Since I thought the 2015 Oscars were in danger of being predictable, it would probably be hypocritical of me to have issues with Birdman winning Best Picture and Eddie Redmayne getting Best Actor at the Academy Awards Sunday night.
Don’t misunderstand me — I certainly have no problem with being wrong on those picks. I’m not that egotistical. (Anyone familiar with my sports predictions knows being wrong is not new for me.) The unexpected is always more fun. Most of us root for the upset.
So from that standpoint, the 2015 Oscars were a pleasant surprise by the end. Yet it feels like Academy voters might have gotten it wrong with a couple of their winners.
It probably shouldn’t have been a surprise that Eddie Redmayne won Best Actor for his portrayal of Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything. Most years, Redmayne would seem like a lock for playing someone whose body has been rendered almost completely paralyzed by ALS. He probably earned even more points among Academy voters for playing a real-life figure who’s still alive and relatively familiar within the culture. Winning an Oscar for that kind of performance has basically become a cliche over the years.
But it really seemed like Best Actor was going to be Michael Keaton’s award to win. Early on, Birdman received publicity and notoriety for being Keaton’s career revival, and everyone loves a comeback. However, there was some thought that maybe his role as Riggan Thomson — an actor famous for playing a superhero who walked away from the franchise and was trying to resuscitate his career on stage — reflected reality a little too closely.
Was Keaton kind of playing himself, or at least a version of himself? Looking at it that way, maybe his performance just didn’t seem as impressive as playing Stephen Hawking. I’ve read some critics say that Redmayne didn’t really have to perform because he couldn’t move — which seems terribly unfair, considering he still had to convey thoughts and emotions with little more than his eyebrows and the corners of his mouth. That was apparently the difference among voters.
Yet it’s the film Keaton starred in winning Best Picture that had my eyebrows raised by the end of the ceremony. Ever since it was released, there was always a very good chance Birdman was going to win the big prize, so it would be silly to say its win was a surprise. Besides Keaton’s comeback and Alejandro Gonzalez Iñárritu (who was a very deserving Best Director winner) seemingly stepping out of his comfort zone to direct a surrealist dramedy, Birdman also had elements that presumably appealed to many people in Hollywood about the current state of the moviemaking industry and its perception as art in the culture at large.
During the past weekend’s award circuit, it became popular to dump on superhero movies and their dominance of big-budget, blockbuster filmmaking. Upon winning Best First Feature honors at the Independent Spirit Awards, Nightcrawler director Dan Gilroy championed independent films holding the line against the “tsunami of superhero movies” in Hollywood. I can certainly understand Gilroy’s frustration with studios being enamored by superhero flicks. But that sentiment rings just a bit hollow from someone who once wrote a script for Superman Lives. Had that project been produced, would he be ripping such films?
http://youtu.be/h48wcCnP9A8
Neil Patrick Harris’ opening musical number at the Oscars included an appearance by Jack Black, who ranted, “This industry’s in flux, it’s run by mucky-mucks pitching tents for tentpoles and chasing Chinese bucks. Opening with lots of zeroes, all we get are superheroes: Spider-Man, Superman, Batman, Jedi Man, Sequel Man, Prequel Man, formulaic scripts!” Black, by the way, was once attached to a comedic Green Lantern film, written by Robert Smigel.
Birdman depicted an actor who had become pigeonholed by playing a superhero and could never escape that masked character’s shadow. Thomson has to flee Hollywood to redefine himself and do meaningful work. A New York Times theater critic openly resents his attempt to come to Broadway to revive his career, deciding she’s going to kill his play before she’s even seen it performed on stage. Rebukes against blockbuster filmmaking (which didn’t begin with superhero films, even if many of them now seem very similar) and those who would tear down the work of writers, directors and actors obviously spoke to Academy voters.
It’s probably harsh to say Birdman winning Best Picture is a disappointment. I certainly don’t feel like it’s undeserving. I wrote a positive review of Birdman and included it among my top 10 films of 2014. However, I did place Boyhood much higher on that list. I felt like the story of a boy and his mother’s evolution during a 12-year span was far more resonant and would hold up better years from now.
But there also seemed to be a perception that the movie and its real-time filming was a gimmick, and that the script wasn’t really written, so much as improvised when the crew reunited each year. Personally, I think that’s misguided and not giving writer-director Richard Linklater nearly enough credit for crafting a story that would hold together over such a long period, not to mention coming up with an innovative premise that could only be accomplished on film, thus showing the medium’s possibilities.
The Oscars aren’t obligated to take a longer view of a particular year’s crop of films, though I wish they would. Maybe it’s more appropriate to view Best Picture nominees within the year they were nominated, as if they were a snapshot of the culture and industry at the time. More often than not, that seems to be the Academy’s move with winners like Shakespeare in Love, Crash, Slumdog Millionaire, and The Artist.
That short-sightedness seems even more pronounced when you ask average movie fans about which films they enjoyed that year. How many of them would say Birdman — or Boyhood this year? “Most popular” obviously doesn’t mean “best,” but perhaps that should be considered in the process more than it currently is.
To be fair, some years don’t produce five great movies to nominate. But as a movie fan and lover of the Oscars, it’s a bit painful to look back at certain winners and wonder how that happened. I feel like that’s going to happen with Birdman, though it’s obviously far too early to say that now.
I thought all along Iñárritu’s film was too weird a movie to really have a chance at winning Best Picture. Obviously, I was wrong about that. And maybe it’s a good thing that an unconventional film like Birdman won the Academy’s biggest prize. Maybe we should all be happy about this result. I might get there eventually.
