Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hallucinatory backstage farce flies away with the Oscars
By N.B.
“BIRDMAN” flew away with the Oscars this year. Alejandro González Iñárritu’s hallucinatory backstage farce won the Academy Awards for Best Film, Director (pictured), Screenplay and Cinematography. Had it not been for Eddie Redmayne’s uncanny transformation into Stephen Hawking in “The Theory Of Everything”, it is likely that Mr Iñárritu’s leading man, Michael Keaton, would have won in the Actor category, too. In the circumstances, it’s easy to feel a pang of disappointment for Richard Linklater, the writer-director of “Boyhood”. His beautiful, surprisingly feminist chronicle was neck-and-neck with “Birdman” in the awards ceremonies that preceded the Oscars, but ultimately “Boyhood” had to make do with Patricia Arquette’s Best Supporting Actress trophy. In the voters’ minds, perhaps, the struggles of an ordinary Texan family were less compelling than the headaches of being a fading Hollywood movie star.
In general, the Oscars fell the way they were expected to—as they usually do these days, now that there are countless websites and algorithms devoted to their prediction. Wes Anderson’s dessert-trolley-for-the-eyes, “The Grand Budapest Hotel”, was the evening’s other big winner, for Score, Production Design, Costume and Make-up. Julianne Moore (“Still Alice”) and JK Simmons (“Whiplash”) thoroughly deserved their Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor victories, even if Ms Moore was really being honoured for her work in numerous earlier, better films than “Still Alice”. Hers was a classic “Right Actor, Wrong Role” Oscar, to rank alongside Al Pacino for “Scent Of A Woman” and Paul Newman for “The Color Of Money”.
There were only two salient injustices—and again, they weren’t unexpected. “The Imitation Game” won for Best Adapted Screenplay, despite its failure to convey what the Bletchley Park codebreakers actually did, and its inclusion of risibly fake clashes between the boffins and the brass (“We need six more months!” “You’ve got one month!”). Meanwhile, the decision to give the Best Animated Feature award to Disney’s cynical, forgettable attempt to launch a superhero cartoon franchise, “Big Hero 6”, only emphasised how absurd it was that the far superior “Lego Movie” wasn’t even nominated.
If the ceremony raised any broader question, it is whether we have finally seen the demise of the Hollywood Oscar-bait movie. For decades, the Best Picture category was dominated by high-sheen, middle-brow, supposedly uplifting, politically liberal epics, from “Gandhi” to “Dances With Wolves” to “The English Patient”. They were usually based on novels or true stories, they tended to be on the dull side, and, in the 1990s, they were often driven to award-nabbing glory by the campaigning of Miramax’s head honcho at the time, Harvey Weinstein. If you were the kind of person who only went to the cinema once a year, you could see such a film and come away with the comforting assurance that Hollywood (and its British counterpart) was still making well-crafted, largely humourless entertainment. But times have changed: in recent years, the Best Picture line-up has become ever more low-budget, quirky and unpredictable. Anybody who plumped for “Birdman” as their annual cinema outing would have stumbled out of the cinema wondering what on earth they had just seen.
Ironically, Hollywood is now reliant on indie movies and foreign imports when it wants to congratulate itself: of this year’s eight Best Picture finalists, “American Sniper” was the only film to come from a major studio, and Sunday’s prize-winners were virtually indistinguishable from those at the Independent Spirit Awards on Saturday (although “Boyhood” did better at the Independent Spirits).
Academic economics: the budgets behind this year's Best Picture Oscar nominees
One reason for the sea change is that in 2009 the Oscars expanded the Best Picture shortlist from five titles to a potential ten, making room for some riskier contenders. Another factor is that cutting-edge cable television dramas have whetted audience appetites for more daring fare. Less romantically, however, the key factor is that Hollywood’s studios are now shovelling their money into superhero franchises, having given up on any project that won’t sell a zillion dollars of plastic figurines to a global audience. A stodgy three-hour biopic directed by Ron Howard just doesn’t have the same international appeal as an “Iron Man” sequel.
Many a hand-wringing article has been written bemoaning the demise of the mature, mid-level Hollywood movie. But when you look at the runners and riders at this year’s Academy Awards, you have to ask whether the studios’ cowardice is actually a positive thing. Whether you prefer Mr Iñárritu’s formal fireworks, Mr Linklater’s low-key humanism, or Mr Anderson’s neurotically precise whimsy, it’s clear that that the glut of superhero blockbusters hasn’t stopped innovative, experimental, personal films being made—and those films are now getting the sort of mainstream media coverage that they wouldn’t have done back when stuffily prestigious Oscar bait was hogging the Best Picture shortlists. The Academy’s new indie-friendly attitude may have resulted in “Birdman” being this year’s main winner, but cinema-goers can count themselves lucky, too.
