Movies

So expectations in the film world could hardly be higher for “Shame,” McQueen’s NC-17-rated film that again stars Fassbender, this time playing a sex addict in 21st-century Manhattan. His character, Brandon, is an executive in some unspecified financial or I.T. profession who measures his days and nights by anonymous sexual conquests, not to mention dates with hookers, online chat sessions and regular old porn-fueled masturbation. As you may have heard by now, Fassbender is stripped naked in “Shame,” but the physical full-monty nudity (while likely to be of interest to many viewers) is honestly the least of it.

Here’s what I wrote after first seeing the film in Toronto:

“Shame” hints at a conventional movie narrative a fair bit more than “Hunger” does, but it’s first and foremost a visual and sonic symphony, and a Dante-esque journey through a New York nightworld where words are mostly useless or worse. (The credits say the movie was “based on a screenplay by” McQueen and Abi Morgan, which suggests that what we see on screen was largely improvised.) I would say we get 12 or so minutes into the film before anyone says anything, and most of that is a tense and powerful scene of Brandon trying (and apparently failing) to pick up a married woman on the subway. Even when someone finally speaks, it’s only Brandon asking a co-worker what happened to his computer, which is infested with viruses from all the hardcore porn sites he visits. (A man has to have his priorities straight.) Whatever garbage in their past has driven Brandon and Sissy (Carey Mulligan), his drunken, slutty and suicidal sister, onto their self-destructive paths, we never learn about it and don’t need to. (Can we revise Tolstoy’s famous maxim so it observes that all unhappy families are alike?)

A bottle-blond cabaret singer who shows up from L.A. to camp on Brandon’s couch, Sissy somehow catalyzes a crisis in his life of unrepentant, beyond-compulsive horndoggery. Again, we don’t exactly know what specters Sissy’s arrival conjures up, and I would argue we don’t need to. Perhaps because of his career working in largely or entirely nonverbal media, McQueen feels no urge to overexplain. Sissy sings a killer cool-jazz rendition of “New York, New York” that reduces Brandon to tears (and may well do the same for you). Then she goes home with his married boss, who’s way more of a loser than Brandon is. Brandon tries to go cold turkey, stuffing all his porn — and even his laptop — into trash bags and going on an actual date with an attractive woman from work who actually seems to like him. But he can’t even fake an interest in the normal rituals of courtship. When his date (the African-American actress Nicole Beharie) asks him about his longest relationship, he says it lasted four months, but we suspect it was more like four hours, or $400.

Fassbender and Mulligan both give massive, irresistible performances (the former won the acting prize in Venice) as people drowning in a hostile sea of commodified sexuality and self-hatred. For all the nakedness and all the screwing, much of it framed by views of Manhattan at its most anonymous and terrifying, “Shame” is more a clinical spectacle than a prurient one. McQueen combines ’80s disco-pop and 19th-century Romantic music brilliantly, in one of the best soundtracks of the year, and cinematographer, Sean Bobbitt, uses the antiseptic New York interiors as no one has since Mary Harron’s “American Psycho.” While “Shame” isn’t an easy film to sit through, to describe or to figure out, it’s riveting, spectacular, passionate cinema.

I met Steve McQueen in a SoHo hotel room that was alarmingly plausible as a place where Brandon might have sex with a woman (or man) he’d never see again. A gruff, fast-talking guy with an East London accent and the traces of what I suspect was a childhood speech impediment, McQueen doesn’t crack jokes or engage in small talk. He did tell me, before I turned on my digital recorder, that he’s had to abandon his childhood passion for the Tottenham Hotspur soccer team because of “too much grief, too much heartache.” What struck me upon listening to the interview a second time was the intense earnestness, even idealism, of his vision to cinema, which is quite the opposite of the ironic or detached demeanor you might expect from someone with McQueen’s art-world reputation.

I want to start by talking about your relationship with Michael Fassbender, which I already characterized as being a little like the one between Scorsese and De Niro, or maybe between Josef von Sternberg and Marlene Dietrich. You’ve made two movies with him, and I certainly hope you’ll make more. Is it the kind of situation where you guys talk over the film a lot, or do you just get out there and do it?

Just do it. I’m not so keen on talking, I’m more keen on doing. It’s often the case that when you talk about something, you talk yourself out of it. Or, you know, you think too much about it. Sometimes you’ve just got to jump. Michael has the capacity to do that; he’s similar to me in that regard. You’ve got to find out through doing. It’s a great collaboration, to work with him, but I don’t write scripts for him at all. It’s not that I have him in mind. But what happens is that he can transform himself into that situation.

What you get in “Hunger,” with Bobby Sands, is a person who’s very different from Brandon. He’s using language, he’s trying to find things through language. Once you push violence to its total, absolute extreme you push language, and that’s what he’s doing. He’s trying to find things through communicating, through talking, as in the long scene with the priest. And this person, in “Shame,” he hardly talks at all, you know, it’s all internal. It’s an incredible feat to communicate that to the audience, and I think within the first 10 minutes we put the whole sex addiction thing to bed, in a way. We understand it, we get it out of the way.

Right, well, we certainly understand that Brandon’s sexual addiction is an extreme example.

This is not a person who’s just in the situation of being promiscuous. It’s a person whose days and nights are spent dealing with sex, in the same way some people deal with alcohol. To get through a day this person may have to relieve himself sexually 20 times, or engross himself in pornography for 72 hours at a stretch. So there’s a big difference.

Both of these films, as I see them, are about the body. What Bobby Sands and Brandon do with their bodies is quite different, I guess. But they’re both pretty extreme examples.

We all use our bodies, that’s how we are. We hardly ever talk. In film, people are talking all the time about how they feel and whatnot, and in reality that’s just not the case. We made “Hunger” in the way we did to reflect some kind of reality, and I feel the same way about “Shame.” The whole idea of back story and what could have happened to them — I wanted to make that situation familiar rather than unrecognizable. I wanted it to be about what we know, about what happens to them in everyday life. You meet someone for the first time and you have no idea who that person is really. What they do is present themselves the best way they can, and possibly through a period of time, after getting to know them, through the present you might see the past in them. And that’s exactly what I wanted to do with Sissy and Brandon and the audience.

If you think about the way Bobby Sands used his body, he was in a maximum-security prison in Belfast and within that he created his own freedom by stopping eating. On the other side of the pond in a different decade, Brandon is living in Manhattan in this metropolis of excess and Western freedom. He has a great job, he’s attractive, he has money. Within those possibilities, he creates a prison for himself through his activities with sex. So they are polar opposites, in a way, but they are somehow related. The situation of the body is very much in there. But, see, the body is what we do. In reality we are not Shakespearean actors having long conversations about how we live and whatever. We groan and grunt and get through a day. And often when we do talk, we talk a lot of shit, because it’s a way of filling time, avoiding stuff. If we do talk, possibly to our best friend or our psychiatrist or whatever, most of the time people don’t listen.

There’s no explicit social commentary in the film, in the sense that it’s a story about one guy and his sister and their problems. But you could definitely read it as a parable about social isolation, about family trauma, about sexual dysfunction, about consumer society and so on.

We’re making a film about now. It’s not a costume drama, it’s not something that happened 40 or 50 years ago. It’s about now, and for me — I don’t care what anyone says — I think cinema has a responsibility. You’ve got HBO and AMC doing whatever they’re doing, but cinema has another way of doing things, which can actually be closer to how we live today than any nine-part series on television. Absolutely. We can do that, and people are interested in seeing that and having a conversation about it.

What happens when you make a film about now is that it does have an aspect of social commentary because it’s urgent, there’s an immediacy about it. Particularly about the Internet, about pornography on the Internet, and about how that affects us, how we navigate this maze of sexual content that’s all about us.

Well, there’s the environment in that sense, and there’s also the physical environment of this film, which is a hyper-modern, anonymous, vertical vision of life in New York. You were obviously very careful about picking locations …

I wouldn’t say I was so careful. People have said that before, but I wasn’t careful at all. What I was careful about was where Brandon lived, where he worked, how we would travel to work, where he would get his dry cleaning done, where he would get his takeout food. These things were basically about ritual, about following Brandon and his rituals. So something could be the ugliest building in the world, and I’d have to shoot there, and that’s fine. Actually I love that limitation. It makes me happy to work with it to tell the story. It’s all about the story. I don’t make adverts, I’m not choosing wonderful locations. I’m choosing the reality that this character lives in and works in, how he gets from A to B.

One can also talk about the fact that a lot of New Yorkers live and work in the sky. It sounds corny and some people in New York tilt their heads and look at me, but it’s true. It’s amazing.

Well, a certain class of people in Manhattan, yes. Not me or most of the New Yorkers I know.

That’s right. It’s not everyone, but it’s a lot of people. You get these huge windows, like we have right here [in this hotel room], and you’re putting yourself in the perspective of the city all the time. It’s interesting, isn’t it? What happens is: Within this metropolis, you’re always in the frame. What am I, in this huge sea of people? It’s almost like reversing a telescope. It puts a microscope on you. Within the frame it’s quite lonely, these huge apartment buildings and office towers, all these windows and reflections, reflecting the surroundings where you are. It’s a lot of stuff to deal with, and it’s a reality. Maybe I heighten it by putting the camera on it — this is cinema — but it’s not a case of telling a story that’s different from what’s already here.

To the extent that we can’t resist identifying a character’s surroundings with his psychology, Brandon’s psychology seems kind of horrifying.

Yeah, absolutely. It’s like prison, in a way. A prison with no bars. Maybe it’s too much freedom.

You had that intense conversation at the center of “Hunger,” and you do something similar here, with the heartbreaking scene when Brandon goes on a real date and tries to have a conversation with a woman instead of just sex.

It’s the first time he actually opens up verbally, as opposed to opening up emotionally, which he does with Sissy. I love that scene, with the waiter coming every five seconds. It’s a bit comedic, but it’s also something that happens in reality when you have dinner. It’s difficult to have a conversation! The date happens in the walk-and-talk outside, and it’s so awkward and sweet, these people trying to get to know each other.

Talk about the song, Sissy’s killer rendition of “New York, New York.” That totally destroyed me, and maybe it’s just the way that Carey owns it, which is amazing. But it’s also the way it’s placed in the film, and of course how Brandon reacts to it.

What it does is that, in verse, it talks about the past and the present, and you can see what happens. Brandon, I imagine, would like to leave. He’d like to get out of that situation, but he can’t, he’s brought his boss to see his sister sing. So he’s forced to listen, and it’s the only time he actually listens. Earlier we were talking about listening, and people don’t listen, man. It’s difficult, isn’t it? And people don’t do it.

Sissy is communicating with him in verse, she’s singing the truth — it’s all there in the lyrics — and it evaporates his defenses. It opens doors which are locked inside him, and for that moment he’s opened up, he acknowledges the past. As soon as she stops singing, the doors are locked and the drawbridge goes back up again. That moment can give us so bloody much. We recognize it, we understand. It’s like setting off a dog whistle in the cinema; it’s something we know about although it’s not necessarily talked about or tangible. That’s the power of cinema, that’s what I’m talking about. That’s what cinema can give us, it can go much further on emotional journeys.

I don’t want to give away the ending, but you deliberately leave Brandon’s fate undecided. I don’t know what direction he’s going, but I have to say I fear the worst for the guy.

There has to be some kind of glimmer of hope. I hope he doesn’t get off that train! But of course he might stay on the train this time and get off another time. I don’t know. All of us are trying, that’s the thing. We’re all on that train. I want cinema to be like a mirror, that reflects the audience, so we see ourselves on the screen. Sometimes people might not want to look at that, because it’s not particularly attractive. But we have to look at it in order to move on, to engage with where we are, to reflect on what we are and alter what might happen.

“Shame” opens this week in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington, with wider national release to follow.

Now, it’s also true that my reaction to all this diligent legwork by a team of at least seven Times reporters can be summarized with a colloquial phrase that begins with “No” and ends with “Sherlock.” No one who has paid attention to the Oscars or the Academy — or the American film industry at large — harbors any illusions about who’s running the show, or believes that Oscar voters have much in common with Americans or moviegoers at large. Indeed, the borderline-cruel caricature of a typical Oscar voter, often bandied about in private by journalists and publicists, is of a 70-something retired actor, certainly white and probably Jewish, who wears sky-blue slacks and white patent leather shoes and lives in Brentwood or Beverly Hills. That seems to be almost exactly what the Times investigation has revealed. If anything, I found the median age of Academy members to be surprisingly young, at 62, and the male membership surprisingly low, even at 77 percent. It’s only half facetious to say that those numbers reflect years of outreach and affirmative action.

It’s worth noting, by the way, that the Times pointedly did not inquire into the religious or ethnic affiliations of the Academy’s white members. I can’t deny being curious about the question of how Jewish the Academy is these days, and you might be able to construct a non-offensive argument for why that’s relevant information. But it’s information that ugly people would use for ugly reasons, and you can’t blame the reporters and editors involved for not jabbing a stick into that particular hornets’ nest. (Internet comment threads on this topic are likely to be bad enough without raising the subject directly.) For the record, I suspect anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists might be a little disappointed. Of course it’s true that Hollywood retains some of its traditional identity as an industry founded by Jewish immigrants at a time when other business ventures were closed to them. But I’m guessing that Jewish membership in the Academy has declined a fair bit, in relative terms.

As the Times report goes on to explain, you can’t accuse the Academy of failing to represent its own industry, which overwhelmingly remains a white boys’ club in almost every area (except public relations, long a realm of female power in Hollywood). Many areas of the mainstream film business, including cinematography, special effects work and the executive suites, still have very few women and almost no people of color. Crunching the numbers provided by San Diego State professor Martha Lauzen and the movie industry’s guilds, the Times concluded that the Academy represents women with rough accuracy among producers, directors and screenwriters, the key creative positions behind the camera. Of course this provides no answer to the larger question: Two years after Kathryn Bigelow’s big Oscar triumph with “The Hurt Locker,” why were only 5 percent of the top 250 box-office films in 2011 made by women? (Reportedly, 17 percent of screenwriters for Hollywood pictures were women, and about 25 percent of producers.)

As Steve Pond, the level-headed Oscar reporter at The Wrap, puts it, “In other words, the Academy, which is supposed to represent the best of the movie industry, is an accurate reflection of that industry in many ways.” That’s entirely true, but Pond is essentially shrugging off a larger social and cultural issue that speaks to the long-term relevance of the Oscars, or rather the lack thereof. I think we all owe a debt to the L.A. Times, however obvious the results of their work may appear, for thrusting this question front and center: How much do the creaky, crusty demographics of the Academy have to do with the fact that people don’t really care about the Oscars anymore?

I realize that I’m begging the question here on a number of levels (and for once I’m using that phrase correctly). We have nearly reached the end of an awards season more tedious, more predictable and more drawn-out than any in recent memory, and in that context it’s tough to evaluate the history or the overall viability of the whole enterprise. Millions will tune in on Sunday night to see the fabulous gowns, tearful speeches and unfortunate production decisions, of course. But hardly anyone who isn’t directly involved this year feels a passionate rooting interest. (I mean, do you?) We can predict the winners in almost every major category, with the possible exception of best actress (although I think Viola Davis has pulled into the lead.) The nominated pictures are almost all tepid and noncontroversial, neither huge popular hits nor memorable cinematic breakthroughs. (The one exception to this might be Terrence Malick’s “The Tree of Life,” which won’t win anything significant.)

In the middle of last week, about 10 days out from Oscar night, I clicked over to a major entertainment-news site to see what scurrilous and delightful tidbits they might have to offer. Among 35 or so stories on their front page, exactly two had anything to do with the Oscars: One was about an after-party that Jimmy Kimmel and Oprah Winfrey would reportedly attend (well, OK then!) and the other was about Kodak pulling its name off the Hollywood Boulevard theater where the ceremony is held. A couple of TV talk-show hosts, and the slow death of the historic American company that once made all the film movies were shot on (in the long-ago days when movies were shot on film). I think that about sums it up.

As I’ve suggested in a couple of earlier articles, I think the Academy has gradually painted itself into a cultural corner, with the Oscars increasingly devoted to middlebrow, mid-budget “Oscar-y” films that are neither mass-market hits nor indie-flavored critic’s darlings. As one reader commented in response to my recent piece on the apparent Oscar failure of “The Descendants,” what the Academy means by “best picture” is unclear. “Is it one we should admire? Is it one whose actors and directors we should applaud? Is it one people can’t stop talking about and actually want to see again?”

What the Los Angeles Times has given us is a quantifiable, demographic answer to those questions. The Academy Awards emanate from a closed universe of movie industry insiders, who are overwhelmingly rich white guys over age 50 (in the real world, one of the demographic groups least likely to go see movies in the theater). Inescapably, the awards reflect the tastes, inclinations and worldview of that audience, which goes a long way toward explaining all the portrayals of depressed middle-aged men among this year’s nominees (and the otherwise inexplicable best-picture nomination of “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close”).

As recently as the turn of the century, when best-picture winners included major pop spectacles like “Titanic” and “Gladiator,” the Academy’s voters could serve as a plausible stand-in for a pretty big slice of the adult moviegoing audience. But as the entertainment universe has grown ever more niche-oriented and “narrowcasted,” and Hollywood’s global harvest of billions has increasingly come to rely on franchise movies aimed at teenagers, Oscar-friendly pictures have become their own middle-aged genre. As Steve Pond notes, the results aren’t always as disappointing as they are this year: “No Country for Old Men,” “The Hurt Locker” and “The Departed” are (at least arguably) exemplary new-school Oscar pictures. But there’s also no denying that they appeal most strongly to white men of a certain age.

One response is to say “so what,” as some people do in the Times piece. The Academy is a private membership organization, which is devoted to burnishing the image of the film industry and has never claimed to represent the public at large. It can give out awards however it wants, and people aren’t required to watch. Another might be to institute radical reforms, as suggested by 2001 best-actor winner and longtime member Denzel Washington: “If the country is 12 percent black, make the Academy 12 percent black. If the nation is 15 percent Hispanic, make the Academy 15 percent Hispanic.” It’s safe to say that Academy president Tom Sherak and CEO Dawn Hudson are going to steer well clear of both those positions, like Odysseus navigating between Scylla and Charybdis. They’ll make mumbled noises about diversity, do little or nothing in terms of concrete change, and hope to God that next year’s Oscar race has more sizzle.

In fact, there are reportedly 157 members in the Academy’s documentary branch, which is about 2.5 percent of the total membership. Until recently that tiny group was seen as a bunch of hidebound conservatives, notoriously resistant to new aesthetic and narrative approaches to documentary film. There’s really no way to exaggerate the strangeness of this category over the years, or the number of important films that have been completely overlooked. The most famous non-nominees include “The Thin Blue Line,” “Roger & Me,” “28 Up,” “Hoop Dreams” and “Grizzly Man,” and it’s absolutely not coincidental that I’ve just cited films by Moore, Werner Herzog, Steve James and Errol Morris, all of them controversial figures whose work flies in the face of long-standing cinéma-vérité convention.

On the other side of the ledger, the list of winning and nominated features over the decades of the award’s history have an irresistibly random quality; as filmmaker and blogger AJ Schnack recently told me, the winners have included Jacques Cousteau, Walt Disney (twice apiece) and the Department of the Navy. Trying to pick the single most bizarre Oscar-winning documentary, one faces an embarrassment of riches. Is it “The Hellstrom Chronicle” (1971), which combines bogus science and genuine stop-motion photography to suggest that we’ll all be eaten by bugs? Is it Peter Watkins’ terrifying “The War Game” (1966), which depicts the effects of a hypothetical Soviet nuclear attack on Britain and can only be considered a documentary by stretching the term beyond all recognition? I’m going with “Design for Death,” an anti-Japanese agitprop film from 1947 that reportedly featured faked archival footage and was mostly written by Theodore Geisel (aka Dr. Seuss).

You can definitely discern streams or currents in the documentary category; most famously, between 1995 and 2000, five of the six Oscar-winning films were about Jewish and/or Holocaust-related topics. (Spike Lee got in trouble for observing that his 1997 film “4 Little Girls” had no chance up against “The Long Way Home,” a film about Jewish emigration to Israel. He was right.) In 1994, the year the Academy spurned “Hoop Dreams,” it awarded the Oscar to “Maya Lin: A Strong Clear Vision,” a little-seen film made by Freida Lee Mock, who happened to be governor of the Academy’s documentary branch at the time.

In recent years, the documentary branch has veered from righteous political anger to a desire to reward films that reach out to broad, general audiences. So we get Oscars for Alex Gibney’s “Taxi to the Dark Side” (2007) and Jean-Xavier de Lestrade’s “Murder on a Sunday Morning” (2001) — terrific films, both with very little box-office appeal — and also for “March of the Penguins,” “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Man on Wire.” One-time renegades Moore and Morris have come in from the cold, although arguably neither guy won for his best movie: Moore’s “Bowling for Columbine” and Morris’ “The Fog of War.” One can definitely continue to kvetch about the omissions. I don’t know whose dog Steve James ran over, but it’s absolutely disgraceful that “The Interrupters,” his moving and dramatic film about ex-gang members trying to stop Chicago street violence, was left out this year. As for Asif Kapadia’s “Senna,” I guess it wasn’t groundbreaking in any way, but it’s still an exciting film that put a lot of ordinary people’s butts in the seats.

However, if the Academy’s documentary branch wants to reach across the partisan divide into red-state America, it has the perfect candidate this year in Daniel Lindsay and T.J. Martin’s “Undefeated,” a “Hoop Dreams”-style story about sports and society that inspired me and made me mad in about equal portions. (I’ll discuss the other nominees on another occasion, but here they are: Danfung Dennis’ war-veteran saga “Hell and Back Again,” Marshall Curry’s “If a Tree Falls: A Story of the Earth Liberation Front,” Joe Berlinger and Bruce Sinofsky’s “Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory,” and Wim Wenders’ 3-D dance documentary, “Pina.”)

“Undefeated” is a tale of the 99 percent for sure, except that the young men who play for coach Bill Courtney’s Manassas High School Tigers, on the north side of Memphis, are a lot closer to the bottom 1 percent than the top. They live in a physically derelict and economically devastated neighborhood, where few households have two parents and few of those parents have full-time jobs. Before Courtney, a local businessman who lives in a luxurious suburban home, volunteered to coach the Manassas football team for no pay, they were a bedraggled program who’d gone almost 14 years without winning a single game. As he explains it, the school kept the team going by essentially renting it out as a sacrificial goat to suburban schools on a pay-for-play basis. The Manassas players would be bused out to some white neighborhood, take a whipping from some better-coached and better-organized team, and go home with a pizza and a check for a few thousand dollars. Courtney’s mission at Manassas is evangelical, in several senses of the word. He wants to create a winning football team, he wants to teach these boys self-respect and encourage them to pull themselves out of their dismal circumstances, and he wants to serve as surrogate father and mentor to young men with very few constructive role models.

If Courtney doesn’t officially want to serve as a spiritual guide, or spread the gospel of Jesus Christ, it’s probably fair to say that in the context of Southern high school football, that stuff just comes with the territory. This is an old-school, you-are-there documentary, completely free of judgment or extraneous commentary, and the pervasive quality of religious faith in the lives of Courtney and his team — along with the sense that team sports, and especially football, is itself a sort of spiritual quest — is just a given. Courtney stops just short of praying to God for victory before a big game, but when Manassas goes on an unlikely winning streak during the 2009 season, he doesn’t discourage the view that their comeback victories over bigger, richer and whiter schools might just be the will of the Big Guy.

I’ve already mentioned race more in this article than anyone does in the film, maybe because the racial dynamics of Manassas, and of Memphis and Tennessee and the United States, are so obvious to everyone involved. When Courtney tries to get his troubled defensive star, Chavis Daniels, to get in his car for a chat, he jokes, “You don’t like to ride with white people, Chavis? Is that it?” That might be the only time in “Undefeated” that anyone officially notices that Courtney has a different skin color than all the players on his team, and from virtually everyone on the Manassas campus.

To be honest, the whole idea that high school football is this almost mythological test of masculine character is profoundly alien to me. Still, there’s no disputing that Bill Courtney has touched and transformed his players’ lives, at absolutely no tangible benefit to himself. His brand of hyper-Christian caring and tough love — after one practice, he tells the team he must go home and pray for forgiveness for cursing so much — is hungrily embraced by these young men who’ve hardly ever had anyone treat them with dignity, let alone a wealthy white man who didn’t have to. Manassas’ unlikely 2009 run makes for great drama, as do the heartbreaking tales of the team’s three stars: Daniels, academic standout and undersized lineman Montrail “Money” Brown and O.C. Brown, a massive offensive lineman and genuine NCAA prospect.

But if O.C. and Money are getting out of north Memphis, partly through their own skill sets and partly because Courtney gave them a leg up at the right moment, what the hell is going to happen to the rest of the kids at Manassas? Should you have to be a football star — and one with a rich, white, well-connected coach — to have any shot of escaping from crime and poverty and a dismal, half-abandoned neighborhood? “Undefeated” is a genuine crowd-pleaser, a rousing and inspirational flowers-in-the-junkyard fable of hope and possibility in grim circumstances. But I can’t help thinking that if you step back from the immensely likable Bill Courtney and his football team, the bigger picture is of a screwed-up society that can offer no hope to millions, and is throwing away entire generations of young people.

“Undefeated” opens this week in Los Angeles and New York, with wider release to follow.

Oldman is a reflective, soft-spoken fellow who considers questions carefully before answering them, but he doesn’t have to think about this one. “It was greatly liberating, powerfully liberating, to play George Smiley,” he says. If he plays a character who’s called upon to cry, Oldman explains, “Those are Gary’s tears. They have to be real. I’ve had to feel that grief or that anger, and then the performance is contaminated by that emotion.” With Smiley, he goes on, he didn’t have to display that emotion on the outside; the character is a profoundly melancholy, even tragic figure, but all that emotion is bottled up inside, in the classic English style.

Oldman recently made a brief visit to New York, to talk about the first Oscar nomination of a circuitous acting career that has taken him from the British indie fringe of the mid-’80s to major Hollywood roles and video games. (He is most famous among the schoolmates of his teenage sons, he says, for supplying the voice of Sgt. Reznov in the “Call of Duty” series.) I got to spend some time with him in two different settings: First as the moderator of a question-and-answer session at Manhattan’s Sunshine Cinema, following a screening of “Tinker Tailor,” and then the next morning over coffee at Oldman’s Upper East Side hotel.

A performer of tremendous, almost chameleonic flexibility, and something of a cult figure for many younger actors and film fans, Oldman has never been in exactly the right spot for an Oscar to land on top of him. As the star of “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” he was too edgy and too English. As a memorable character actor in Hollywood movies like “JFK” and “True Romance,” he perhaps seemed too damaged and disturbing. (Oldman explains that he settled on a key detail of the “True Romance” character after interviewing a Brooklyn teenager, who told him to replace the word “titties” with “breasteses.”) His ’90s roles as a leading man (“Immortal Beloved,” “The Scarlet Letter,” “Lost in Space”) never clicked in quite the right way, although we should make an exception for Francis Ford Coppola’s flawed but gorgeous 1992 “Dracula.”

Now, at age 53, Oldman finds himself — as he ruefully puts it — almost an “elder statesman” of the film business. On “Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy,” he says, he got to work with both John Hurt, an actor he has long idolized, and Tom Hardy, a younger actor who idolizes him. “I might like to think of Tom as a peer and a contemporary, but I’ve got almost 20 years on him,” Oldman says. “He’ll say to me, ‘Gary, I watched all your films when I was a kid.’”

As Oldman told the Sunshine audience, getting to play John le Carré’s legendary spymaster was an amazing opportunity, but one he approached with trepidation and nearly refused. He was “absolutely petrified” about taking a role so strongly identified with Alec Guinness, who played Smiley in the legendary BBC miniseries of the early ’80s. “You’ve got a knight of the realm, one of the most famous and most beloved British actors in our history. And if you asked almost anyone in the U.K., or at least anyone over a certain age, ‘Who is George Smiley?’ they’d say, ‘Oh, right, that’s Alec Guinness.’”

But just as director Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, modernist take on le Carré’s novel feels entirely different from the boxy claustrophobia of the TV series, Oldman’s Smiley is quite a different creation from Guinness’. “No doubt there are parts of the character where I wind up in the same place as Alec Guinness,” Oldman says, “but I’d like to think there are things in Smiley he didn’t find. Ultimately, I think his Smiley might be a bit more huggable. I think there’s a coldness, even a sadism to the character as I play him.”

Across these two conversations, I found Oldman to be an exceptionally thoughtful and gentlemanly person, much closer in manner to the quiet but deadly Smiley than to the unstable, violent or passionate characters he was known for in his youth. Oldman’s working-class London accent has been softened by nearly two decades in Los Angeles; he actually worked with an accent coach to make sure his performance as Smiley carried the correct upper-class Oxonian overtones. (“I was casting about a little bit to find his voice. And then I got to meet John le Carré, and said, ‘Thank you very much. I’ll take that.’”)

If anything, Oldman comes across as an intensely private person who isn’t terribly comfortable with the glare of celebrity, which may partly account for the fact that his leading-man career never quite took off and he’s never previously been nominated by the Academy. He talks about film, theater and literature with obvious passion and knowledge, and never seems to give rehearsed answers. For instance, he says he’s enjoyed playing Sirius Black in the “Harry Potter” series and Commissioner Gordon in the “Dark Knight” films, but also makes clear that those roles have been personally and financially beneficial. In the 2000s, he found himself raising two sons after a divorce, and didn’t want to be an absentee dad. “I didn’t want to be away from home all the time, and then I also didn’t want to be the kind of father who dragged them all over the world. Doing those kinds of roles in those kinds of movies, you’re making the most amount of money for the least amount of time.”

Oldman is a genuine movie lover, a connoisseur of cinematography, costuming and music — which makes him a particularly gratifying interview subject. While we were standing backstage waiting for the closing credits of “Tinker Tailor” to wind up, he talked about the piano theme, spreading his fingers on an imaginary keyboard: “Listen to that, so lovely. Then it goes all Russian!” When I meet him for coffee the next morning, we begin talking about the American movies of the 1970s that he likes best, starting with Roman Polanski’s “Chinatown.”

You were talking last night about your relationship with Los Angeles, and it struck me that you don’t view the city as an outsider or a visitor, at least not anymore. It sounds like you love the place, and have complicated feelings toward it.

It’s a shame about California, and particularly about L.A., where they’ve demolished so many landmarks. It’s a bit of a disease there, where if anything is over 30 years old, they sort of knock it down and replace it. It’s a strange town, it’s this sprawling suburb, and then there’s a city, the old town. It’s as if someone wanted to build a New York or a Chicago, they got only so far and they gave up. They just abandoned it. I’ve lived there for 17 years, and I’ve grown rather fond of the place.

I’m guessing you must like “Chinatown,” both because it’s your kind of movie and also because it captures so much of that urge to destroy and rebuild.

Oh, yeah, “Chinatown.” Sometimes it takes an outsider. If you look at Schlesinger’s “Midnight Cowboy,” it’s such a microcosm of New York life at that time. He captured something about New York that was extraordinary. Polanski did much the same. Or a native can do it, a real native — Scorsese or Woody Allen with New York, P.T. Anderson with L.A. and the Valley.

Here’s another thing: These films, like “Chinatown” — these movies were mainstream! You try to say to a younger generation, who are watching these movies on DVD, and getting their sense of history through that: “The Conversation,” “Dog Day Afternoon,” “Network,” “Chinatown,” “All the President’s Men,” “Marathon Man,” “Taxi Driver.” They were the movies you went to see at the cinema! They weren’t particularly art-house movies. They played everywhere.

Sure. I went to see “Taxi Driver” with my dad at the mall, in suburban California. It’s a little bit hard to imagine that particular movie playing there now.

Yeah, that’s right. It’s “Puss in Boots.”

I feel like the early part of your career, from the late ’80s to the early ’90s, almost belongs to that era of movie history. I can’t imagine Coppola’s “Dracula” being made now, or not the way you did it.

Well, I certainly think that — “Dracula,” for instance, it’s such a romantic movie. If you made it now, it would be a whole different animal. First of all, you’re competing against the market that has movies like “Paranormal Activity.” You’d have to deal with the scare factor. It was such a romantic take on the genre, and the book. This sort of tragic love story. I don’t know if people would want that now.

They could turn it into a “Twilight” movie. You guys were a couple of decades ahead of the curve on that one!

Right. I mean the people that write checks might not want it. I’m not talking about an audience. And then there was that slump in my career. People say to me, “Oh, there was a while where you disappeared.” There were many factors. I took a bit of a back seat, I had kids and I wanted to focus on them. There’s that period in the late ’90s, the early 2000s, where I didn’t do a great deal. People say, “Oh, you had a slump in your career.” And I say, “Really? Name me a movie. Name me a great movie from those years that I’d have wanted to be in.” That was a real strange seismic shift in the industry. That was when it all really started to change.

A great deal of it was being exported, suddenly, and the kind of movies that they were making was very different. I was lucky — I caught the very tail end of the indie thing, coming out of the late ’70s and going into the ’80s. With “Sid and Nancy” and “Prick Up Your Ears,” those were the last of that. Then there was the Merchant-Ivory phenomenon, that happened for a while. And then Tarantino, with that voice, that great marriage of action and dialogue, the like of which we’d never seen before.

But if you go back to those ’70s movies, you can’t imagine those being made today. I watched “Network” recently, funnily enough — I was on an Air New Zealand flight. Do you know there’s not a note of music in that film? Not a note. And it holds up. It just works. Those stunning performances from people, especially Robert Duvall, who is marvelous in it. You think of Finch, of course, and Faye Dunaway. But for me it was Robert Duvall and, of course, Ned Beatty. You remember him? When he gets him into the office, and they do that scene down that long table, gives him that speech?

I’m sure we could talk about ’70s films for a couple of hours, but why don’t you tell me about the moment when you found out you’d been nominated for the Oscar.

I was in Berlin, rather fittingly. I was in the middle of what I thought would be my last interview for “Tinker Tailor.” We were opening the movie there, and it was around 2:30 in the afternoon. My manager was watching the announcements in the hotel bar, and he came in looking flustered and a little teary-eyed, and said, “You’re an Academy Award nominee.”

We were already having anticipatory disappointment and anger. “Let’s just get angry early” — you know what I mean? Before we heard, I asked him, “Are you all right?” And he said, oh, he was just getting pissed off in advance. Tomas Alfredson, the director, went out for a walk. He couldn’t take it. So he was out walking around at the Brandenburg Gate. If one had taken the temperature for the last month, with the SAG Awards and the Globes, we weren’t part of it. So I wasn’t expecting anything. It was quite a shock.

I think I said this last night: You can let it overwhelm you and stress you out, give you anxiety. You can be cynical about it, or you can be, I think, overly modest — “I am not worthy,” that kind of thing. Or you can enjoy it. And I’m just having a great, great time, riding in the front cabin. It’s nice up there!

People in my position spend a lot of time fretting about whether the Oscars still mean anything to the culture at large, whether they mean what they used to, and so on. I wonder how that question looks to you. Do you feel like you’ve finally been accepted as a son and brother in Hollywood, after all these years?

I mean, I’ve never felt excluded, exactly. I am a participating member of the Academy and all that. But I think the answer is yes. You become an elder statesman, don’t you? A veteran. I’ve put the years in, I’ve got quite a body of work. And it’s particularly nice for me that it happened with this film and this character. I know some people who’ve been in this situation who have not had a good time. They get nominated, and they didn’t have a particularly good time on the movie, or they might not like the director. That’s got to be bittersweet, because you’re excited for yourself that you’ve been acknowledged, and yet you have a taste in your mouth from the experience.

This was a Rolls-Royce from the beginning, with Tim Bevan and Working Title, Robyn Slovo, the producer, Tomas Alfredson, the director — and this cast of actors! You know? So I’m very happy that it happened with this one. And we’ll see, who knows. It’s an achievement to make the top five.

And then, what you mentioned about the Oscar — where it is culturally, does it still mean the same thing, all of that. It certainly feels like it does from the inside, that’s for sure. It’s a big deal from where I’m sitting. What it means to the public — it’s a question I’ve never really asked anyone, you know? It’s never really come up. As an insider, you can take it or leave it, you can be cynical, you can dismiss it. It’s easy to be on the outside and criticize it. To me, the Golden Globes — that one is a puzzlement. There’s not one journalist I’ve spoken to who hasn’t had a comment or made a remark. Or rolled their eyes, as you are doing now. [Laughter.]

As you say, you’ve got quite a body of work, but this role feels quite distinct. Smiley is so quiet and calm, and you have a reputation for playing exaggerated, emotional characters. So much of the film is you being impassive, or at least seemingly impassive, underreacting rather than overreacting.

I’m excited and happy about the nomination precisely because of that. It’s not so showy, so extroverted. There’s a lot going on, but it’s like a simmer, isn’t it? It’s a small flame. It’s ironic, I suppose. There have been a few in the repertoire that have been more bombastic and showy, but I have to say this feels right. I don’t know — does that make sense? It’s a more mature piece of work.

I agree. I get such a powerful sense of depression or melancholy from Smiley. From the whole movie, actually, but especially from this tremendously still and quiet performance you give at the center of the movie. It’s like all the anxiety and sadness of post-war England compressed into one guy.

Well, he’s a romantic. A disenchanted romantic, one of the last. And he’s having to deal with these people, these new people in this new war, where it’s God versus Marx. There are suddenly all these questions, all these philosophies to deal with. I thought when I was working on it, “What would a psychiatrist, a therapist, say to Smiley in this day and age?” Look at that relationship [with his constantly unfaithful wife], it’s very dysfunctional, it’s very inappropriate. Someone might say to him, “Why don’t you feel that you deserve more than Ann? Why are you happy with scraps from the table, and not a full meal?” Those are the questions I asked myself; that’s what I was playing. That sadness that he carries around. I think, also, that he knows that the mole is Bill Hadon [played by Colin Firth] before I let you know it’s Hadon. So there’s this double betrayal.

When he talks about meeting Karla [the legendary KGB spymaster], and I have that monologue …

Yeah, about meeting Karla and figuring out his weakness. Which is such a great scene.

Smiley feels a little bit responsible for creating Karla, because he was the one person Smiley couldn’t crack, and he got away. And subsequently Karla became Karla — you see, I’m not being cuckolded by Bill Hadon, I’m being cuckolded by a man who’s thousands of miles away, this is how clever he is. But Smiley invites Peter Gwillam [Benedict Cumberbatch] up and they have whiskey, and then Smiley says to him, indirectly, don’t have a relationship. You want to be successful in this business? Don’t be involved. It’s his way of saying, I let him go, you see? Maybe you should tidy up your own affairs. [Long pause.] It’s fucking brutal, it gets me every time. The casualties of it.

I also found it chilling when Smiley says he has found Karla’s weakness, and that’s the fact that he’s a zealot, a true believer. Which raises the question of what Smiley believes in, or if he believes in anything. It’s the great mystery of the character.

Well, he’s become cynical, and the cynicism is there in the writing. I think it’s there in great writing. I think Arthur Miller has it, Tennessee Williams has it. I don’t even think great writers are even conscious of it, but there is that thing: Are we any better than you, when we think about it? Aren’t we really the same? What’s it all about?

Now we’re lucky. We look back at that period and we wonder: Should we have been as paranoid as we were? Perhaps not. What was all that about? But at the time, you know, it all felt very different. It’s an extraordinary piece of writing, a terrific creation. I’m very fortunate to have gotten to play it.

Still, you know what I’m talking about. Generally speaking, in recent years only certain kinds of movies have been serious candidates for the major Oscar categories, and in particular for best picture. While it’s impossible to lay out a precise description, it’s like Justice Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity: You know it when you see it. Earnest, middleweight dramas that teach life lessons and feature major emotional climaxes always leap to the forefront. They should make you laugh before they make you cry, or vice versa. Classic three-act structure; a major star playing slightly against type; at least one odd or gruesome or humorous supporting performance from a name actor. (Notice that I have just precisely described “The Descendants,” a tailor-made Oscar-winner if ever there was one, which for both extrinsic and intrinsic reasons is likely to fall short this year.)

Even Oscar winners that appear to violate some of these rules hew to the overall pattern. “No Country for Old Men” is an open-ended, nihilistic, ’70s-style American drama, but also one that alternates dark and light, features identifiable stars and a classic Western landscape. “The Hurt Locker” has no name actors, but offers an archetypal tale of courage in warfare that straddled the nation’s ideological divide. (It was also the least successful best-picture winner in history.) “Slumdog Millionaire” also had no stars and was set in a foreign country, but was essentially an old-time Hollywood drama filtered through India and then through canny stylemonger Danny Boyle.

I think we all understand that the 6,000-plus voters of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are a peculiar and self-selected group, and that they aren’t selecting the winners based on criteria that are important to anyone else. They aren’t picking movies the public likes. Indeed, over the last two decades the Academy’s taste has wandered increasingly far from that of the mass audience. And while artistic merit is an inherently nebulous and subjective concept, I don’t think that’s what they’re using either. Seriously, Academy members — let’s go out for coffee, and then you can sit there and look me in the eye and tell me that “War Horse” or “Midnight in Paris” or “Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close” (for the love of Jesus!) is a better movie than “Melancholia” or “Take Shelter” or “Coriolanus” or “Drive” or about 30 other things I could come up with.

For that matter — and this one’s just as important — try to convince me that those nominated films are a better example of what Hollywood does best than such big, spectacular and hugely popular films as “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2,” or “The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1″ or “Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol.” Sorry, but no. The thing is, Oscar voters are picking the movies that make people who work in the film industry feel better about what they do, for reasons that perhaps a highly-paid shrink could puzzle out. When we get involved in obsessive horse-race coverage of the Oscar campaign, we’re using voodoo and amateur psychology and meaningless statistics and other forms of hokum to try to get inside the heads of those 6,000 voters. I say the hell with it.

OK, I don’t quite say the hell with it. I’m as professionally interested in the outcome as anybody else who covers this business for a living, and as my editor recently observed, the Oscars are quite a bit like the Republican presidential contest. Just because the whole thing’s a charade doesn’t mean that nobody cares, or that we can ignore it. But my proposal for an Alternate-Dimension Oscars tries to imagine what the awards might be like if they didn’t disqualify, de facto, almost every kind of movie that people like to watch.

Believe it or not, I’m not envisioning an awards show geared toward the artsy-fartsy films that pointy-headed intellectuals like me tend to favor. If the best-picture race were between “Melancholia” and “Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives,” and Nick Cave were getting ready to rip open that envelope and announce the winner, wouldn’t that have America on the edge of its sofa? Please, no. I think the “Dark Knight” problem is a much bigger one, by which I mean the Academy’s propensity to ignore large-scale, well-crafted, ambitious entertainments — the kind of movies at which Hollywood excels, like it or not — if they seem too violent or too pulpy or too fanboyish or too free of tedious message-delivery.

This isn’t exactly breaking news, but most popular genres of film are de facto ineligible for Oscar consideration: superhero movies, thrillers, crime dramas, romantic comedies and franchise pictures of any kind. On the other side of the coin, despite a recent reputation for indie-ness, the Academy largely steers away from the kinds of serious art-house dramas that play film festivals and keep upscale big-city audiences excited about the possibilities of the form. Instead, the real-life Oscars find themselves hopelessly trapped in the middle, endorsing calculated middlebrow pablum that everybody involved knows is a big pile of unmemorable meh. If the aim of the entire organization and its awards show is to present the best face of the American film industry to the world, then this whole situation is ridiculous and self-destructive.

Hence my proposal for an Alternate Universe Academy Awards, an unholy blend of the MTV Movie Awards and the Indiewire critics’ poll that will get people excited, lead to considerable fighting and weeping, and produce some genuinely unexpected moments on Oscar night. This is my alternate universe, at least for now, so I’m announcing the best-picture nominees. I hope you’ll play along, with your own lists, emendations and angry deletions. In recognition of the fact that there’s at least a little Venn-diagram overlap between my manufactured universe and the real one, I’ve kept the unlikeliest of this year’s Oscar nominees on the list.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2 I’m not a big fan of the series, or the books, but that’s not what this is about. A tremendous technical accomplishment and a huge worldwide hit, managed with considerable dramatic chops and without selling out the source material.

The Lincoln Lawyer We can talk about the best-actor category later, where I think Matthew McConaughey’s underappreciated comeback role should be a strong contender. But from its ’70s-style L.A. noir vibe to its combination of sleaze, humor, emotion and violence, “Lincoln Lawyer” was arguably the year’s best Hollywood genre film.

Melancholia No need to repeat all the praise I and other critics have lavished on Lars von Trier’s hybrid of Chekhovian wedding comedy and apocalyptic masterpiece, with terrific performances from Kirsten Dunst and Charlotte Gainsbourg. Cinematic accomplishment of the year.

Mission: Impossible — Ghost Protocol Tom Cruise back in his borderline creepy, control-freak comfort zone, and a dynamite live-action debut from director Brad Bird added up to an enormous hit and the year’s most satisfying action flick by far.

A Separation Yeah, it’s a real-world nominee in the foreign-language category, but Asghar Farhadi’s continually surprising Iranian domestic drama, with its hidden stories about class conflict and its tense, involving portrait of life inside the Islamic Republic, is the year’s best example of global realism.

Take Shelter For my money this apocalyptic weather thriller — or is it a private tale of madness? — captured the American national mood better than anything else I saw all year, with a shattering lead performance by Michael Shannon and terrific supporting work by Jessica Chastain.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy Gary Oldman actually is nominated as best actor for his disturbing, ultra-quiet role as George Smiley, and deservingly so. But Tomas Alfredson’s chilly, modernist period piece is a witty and brilliant reimagining of John le Carré’s most famous spy novel.

The Tree of Life I was as surprised as anybody to see Terrence Malick’s long-brewing history of humanity and the universe on this year’s real-world best-picture list, and I think that’s largely due to the performances by Brad Pitt and Chastain in the more comprehensible Texas-childhood scenes. Given its reputation among critics (not necessarily including me) and Malick’s near-godhead status, it belongs here too.

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn Part 1 Go ahead and laugh, superior-minded Salon readers. Laugh, I tell you! This is a strongly crafted pulp movie, so pretty you want to bite it. Director Bill Condon fully satisfied the worldwide Twihard base while also hinting at some of the genuine perversity that underlies the saga. I won’t indulge my Twilight-vs.-Harry Potter riff right now, except to restate my view that the best of the former (this one) is probably superior to the worst of the latter.