Nicholas Thurkettle

Now I think I know how baseball fanatics feel, when they draw swords over steroid-inflated statistics, or exactly which of the umpty-ump scandals besmirching The Great American Pastime™ over the course of a century was the one that made it Lose Its Innocence™. When the field is ever-evolving, greatness becomes a moving target, and comparisons to history a trap. But oh, aren’t the arguments fun?

The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences threw one humdinger of a curveball when they announced that they would nominate ten films for the honor of Best Picture of 2009, instead of the field of five which has been traditional for over 65 years. This was not an arbitrary act; it was a calculated experiment to see if they could increase viewership for the Oscar telecast by strengthening the odds for nominees that Joe Popcorn Combo has actually seen. This was a bold counterstroke after last year’s snubbing of mainstream masterpieces The Dark Knight and WALL*E in favor of The Reader – a movie so prestigious hardly anyone had seen it at all.

What the Academy remembered is that for the non-industry viewer, suspense over the outcome is not on the shortlist of reasons to watch. The non-industry viewer has probably only seen two or three of the movies in contention, if that, and have only the exposure to, or interest in, the awards season horserace that they get from Entertainment Weekly. They don’t get lost in the weeds of the For Your Consideration ads. When a Best Picture front-runner is a popular, big-grossing movie – particularly if it is still in wide release – ratings consistently go up. I think this is because, for the average viewer, Oscar is coming into their living room to affirm their intelligence and taste, which they enjoy.

Now AMPAS cannot have known that James Cameron was already preparing to handle their visibility problem – his Avatar is already one of the biggest hits of all time, and is becoming the same sort of irresistible cultural black hole as his previous film, Titanic. That makes it a Day One frontrunner for the big prize, the inspiration for many potential blue-skin jokes on the night of the broadcast, and a guaranteed ratings draw.

So has the experience proved useless? I do not think it has. With every film critic, professional and otherwise, making a ritual out of a top 10 list, for Oscar to do the same hardly feels alien at all. And looking at the 10 they chose reveals not 10 movies whose greatness everyone necessarily agrees on, but 10 movies that represent a diverse spectrum of the many things the movie industry does well. We have science-fiction, inspiring drama, wicked social satire, contemporary stories and period stories, groundbreaking visual spectacle, rueful comedy, an inspired pulp war epic, and only the second animated feature in history to be in contention (more on that in a bit). There are still safe choices in there, but also some admirably daring ones. If we keep this up, we might even see a documentary in there someday.

Of course, the Academy is a consensus of voters, so maybe five movies just weren’t a big enough sample to produce good consensus results. Maybe this actually provides a little inoculation against some of the goofier inclusions and exclusions. Certainly you will find boosters disappointed that Invictus couldn’t even make a ten movie shortlist, or that Where the Wild Things Are was forgotten entirely. But aren’t the arguments fun?

Probably the most troubling argument has to do with the new normal of prestige in a Best Picture nomination. With twice as many handed out, are they now worth only half as much honor? And can’t we think of years when there just haven’t been ten truly outstanding films? With the graveyard of Oscar history already haunted by mediocre nominees, haven’t we just laid the groundwork for many, many more? These are all possibilities, and not likely to be solved by half-measures like a field of eight nominees. As the brilliant-but-mortal George Carlin once observed about the 10 Commandments: “10 sounds official. 10 sounds important.”

I don’t think you’re going to see this experiment go away after this year.
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A Serious Man
Directors: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Writers: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Producers: Joel Coen & Ethan Coen
Stars: Michael Stuhlbarg, Richard Kind, Fred Melamed, Sari Lennick, Aaron Wolf, Jessica McManus, Peter Breitmayer, Fyvush Finkel

I use it often, but no movie in my memory is more appropriately described by Mel Brooks’ timeless saying “Tragedy is when I cut my finger. Comedy is when you walk into an open sewer and die.” Comedy is about suffering; then there is Jewish comedy, that shared invitation to find the ironies and chuckles hidden in horrible misfortune, from a culture that knows a few things about that. The defining joke of A Serious Man, the latest work from Joel & Ethan Coen, is that you can never tell a Jewish person things couldn’t possibly be worse.

A movie is rarely created which is such a perfect expression of its own idea. In their 2007 Academy Award-winner No Country For Old Men, the prodigious brothers achieved a purity of cinematic technique that seemed almost miraculous. A Serious Man, one of the best films of 2009, is produced at the same astounding pinnacle, and in its rueful way it is even less hopeful, but far more rib-splitting.

It is not about its incidents but its attitude, which is mean at a level people earn philosophy degrees to study. The universe it depicts is a disturbing one, since it will not just obstruct your ambitions but spite your whole existence. You might not want to see a movie that so masterfully suggests you live in a place like this. And yet, if you have ever felt your sanity and dignity unreasonably abused by fate, this will feel so familiar; maybe even morbidly comforting. Your community is who you suffer with – and if you’re in a community, at least you’re not alone.
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