The exemplary fact of this year’s Oscar nominations is the acknowledgment of “Beasts of the Southern Wild” in four major categories (Best Picture, Best Actress, Best Director, and Best Adapted Screenplay). The independently-produced film is Benh Zeitlin’s first feature; he was under thirty when he made it, on a budget estimated at $1.8 million, and it made its première last January at Sundance. The very fact that the Academy is aware of its existence, let alone considers it for its highest honors, is a sign of an industry that is more fluid than ever—and of a time when the studios often function as distributors and the field of production is wide open to grassroots newcomers. But the movie itself is this year’s “The Help,” a romanticized and mythologized vision of poor Southern blacks (in this case, a father and daughter in a Louisiana bayou community called the Bathtub) that also sentimentalizes the very notion of self-help (“The Self-Help”) in a story that spotlights a tough, poetic, independent-spirited child facing dangers in aquatic adventures (well, “Life of Pi” also fared well in the nominations).
Hollywood—I suppose, in the image of the country at large—acknowledges the primacy of matters of race (a batch of nominations for “Django Unchained” as well, plus, of course, “Lincoln”) but not too closely: Quentin Tarantino and Steven Spielberg look at the country’s original sin (or one of the original sins) from a historical distance, and Zeitlin, for all the sincere, warm-hearted, poetic (though rather self-consciously poetic) energy with which he invests the film, conjures a neo-primitive world apart that reeks of an (utterly unintentional) condescension. The movie offers not just an apolitical but an anti-political, by-the-bootstraps view of essentially political matters that—centered as the story is on the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina—is the basis of the sentimental consensus that won it an audience and a batch of nominations. I’ll revisit it soon, though, and follow up here.
The most pleasant surprise, for me, was the nomination of the three principals of Paul Thomas Anderson’s “The Master”—Joaquin Phoenix for Best Actor, Philip Seymour Hoffman for Best Supporting Actor, and Amy Adams for Best Supporting Actress. It’s inconceivable that the movie wasn’t nominated for Best Picture and that Anderson wasn’t on the Best Director list—three such performances don’t just materialize from the ether. It’s pleasant to note that “Moonrise Kingdom” received one (though, sadly, only one) nomination (Best Original Screenplay), though there was no reason to expect that it would do better. Not all of the films that the Academy honors have been big commercial successes (and they never have been—the victory of “Crash,” in 2005, still makes the industry cringe) but they tend to substitute emotional expression for emotion itself (“Silver Linings Playbook” grabs the audience by the lapels and shrieks, “Feel! Feel!” as Robert De Niro looms in the background growling, “Or else…”), or a proud display of seriousness and importance for audacious approaches to actual substance. It was ever so. Hollywood (and, indeed, its New York studio predecessors) has made great movies from the very start; they’re not necessarily the ones that make the most money, or the ones that the industry itself is most proud of.
The contradictions are built into the very nature of the cinema, which isn’t just an art form and, of course, a business (as publishing, the art world, the theatre, music are, too)—but (as André Malraux famously noted) also an industry. It’s highly technical and capital-intensive; it depends heavily on scientific innovations; and, most of all, its inherent documentary power—the sense that even its fictions are crucial realities—make it automatically political. The controversies over “Zero Dark Thirty” and “Django Unchained,” the debate over possible connections between actual violence and movie violence, make the Oscars, more than ever, feel like reruns of Presidential campaigns, with leading candidates and favorite sons (and daughters) and dark horses. It isn’t the image or self-image of the industry that seems to be in play, but that of the country.
