3. In 1999 the five movies nominated for Best Picture were the war epics The Thin Red Line and Saving Private Ryan, the period piece dramas Shakespeare in Love and Elizabeth, and the less period-yet still period drama Life is Beautiful. If you were to sit ten people down and ask them to name their favorite nine would pick Saving Private Ryan. The one who didn’t was most likely too upset by the realism. Somehow, the Academy didn’t pick Saving Private Ryan. It didn’t pick The Thin Red Line with it’s A-list cast, big scope approach. It didn’t even pick Elizabeth with Cate Blanchett fully immersing herself in the character of the queen. Instead it picked a showy, derivative, film about a woman playing a woman in a Shakespeare play and the Bard himself falling in love. I’m not saying that Shakespeare in Love is a bad movie. It just isn’t a very good one. And I am by no means saying that Saving Private Ryan is perfect. It’s not. The ending in the graveyard is a little overacted tries too hard to pull at your heart strings and there are some scenes that I feel don’t work. It is still a highly enjoyable movie that is widely considered one of the top 100 films of all time by critics and the public alike. I have seen both films more than once and own each but in no area would I consider Shakespeare in Love the better movie. The only logical conclusion I can come to is that fans of the movie were split between the two war films and fans of period dramas greatly preferred Shakespeare over the other choices. I was eleven when this year’s awards aired and even then I felt it was wrong. That can’t be a good sign.
2. The King’s Speech. I saw this movie with minimal hopes and they were met but that’s about it. It’s a movie with some great acting, especially from Colin Firth, whom I had never liked until his phenomenal performance in A Single Man. It is also a very cut and dry, typical Oscar film that as Entertainment Weekly puts it, “could have been made at any point in the last five decades.” And it’s true. It’s formulaic and exactly what you would expect. A movie full of accents (never mind that the principle cast is British), showy wardrobes, good conquering evil (good being the king and evil being speech impediments), and a feel good ending (speech impediment no more!). On the other side of the spectrum was The Social Network, a movie that during it’s initial promotion was referred to regularly as “The Facebook Movie.” It sounds nothing like an award winner and actually sounded like kind of a terrible idea. Enter David Fincher. He turns the act of coding into an exciting world where being “plugged in” isn’t nerdy, it’s cool. It’s a movie based on a true story with major liberties taken, but the same can be said for The King’s Speech. The acting is tremendous from the entire ensemble. They all seemed to be born for Aaron Sorkin’s quick-witted dialogue. Justin Timberlake, Andrew Garfield and Rooney Mara whom got snubbed themselves in the Best Supporting Acting races for playing a too-slick for his own good founder of Napster ,a business student who makes a bad business decision, and the (doesn’t actually exist) driving force behind our beloved Facebook respectively. The score, which won an Oscar for Trent Reznor and Atticus Ross, is both excellent and fresh. Most importantly though, it’s a movie that took a chance. It didn’t try to say look at the mistakes we’ve made in the past and how far we’ve come like so many other Best Picture winners have. Instead, Fincher told us how the world is now take it or leave it. I own every Best Picture winner from 1991 until 2009 but one (The English Patient) and there is a reason for that. The winners in 1996 and 2010 just weren’t that good. Sure, I have problems with plenty of the other winners, but I can still enjoy them. It’s not even that I have this grudge against The King’s Speech preventing me from watching it again, it’s simply that I have had no desire to. Once was more than enough and I am fine with that. In the year+ since The Social Network showed us a million dollars isn’t cool, Eduardo Saverin’s shares were reduced to .03%, and Mark Zuckerberg isn’t an asshole, he’s just trying so hard to be I have watched it no less than 10 times. Maybe that’s why this ranks so highly on my list of snubs. Or maybe it’s because it’s only been a year and I haven’t been had a new mistake to take my mind off of it. Regardless of why, doesn’t change the blatant injustice that happened on that night in 2011. I guess Aaron Sorkin really knew what he was talking about when he said you don’t get 500 million friends without losing a few Oscar races.
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