SPOTLIGHT: THE AFTERMATH
After the Oscar ceremony, Andy left the following message on stagespace:
Thank God the Academy knows what it's doing. Kudos for awarding quality and giving Clint Eastwood the Best Director Oscar. And thank God MILLION DOLLAR BABY won Best Picture over THE AVIATOR. Made me proud! If you haven't seen MILLION DOLLAR BABY yet, go see it!
No, I'm not kidding. That is, ver batim, what he wrote.
And this was my reply:
Congratulations, Andy. As admirer- and defender-in-chief of all things mediocre, you must truly feel vindicated that the Academy has taken drab, overwrought, overpraised and ultimately forgettable work and called it the best of the year.
Those of us who need a little more, though, are not feeling as great. Here are a few reasons why:
The premise behind Million Dollar Baby is about as tired and hokey as it gets. In terms of grand and far-reaching questions, this movie asks these: Can somebody with a spirited demeanor and a tireless work ethic beat the odds and make it to the top? Can a girl with a lost father and a man with an estranged daughter ever learn to trust again? Should a man follow his faith or do what his concience says is right?
Even if you find those questions somewhat inspired, it's hard to see how you could find a less inspired way to ask or answer them. Hilary Swank, whose character is a native of a non-southern state, is forced to emit from her mouth such things as "I don't raghtly know," while Clint Eastwood--- who speaks with a sustained gruffness, as though his voice had been fried in oil--- clearly relishes such lines as "Tough ain't enough, girly." The build-up to "the big fight" is especially unsuspenseful, given that Ms. Swank shows not a moment of skepticism and that we're never given reason to believe, as the movie seems to, that she is not the greatest woman boxer who ever lived.
The characters, in fact, are little more than broad-stroked archetypes infused with a bit of dime-store psychology and endowed with a disproportionate serving of grace and dignity. It's not enough that Eastwood's character goes to church everyday after writing heartfelt letters to his long-lost daughter. He also reads Yeats and learns Gaelic, surely earning him extra-bonus smarty points. Where all this "hard book-learnin'" goes after it reaches his head, however, is left unexplained, since he as no point says anything in the way of wisdom. We have to discover his "curiosity" and "brilliance" by connecting these glaring bits of cheap and easy shorthand. (For someone in Dramatic Writing, Andy, you accepted "I'm just a poor girl" as character development a little too easily.)
But, of course, the movie is simply biding its time until the Big, Unexpected, Tragic Greek final act, which, as it plays out, is really no more than a cheap plot twist designed to tear at our hearts under the guise of forcing us to re-evaluate our notions of.... what? Life, mortality, and faith, or some such nonsense. But it never gets real about these things. By this point, we've so accepted the laziness of its storytelling, the cheapness of its sentiment, and the generality of its characters that it can't honestly expect us to listen up when it wants to tell us something Important. Perhaps the worst part about Million Dollar Baby is that it forced me to dislike it as much as right-wing nuts do.
Andy will respond with an indignant diatribe about my alleged inability to enjoy anything with "a heart"--- or maybe a recitation of the many awards it won or the critics and audience members it won over. Maybe he'll discredit me with an attack on the work I do or don't do--- or maybe he'll simply refuse to respond because he feels personally affronted, even though nobody has affronted him. Whatever happens, though, I don't think he can truly defend Million Dollar Baby as an original work of artistic merit. The real story of these Academy Awards is that quality lost--- and so did all of us who, with fervent hearts, denounce the contrived and champion the creative.
Actresses who have less Best Actress Oscars than Hilary Swank:
Barbara Stanwick
Faye Dunaway
Holly Hunter
Sissy Spacek
Diane Keaton
Julie Christie
Greta Garbo
Meryl Streep
Frances McDormand
Jessica Lange
Jessica Tandy
Emma Thompson
Ellen Burstyn
Anne Bancroft
Joanne Woodward
Actressess who have the same number of Best Actress Oscars than Hilary Swank:
Bette Davis
Sally Field
Jodie Foster
Elizabeth Taylor
Ingrid Bergman
Vivien Leigh
Movies that lost the Best Picture award:
Citizen Kane (to How Green was My Valley)
It's a Wonderful Life (to The Best Years of Our Lives)
A Streetcar Named Desire (to An American in Paris)
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof (to Gigi)
Dr. Strangelove (to My Fair Lady)
Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf? (to A Man for All Seasons)
The Graduate and Bonnie and Clyde (to In the Heat of the Night)
Romeo and Juliet (to Oliver!)
A Clockwork Orange and The Last Picture Show (to The French Connection)
Cries and Whispers (to The Sting)
Nashville and Dog Day Afternoon (to One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest)
Taxi Driver, Network and All the President's Men (to Rocky)
Apocalypse Now (to Kramer vs. Kramer)
Raging Bull (to Ordinary People)
Hannah and Her Sisters (to Platoon)
Good Fellas (to Dances with Wolves)
Pulp Fiction to Quiz Show (to Forrest Gump)
Il Postino and Sense and Sensibility (to Braveheart)
Fargo (to The English Patient)
Elizabeth (to Shakespeare in Love)
Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (to Gladiator)
Gosford Park, In The Bedroom, and The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (to A Beautiful Mind)
The Pianist (to Chicago)
Sideways (to Million Dollar Baby)
Directors who have won the Academy Award:
Kevin Costner
Milos Forman
Mel Gibson
Ron Howard
Steven Soderbergh
Oliver Stone
Robert Zemeckis
Directors who have never won the Academy Award:
Robert Altman
Ingmar Bergman
Tim Burton
Charlie Chaplin
Howard Hawks
Alfred Hitchcock
Stanley Kubrick
Akira Kurosawa
Fritz Lang
Spike Lee
Sidney Lumet
David Lynch
Martin Scorsese
Ridley Scott
Orson Welles
