A Personal History of Oscar Watching: 2009

The cast and crew of Slumdog Millionaire accept the Oscar for Best Picture at the 2009 Academy Awards ceremony.

The 81st Academy Awards

Ceremony date: February 22, 2009

Best Picture: Slumdog Millionaire

Best Director: Danny Boyle for Slumdog Millionaire

Best Actor: Sean Penn for Milk

Best Actress: Kate Winslet for The Reader

In the pre-Twitter days, live blogging meant literally that: updating your blog in real time while watching a live event. This was the first year I tried that. I did it again in 2010, and that was that. Live blogging the Oscars is not for me. I love the show too much. I do not want to be dealing with the site or checking my Twitter feed constantly while I am trying enjoy my favorite night of the year. You can find those live blogs on the site still. They are interesting little time capsules of my younger self trying to figure out this whole website thing.

At the 2009 ceremony, the producers attempted to program the awards to reflect the filmmaking process. They started with the screenplay awards, then art direction, etc., all the way up to the finished product. If you really think about that, though, it does not make much sense. So much of filmmaking is simultaneous creation. Craftspeople of all disciplines are on set every day, making a film work. The producers and director are there from the start. It is a whole jumble. Points for trying to give the show a loose structure, but the thread was tenuous from the start.

Two things stand out from this show: Heath Ledger’s posthumous Best Supporting Actor win for The Dark Knight and the near sweep by Slumdog Millionaire. Ledger’s victory was a foregone conclusion. As much as I might have preferred Philip Seymour Hoffman in Doubt, or the not-nominated Brendan Gleeson (In Bruges) and Dev Patel (Slumdog Millionaire), it is hard to begrudge Ledger the Oscar, and certainly, no one would want to lose the moment Ledger’s family accepted the award on his behalf.

Another of the big experiments the producers of this ceremony tried was to have past acting winners in each of the four categories pay tribute to each of the nominees before announcing the winners. This is a fun idea in theory, but in practice, it was a bit of a drag. My feeling is that if you are going to give seven minutes-plus to each of the acting categories on a show people already complain is too long, then just let the winners talk for however long they wish.

The speeches are the best part of the show, the thing that makes the Academy Awards unique. It has never made sense to me the consternation over lengthy speeches. Playing people offstage at the biggest moment of their lives seems needlessly cruel. Of all the places to cut time in the show, the speeches should be the last.

The triumph of Slumdog Millionaire still seems odd in retrospect. Throughout the season, it became a juggernaut. It could not be stopped. It is hard to say why or how except that it is, at its core and despite delving into real darkness, a feel-good movie made by a group of delightful people for whom you want to vote.

The story of the movie nearly being dumped straight to DVD then being rescued by Fox Searchlight also helped make it the kind of underdog everyone wants to see win. And win it did, to the tune of eight awards. No movie since has won as many. Gravity came closest in 2013 with seven wins but no Best Picture. I think it would be difficult in the current era of the Academy to match the number put up by Slumdog Millionaire.

This was the last time the Academy had just five nominees for Best Picture. After this ceremony, they would go to 10 nominees, then at-most-10 nominees, which is where we are today. Folks paying attention at the time will remember this as a response to the lack of a Best Picture nomination for either The Dark Knight or Wall-E. The Academy, it was feared, was losing relevance when artistically accomplished box-office champions could not compete for the top award. We can talk about how that has worked out in future installments of this series.

Quick notes: Kate Winslet finally wins an Oscar, though I preferred her work in Revolutionary Road to her performance in The Reader. Just happy to see her with a statue. … The Mickey Rourke comeback tour stalled out here with Sean Penn taking home Best Actor. My favorite of the nominated performances was Richard Jenkins in The Visitor. … Looking back on my predictions from this year, I actually did pretty well. Not counting the shorts, which I had not seen, I went 17 for 21. Those are numbers I would kill for now.

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Next time: I throw my first Oscars party and The Hurt Locker takes down Avatar as the Academy paradigm shifts.

New movie review: Godzilla

Aaron Taylor-Johnson, as U.S. Navy Lt. Ford Brody, catches his first glimpse of one of the monsters in Gareth Edwards' Godzilla.

Ken Watanabe. Bryan Cranston. Juliette Binoche. David Strathairn. Elizabeth Olsen. Sally Hawkins. Aaron Taylor-Johnson. It is an A-list cast up and down the line. One simply wishes it had been given more to do. Instead, Godzilla asks these talented people to look stunned and dispense pseudoscience dialogue that is so ludicrous it almost makes you forget you are watching the latest entry in the “serious blockbuster” canon.

There have been serious blockbusters for as long as there have been blockbusters, but the most recent crop traces its lineage to Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. These are morality tales about humankind’s inhumanity or its shabby treatment of nature or any other broadly defined, vaguely threatening concept. Many of these films are very good, laudable for their ability to astound the senses and engage the mind. Godzilla is not of their ilk – failing on the latter front and proving a mixed bag on the former.

One wishes not to be too harsh on this movie because it at least tries to create a knowing dialogue about science and nature, and director Gareth Edwards treats his viewers as intelligent, thinking people, whereas so many of these films ask you to leave your brain with the ticket-taker. These are admirable qualities, but at $12-15 for a movie ticket, more if you are seeing this in IMAX 3D, it does an audience no good to grade on a curve.

Edwards clearly is a talented director with an eye for unique visuals and, in the early going at least, a well-defined sense of authorship. Once the movie gets into its second and third acts, however, he falls into the trap these effects-laden films so often set: an over-reliance on set pieces in place of a story.

Name a world disaster in the last 15 years or so, and there is a good chance you will find an homage to it in this film. The inciting incident is meant as a stand-in for the Fukushima nuclear disaster, there is a monster-caused tsunami reminiscent of the devastating Indonesian earthquake and tsunami, and at least once, a plane hits a building behind a character at such an angle as to evoke the Sept. 11 World Trade Center attacks.

There is nothing inherently wrong with using real-world events to inform your action picture -- and the trope has been well employed throughout the lifespan of cinema – but it would have been nice for Edwards to put a more distinctive directorial stamp on these moments rather than asking historical associations to do the heavy lifting.

Where the enterprise falls apart, though, is on the page. Movie-goers are savvy people. They basically know what to expect from a big-budget monster movie. The Godzilla movies in particular have a rich cultural and political heritage, dating back to the 1954 original. At their best, these movies are almost always about the destruction of nature and more specifically the dangers of a nuclear society.

In the wake of Fukushima, an environmental message about the need for scientific caution and restraint is a welcome one, but when it comes to the science of monster movies, less is more. Instead, screenwriter Max Borenstein bogs down the early scenes by piling on expository dialogue that asks us to believe the creatures depicted are the result of a chain of improbable events and not plot convenience. As a general rule, it is best not to nitpick the science of these movies, and the problem here stems not from the science talk so much as from the time it takes away from building real characters.

Johnson plays Ford Brody, whose name is a possible homage to the protagonists of the Jaws films, and Edwards has stated his portrayal of Godzilla was inspired by Steven Spielberg’s depiction of the shark. Brody survived a Japanese nuclear plant disaster as a child. His father, who worked at he plant, is played by Cranston, in a yeoman performance. The elder Brody believes the meltdown was the result of something more nefarious than an earthquake.

Watanabe and Hawkins play scientists who are part of an apparently international coalition devoted to covering up what lies at the heart of the disaster and studying it. Watanabe is good, but the material he is given is not. Hawkins is criminally underused, as is Olsen as Johnson’s wife, and Binoche makes little more than a cameo as Cranston’s wife. This shunting of the female characters is problematic and sadly emblematic of the genre, but it might be more troublesome if any of the male characters were given anything much better. They are not.

For much of the second and third act, Brody, a U.S. Navy lieutenant, wanders from one destructive scene to the next in such a way that it seems the monsters may be following him. Scientists and high-ranking military officials try to figure out what to do as one major city after another comes under attack, though San Francisco gets the worst of it. For years, critics have complained New York City was suffering unfairly as the primary target for cinematic destruction, but add this to the new Star Trek and Planet of the Apes films, as well as X-Men: The Last Stand, and San Francisco may be making a comeback as blockbuster whipping boy.

At one point, a scientist offers this solution: Let the monsters fight it out themselves. It sounds like fanboy service as defense strategy, and as the buildings tumble, the movie collapses under the weight of its own unsustainable premise. If you want big action and big monsters, that is what you are going to get. If you want an intelligent, fully immersive e+xperience, look elsewhere.

See it? No.