Tag: Cache

Academy Double Dip. | My Trouble with Oscar.

“‘After more than six decades, the Academy is returning to some of its earlier roots, when a wider field competed for the top award of the year,’ said academy President Sid Ganis. ‘The final outcome, of course, will be the same – one Best Picture winner – but the race to the finish line will feature 10, not just five, great movies from 2009.’” Most likely realizing that a nod for The Dark Knight last year would’ve doubled their television ratings, the Academy Awards pads out to ten Best Picture nominees.

Ten, really? I know I pick 20 movies for my review round-up every year, but still: most years it’s hard to come up with five or six worthy nominees, much less ten. It’d be better if they went to a system where “up to” ten movies were chosen, but not necessarily that many if the pickings were slim that year. In any case, maybe Hollywood needed an “Oscar Stimulus Package,” but given that it’s still the same people voting for the winners, I tend to think the Academy will probably continue to get it wrong most years regardless. Just looking at the past decade:

1999: American Beauty wins. Not a particularly poor choice by Academy standards, I guess, but the other nominees include a sop to the box office (The Sixth Sense) and by-the-numbers drek like The Cider House Rules and The Green Mile. (Only other worthy nominee: The Insider.) Meanwhile, many of the best and most groundbreaking films of the year — Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, Fight Club, The Matrix — are all overlooked.

2000: Gladiator. Terrible choice. The worthy nominees are Traffic, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, and *possibly* Erin Brockovich. Chocolat makes the cut thanks to the Miramax machine. Left unnominated: Requiem for a Dream, Wonder Boys, O Brother Where Art Thou, and High Fidelity.

2001: A Beautiful Mind. A stunningly bad choice, and easily the worst of the five films nominated. The Oscar should probably have gone to In the Bedroom or Fellowship of the Ring, although Gosford Park and (tho’ I didn’t like it much) Moulin Rouge! are respectable picks. Left off the wheel: Mulholland Drive, Memento, The Royal Tenenbaums, Ghost World, Amelie, and Sexy Beast.

2002: Chicago — I never saw it, but not a particularly good year for film anyway. Gangs of New York, The Two Towers, and The Pianist all make sense as contenders. The Hours (another Miramax film)…not so much. Possible adds: The 25th Hour, Y Tu Mama Tambien, Far from Heaven, About a Boy.

2003: Return of the King runs away with everything, which is deserving but also feels somewhat dutiful after the previous two years. (FotR is easily the best film of the three, imho.) Most of the other nominees are well-chosen — Lost in Translation,
Master and Commander, Mystic River — with the possible exception of Seabiscuit. Other possibles include The Quiet American, Finding Nemo, Dirty Pretty Things, House of Sand and Fog, Monster, City of God, and L’Auberge Espagnole…but it’s probably more likely that extra nods would’ve gone to the heaps of middling Oscar bait that year, like Cold Mountain, The Last Samurai, or 21 Grams.

2004: Million Dollar Baby. A certifiable stinker, and arguably Clint Eastwood’s least-deserving movie of the decade. (Mystic River or Letters from Iwo Jima are closer to caliber.) It beats out The Aviator and Sideways, as well as Finding Neverland (Miramax) and Ray (never saw it). Off the board: Hotel Rwanda, Before Sunset, Garden State, Kinsey, The Assassination of Richard Nixon, Spiderman 2, In Good Company, The Incredibles, and — most egregiously — Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. If I had to guess, Closer and Kill Bill Vol. 2 (Miramax) might’ve snagged undeserving nods in a field of ten.

2005: Crash. Another woeful pick, it won over a respectable field of contenders (Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Good Night, and Good Luck, Munich.) That being said, Syriana and the best film of 2005, The New World, weren’t even nominated. Neither were Layer Cake, Ballets Russes, A History of Violence, The Squid and the Whale, Cache, Match Point, The Constant Gardener, Grizzly Man, Batman Begins, or The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada. All these — and many others — were better than Crash.

2006: Scorsese wins a charity Oscar with The Departed, beating out worthwhiles Letters from Iwo Jima (the best choice of the 5) and The Queen, as well as more dubious picks Little Miss Sunshine and Babel. The best film of the year, United 93, isn’t nominated. Nor is Children of Men, The Lives of Others, The Prestige, The Fountain, Pan’s Labyrinth, or Inside Man. It’s reasonable to suspect that additional Oscar nods might’ve gone to the likes of The Last King of Scotland, Little Children, Notes from a Scandal, and The Pursuit of Happyness.

2007: No Country for Old Men — A fine choice. I’d say this year Oscar almost got it right…but the other nominees are still somewhat suspect. Michael Clayton, ok, There Will Be Blood, sure. But Atonement and Juno? I’d rather have seen The Diving Bell & the Butterfly, Zodiac, The Savages, Charlie Wilson’s War, In the Valley of Elah, The Assassination of Jesse James, Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, 4 Months, 3 Weeks, & 2 Days, or my favorite film of the year, I’m Not There, get their due.

2008: Slumdog Millionaire (ugh) beats out Milk, Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon and The Reader. Of those, Milk and F/N are solid, and ideally would’ve been paired with The Dark Knight, The Wrestler, Let the Right One In, and/or WALL-E. Other possibles include Man on Wire, Snow Angels, Waltz with Bashir, Vicky Christina Barcelona, Iron Man, and The Visitor…although it seems more likely Oscar would’ve gone with Gran Torino, A Christmas Tale, Doubt, Revolutionary Road, or Valkyrie.

So, to review, in only one of the past ten years (2003) did Oscar pick the movie i’d argue was actually the best that year, although even that one feels a bit de rigueur. (Admittedly, they came close in 2007 as well.) In six of those ten years (1999, 2004-2008), my best film of the year wasn’t even nominated. In four of those ten years (’01, ’04, ’05, ’08), a — to my mind, of course — certifiably lousy film won Best Picture. And in three other years — ’99, ’00, and ’06 — an at best middling movie won the top prize. Not exactly what you’d call a record of distinction.

Hidden Costs.


The second half of last night’s double-feature, Michael Haneke’s Cache, offered a moral universe in many ways diametrical to that of Match Point — here, even the long-buried sins of the upper crust are eventually exposed before the Great Eye. As I said in the 2005 round-up, last year was a banner year for politically-minded movies, and Cache, both an unsettling thriller of personal surveillance and a timely rumination on First World comforts and complicity in an age of terror, definitely ranks among them. With its inordinately protracted (and sometimes intentionally confusing) shots and its refusal to answer many of the questions it poses (including the plot device driving the film), Cache isn’t going to be everyone’s cup of tea, and I’m sure some will write it off as just a pretentious and inscrutable foreign film. Nevertheless, I thought Cache was well worth seeing. It’s a film that, both visually and politically, will put you ill at ease.

Cache begins with a long, steady image of a Parisian street, held throughout the very slowly typed-out credits and beyond. Well after the normal amount of time our movie-conditioned eye allots for a basic establishing shot (by now, Tony Scott would have had an embolism), the image is suddenly paused, and then rewound. As it turns out, we’ve been viewing a tape, one featuring –and sent to — the home of the Laurents, along with a scrawled picture of a child vomiting blood. (Yes, it starts like Lost Highway, but they’re very different movies.) Georges (Daniel Auteuil), the host of his own popular Charlie Rose-ish television show, is nonplussed by this bizarre tape, and his wife Anne (Juliette Binoche), a successful book agent, is driven to distraction, particularly as more cassettes (with more information) arrive, and it becomes increasingly clear that Georges has some sense of why this is happening. Soon, for the sake of his wife and 12-year-old son Pierrot (Lester Makedonsky), Georges is forced to follow the path prescribed by these strange missives, and to confront a dark moment in his past that he, his parents, and arguably his nation have purposefully forgotten.

What that dark moment is is for you to discover, although it’s one that (as political analogy — it doesn’t work quite as well in terms of straight narrative) hearkens to the French-Algerian conflict and, more broadly, the war on terror and the hidden costs and benefits of colonialism. Georges rages and fumes throughout the movie, insisting over and over that he and his family are being terrorized. But by whom, and for what? Is Georges really blameless, and, that question aside, are his responses appropriate? Some very brief flashes of didacticism aside (for example, the scene involving CNN), Cache generally posits troubling questions about national memory, the dividends of empire, and the state of the world today without telling us how to feel about them.

Another layer of unease in the film involves the aforementioned camerawork. Cache returns to that exterior view of the Laurents’ home several times, and we never know if we’re watching “just” an establishing shot or indulging in the stalker’s-eye-view. (The likely answer, a la Rear Window, is that we’re doing both.) This goes for almost every scene in the film, and the cumulative experience of “stalking” the Laurents for two hours adds to the apprehension and foreboding of Cache. We begin to feel complicit in this crime of surveillance, just as, in time, we come to feel complicit in the Laurents’ sins. (Sure, the question of “the gaze” is a hoary staple of any Film 101 class — still, Haneke manages here to move past arthouse histrionics and create something that feels genuinely creepy.)

Finally, as I said above, Cache is disarmingly open-ended, particularly by the “explain-everything-several-times” standard we’re used to. Yes, one character’s arc is made clear, I think, by his/her womb-like retreat from the world, and that maddening last shot, if you caught the action (screenshot spoilers here), does suggest a possible answer to the cassette issue. But, ultimately, the bullet-points of the thriller story aren’t all that important. The plot mechanics of Cache may remain hidden, but the unsettling impressions of guilt and complicity it leaves linger in plain sight.