Anyway, the AMPAS has demonstrated over the past couple of years that they do in fact have some insight -- some as they did chose the terrible A Beautiful Mind (2001) and Chicago (2002) as best pictures for their respective years. With their nominees for 2005, however, it is back to that earlier dark age -- even if they mercifully passed on Ron Howard and Rob Marshall's 2005 banalities. Okay, so two of the five films nominated are of above average quality, while numbers three through five are different shades of bad.
What follows are my brief assessments of the five titles, listed in descending order of preference. Beneath these is a second list of ten films which I would prefer to any of the five titles selected by the AMPAS to compete for the best picture Oscar, including the least offensive of this year's spate, Capote.
Bennett Miller's Capote is sustained by this year's flashiest (and to my mind best) male performance, Philip Seymour Hoffman as Southern novelist, wit and raconteur Truman Capote. Miller films the script's über-tight exposition in a startlingly unfussy, classically-sound manner, which at the same time offers some sense of the elegance of the film's predominantly Midwestern landscapes. But again, the performance is the thing here, as is the admirable complexity with which Miller paints his often un-heroic lead.
George Clooney's Good Night, and Good Luck. is easily the most visually flamboyant of the five nominees, shooting the Edward R. Murrow biopic in the sort of gorgeous high-contrast black-and-white that one is more likely to associate with the previous decade of American cinema. Never mind this, Clooney actually demonstrates an interest in style which is nearly approximated by the graceful cool of his performers, particularly by David Strathairn as Murrow himself, in a performance worthy of the actor's nomination. If Good Night, and Good Luck. doesn't quite match Capote in the former's ambiguity (if not integrity) with which the subject is depicted -- Clooney doesn't hesitate to canonize his hero -- the film's evocation of atmosphere (in the very broadest sense) nearly makes up for this shortcoming.
Ang Lee's Brokeback Mountain may well walk away with the hardware this year, as much one suspects for what its defenders would like it to say rather than for what it actually says or how it says it. This is not entirely the fault of Brokeback Mountain, which whatever happens on Oscar night, will remain a missed opportunity in genre revisionism (not that anything more should be expected of professional opportunist Lee). Ultimately, Lee's film is little more than a visually-flaccid examination of half-baked sexual pathologies, notable less for their supposed emotional depth than for the incomprehensibility of the structuring relationship. If Lee was indeed so keen on profaining the American Western, he should have attended more to its semantics.
Steven Spielberg's Munich should give the director's more vehement bashers enough ammunition for the rest of their natural lifetimes. How any thinking person could believe that this will do anything to heal the Israeli-Palestinian rift -- which Spielberg claimed on-record -- is unimaginable.
To do so, they would have to digest the morals of a narrative that builds its case upon the psychology of a hired assassin whose internal state has been willfully perverted for precisely this narratological reason (as Eric Bana's character is improbably wracked with guilt while he attends to the business of avenging the cold-blooded murder of his countrymen). Of course, human psychology does not exactly seem to be Spielberg's strong-suit, what with his ascribing of post-tramatic event syndrome to a character that didn't experience said occassion (most spectacularly, moreover, during one of the worst sex scenes in recent memory). Add to this the year's most heavy-handed -- and cloying -- conclusion and Spielberg would seem hard to beat in the category of worst 'best picture' nominee of 2005.
But for Paul Haggis' Crash, which is not only the worst of the five nominated films, but also the worst American film I have seen in the past twelve months. Granted, I am generally successful in avoiding contenders for honors such as this, but that said, there is something truly awe-inspiring to Crash's atrociousness. If you've seen Munich, think of the absence of any subtlty in the final scene and then apply it to an entire script and you begin to approach what Haggis is doing in Crash. That's just part of what you get with Crash, which when its not trading on this or that racial stereotype, offers such moments of understated elegance as Matt Dillon's Oscar-nominated black-hating cop who ends up rescuing the same African American woman from a burning car that he had molested earlier in the film; Sandra Bullock's perpetually angry white woman, who is helped after a terrible fall by the same minority maid who up to this point had been quite often the object of her tyrades; and most astonishing of all, the Islamic store owner who targets the wrong Hispanic gentleman for vandlizing his store and in the process shoots the latter's daughter... who nonetheless survives because of the forsight of the store owner's older daughter. That a film this bad could be under consideration for the title of the year's best invalidates any organization that would make this case -- as it seems to validate the auteur theory: surely Million Dollar Baby (which Haggis scripted) is Eastwood's genius after all.
Had the AMPAS been interested in recognizing truly deserving work,
they would have cited any one of the following ten films above the five they did in fact choose: Christopher Nolan's Batman Begins (deserving of its cinematography nomination); Andrew Adamson's The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe; David Cronenberg's A History of Violence (easily the year's best English language film); Harold Ramis' The Ice Harvest; Phil Morrison's Junebug (Amy Adams should win in her supporting category); Woody Allen's Match Point; Robert Rodriguez and Frank Miller's Sin City; Noah Baumbach's The Squid and the Whale (hopefully will walk away with the best original screenplay trophy); Tommy Lee Jones' The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada; and David Dobkin's Wedding Crashers.
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