewarding the Henry Fonda and Katherine Hepburn for treacly On Golden Pond, for example, instead of the far more deserving Paul Newman for Absence of Malice and Susan Sarandon for Atlantic City--but the Best Picture race wasn't one of them.

2. Roberto Benigni deserved his Best Actor award in 1999. Not everyone hates Life is Beautiful, but those who do hate REALLY hate it; they find it an utterly despicable, profoundly immoral, aesthetically cheap pastiche of a film--and the central cause of that horror is Roberto Benigni, who they consider a horrible pathetic clown of a man. His win over Edward Norton's vicious turn in American History X is taken taken as evidence of Hollywood's anti-Semitism, or some such thing. Again, I disagree. The viewers who respond to this strangely farcical comedy set during the Holocaust are simply unable to take the opening words of the film seriously: that the whole thing is presented as a bedtime story, a fairy tale, a parable. For myself, as someone who doesn't really buy into the whimsical (and arguably condescending) relationship between Benigni's character and his son, but who found a certain sacrificial beauty to it all the same, Benigni's performance throughout the final half of the film--where he was constantly terrified and yet always able to fully enter into the ridiculous fantasy he is spinning for his boy--was clownish in the best sense, and amazing to watch.

It pains me to say this; also nominated for Best Actor that year was Ian McKellen for Gods and Monsters, which I think is a tremendous, too-soon forgotten movie. But no, Benigni deserved it.

Others choices, anyone? Anyone willing to go against the critical consensus and defend Out of Africa or Forrest Gump or A Beautiful Mind? Or even Crash? (Well, of course not that last one; let's not go COMPLETELY crazy here.)

3 comments:

Withywindle said...: I'm happy Braveheart won, although I wouldn't have minded if Apollo 13 or Babe had got the nod instead. But is that controversial?; Monday, March 03, 2014
Russell Arben Fox said...: It is to me! I think Braveheart was hammy (and Apollo 13 merely workmanlike, at best), while I think Babe was tremendous bit of whimsical yet deeply thoughtful storytelling, one of the best movies of the 1990s. (Too bad the sequel was awful.); Monday, March 03, 2014
Withywindle said...: Ah, I liked some of the historicity in the fabric of the movie (disparity in Scots and English weaponry, as I recollect), and I thought it was a good, bravura epic. But I can't quarrel with someone who loved Babe, since I loved it too. ("Pig ... of ... destiny!") I thought it was a good year for movies, all in all.; Monday, March 03, 2014

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"Every one of the standards according to which action is condemned demands action. Although the dignity of persons is inevitably violated in action, this dignity would be far less recognized in the world than it is had it not been supported by actions such as the establishment of constitutions and the fighting of wars in defense of human rights. Action must be untruthful, yet religion, science, philosophy, and the arts, the main forms of absolute fidelity to the truth, could not survive were they unsupported by action. Action cannot but be anticommunal in some measure, yet communal relationships would be almost nonexistent without areas of peace and order, which are created by action. We must act hesitantly and regretfully, then, but still we must act."

(Glenn Tinder, The Political Meaning of Christianity: The Prophetic Stance [HarperSanFrancisco, 1991], 215)

"[T]he press was still the last resource of the educated poor who could not be artists and would not be tutors. Any man who was fit for nothing else could write an editorial or a criticism....The press was an inferior pulpit; an anonymous schoolmaster; a cheap boarding-school; but it was still the nearest approach to a career for the literary survivor of a wrecked education."

(Henry Adams, The Education of Henry Adams [Mariner Books, 2000], 211)

"Mailer was a Left Conservative. So he had his own point of view. To himself he would suggest that he tried to think in the style of [Karl] Marx in order to attain certain values suggested by Edmund Burke."

(Norman Mailer, The Armies of the Night [The New American Library, 1968], 185)

"All those rely on their hands, and each is skillful at his own craft. / Without them a city would have no inhabitants; no settlers or travellers would come to it. / Yet they are not in demand at public discussions, nor do they attain to high office in the assembly. They do not sit on the judge's bench or understand the decisions of the courts. They cannot expound moral or legal principles and are not ready with maxims. / But they maintain the fabric of this world, and the practice of their craft is their prayer."

(Ecclesiasticus (Sirach) 38:31-34, in The Revised English Bible with the Apocrypha [Oxford University Press, 1989])

"The tendency, which is too common in these days, for young men to get a smattering of education and then think themselves unsuited for mechanical or other laborious pursuits is one that should not be allowed to grow up among us...Every one should make it a matter of pride to be a producer, and not a consumer alone."

(Wilford Woodruff, Millennial Star [November 14, 1887], 773)

"We are parts of the world; no one of us is an isolated world-whole. We are human beings, conceived in the body of a mother, and as we stepped into the larger world, we found ourselves immediately knotted to a universe with the thousand bands of our senses, our needs and our drives, from which no speculative reason can separate itself."

(J.G. Herder, Metacritique of the Critique of Pure Reason in Werke in zehn Bänden [Deutsche Klassiker Verlag, 1985-2000], 8:508, translated by Sonia Sikka)

"'Business!' cried the Ghost, wringing its hands again. 'Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my business; charity, mercy, forbearance, and benevolence, were all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!'"

(Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol [Candlewick Press, 2006], 35)

"The Master said, 'At fifteen, I set my mind upon learning; at thirty, I took my place in society; at forty, I became free of doubts; at fifty, I understood Heaven's Mandate; at sixty, my ear was attuned; and at seventy, I could follow my heart's desires without overstepping the bounds of propriety.'"

(Confucius, Analects [translated by Edward Slingerland, Hackett, 2003], 2.4)

"That drunken poet from whom you would not take a dreary tragedy, he believed in himself. That elderly minister with an epic from whom you are hiding in the back room, he believed in himself. If you consulted your business experience instead of your ugly individualistic philosophy, you would know that believing in himself is one of the commonest signs of a rotter. Actors who can't act believe in themselves; and debtors who won't pay. It would be much truer to say that a man will certainly fail because he believes in himself. Complete self-confidence is not merely a sin; complete self-confidence is a weakness."

(Gilbert K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy [Bradford and Dickens, 1957], 10)

"Lack of experience diminishes our power of taking a comprehensive view of the admitted facts. Hence those who dwell in intimate association with nature and its phenomena grow more and more able to formulate, as the foundations of their theories, principles which admit a wide and coherent development: while those whom devotion to abstract discussions has rendered unobservant of the facts are too ready to dogmatize on the basis of a few observations."

(Aristotle, On Generation and Corruption [translated by H.H. Joachim, Oxford, 1922], lines 316a5-9)

"The man who has gone through college or university easily becomes psychically unemployable in manual occupations without necessarily acquiring employability in, say, professional work."

(Joseph Schumpeter, Capitalism, Socialism, and Democracy [Harper Perennial, 1975], 152)

"[God] does not want men to give the Future their hearts, to place their treasure in it. . . . His ideal is a man who, having worked all day for the good of posterity (if that is his vocation), washes his mind of the whole subject, commits the issue to Heaven, and returns at once to the patience or gratitude demanded by the moment that is passing over him."

(C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters, revised paperback edition [Macmillan, 1982], 69)

"Money is simply a tool. We use money as a proxy for our time and labor--our life energy--to acquire things that we cannot (or care not to) procure or produce with our own hands. Beyond that, it has limited actual utility: you can't eat it; if you bury it in the ground, it will not produce a crop to sustain a family; it would make a lousy roof and a poor blanket. To base our understanding of economy simply on money overlooks all other methods of exchange that can empower communities. Equating an economy only with money assumes there are no other means by which we can provide food for our bellies, a roof over our heads and clothing on our backs."

(Shannon Hayes, Radical Homemakers, [Left to Write, 2010], 57)

"Was du ererbt von deinen Vätern hast, / Erwirb es, um es zu besitzen. / Was man nicht nützt, ist eine schwere Last; / Nur was der Augenblick erschafft, das kann er nützen."

"What from your fathers you received as heir, / Acquire [anew] if you would possess it. / What is not used is but a load to bear; / But if today creates it, we can use and bless it."

(Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Faust [translated by Walter Kaufmann, Anchor Books, 1963], lines 682-685)

"A scholar's business is to add to what is known. That is all. But it is capable of giving the very greatest satisfaction, because knowledge is good. It does not have to look good or even sound good or even do good. It is good just by being knowledge. And the only thing that makes it knowledge is that it is true. You can't have too much of it and there is no little too little to be worth having. There is truth and falsehood in a comma."

(Tom Stoppard [spoken by A.E. Houseman], The Invention of Love [Grove Press, 1997], 37)

"I believe in democracy. I accept it. I will faithfully serve and defend it. I believe in it because it appears to me the inevitable consequence of what has gone before it. Democracy asserts the fact the masses are now raised to a higher intelligence than formerly. All our civilization aims at this mark. We want to do what we can to help it. I myself want to see the result. I grant that it is an experiment, but it is the only direction society can take that is worth its taking; the only conception of its duty large enough to satisfy its instincts; the only result that is worth an effort or a risk. Every other possible step is backward, and I do not care to repeat the past. I am glad to see society grapple with issues in which no one can afford to be neutral."

(Henry Adams, Democracy: An American Novel [Farrar, Straus, and Young, Inc., 1952], 53)

"Old men ought to be explorers / Here or there does not matter / We must be still and still moving / Into another intensity / For a further union, a deeper communion / Through the dark cold and the empty desolation, / The wave cry, the wind cry, the vast waters / Of the petrel and the porpoise. In my end is my beginning."

(T.S. Eliot, "East Coker," Four Quarters [Harcourt, 1943])

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Sunday, March 02, 2014

Defending the Oscars (Sometimes)

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