There are few movies that feel like they could give The Artist some heat: Hugo and The Descendants. Perhaps, as many a Tweeter will tell you, “it’s been The Artist since Cannes.” And okay, fine. Maybe. What makes The Artist such a threat? It is loved by many, hated by few. Almost every other film in the race has its haters. But how can you hate The Artist? It’s like hating Slumdog Millionaire or The King’s Speech. You can’t – it’s would be akin to drop-kicking poor little Uggie across the room. You hate yourself inside for hating something that lovely and brilliantly made – a silent, black and white movie no less. No one is going to realistically have anything to complain about if The Artist wins. Not even GQ’s Natasha Vargas-Cooper, who went on a tirade about how much she hates American Beauty in retrospect:
Yet, so often during this splendid time of year, the conversation trumps the conversation piece and it becomes impossible to see Oscar contenders objectively during their time. Take 1999, a momentous year for movies that lead to some of the most contemptible wins in Oscar history. Indie turks like Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David O. Russell—who made a name for themselves laboring on shoestring budgets during the early ’90s—were given studio backing, bona-fide stars, and just enough license to ensure their scripts wouldn’t be nitpicked to the point of banality. This was the year Fight Club, The Matrix, Three Kings, Office Space, Being John Malkovich, Election, Magnolia, and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut were released. A new aesthetic and intellectual order was gelling, one that would later come to define ’90s cinema: a mini-golden age, when today’s best working directors and writers were actively demolishing the old guard by bucking middlebrow, feel-good formulas in favor of dark, irony-laden, sometimes mind-bending, and sinister narratives that pulsated with equal parts exuberance and disenchantment.
With the exception of The Matrix sweeping the special effects trophies, these films were nearly invisible at the Oscars. The five contenders for best picture were The Green Mile (total gasbag), The Insider (admirable), The Sixth Sense (no), The Cider House Rules (never), and American Beauty. The most prestigious prizes—Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Picture—all went to American Beauty. It’s not a tremendous shock, of course, that the Academy would pick a mediocre movie as the Best Picture of the year—this happens all the time. What is downright bewildering is how often American Beauty was identified as instant canon, an unflinching satire of American dysfunction in Clintonian times, and the piercing cultural coda for an angst-filled decade.
I can think of few other films that struck such awe, and now inspire such vitriol. Unlike other contrived winners, like, say, Crash, whose repugnant qualities are immediately apparent, American Beauty‘s badness, its slickness, its insistence on its own profundity, was enough to bamboozle many of us as teenagers. I believe it’s one of the earliest firsthand experiences my generation had with changing our minds about a movie we loved.
At first blush, American Beauty seemed grand, dark, and subversive (especially to the angst-riddled mind of a high school sophomore not old enough to buy tickets for R-rated movies). The raciness of the opening scene—a found-footage camcorder clip of Jane (a pallid Thora Birch), reclining on a bed in post-sex flush, telling the camera that she wished her dad wasn’t a “horny geek boy” and “doesn’t deserve to live”—was enough to hook right into a swirling teenage psyche. The movie’s themes pander directly to the narcissism of the young—libidinous individualism, the triumph of youth over cynicism, the beauty of ordinary things (i.e. dead birds, plastic bags) over empty materialism. We responded naively and passionately—the desired effect. But we were just kids! What is so confounding now about American Beauty is how adults endorsed such juvenilia.
Anyone who remembers that Oscar year (raises hand) knows that Sam Mendes was the celebrated director of the moment and Kevin Spacey was the actor of the moment. The movie not only couldn’t lose but it also won everything in sight leading up to the Oscars.
Quick story: when I was at UCLA and I placed 3rd in the Samuel Goldwyn Writing competition — which was a miracle considering I’d written a screenplay on a lark — took me maybe four days total to write it. To place 3rd was a big, big deal to me back in 1993. But when Gil Cates handed me the award, along with four other writers (one of them went on to write actual screenplays for Hollywood) he said this award doesn’t mean you’ve arrived. It is something to reward your promise — what you will do from here on out.
Pause to reflect on how I did next to nothing, but that’s another story. The point I am making here is that the Oscar can sometimes mean it rewards a body of work, paying back a debt to a brilliant filmmaker who has been kicking around for a long time, turning one great film after another – someone like, say, Martin Scorsese, or someone like, say, Alexander Payne. The flipside is when the Academy falls in love with a newbie, like Sam Mendes, and thrusts gold statues at them. But we don’t yet know their fate. It must be hard to live up to that, in fact, because what do you have to reach for? What those directors and actors after that often determines how we view their past successes. Right after American Beauty, Kevin Spacey took an inexplicable fall in his career. Who knows why these things happen – we only know that they do happen. It might have been Pay it Forward. And Sam Mendes, too, has not exactly outdone American Beauty. Had he made a masterpiece equal to it by now, I’m sure no one would regard American Beauty with skepticism.
If a director has made so many brilliant films in the past it is more sensible to reward them with an Oscar than a one-off. You just never know where that director’s career is headed. You hope it’s headed in the right direction but you just never know.
To that end, I’m wondering if Alexander Payne’s faithful contribution to American film might not play into the way Best Picture is decided this year. If you look at the DGA five, you have a stupefyingly talented bunch – of those, two have been handsomely rewarded by Oscar: Martin Scorsese and Woody Allen. Next, you have the way way overdue Alexander Payne and David Fincher – two of America’s most adept, original, brilliant directors. And then you have the newbie, Michel Hazanavicius. I’m not sure that the industry will be ready to pick him when this is really his first at bat. Alexander Payne came very close to winning Best Picture for Sideways — and is coming even closer now with The Descendants.
Not only is Payne a beloved American director but The Descendants is an American story. It is about our past, our future, and our families. It is about being an unlikely caretaker of the land and our own offspring. Like all of Payne’s work, there isn’t a false note in the film. When it played at the Academy it was met with long, sustained applause. It has won the Golden Globe for Drama, the LA Film Critics and the Southeastern Film Critics. That makes it a major threat, not a minor one.
You know, just saying.
The article closes this way:
We can be thankful to American Beauty for one thing, though: sharpening our senses. After all, one of the best parts of growing up is developing a bullshit detector; learning that our own sensibilities as moviegoers evolve. People will repeatedly return to the formative movies of their youth with the ability to see the flaws and anachronisms, but still find the experience invigorating. There are some movies that quaintly don’t hold up, but retain their endearing qualities. Like, say, Beetlejuice. Then there are movies that betray, manipulate, and cheat you.
At the end of American Beauty, after his maniac neighbor has murdered Lester, the camera soars above the nameless suburb, as Lester serenely narrates:
…I can’t feel anything
but gratitude for every
single moment of my
stupid little life…
You have no idea what I’m
talking about, I’m sure.
But don’t worry…FADE TO BLACK.
You will someday.
It’s one thing when a movie is fun trash. It’s quite another when trash totters around calling itself art and insists that you agree. The older I get, the more I find myself asking, “What do they take me for?” Now I yell at my TV when movies like American Beauty take top prize, because good heavens, that plastic bag speech. How could we have been so blind! We were young—what was everyone else’s excuse?
I don’t know if I agree with this piece or not but it interesting to note how quickly perception can shift.
