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 | The Artist

Sounds of Silence

by Thomas Delapa


While Hollywood faded at the box office in 2011, three noteworthy movies took a long look back at cinema’s past—not in anger, but with love and nostalgia. The Artist, My Week with Marilyn and Hugo are all Oscar-nominated flashbacks that returned us to simpler times, well before the simpler minds of modern, Die-Hardened Hollywood.

If Martin Scorsese’s 3-D Hugo is deep on cinephile sentiment and short on depth, the Franco-American Artist paints a loving, lustrous portrait of Tinseltown in the late silent era. Few, if any, recent films have spoken with such eloquence on just how much the movies have lost by abandoning their roots in nuanced acting and pantomime.

Iris in on an ornate picture palace in 1927 Los Angeles. Onstage, suave matinee-idol George Valentin (Jean Dujardin) hams it up at the premiere of his latest flick before a packed house of smartly dressed Jazz Agers. In this cinematic love letter written and directed by Michel Hazanavicius, Valentin’s character is sealed with a kiss blown back to such icons as Douglas Fairbanks as well as sound star Gene Kelly.

Despite Dujardin’s charming, nimble presence (he won Cannes’ Best Actor award), the real star of the show is the film itself, a jaunty black-and-white trip down the memory lane of the silver screen. Shot in the boxy 1.33 celluloid format of old, The Artist is anything but square; it looks so positively right that its negative might have been uncanned from the vaults of MGM, Paramount or Fox (pre-Murdoch) during the bygone studio years.

Whatever the vintage, Hazanavicius pays homage to a galaxy of Hollywood classics, from A Star Is Born and Sunset Boulevard to Singin’ in the Rain and Citizen Kane. The unkindest critical cut is that Hazanavicius excessively mimics his favorites, leaving us with a narrow, if crystal-clear, focus.

Starting with A Star Is Born (pick a version), Hazanavicius and his cinematographer Guilliaume Schiffman shine a spotlight on Valentin as he’s eclipsed by Peppy Miller (Berenice Bejo), a bob-haired flapper who ascends to stardom during the revolutionary switch from silent to sound. Stuck in a freeze-frame, Valentin does a Charlie Chaplin and refuses to talk on screen, insisting that the silents are still golden. Our hero’s downfall is what might have happened to Gene Kelly’s Don Lockwood had he stayed indoors and sulked instead of singin’ (and dancin’) in the rain.

Despite the 90 or so minutes of silent pictures, they’re not at all hard to hear, thanks to a colorful and atmospheric score by Ludovic Bource that sometimes echoes too loudly with Bernard Herrmann melodies. As Gloria Swanson famously said in Sunset Boulevard, the silent stars didn’t need words, they “had faces”; Dujardin and company say what they need through a delicate dance of gesture and facial expression—as well as a sprinkling of intertitles. A Jack Russell terrier channeling Rin Tin Tin, Valentin’s faithful dog (Uggie) is one of the movie’s best friends.

Audiences may be amazed and delighted by Hazanavicius’s adoring attention to period detail, from Murphy beds and "Pickfair"-era Hollywood mansions to such quaint screen punctuations as wipes, irises and slow fades. While The Artist borrows too much to be an artistic masterpiece in its own right, it deserves a joyful exclamation—aloud—for its heart.


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1/29/12