Salon.com > An Education

Oscars: Hollywood’s war against itself (continued)

Mon, 08 Mar 2010 21:09:00 +0000

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.

Oscar 2010: Carey Mulligan’s charm offensive

Mon, 01 Mar 2010 17:01:00 +0000

At one point in Lone Scherfig's "An Education" Carey Mulligan, as a 16-year-old schoolgirl whose yearning for culture and sophistication is being stroked by an older man, sits in a posh supper club flanked by this new beau and his two ultra-sophisticated friends. Mulligan's character, Jenny, is a bright girl bucking the constraints of her suburban upbringing; this is early '60s, pre-swinging London, an era when nice girls supposedly didn't (though in actuality they often did). But it's not really sex Jenny is after; what she's seeking is much harder to define. She speaks schoolgirl French, sneaks cigarettes with her friends, and spends hours stretched out dreamily in her room, listening to Juliette Greco records -- records that, in those pre-Amazon days, actually had to be brought back from France in a suitcase by a human being, or at least special-ordered from your local record shop. Jenny is hungry for the world, and that supper-club scene in "An Education" nails it: Sitting at the table with her new friends, her hair done up -- or, rather, undone -- in the nondescript center-part hairdo of schoolgirls everywhere, she's the teenage equivalent of a plane ready for takeoff. Her simple plaid shift dress is accessorized with a dainty heart locket, a cigarette poised delicately between her fingers and -- the killer detail -- dimples.

The Oscar nominations: Trying to please everyone

Tue, 02 Feb 2010 17:03:00 +0000

So what was the inflated Academy Awards best-picture category, expanded this year from five to 10 nominees, going to bring us? More populism or more existentialism? Was it going to open the door to animated films, to fantasy and science fiction, to foreign flicks and low-budget indies -- or just to middle-of-the-road Hollywood sentimentality, calibrated to draw in heartland viewers who've increasingly tuned out the whole Oscar spectacle?

Given the Academy's catholic desire to please all its contradictory and overlapping constituencies, it shouldn't have surprised anyone that the answer was all of the above. And yet, somehow, it did. I think of the five extra nomination slots as the "Dark Knight" apology awards, but this year offered no exact TDK-cognate, i.e., no commercial-critical behemoth likely to be snubbed by the Academy members' peculiar blend of middlebrow snobbery. (Just to be clear: I didn't like "The Dark Knight" much, personally. But that's irrelevant when it comes to the Oscars. Given its alleged seriousness, cultural impact and box-office firepower, a best-picture nom should have been automatic.)

Box office report: “Avatar” hits $2 billion

Mon, 01 Feb 2010 06:32:00 +0000

"Avatar" won the box office derby for the seventh straight weekend, taking the record for the biggest seventh weekend gross ($30 million) from "Titanic" ($25 million). Dropping just 14 percent, the unstoppable monster has now grossed $594 million, meaning it will cross "Titanic's" $600 million gross in the next two or three days, perhaps on Tuesday, when the Oscar nominations are announced. Early last week, James Cameron's amazing hit surpassed "Titanic's" worldwide box office gross to become the world's highest-grossing movie. This weekend it crossed the seemingly unfathomable $2 billion mark worldwide. You can babble all you want about inflation, 3D and IMAX ticket prices, and what have you, but check out this little statistic: When "Avatar" reaches $2.239 billion, which it will in the next two or three weeks, it will have doubled the worldwide take of every other movie ever made except "Titanic." It will also soon have a $1 billion lead over any movie not directed by James Cameron. There's not much more to say at this point than "wow" and "don't make a sequel," so let's move on.

Andrew O’Hehir’s best movies of 2009

Mon, 28 Dec 2009 02:01:00 +0000

All I have to say about 2009 in film is that I'm sure they'll find movies to give those 10 best-picture Oscar nominations to, but it won't be any of the ones on my list. That's not a shocking development, but in this year of global recession, the distance between the massive pop-Hollywood spectacles and the little-noticed obscurities way out on the cultural margins seems to have widened into a yawning abyss.

Actually, though, this has been a pretty good year for the independent-film sector, at least in economic terms. I know, that goes against both perceptions and the headline news: the implosion of Miramax and the pseudo-indie, mid-budget bombs churned out by mini-major studios like Fox Searchlight (e.g., "Amelia" and "Whip It"). But it's true anyway.

“An Education”: Romance with an older man

Fri, 09 Oct 2009 07:06:00 +0000

Even when we're not talking about outright child molestation, the idea of a sexual relationship between a young woman and a much older man is likely to freak people out. Statutory rape is itself a vague term, with the specifics varying from state to state (and from country to country). And even if the sex is consensual, the question of "How young is too young?" invariably comes up.

One of the best things about "An Education" -- in which the superb young actress Carey Mulligan plays a teenager in early '60s Britain who has an affair with a much older man, played by Peter Sarsgaard -- is that it never gets hung up on that question, even as it acknowledges the emotional consequences that either party might suffer in this kind of affair. The picture, made by Danish director Lone Scherfig ("Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself"), and adapted by Nick Hornby from a memoir by Lynn Barber, is for the most part refreshingly nonjudgmental: It prefers to treat a woman's entree into the world of adult love as a saga of mystery, adventure and possibly heartbreak, not as an event that needs to be scripted or legislated by her elders. The picture tacitly accepts that when it comes to first love, someone always gets hurt -- not necessarily because one party is taking unfair advantage, but because sex leaves us vulnerable, period.

The British indie explosion

Thu, 08 Oct 2009 07:08:00 +0000

From left, Tom Hardy in "Bronson," Michael Sheen in "The Damned United" and Carey Mulligan in "An Education"

Is it pure coincidence that three of the fall season's best movies are opening right on top of each other -- and that all three are products of Britain's suddenly resurgent indie-film industry? I'm voting both yes and no. It's coincidence in the sense that the film-release calendar seems to operate according to laws that aren't just random but positively irrational: It verges on marketplace suicide to open these three movies at the same time, but here they are. What's not coincidence is that the film biz in post-imperial, post-Tony Blair Britain is riding a hot streak, cranking out splashy, stylish, audience-friendly flicks that bear no resemblance to the fusty, fussy, Jane Austen-in-lingerie stereotypes of yore.