A Personal History of Oscar Watching: 2006

The Cinedome 7 West in Newark, Calif. It always looked like that.

The 78th Academy Awards

Ceremony date: March 5, 2006

Best Picture: Crash

Best Director: Ang Lee for Brokeback Mountain

Best Actor: Phillip Seymour Hoffman for Capote

Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon for Walk the Line

This one might go on a little long, and not just because it featured possibly the most notorious ending of any Oscars telecast not involving an envelope snafu. Rather, my memories of much of this show are quite vivid as it was the first ceremony for which I had seen all the Best Picture nominees beforehand and the first broadcast for which I attended a party, thus cementing the Academy Awards as an annual tradition in my life.

So, let’s get it out of the way right at the top: I have no problem with Crash as a Best Picture winner. I was thrilled at the time – though shocked like everyone else – and I remain completely at peace with that choice. It is probably my least popular Oscars opinion that Crash is a worthy recipient of the top prize and is a better film than Brokeback Mountain, which I find overdirected and dull, despite some stellar performances. Ranking the Best Picture nominees, I have Crash second behind Capote and followed by Good Night and Good Luck, Brokeback, and Munich.

This brings me to the second point: my conscious decision to see all of the nominees. This was my senior year of high school, and as a teenager is wont to do, I was spouting opinions with little to nothing to back them up. This time, it was about the Oscars. A friend rightly called me out, saying that I really could not have a valid opinion without having seen the films. So, rather than shut up about it, which was probably the point of the chastisement in the first place, I decided to see them all.

Crash famously came out early in the year, and I had seen it on DVD with my dad. It belongs in the pantheon of Best Picture winners my dad and I can enjoyably watch together, a group that also includes Forrest Gump, Rain Man, Platoon, and Rocky. The other one is The Departed, which we will talk about next time. I remember liking Crash, enjoying its interconnected story structure, and overall appreciating the message, which most would call facile today but which hits the targets at which it aims. One down.

When Brokeback Mountain was in theaters, I was 17 and had a car and a permit, but I was not really driving anywhere. I still walked to school, and to go to the movies after class, I hopped on the bus. On the way back, I hopped on the wrong bus and ended up in a different city entirely. I then had to take a train back to my neighboring hometown. I had one of those old Nokia flip phones and pretty much only used it to call for rides home. My dad kindly obliged. Two down.

Next, two birds with one stone on a weekend. I saw advertised in the paper – yeah, we still got movie times in the paper then, at least at my house – that the Cinedome 7 was doing a double feature of Capote and Good Night and Good Luck. What luck! I had never been to a double feature before and was excited at the prospect. My dad dropped me off on a rainy Saturday afternoon, and I told him to come back to get me in about five hours.

Nervously, I approached the ticket counter and asked for the double feature ticket. The box office attendant did not seem to know what I was talking about and gave me one ticket for Good Night and Good Luck. After the film, I asked an usher what to do about the double feature and was told just to hang out and the second movie would start. Even though the double feature had been advertised, because both films were not on the ticket, it somehow still felt like stealing. Nevertheless, I caught the second film and wrote Capote on the back of the ticket in pen for record-keeping purposes. Four out of five.

The next weekend, the same theater was hosting the two-for-one bill of Munich and Syriana. This time, I told my dad to come back in six hours. Now, I was a pro at the whole double-feature thing and calmly passed the 15-minute break between movies by listening to my MP3 player, which held an impressive 32 songs (depending on the length of the songs, of course).

The Cinedome 7 West was a truly run-down relic of theatergoing days past. My grandfather and I had seen Walk the Line there a couple months before and one of the sound channels was just out – not an ideal way to experience a musical. But, as with all crummy things from our youths, I loved it.

Along with the Cinedome 8 East, it was the primary theater of my childhood. It had an arcade that I still think about and which makes me sad realizing movie theaters do not really have arcades anymore. I know why, but you know, nostalgia and all. The Cinedomes deserve their own piece someday, but these four movies in eight days were really my last hurrah with the great movie houses of my youth. They were not much, but they were always there when I needed them. Five out of five. I was ready for the show.

My school friend Maddie, with whom I took theater and business math, was interested in the Oscars but even more interested in party planning. It was a passion of hers, and we made a pact while sitting in that business math class that if I ever got to make a movie, she would plan the wrap party. Those are the kind of pacts you make with high-school friends. I wonder if she remembers at all.

Corny as it probably seems, I still have the invite to that party saved, tucked away in its original envelope along with other mementos from my early years of Oscar watching – newspaper clippings of the nominees, computer printouts of my predictions and wishes, etc. All of that is kept inside of the front cover of Jim Plaza and Gail Kinn’s “The Academy Awards: The Complete Unofficial History,” a reference book that served as my film bible in the pre-internet days. I had the post-2004 edition, which included everything up through Million Dollar Baby. Not sure what I am waiting for to buy the revised, updated version. Someday, perhaps.

The party was a delight, featuring friends who cared about the movies and others who cared about being places their friends were. We made predictions, ate food and candy, drank sodas, and generally enjoyed each other’s company. The awards proceeded apace, culminating in Ang Lee winning Best Director for Brokeback Mountain. All was going according to plan. Then, Jack Nicholson read out Crash for Best Picture and all hell broke loose. Thankfully, Twitter was a long way off from existence.

I cheered and proclaimed that the Academy had made the right choice. The same friend who chastened me into seeing all of the nominees before commenting reminded me I had already proclaimed Capote the best of the nominees. I hit reverse and proclaimed Crash the right winner “among the nominees that had a chance,” and so joined that eternal dance of movie punditry. I have not stopped dancing since.

Quick notes: I cannot let this year pass without commenting on the Best Actor win for Philip Seymour Hoffman, whose death still hurts so much. I loved him even then, and he remains one of the best ever to do it. … We all have vivid memories of Three Six Mafia winning Best Original Song for “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp” from Hustle and Flow. One of the great weird Oscar moments. … Still remember George Clooney accepting his Best Supporting Actor statue with the immortal, “I guess I’m not winning Director.” A legend.

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Next time: Off to college for me, and Martin Scorsese finally gets his due with The Departed.

New movie review: Love & Mercy

Paul Dano plays the young Brian Wilson in Bill Pohlad's remarkable Love & Mercy.

Brian Wilson is a genius. Full stop. As the primary creative force behind The Beach Boys, he is responsible for crafting some of the catchiest pop melodies this side of The Beatles, and his complex musical and vocal arrangements have been and will be studied by musicians and critics for decades. His contributions to popular music are innumerable, and his influence is as widespread as it is singular. There is no one like him.

It is also indisputable that he has lived a hard life. Every step of the way, he was harassed, abused, and exploited by those around him. His petty, vindictive father terrorized him his whole life. He succumbed to drugs, alcohol abuse, and mental illness. He famously spent three years lying in bed, haunted by the voices in his head and the demons in his thoughts. His greatest gift is also his curse, and though the creative spirit he embodies has been battered and bruised by the world around him, it has not been broken.

The story of Wilson’s life is by turns haunting, surreal, sad, and triumphant and deserves a film of equal depth and complexity. That film is director-producer Bill Pohlad’s tender, beautiful Love & Mercy. Pohlad has spent most of his career as a producer, helping shepherd to the screen films such as 12 Years a Slave, The Tree of Life, and Brokeback Mountain. Here, he takes over the director’s chair for the first time in 25 years, and the results are stunning.

Working from a screenplay by Oren Moverman and Michael A. Lerner, Pohlad portrays Wilson’s life as a gorgeous, elliptical tone poem about the confused and hyperactive mind of a brilliant artist. Pohlad avoids the pitfalls of most by-the-numbers music biopics by not focusing on dry biography – though the film is impeccably researched and detailed – and instead presenting events as Wilson would have experienced and interpreted them.

John Cuscak and Elizabeth Banks in Love & Mercy.

The film is split into two parts given roughly equal weight. Paul Dano plays a younger Wilson shown struggling to take the band and its music in new directions with the recording of the now-legendary Pet Sounds. John Cusack plays Wilson two decades later, after his “bed” period and while under the control of psychiatrist Eugene Landy (Paul Giamatti). During this time, he meets Melinda Ledbetter (Elizabeth Banks), who tries to help him break free of Landy’s influence.

All of the performances are superb, and Banks in particular is a revelation. Known almost exclusively for her comedic roles, though some audiences will no doubt recognize her best as Effie Trinket from the Hunger Games films, Banks plumbs depths of emotional resolve and compassion that she has rarely been able to showcase. She more than rises to the challenge, exerting herself as the conscience of the film as Ledbetter is the only person we meet who sees Wilson for the man he is behind the myth.

Giamatti turns in typically excellent work as Landy, whose purposeful misdiagnosis allows him to take guardianship of Wilson and bend and manipulate him to his will with a cocktail of medications and psychological abuse. In an older but not-yet-wise Wilson, Cusack gets a role befitting his immense talent. Through all his lies and fabrications, Landy says one true thing – that Wilson is a boy in a man’s body – and Cusack’s subtle, introverted work perfectly captures that truth.

This half of the movie comprises a more traditional narrative, which is strong, if a bit clichéd and propped up by its wonderful actors. The sequences with younger Wilson, identified in the credits as “Past Brian,” are another matter altogether. In showing the process of creation, Pohlad mixes film stocks, plays tricks with the soundscape, and shuffles our perception of time to put the audience directly in the mind of a musician having an artistic and spiritual breakthrough.

Though the supporting performances are strong, Dano is like a one-man show through this section of the film. An actor who has showed immense promise in films as diverse as Little Miss Sunshine and There Will Be Blood, here, he realizes the full potential of his talents. Wilson cannot escape his past as every element of his life conspires to drag him back to a place of pain and misery. Dano embodies this man who wants so badly to please others and express himself artistically but keeps finding these two endeavors to be contradictory. Making full use of his face, voice, and mannerisms, Dano brings to life someone who is simultaneously breaking through and breaking down.

In service of all these wonderful performances, Pohlad provides an immaculately crafted world for his actors to explore and for his to take root. It is hard to think of a recent film that has used sound so well and in so many different ways. From the complete lack of artifice in Wilson’s hammering out of a rough version of “God Only Knows” to the sonic collage of past Beach Boys hits – provided by frequent Trent Reznor collaborator and Oscar winner Atticus Ross – Pohlad creates a universe of sound that is rarely pleasant but always emotionally resonant. This, we can infer, is what it sounds like to be Wilson.

The portrait of Wilson in Love & Mercy is that of neither saint nor sinner. He has done wrong and been wronged. For every triumph, he has been exposed to a trial. While the people in his life have hurt him, he has endured and persevered with help of others. His successes have not inured him to the difficulties of life. He is a genius whose struggles have humbled him. He does not ask for pity or praise. All he needs is a little – well, it’s right there in the title.

See it? Yes.