The 84th Academy Awards -- 2012

Midnight in Hollywood

by Thomas Delapa


And now, the envelope please for the best morning-after Oscar lead: Silent Night ... Silence Was Golden ... Let’s Hear it for The Artist. ... For Hugo, it was a basic Paint It Black.

Zut alors! The Artist, a loving Franco-American tribute to silent cinema, spoke the loudest at the 84th Academy Awards, winning gold in five categories, including Best Director and Best Picture. There were few surprises in Hollywood’s genial, but generally lackluster annual tribute to itself. The biggest winner might have been the worldwide audience, which at least didn’t have to endure a return performance from last year’s tinny Gen-X teaming of James Franco and Anne Hathaway.

Meryl Streep may have pulled off a small upset for her victory as Margaret Thatcher in The Iron Lady, besting Viola Davis in The Help, and Streep might have even won over the crowd for her disarming acceptance speech. “Streep fatigue”? After a record 17 nominations and three wins, you bet. Hollywood’s reigning grande dame (at the age of 62), Streep has steeped into the Starbucks of the movies—omnipresent, rich and creamy, and not without a bitter aftertaste.

Nostalgia, not Grease, was the word the long night, starting with Billy Crystal’s ninth role as host. Crystal was drafted when Eddie Murphy bowed out in allegiance to foot-in-mouth producer Brett Ratner, whose salacious and homophobic remarks last November got him the boot. In the 3-hour-plus event, Hollywood preferred to look back, not forward, focusing on its glittery past rather than its uncertain future in the age of thinning audiences and the multi-media challenges to its dominance—not unlike its slow fade in the made-for-TV 1950s.

With box-office attendance down significantly in 2011, the studios continue to bet on overstuffed technology and novelty, not talent, especially 3-D. Even New (now Old) Hollywood film purists Martin Scorsese and Steven Spielberg joined the 3-D parade in 2011, though not with big hits. While the $150 million-plus Hugo did grab the lion’s share of technical Oscars, it barely meowed in the major categories, which won’t much help its so far one-dimensional ticket sales.

In Hollywood’s own backyard at the sponsor-less (nee Kodak) theater, The Artist was masterful, leaving most American nominees French-fried and tongue-tied. Best Director Michel Hazanavicius thanked the late, great Billy Wilder three times, while gushing Best Actor Jean Dujardin said he loved our country and gave a shout-out to Douglas Fairbanks, one of his models for his role as silent star George Valentin. Among the hunky also-rans, George Clooney had to be content with statuesque supermodel Stacy Kiebler on his arm, while Brad Pitt seemed satisfied to be clutching Angelina Jolie, whose slit gown (and vampy podium pose) tied her with a full-breasted Jennifer Lopez for best (un)dressed star.

While Billy Crystal did yeoman’s work in a substitute lead role, ringing in with a few zingers ("Nothing can take the sting out of world economic problems like watching millionaires present each other with gold statues"), his schtick seemed a déjà vu rewind, sort of like the Oscars as whole. The Artist became the first silent movie since 1927-28 (and Wings) to win for Best Picture. The fact that a low-budget, nearly wordless, black-and-white movie stomped its well-heeled competition speaks volumes about how much loud, mainstream Hollywood has lost its way, if not its voice.

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2/27/12

Film Review | War Horse & The Adventures of Tintin

War and Oats

by Thomas Delapa


Less is often more in Hollywood movies, but don’t tell that to screen general Steven Spielberg, director of two, count ‘em two, major holiday releases. In the case of War Horse and The Adventures of Tintin, Spielberg had an uphill battle before the first shots.

According to the Associated Press, Hollywood’s 2011 box-office numbers will hit a low not seen since 1995. With no blockbusters on the scale of Avatar or The Lord of the Rings, few summer smashes and most A-list directors taking a holiday hiatus, election-year adult audiences ought to be asking themselves, “Where’s the beef?” Instead of hefty films with bite, Spielberg and fellow auteur-in-arms Martin Scorsese (in Hugo) served up candy-coated corn.

Based on a children’s novel by British author Michael Morpurgo that grew into a hit play, War Horse is a handsome but skittish crossbreed between Black Beauty and All Quiet on the Western Front. It’s a boy-and-his-horse story about young Albert (Jeremy Irvine) and Joey, a spirited colt who marches from the green fields of Devon to the bloody World War I battlefields of France. Forcibly separated from Albert, Joey passes from one owner to the next, finally arriving in the beastly trench warfare of the Somme.

Perched in the no-man’s-land between kiddie-lit and anti-war tract, Spielberg’s dramatic terrain is tricky, and he never quite finds his footing. As a plow horse, Joey saves the family farm from a mean landlord (David Thewlis), the melodramatic load lightened by Disneyfied comic touches and John Williams’ mickey-mousing score. Though Spielberg aims at making a heartwarming family film, War Horse only pulses during the few battle scenes, led by a David Lean-like British cavalry charge, bayonets drawn, against the Germans.

In the novel, Joey himself narrates his story as he’s yanked along under the reins of a string of good and bad owners. But with that voice gone on the screen, we’re left with the anthropomorphized sight of woeful, mistreated Joey, a mute Mr. Ed. Except for a kindly captain (Tom Hiddleston) who drafts the horse as his mount, Joey’s human co-stars have even less to say, surrendering to a script that comes up lame in the backstretch.

Whether affixed with bumper stickers that say War Is Hell or Be Kind To Animals, War Horse plods through a well-trod turf. Throughout Joey’s journey, we watch his human handlers making and breaking promises to each other and him, resulting in separation, loss, and death. The nadir of the fable is a mawkish vignette that drops Joey into the arms of a French farmer’s sugar-sweet granddaughter who seems airlifted in from a 1930s Deanna Durbin movie.

By the time the climax is dragged in, the battle for the audience’s minds, if not their hearts, is over. In the thick of a battle between the British and Germans at the Somme, Joey becomes the catalyst for the most improbable wartime plot turn since McHale joined the Navy.

For the bottom-half of his 2011 double feature, Spielberg drafted the Eurocentric Tintin comic-book series written by Belgian author Hergé. Like Scorsese in Hugo, Spielberg takes his first flying, in-your-lap leap into the world of 3-D fantasy, enhanced with motion-capture visual effects. If War Horse might claim partial victory on looks and animal magnetism, the retro charm of Tintin is conspicuously missing in action. For all the millions spent on this production, it’s hard to picture how anyone could generate such a generically lackluster teen hero. Only HAL 9000 might warm up to Tintin, a carrot-topped boy journalist who stumbles into a mysterious plot thick with thieves, treasure and ships in bottles.

Despite his G-rated retorts ("Great snakes!"), this kid also bizarrely packs a handgun, setting off a slew of frenetic chases and shootouts befitting a low-caliber action movie. For a director who went so far as to digitally delete the guns in his E.T. re-release, Spielberg seems to have sailed off into a weird new dimension, and a shallow one at that.

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1/4/12