It’s no great revelation that the film industry has always worshipped — and objectified — women. Female sexuality in particular, refracted through the lens of a male-dominated medium, has undergone several curious transformations.
There have been goddesses like Greta Garbo, Marlene Dietrich and Louise Brooks, who embodied sexual power through regal haughtiness and disdain; wisecracking tomboy princesses like Barbara Stanwyck, Lauren Bacall and Katharine Hepburn, who were luminous women with soft hair and strong chins and mouths that spit out a barrage of sharp-tongued witticisms; and kittens like Marilyn Monroe and Jayne Mansfield, who filled out the hard edges with voluptuous curves and exchanged wit for bewilderment. There have been long-limbed, silken-haired 1960s sexual adventurers, delicately sensitive ’70s waifs, ’80s power bitches and quirky but vulnerable ’90s girls (portrayed almost exclusively by Winona Ryder).
In an industry that has traditionally functioned almost entirely as an outlet for the creative visions of male directors, writers and producers, what the stereotypes have illustrated is the way men (at least moviemaking men) see women. And the way they’ve seen them, traditionally, has been with a potent mixture of adoration, lust, loathing and fear. Yet the much-maligned “male gaze” of film-theory legend has already gotten more than its share of play. What has been woefully absent is any discussion of the female gaze.
Few female directors have been given the opportunity to bring their representations of women to the screen, let alone their idealized, fantasy versions of men. Since 1922, only two women have been nominated for an Oscar in directing. Neither won. A few directors, such as Yvonne Rainer, have been able to make a name for themselves in the world of avant-garde and experimental film; others, such as Elaine May, who in the ’70s directed “Mikey and Nicky,” still one of the most powerful — and underrated — films of the decade, seemed fated to enjoy their successes in obscurity. In Europe, Agnes Varda, Claire Denis and Lina Wertmuller have been making solid and intelligent films for years. In America, female directors have been largely ignored.
But in the mid-1980s, when a wave of low-budget independent films made moviemaking more accessible to Hollywood outsiders, a handful of women began projecting complex and interesting female characters onto the screen. Allison Anders, Lisa Krueger and Mary Harron all made films that explored the female experience with honest and fresh female protagonists. Tamra Davis, Kathryn Bigelow, Amy Heckerling and Mimi Leder crashed the boy-dominated party of mainstream comedy, action and horror. And let’s not forget Barbra Streisand, Penny Marshall, Jodie Foster and Diane Keaton, who made the transition from actresses to directors and have given us a series of sweetly sentimental blockbusters.
But the new crop of female-fronted releases goes beyond the proto-feminist “about women, by women” model. The films of Kimberly Peirce, Krueger, Harron, Jane Campion, Denis and newcomer Sofia Coppola — all of which are premiering soon or currently in release — don’t fall under the feather-soft rubric of the typical “woman’s picture,” nor do they shy away from raw depictions of sexuality or violence. This new wave shows the beginnings of a kind of inversion, a fresh element in filmmaking and in the cultural psyche in general: The female gaze has finally hit the big screen. Suddenly, we can discern the sexualization of the male actor by the female director.
Campion has always been a master of exposing both the subtle carnality and the startling innocence that lurk beneath the surface of her male stars. In both “The Piano” and the recently released “Holy Smoke” she finds her muse in Harvey Keitel, whose particular brand of beautiful ugliness exemplifies a stormy, visceral sexuality — the “fire under the surface” of which Campion is so enamored. Some of her best male imagery is defined by a sort of “King Kong” idealization: the untamed brute with a soft heart for the right woman. Another element of Campion’s representation is the recurrence of men easily manipulated by the women in their lives (the baffled boyfriend in “Sweetie,” Sam Neill’s brutish husband in “The Piano”). In “Holy Smoke,” Campion continues this theme, with Keitel’s cult deprogrammer becoming programmed himself by Kate Winslet, brainwashed not by rhetoric but by her eager and delicious voluptuousness. For Campion, men are as malleable as clay.
In Coppola’s upcoming “The Virgin Suicides,” Josh Hartnett gives an electric performance as Trip Fontaine, a teenage Adonis whose graceful swagger will tap into any woman’s latent desire to seduce a 17-year-old. Coppola reportedly auditioned hundreds of young actors for the role, but with Hartnett she draws out a charisma and raw sexuality that can make you weak in the knees. This adoration of youth has existed for years in film. Watching Fontaine walk causes the same pang of guilty lust in women that Mena Suvari’s character in “American Beauty” must elicit in men. But Coppola’s scenes with Hartnett are a shrine to the fresh and vibrant carnality of teenage boys, a sort of reverse Lolita-ism. Eventually Fontaine becomes a catalyst for the film’s central tragedy and his aura fades, but for one brief moment the seduction is complete.
In “Committed,” Krueger has taken the age-old theme of a woman in love with a man who’s afraid to commit and turned it into a comedic road movie. Luke Wilson plays a blinking and confused sensitive guy searching for his soul in all the wrong places. What he has forgotten — in the midst of all this endearing self-absorption — is his wife, played by Heather Graham. Graham’s search for her husband is fueled by a blind optimism that would be annoying if it weren’t for Wilson’s inherent sweetness. The “nice guy” stereotype is in full form here and it’s a role Wilson was made for. With his good-natured demeanor and puppy-dog face, he’s an actor who can make even the most blatant selfishness seem somehow charming.
In “American Psycho,” Harron directs a delicately boned, elegantly dressed Christian Bale as Bret Easton Ellis’ coldhearted killer. Bale plays the part with bored and haughty bemusement, moving through the film like a smugly satisfied cat. “American Psycho” is not a film one might expect to be directed by a woman, but it is Harron’s feminine touch — and her humor — that keeps the film’s brutal elements palatable. In a satirical take on ’80s excess, Bale’s rich kid has a sense of entitlement as large as his ego — yet there’s something in his snobbery that is appealing. We can laugh at his cruelty because Harron has created an effective film stereotype: the privileged white Ivy Leaguer every viewer loves to hate.
In Peirce’s haunting “Boys Don’t Cry,” the brutality of the film’s “real” men is juxtaposed beautifully with the main character’s self-constructed masculinity. Hilary Swank’s “Brandon” seduces Chlok Sevigny’s Lana by offering a balance of female vulnerability and male strength. The girls in the film love Brandon for this quality; the men despise him. The film’s violence is fueled by the male characters, whose ignorance and insecurity in their own sexual power lead to a disturbing climax. But what makes the film truly explosive is the question it poses: Is what women really want in a man a woman?
One of the most beautiful films this year is Denis’ “Beau Travail,” a meditation on male sexuality that is as gorgeous and sublime as any movie made in the past decade. Set in the barren, black-rock plains of northern Africa, it takes as its essential focus the beauty of the male form, flawlessly composed in a series of shots of the main characters, a squadron of Foreign Legion soldiers. Throughout most of the movie, the sweat, blood and animal sexuality that make up the male mystique are reflected in the harshly beautiful landscape. The camera slowly pans over hot sands, twitching muscles and blue sea with equal relish.
Of all of these directors, it is Denis’ fearless sexualization that perhaps best illustrates our perception of men. Her characters are a mixed batch, encompassing the whole gamut of male iconography: from Campion’s brute, to Coppola’s pretty boy, to Krueger’s nice guy. But it’s her unapologetic objectification of the male body that is most exciting of all.
The “eye,” so long dominated by men, has slowly but surely been attained by female directors. And what does this reflection show us? How exactly do women perceive men? Do we see selfish brutes, softhearted fools, psycho killers? Do we worship, like men, the beauty of youth? Do we pay tribute, like the Greeks, to the thin graceful curves of the adolescent male body? Most likely, we do all of the above, with each of these elements contained in our assessment of the opposite sex — the innocence, the cruelty and the helplessness combined.
But what’s most refreshing is simply that female directors are beginning, at last, to explore the same themes their male counterparts have explored. It’s our time to deconstruct the opposite sex, to manipulate male sexuality according to our own observations and whims. After too many years, it’s finally our turn to objectify, sexualize, fear, worship, loathe, adore and, best of all, lust after.
Have things improved in Iraq and Afghanistan since we decided to gung-ho the hell over there and blow stuff up? Let’s just say that expert opinion is divided on that question, but the movies have been amazing. You could curate a dynamite film festival out of post-9/11 war movies, both documentaries and narrative features, starting with Michael Tucker and Petra Epperlein’s prescient “Gunner Palace” — made in 2004, just as the Iraq conflict was going seriously south — and moving forward through “The Situation” and “Iraq in Fragments” and “Battle for Haditha” and, of course, “The Hurt Locker” and last year’s Oscar-nominated, you-are-there documentary “Restrepo.”
So Danish director Janus Metz’s widely acclaimed “Armadillo” (winner of the Critics’ Week prize at Cannes last year) arrives in a crowded field and belongs to a familiar genre: Meet a group of ordinary, likable guys — and then go with them into hell. It isn’t in English and reflects a non-American perspective, which only makes it less likely that it will find any kind of audience here. That doesn’t change the fact that it’s a brilliant work of cinema, a nonfiction film as intense and visceral as any drama, and an emotional and moral experience that feels horrifying and exhilarating at almost the same moment. Metz and cinematographer Lars Skree spent six months in 2009 living with a group of Danish soldiers at Forward Base Armadillo, in the opium-rich province of Helmand in southwestern Afghanistan, where they experienced several firefights with Taliban forces dug in less than a mile away. The filmmakers were fortunate to come back to Europe alive — and what they came back with was a mesmerizing, beautiful and terrifying documentary that can stand among the greatest war movies ever made.
“Armadillo” has provoked something close to a political firestorm in Denmark, a customarily calm social democracy with a smaller population than New York City and greater income equality than any nation in the world. Only a few hundred Danish volunteers have joined the United States-led coalition forces in Iraq and Afghanistan, but war is war, and as the climactic scene in “Armadillo” makes clear, it’s often very ugly indeed. Metz and Skree were on hand to witness a hair-raising battle that ends when a small detachment of Danes ambushes a group of Taliban snipers in a ditch, and let’s be very clear about this: What you see in the film is death, right up close, and everything about it is dreadful.
Whether the Danish soldiers engage in vicious, callous or criminal conduct, as some commentators have suggested, is perhaps a subjective question, or one that looks different to European eyes than American ones. What I saw in “Armadillo” was a group of amped-up young men high on the drug of war who survive a kill-or-be-killed situation, one where moral considerations have all but evaporated. Their behavior is not exemplary but it seems comprehensible, and those of us watching cannot know what we would do in the same situation. This is a cliché that’s applied to war movies way too often, but your political outlook and opinion about the Afghan conflict are pretty much irrelevant to “Armadillo.” It’s a strict cinéma-vérité film with no narration or commentary; war opponents can find plenty of evidence that the whole endeavor is a pointless morass, while those who believe that the Taliban must be defeated, whatever the price, may conclude that these young soldiers and others like them are making a valuable sacrifice and slowly turning the tide.
I guess those questions can never be overlooked, given how much of the Western world’s so-called prestige, not to mention America’s national debt, is tied up in the Afghan conflict. But at the risk of retreating to aesthetics, let me say that Metz and Skree have made a movie that is first and foremost a movie, a sensuous widescreen landscape of helicopters and mist-shrouded groves of trees and agricultural canals and bored, agitated young men who ride motorcycles and watch pornography and risk their lives every day for ambiguous reasons. I assume “Armadillo” was shot in the field on digital video and then blown up to 35mm, but it so magnificently constructed that I became disoriented at certain moments: That isn’t an actor convincingly rendering a man in shock; he’s actually been shot. That isn’t brooding Method acting; that guy has just learned that a mortar shell whose target he selected has killed a little girl.
Every 21st-century war film tries to grapple with the eerie disconnection of modern warfare, whose soldiers return (if they do return) to a comfortable consumer society that seems less than eager to know about what they saw and felt and did. Jeremy Renner’s memorable “lost in the supermarket” scene in “The Hurt Locker” was one version of this, and Metz delivers an intimate, distinctly Nordic response, with the soldiers of his platoon arriving home to a small country that’s so polite and clean and pleasant that it seems as if the grisly deaths we witnessed in that ditch in Helmand province couldn’t have happened in the same universe. “Armadillo” can’t resolve the vicious moral and philosophical conundrums of war in general or this one in particular, but it may do something even more valuable: Whatever you think — or whatever you think you think — it will leave you shocked, gasping, uncertain.
“Armadillo” is now playing at the IFC Center in New York, with more cities and DVD release to follow.
I’m grateful to have been thoroughly and completely wrong about the best-picture race — as were a great many other supposedly knowledgeable stooges — for a whole bunch of reasons. First and foremost, Kathryn Bigelow’s historic sweep was a genuinely moving and surprising capper to one of the most tedious Oscar broadcasts in recent memory. All that industry hand-wringing, a much-touted new production team, and what do we get? Interpretive dance numbers set to fragments of the nominated scores. Seriously? If they’d hired the Sparkle Motion dance team out of “Donnie Darko,” it couldn’t have been any lamer. (Actually, that would been a lot more fun to watch.)
Although I have mixed feelings about “The Hurt Locker” itself, and about the cultural-psychological reasons for its ascendancy, Bigelow herself is a genuine and strange cinematic genius who has paid her dues several times over and richly deserves her moment of triumph. (Is “Hurt Locker” her best film? Probably not. Her second-best? Not even sure about that.) I wish producer-screenwriter Mark Boal hadn’t complicated Bigelow’s big moment on the stage of the Kodak Theatre by persistently tugging on her elbow, like a kid in a department store who needed to use the john. That was odd.
Did it take a grueling, ¿Quién es más macho? war thriller for a female director to win a pile of Oscars? I know there are counter-arguments — mainly, there just haven’t been that many Oscar-scale movies made by women — but I kind of think, yeah, it did. This may have more to do with the Academy’s recent preference for “serious,” male-coded film genres than with simplistic sexual discrimination. Hollywood legend Joseph L. Mankiewicz won back-to-back writing and directing Oscars in 1950 and 1951 for “A Letter to Three Wives” and “All About Eve,” but it’s difficult to imagine such female-centric movies garnering those kinds of honors today.
Taking the longer view, this year’s Oscar campaign and its conclusion offered some crucial flashes of insight into how the Academy works in the 21st century, which is a whole lot different from the way it used to work. Although this goes against nearly everything I believe about life on Planet Earth, I have concluded that Academy voters as a group are less cynical and calculated than I thought — but also that there is a conflict or schism between the membership and the needs and desires of the Academy’s leadership, or at least its image-management and P.R. teams.
I exchanged e-mails late on Sunday night with a critical colleague, one who’d made the same misguided assumptions that I had about the inevitable victory of “Avatar,” notwithstanding the accolades heaped upon “Hurt Locker” by every critics’ group and industry trade organization. Our fundamental error, we concluded, lay in believing that after several years of victories by mid-budget Indiewood pictures the Academy’s collective thinking, and voting behavior, would at some point return to “normal.” What we meant by normal, of course, was an ingrained institutional preference for big-budget spectacle. But that old normal is dead, and here’s the new normal: Hollywood’s central trade group doesn’t like its own movies that much.
Allow me to quote an esteemed expert: “One thing that’s become clear is that the film industry feels no confidence about the cultural significance of its own products. Hollywood’s self-appointed division of self-importance, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, passed up the chance to honor one of the most ambitious and successful films the American movie factories have ever made in order to hand out hardware to a mid-budget, semi-independent production made in Jordan without movie stars.”
OK, the expert is not all that esteemed. It’s me, and other than replacing “India” with “Jordan,” that’s taken verbatim from the article I wrote last year about the Oscar victory of “Slumdog Millionaire” and the shunning of “The Dark Knight.” If anything, the contrast is even starker this time around. “Avatar” is, of course, a much bigger hit than TDK, and its use of motion-capture technology and 3-D clearly points toward the Hollywood future. “The Hurt Locker” is a genuine indie production, financed and made entirely outside the studio system, which grossed less than $15 million in the United States.
Comparing different eras of financial and cinematic history is rife with pitfalls, but that clearly makes “Hurt Locker” the lowest-grossing best-picture winner in Oscar history. (No. 2 is probably “The Last Emperor” from 1987, but when you adjust for inflation, Bernardo Bertolucci’s costume drama made almost three times as much money as Bigelow’s war epic.) It’s delicious and strange and at least potentially ironic that this happened in the year when the Academy expanded the best-picture category from five to 10 nominees, in an evident effort to make the competition more commercial and more attractive to mainstream audiences.
Honestly, the only conclusion I can draw is that Academy members are voting with their hearts. Who’da thunk it? Maybe an earlier generation of Oscar voters was more persuaded by box-office numbers, mass popularity and marketing muscle — or was simply more in tune with mass taste — but they evidently don’t give a damn about those things now. Personally, I’d have ranked a couple of other nominees above “Hurt Locker” — definitely “A Serious Man,” maybe “An Education” — but it’s an idiosyncratic film made by a genuine visionary. Even setting aside the history-making element of this vote (which was surely a consideration) it’s a respectable choice.
Now, the Academy brass, especially its marketing mavens and the shepherds of its lucrative contract with ABC, may take a more jaundiced view of the membership’s sudden attack of integrity and independence. Oscar’s long relationship with the wider moviegoing public has always been tempestuous, but both as a television franchise and a touchstone of cultural relevance, the Academy Awards cannot afford to be seen as some elitist, out-of-touch coastal bastion of indieness. If we allowed ABC execs a free spin in the time machine, and a chance to replace the last four or five years’ worth of Oscar-winners with movies heartland consumers actually paid to watch, they’d take it in a heartbeat.
Still, at least in terms of water-cooler controversy, this year’s Oscars were largely successful. Mind you, the telecast was a misbegotten mishmash, and the toxic, unfunny repartee of Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin made Hugh Jackman’s 2009 song-and-dance numbers look like the height of showbiz professionalism. But viewership was up, reaching the best numbers since the “Crash on Brokeback Mountain” showdown of 2006, and the huge roster of nominated films yielded contradictory but complementary results: Multiple nominations for hugely popular films, and an underdog victory. A lifetime achievement award for Jeff “The Dude” Bridges (let’s be honest; that’s what it was), and shocking proof that Sandra Bullock is not just a human being but a funny, warm and generous-spirited one as well.
But the repercussions of “The Hurt Locker’s” victory over “Avatar” go well beyond Kathryn Bigelow’s historic breakthrough, and well beyond questions of which movie you or I like better, or which one made more money. It’s another salvo in Hollywood’s peculiar, long-running war against itself, a war unlikely to have any winners.
“The time has come,” said Barbra Streisand late Sunday night. And with that, Kathryn Bigelow, whose low-budget “The Hurt Locker” edged out the most successful movie of all time, became the first female in Academy history to win an Oscar for best director. (Moments later, she’d make a twofer by winning best picture as well.)
But like every historic first, Bigelow’s dual victory was both a stunning personal achievement and resonant metaphor. And not everybody’s been thrilled.
Just a few weeks ago critic Martha P. Nochimson wrote an essay here that lambasted Bigelow as “the Transvestite of Directors … masquerading as the baddest boy on the block.” And after last night’s ceremony, journalist Farai Chideya promptly tweeted, “Among Bigelow’s best-known films are three male ensemble casts: ‘Hurt Locker,’ ‘Point Break,’ ‘K-19 the Widowmaker’. … kudos to cast and to filmmaker and to topic. Gender matrix not so much.” So before we bust the pink champagne, perhaps we should ask: Does Bigelow’s victory still count for the ladies?
I have a diploma with the word “film” on it, so let me take a crack here.
Of course it does. Are you freaking kidding me?
It’s funny, I don’t remember anybody trotting out drag queen metaphors when John Madden’s “Shakespeare in Love” or Anthony Minghella’s “The English Patient” won Oscars, despite their weepy, girly plots. For that matter, in all the conversation about the big battle of the exes between Bigelow and James Cameron, did anybody stop to chide Cameron for an entire career built on decidedly female-centric fare? “Aliens,” “The Abyss,” “Titanic” and “Avatar” might not be “You’ve Got Mail,” but they’re all lousy with strong leading ladies and maternal subtext. (If Cameron were a woman, many large, serious books would be written about the feminist iconography of his otherworldly oeuvre.) Why then are Bigelow’s critics so quick to bag on her for doing what good filmmakers do — making movies with a unique perspective, and an appeal outside of the director’s own demographic? Do we really still think the length and breadth of female filmmaking is “Julie and Julia”? Dear God, please, no.
When I was in film school in the ’80s, a time when professors still thought it was acceptable to comment on the weight and dating habits of girl students, there barely was any concept of women’s cinema. In four years, I studied exactly one female director — Leni Riefenstahl.
Fortunately, it was also a golden moment for young independent filmmakers, some of whom, miraculously, were not males. (Not all of them were white either — go figure.) Patricia Rozema, Martha Coolidge and Mira Nair were just breaking out, but the women who electrified my little group of black-clad clove cigarette smokers were Penelope Spheeris and Kathryn Bigelow. Spheeris made rock ‘n’ roll documentaries and the cult hit “Suburbia”; Bigelow made a weird little vampire movie called “Near Dark.” No hankies. No hugging. Kickass!
As the years went by and Bigelow went on to make tough little dramas like “Blue Steel” and “Point Break” — as well as directing plenty of television cop shows. Her action-oriented style matured, but her style remained distinctive, consistent and always adrenalized. Does that make her a gender betrayer? I don’t know, is “Precious” director Lee Daniels a chick for making a movie about a pregnant teenage girl and her mom?
Yet Bigelow’s win seems to raise a nagging question in certain heads: Why is it that when women finally get a big award winner, it’s for a war picture instead of the kind of fare we so often wind up directing — those warm Nancy Meyers/Nora Ephron relationship stories? Well, maybe the reason movies like “Mamma Mia!” don’t snag the big prizes is as simple as the fact that they’re just not that great. Does anybody complain that men are being artistically shut out from serious competition when they go ahead and make “X-Men”?
That’s the thing that’s both scary and fantastic about Bigelow’s win; it says that maybe if we women are stuck making rom-coms and weepies, it’s not the fault of the system but ourselves. Want more golden statues on the lady shelf? Then fight like hell to make better movies, whatever the subject matter. The last time a woman was nominated for a best director Oscar, it was Sofia Coppola for “Lost in Translation,” a film that was piffling at best. (The only other two female nominees — the indisputably great Jane Campion for “The Piano” and Lina Wertmüller for “Seven Beauties” — had their work cut out for them against “Schindler’s List” and “Rocky,” respectively.) The problem with devaluing Bigelow’s win as being merely a clever bit of cinematic cross-dressing is that it takes away from the fact that “The Hurt Locker” is a great film, full stop.
So it’s no wonder that a groan went up from my couch when Bigelow’s walkout music last night swelled to the strains of Helen Reddy’s cheeseball anthem “I Am Woman.” (What was the Academy’s plan if Lee Daniels had won? Run DMC’s “Proud to Be Black”?) See, everybody? Hollywood can recognize a woman! Let’s give a hand for the little lady!
Of course masculinity and femininity inform the stories we tell. “An Education” was the story of a girl. “The Hurt Locker” was the story of a man. “Avatar” was the story of a bunch of blue people in a tree. Filmmakers bring their own brand of life experience to the table; there isn’t nor should there be an utterly gender-neutral perspective. But anyone who’s seen “The Hurt Locker” and thinks that it’s just some dude flick is selling its director far short. As a filmgoer who’s been following her career for the last 23 years could tell you, it’s a Kathryn Bigelow movie. It has her gritty style, her unmistakably dark humor, her gut-punching humanity.
Perhaps, then, it’s a good thing the Oscars chose to remind the world last night that Bigelow is both a filmmaker and a female. I hope every film school chick in the world is cheering her triumph, because it represents a victory over sexist college professors and dumbass studio executives and every producer who thinks ladies should stick to baby comedies. It represents the door opening just a little wider for talented, accomplished women to tell the stories they want to tell, whether they’re about sweeping romance or kooky comedy or blowing stuff up. There is no need to take away one iota of her accomplishment by suggesting Bigelow earned it by being a dude in a dude’s genre. She got it by being Kathryn Bigelow — a fierce, independent and utterly deserving filmmaker. She’s not the king of the world. She is woman. Hear her roar.
How did they do it? As crazy as it sounds, this year’s Oscar festivities were dynamic, funny and moved along at a good clip. Hosts Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin were hilarious, there were great jokes by everyone from Tina Fey to Ben Stiller, and the speeches were less long and dull than they’ve been in years. For once, no one rambled on forever and agents were rarely thanked. Not only that, but the usual endless tributes that serve no purpose whatsoever were gone, cut down to a great John Hughes segment and an entertaining horror-movie montage. Best of all, the best original songs were not performed, which means we weren’t forced to sit through two more blandly upbeat tunes with those old familiar Randy Newman melodies you’ve heard on every Oscar night for decades now. And I think we can all agree that an Oscar night without a Disney ballad performed or a long, rambling Lifetime Achievement acceptance speech is a winner in anyone’s book.
Here are a few of the highs and lows of the night:
Best new twists on old features: 1) James Taylor’s sweet, wavering voice singing live during the “In Memoriam” portion added a touching and personal dimension to this segment; 2) Remember when the dancing on the Oscars was limited to lackluster, paint-by-numbers choreography by hammy, foolishly costumed Broadway wannabes? The Legion of Extraordinary Dancers blew that tradition out of the water in bringing the best original score nominees to life. The dances for “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar,” in particular, were evocative and breathtaking.
Worst new twists on old features: 1) Neil Patrick Harris is very talented, but after last year’s hilariously funny Hugh Jackman showstopper, this song and dance was only OK. 2) Bringing the best actor and actress nominees onstage in the first moments of the awards? Awkward and pointless. 3) The John Hughes montage was wonderful, but the tribute wandered astray with the big group of actors standing and honoring him with one or two sentences. “He gave us the gift of laughter,” one of them says, thereby giving us the gift of queasiness and John Hughes the gift of turning in his grave.
Best joke of the night: Alec Baldwin explains, “In ‘Precious,’ Gabourey Sidibe is told she’s worthless, nobody likes her, that she has no future. Hey, I’m with CAA too!”
Off-color joke of the night: Robin Williams: “Later this evening, the governor’s ball will be held, just one of many balls being held all over Hollywood tonight.”
Worst dressed: Miley Cyrus appears wearing what looks like one of those 24-hour girdles Jane Seymour used to hawk on TV.
Best exchange of the night: Between Robert Downey Jr. and Tina Fey, in a prelude to the best original screenplay.
Fey: Great movies begin with great writing.
Downey: What does an actor look for in a script? Specificity. Emotional honesty. Catharsis.
Fey: And what does a writer look for in an actor? Memorizing. Not paraphrasing. Fear of ad-libbing.
Downey: Actors want scripts with social relevance, warm weather locations, phone call scenes that can be shot separately from that insane actress that I hate, and long dense columns of uninterrupted monologue, turning the page, and for instance seeing the phrase, “Tony Stark, continued.”
Fey: And we writers dream of a future where actors are mostly computer-generated and their performances can be adjusted by us, on a laptop, alone.
Downey: It’s a collaboration, a collaboration between handsome, gifted people and sickly little mole people.
Strangest moment: Elinor Burkett interrupts Roger Ross Williams while he’s accepting the best doc short award. “Let the woman talk,” she says. At first it looks like she’s some random crazy person who jumped up onto the stage. It doesn’t help that Roger Ross Williams doesn’t really move over and let her stand in front of the microphone. Salon’s Kerry Lauerman spoke to both Williams and Burkett post-Oscars, and the whole crazy clash is explained here.
Best impromptu joke: When screenwriter Geoffrey Fletcher wins best adapted screenplay for “Precious,” he gives a heartfelt but stunned speech and ends it all with, “Sorry, I’m drawing a blank here. Thank you, everyone.” Martin appears and brags to the audience, “I wrote that speech for him.”
Worst incidence of playing with fire: Several people give James Cameron credit for their Oscar and one calls him a genius. Is it really in our best interest to make James Cameron feel more powerful than he already does?
Least gracious remarks of the night: 1) Mo’Nique, “I would like to thank the Academy for showing that it can be about the performance and not the politics.” She’s referring to the criticism surrounding her refusal to campaign for an Oscar, but it ends up sounding like a slapdown of her fellow nominees — that if, say, Maggie Gyllenhal won the Oscar, it wouldn’t have been about the performance.
2) Best costume design winner Sandy Powell (of “The Young Victoria”) starts off her speech with, “Well, I already have two of these, so I’m feeling greedy. I’d like to dedicate this one to …” It’s not a handbag, woman. Guess this is just another ho-hum Oscar-winning day in her sparkly-hat life.
3) Joe Letteri accepting best visual effects for “Avatar”: “Just remember the world that we live in is just as amazing as the one we created for you.” Thanks for that little reminder. Also, remember that the real Lord and Savior and Creator of the Heavens and the Earth is just as all-powerful as James Cameron.
Most accurate mistake of the night: Keanu Reeves, who has become a parody of himself, comes out and speaks in his signature monotone. “Isn’t he paralyzed?” asks my 12-year-old stepson. “Pretty much,” I answer. “Oh, I was thinking of Christopher Reeves,” he says.
Best introductions: Both by Steve Martin. 1) On Sandra Bullock: “You loved her in ‘The Blind Side,’ adored her in ‘The Proposal,’ and thought she was just OK in ‘Miss Congeniality II.’” 2) On “Precious”: “The one film that really lived up to the video game.”
Best gags: 1) Ben Stiller with a blue face and scary yellow eyes, speaking Na’vi. 2) Cutting to Martin and Baldwin backstage wearing Snuggies. 3) Martin and Baldwin’s parody of “Paranormal Activity,” in which they sleep fitfully all night in the same bed.
Best recovery: Just when the tributes to the best actor nominees is getting a little bit over-the-top with talk of the “enormous talent” of “the magnificent Colin Firth” and so on, Tim Robbins saves the day in his tribute to costar Morgan Freeman: “I’ll never forget what you said to me about friendship on the last day of shooting. You said, ‘Being a friend is getting the other a cup of coffee. Can you do that for me, Ted? It is Ted, isn’t it?’”
Best reaction shot: When Stanley Tucci says of Meryl Streep, “The two movies we did together were the highlight of my career,” Streep giggles at the audacity of this, which she clearly believes is an exaggeration.
Strangest trend of the night: Jokes about being gay. Steve Martin and Alec Baldwin have numerous “we’re a couple” gags, Colin Farrell brags about spooning with Jeremy Renner, and Sandra Bullock refers to “my lover Meryl Streep.” It’s official: Pretending you’re gay is the new pretending you’re not gay.
Most abrupt transition: In the wake of Kathryn Bigelow’s best director win, Tom Hanks appears and announces that “The Hurt Locker” has won best picture without reminding us of all the nominees. There are 10 of them, after all, and even if they were introduced throughout the night, that doesn’t mean we couldn’t use a little suspense building, along with a glimpse at all of the honored filmmakers.
Best way to one-up your ex: By snatching two Oscars out of his hands in one night. “Avatar” is certainly an inspired film, not to mention the highest-grossing movie of all time. Maybe that’s why it’s particularly satisfying to see Kathryn Bigelow win best director — the first woman to do so, by the way — and best picture for her relatively humble film “The Hurt Locker.” Suddenly her ex-husband (and our Lord and Savior and Creator of the Heavens and the Earth) Cameron seems not nearly as all-powerful as he did a few hours ago. Hurray for Bigelow! One small slap upside the head to the King of the World, and one giant step for womankind!
In “The Hurt Locker,” Sgt. 1st Class Will James (Jeremy Renner) is the second coming of John Wayne. Just not as cuddly.
What’s the point of this metaphor? It’s that I’m still coming to grips with how a woman could possibly have dreamed up this spartan American soldier in Iraq, who, while obsessively romancing death as a bomb-squad ace, outdoes the most extreme images of machismo ever produced by mainstream America. While Wayne set the testosterone standard in playing characters who lived to fight, his guys also found time to love women — Ethan’s Martha (Dorothy Jordan) in “The Searchers” and the Ringo Kid’s Dallas (Claire Trevor) in “Stagecoach,” to name two.
When they bonded with young, earnest boys, Wayne’s men became meaningful mentors — Gillom Rogers (Ron Howard) in “The Shootist” couldn’t have grown up without the wit and wisdom of Wayne’s John Bernard Books. But Will, with his Wayne-ian steely gaze, his laconic ease at the portals of death, and his patented hero saunter, loves “just one thing,” as he tells his baby boy before leaving him, maybe forever, to return to the killing fields of Iraq. And it isn’t women or kids.
To their credit, director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal never reduce “the thing” to a word. Will’s unnamed passion is left to the enormity of our imaginations when we see him back in Iraq in the humongous bomb-disposal suit that insulates him from any direct contact with the world. What’s less happy is the confused adulation of this solitary savior at the end of the film, as Will takes the place of the bomb-disposal robot we saw in the opening scene — a better “bot.”
Though none can say with certainty who in the partnership of Bigelow and Boal took the lead in forming Will James, credit has been given to Bigelow, the first woman to win a Directors Guild of America award, and now favored to become the first to win an Oscar for directing. But no cheers for Miss Kathy for breaking the glass ceiling by fabricating my worst cinematic nightmare. Quentin Tarantino, who should know better, having just directed a piercingly original ironic study of war and blood lust, dubbed Bigelow the “Queen of Directors” when she took the DGA award. I prefer the “Transvestite of Directors.” Looks to me like she’s masquerading as the baddest boy on the block to win the respect of an industry still so hobbled by gender-specific tunnel vision that it has trouble admiring anything but filmmaking soaked in a reduced notion of masculinity.
OK, I see you objecting back there in the last row. Is it because Bigelow and Boal seem to think they have made an antiwar film, as they made clear when they accepted their BAFTAs (the British Academy Awards)? Something to do with an ironic presentation of Will? Uh-huh. We spend one-and-a-half hours enduring crisis after crisis in which Will is the only person with the daring and skill to save us (since we identify with the American soldiers) from being blown to bits. We hover over him anxiously, for seemingly endless stretches of time, watching (beautiful) extreme close-ups of his skillful and steady fingers palpating wires and wielding wire-cutters, our vicarious lives hanging on each motion. Our field of vision is so completely limited to his expertise in defusing bombs and dealing with invisible enemies that our capacity to think about the larger context of the American presence in Iraq is replaced by nuance-free instincts more characteristic of the tea party movement. This is likely to distance us from this man sufficiently to criticize him, how?
When Will returns home briefly, his wife and child are rendered clichés, as is ordinary American life, summed up in this film by the consumer madness embodied in the ridiculous proliferation of products in the cereal section of a supermarket. He’s happy to go back to the bombs. I don’t buy this as ironic — or valid. Apparently neither do a number of vets, who contend that “The Hurt Locker” has falsified the Iraq experience. Writing in the Huffington Post, Iraq veteran Kate Hoit takes aim at the film as “a full-throttle adrenaline rush that is comprised of ditching common sense and the realities of war” and calls its action climax “pure magical bullshit.” Seems that at least one real woman who served in Iraq is not pleased with Bigelow’s approach to her story. And how about the way Will’s wife is robbed of a point of view by a woman director? (If Bigelow didn’t intend all the hyped-up admiration of Will, then her material got away from her — in a big way.)
I also have a hard time with Will’s relationship with Beckham (Christopher Sayegh), a young Iraqi boy who sells bad DVDs to American soldiers. Because he likes Beckham so much, Will gets one of his fellow American soldiers badly shot up trying to avenge what he thinks is the boy’s horrible death — before he discovers that the Iraqi boy is alive. D’oh, he has misidentified the corpse. And he joyously embraces the living child … No, he doesn’t. He renders himself superhuman by cutting himself off from the kid because — see? — this is where caring gets you. And this is why he prefers “just one thing” to his family! Will is depicted as a majestically manly man in comparison with the merely human Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) at his side, who, shattered by his war experiences, takes the lesson from war that he wants a son.
Yep, Bigelow produces some glorious montages and shots, like the spare geometry of the almost completely white film frames in the army morgue. But I think the outsize admiration for her masterly technique and the summary dismissal in the current buzz of directors like Nora Ephron and Nancy Meyers reveal an untenable assumption that the muscular filmmaking appropriate for the fragmented, death-saturated situations of war films is innately superior to the technique appropriate to the organic, life-affirming situations of romantic comedy.
I don’t begrudge the praise for Bigelow’s depiction of urban war violence, but why the general opinion that Ephron and Meyers aren’t up to much because they don’t use hand-held cameras and flashy cuts that tensely survey an inscrutable environment? That’s not their material. Why isn’t there also some praise for Ephron, for example, for the scenes in “Julie & Julia” that capture the love of life conveyed by Meryl Streep in her celebrated performance as Julia Child? When Julia and her sister, reunited in a Paris train station, run toward each other, so adorably full of affection they don’t care about their resemblance to two lurching cows high on jouissance grass, does anyone think that incandescent moment was achieved only by acting? That the director’s framing of the scene had nothing to do with it?
I’m talking about the way the Hollywood machine doggedly preserves the hierarchy of men above women, and the military landscape above the domestic landscape, even when it’s a woman who directs a war picture. (And often even when men direct rom-coms.) And I’m baffled by how this entrenched prejudice has managed to produce the unfathomably widespread belief that Bigelow’s technically praiseworthy valentine to an emotionally challenged war addict strikes a blow for peace.
A still from "Armadillo" 
James Cameron and Kathryn Bigelow before the Academy Awards on Sunday. 
