THE BOOK--Playing The Percentages In Baseball

I agree about Avatar. 

Regarding the Hurt Locker vs. Basterds, that raises an interesting question.  How much should the social or political impact of a movie have on it’s recognition?  I thought that Basterds was about as well done a movie as possible, but it was of pretty much irrelevant subject matter the best I can tell.  The Hurt Locker, on the other hand, wasn’t as good but it was obviously a lot more relevant.

In baseball terms, should the MVP go to the player with the best stats or the guy who most helped his team reach the playoffs?

Nick/1 - Many would argue the guy with the best stats helped his team the most. Not sure that’s a great analogy, though your overall point is good.

MGL, people like to complain about movie critics and the Academy. Lots of people like to say “Those people never like the movies I like.” Of course, those are the people who think Scary Movie 17 is just the funniest darned movie ever made, so I tend to think their opinion is useless.

I didn’t see “The Hurt Locker” (yet) or “Avatar” (no interest in ever seeing it). But nobody can convince me James Cameron deserved another Best Picture when the last time he won one, he did so with a totally mediocre movie with awesome special effects ("Titanic," which is one of the all-time Academy mistakes - it can be very easily argued that all 4 other nominees were far superior movies. That one was like Justin Morneau winning the MVP a couple years ago.).

As far as Titanic in 97, it was a bad year for movies, as was this year.  I think that 1997 was defensible though, as it was a decent movie for a cliche.  Avatar is a terrible movie, from a quality, artistic point of view. It was a well-done cartoon with no plot, dialogue, or character development.  Avatar winning this year would be the equivalent of when Palmeiro won the gold glove despite hardly playing in the field.  How much the Academy actually considered Avatar, we have no idea.  What was outrageous was the discussion over whether it should have won.  I think that at best it should have been a courtesy nominee.  According to the “Vegas odds,” Avatar and Locker were both about even money and the rest were long shots.  Avatar should have been a long shot.

I cannot compare Basterds with Locker since I didn’t see the latter.  Basterds was excellent but not without flaws.  I generally expect the Oscar winner to be nearly if not completely flawless.  And of course if you don’t like Tarantino movies at all, you probably won’t like Basterds.

As far as the “social relevance” of a movie being one of the requisites for it winning an award, while I never even thought of that before, other than how that affects your overall experience while watching the movie, no, I don’t think it should be a conscious or objective factor at all.

The social relevance of a movie will automatically be built in to your experience of liking or not liking it.

If you love a movie but don’t think it is “relevant,” I don’t think that the relevance should be an issue.  If you don’t love it because it does not strike a chord due to its lack of relevance, than that’s fine.  Obviously if we were to watch some of the old winners and great movies we would not love them as much anymore because they might be socially, culturally or politically obsolete or irrelevant.

Of course a movie about Hitler and the Nazis, especially a fictitious one, is not going to be socially or politically relevant.  I don’t think that should take away from this particular movie in any way shape or form.  At least it didn’t for me.  To a large degree, I go to the movies to get away from the news…

Of course a movie about Hitler and the Nazis, especially a fictitious one, is not going to be socially or politically relevant.  I don’t think that should take away from this particular movie in any way shape or form.

I agree with you all the way on that, but I have a feeling that the voters might be biased towards a more “meaningful” movie.  When you combine it with the backstory of the script writer, I’m sure that made up for the flaws in the movie.

I think a similar thing happened last year with Slumdog Millionaire.  I personally thought The Dark Knight was a better movie, but the subject matter of Slumdog was just SO much more “deep” that I think it was what got it the award. 

In fact, if you go back and look at all the best pictures a disproportionate number of them have been awarded to films that tackle complex or relevant subject matter.  You rarely see a comedy win.  If people were judging the movie solely on how good of a movie it was, there were be a lot more variation in the types of movies that have won. 

BTW, what were the flaws you found in Basterds?

I saw both Hurt Locker and Avatar, and I’d say I’m about thrice as likely to see one of them again as I am the other. Hurt Locker was fine. It was moving and important, but if movies are a visual art form (and they are, aren’t they?), Avatar had much more to say. Though I’m normally the sort to trumpet the importance of things like character development, what does it matter, really, if you sit there for two and a half hours and never feel a lack?

I thought the major flaw was the implausibility of some of the plot details.  For example, letting the fake Italian assistants into the theater, expecting the Colonel to fall for the broken leg story, and the Colonel thinking that the Americans would make good on the deal.  Why would they? The random mix of comedy and drama was a little bit of a flaw in my opinion. People could reasonably disagree on both of those points.

In general, I don’t think a movie like Basterds is ever going to win a Best Picture Oscar.  Too avant-garde.

I agree with you that to some extent relevant movies tend to win.  But I think that is also somewhat accidental.  Most artsy, but not too artsy, well-made dramas tend to be about socially relevant issues.  Comedies don’t win because they are almost always not “good” movies. It is almost impossible to make a “great” comedy.  That doesn’t mean that they can’t be extremely entertaining. Hangover was hilarious, but it wasn’t a great movie by any stretch.

The Academy is looking for brilliant acting, directing, screenwriting, dialogue, cinematography, and the like.  No one is going to argue that a comedy, even a good one, generally has those things.  Same thing with Dark Night.  It had some good acting and some good directing and cinematography, but all the above?  No, I don’t think so.

To me a great movie worthy of an Oscar is like what SC Justice said about hard-core pornography: “I know it when I see it.” I’ll add that I can say the same thing about a movie that does not deserve an Oscar, even if I like it a lot.  Most movies are like that.  The Blind Side, Where the Wild Things Are, District 9, Star Trek, and Julia and Julia were all very good movies and none of them were even close to Oscar worthy, for example.  Unfortunately, I did not see a lot of the movies this year - I have a lot of catching up to do.

"Though I’m normally the sort to trumpet the importance of things like character development, what does it matter, really, if you sit there for two and a half hours and never feel a lack?”

I’ll tell you exactly why it matters.  One, the Academy is not giving an award to the movie that is most enjoyable to watch.  They are giving it to the “best” movie.  It is a subtle distinction to you or even a distinction that makes no sense to you, but you have to realize that the people who vote for these awards are the ones who take their craft (acting, directing, screenwriting) very seriously and I promise you that to them it is not just about sitting there and “not feeling a lack.” Not even close.

Secondly, and most importantly, just because YOU liked the movie or even loved it, does NOT mean that it is a good movie.  What I mean is that if you are a serious moviegoer and movie watcher, then if you want to say something serious about the Oscars, you have to be able to watch a movie and recognize a fine piece or work.

If you simply go to a movie and hope that you are entertained, that’s fine. Nothing wrong with that at all.  Just don’t start lobbying that your entertaining movie deserves to win an Oscar.  No one is going to take you seriously and no one should.  That’s not to say that an Oscar deserving movie should not be entertaining.  It very much should be.  But, it must be a whole lot more than that.  That is where your assessment of Avatar goes wrong, and why it didn’t win best picture, despite being enormously popular.

I don’t have a problem with the Hurt Locker getting Best Picture.  i DO have a problem with Basterds not receiving any sort of award. 

Christoph Waltz receiving Best supporting actor is deserved though.  maybe the best acting job all year from anyone.

the opening scene was one of the most tense movie moments i’ve ever had.

I thought it was interesting that they used an instant-runoff system to determine the winner (see NYT’s Freakonomics blog for details). It would be hard for a love-it/hate-it movie like Avatar to win because so many voters would rank it near the bottom of the 10 nominated movies. (I didn’t see it.) It would be very interesting to see the actual voting breakdown.

There’s no such thing as a “mistake”.  They pick what they think is best, and sometimes it matches up with what we think and sometimes it doesn’t.  It’s about as useful as asking the baseball writers of today who the “most feared” hitter is these days.  Unscientific, completely subjective, and impossible to label as correct or incorrect.

I nearly fell asleep during Avatar. Special effects don’t do enough to keep me awake.

I loved Avatar, but even I realized it wasn’t good enough to win best picture. I haven’t seen Hurt Locker yet.

I agree with Nick at the top. I don’t know how Inglourious Basterds could’ve been much better. The dialogue was vintage Tarantino, and the acting was better than in most of his films. Waltz put on one of the best performances I’ve seen in the past few years. I loved it.

I think the Academy generally does a good job in selecting which films actually win, but there are big campaigns put on by the Studios to get their films nominated and without that, a film stands little chance, especially if it was not released towards the end of the year.

One of the biggest disappointments this year was that Sam Rockwell did not get a nomination for Moon, which was essentially a one man show.

One of the main reasons he didn’t get a nomination was that Sony was concerned about piracy with the movie so close to a DVD release that they did not send “for your consideration” DVDs out. 

http://www.digitalspy.co.uk/movies/news/a194245/sony-moon-oscar-snub-due-to-piracy-fears.html

I don’t know- they gave an Oscar to ‘A Beautiful Mind’ (an incredibly stupid movie) and ‘Gladiator’ (a fun but dumb movie) and this year to Sandra Bullock (I mean come on) so it’s quite clear that the Oscar does not imploy any kind of artistic merit.

Basterds was indeed great, but ‘A Serious Man’- that movie was something else.

"I generally expect the Oscar winner to be nearly if not completely flawless.”

MGL, I believe this was your first mistake.

There were a lot of things I liked about Basterds, including scenes like the one Jamie pointed out in #8 (and Christoph Waltz’s performance, which was a big part of that first scene). Amazing stuff.

However, it’s very hard for me to abstract from the feeling I had that it was also an adolescent revenge movie played against about the most serious context a movie could have, and that this is a distracting flaw.  Perhaps this is what people mean when they say things like “people who don’t like Tarantino movies won’t like it.”

I’m thinking I should have written “revenge fantasy” instead of “adolescent revenge movie.” Freudian slip, but I didn’t mean to make it sound so pejorative. Though I guess maybe “revenge fantasy” isn’t much better in that regard.

i agree with MGL about avatar.  i thought it was a very entertaining experience but the actual movie (ie plot) was wretched.  I thought hurt locker was excellent so was not disappointed when it won best picture, though it was not perfect and I would have voted for Basterd as best screenplay over it.

but to me, the oscars are just one of thousands of industry awards that are held every year, these just happen to get a lot of attention.  and i think voters take it seriously too but they have obvious biases and their objective is to reward people in the industry, not get picks ‘right’ according to critics or the public.  which is why movies like Crash and Shakespeare in Love win best picture and scorcese wins best director for his 4th best movie (and other “lifetime achievement” awards in disguise).  no big whoop.

#18/kendynamo

“i thought it was a very entertaining experience but the actual movie (ie plot) was wretched”

This doesn’t make any sense. You either thought it was a good movie (i.e. a very entertaining experience) or a bad movie (i.e. wretched). You can’t really hold both opinions. You liked Avatar. It’s OK to admit it. I liked it too. It was a hell of a lot of fun to see in 3D and saying the plot was silly seems to be to be missing the point. Who cares about the plot of a roller coaster? Sit back and enjoy the ride. I did.

My personal opinion is that the academy will never pick the “best” movie. They are just too conservative. They go with the best example of their current understanding of what a movie should be.

My definition of the “best” movie is the one that stands the test of time. Just like the best music, best TV shows, etc. Avatar, in spite of it’s many flaws, is a movie I believe will stand the test of time. It’s a watershed moment in movie making in the same way that Star Wars was - another very flawed movie.

It always bugs me when people criticize a movie for being something it was never intended to be. To use a tortured baseball analogy, it’s like complaining that Pujols doesn’t steal enough bases and is therefore not the “best” player in baseball. 

If there was a movie hall-of-fame would Avatar be in? Would Hurt Locker? I can think of a lot of Oscar winners that wouldn’t be and a lot of non-winners who would be in. (IMHO of course).

@wells: um, no i continue to think it was a fun movie to see in the theater despite the fact that the plot and dialog was terrible. i dont see holding those two separate opinions as being impossible to reconcile.  Sorry!

The only one of the Best Picture nominees I saw this year happened to be “Inglourious Bastards”.  Now this movie is really funny, and contains an extended scene in the middle, in a cellar in a restaurant, that is one of the most suspenseful I’ve seen in movies.  So its worth seeing. 

And I agree with the criticism about the Academy giving short shrift to comedies, even from the standpoint of awarding which movie has done best for Hollywood that is the actual purpose of the “best picture” award.

However, there is another scene in the movie where GIs are torturing some prisoners they captured.  In fact, they were sent to France by their superiors with the mission of capturing German soldiers and torturing them.  The movie portrays this as kind of fun.

Now, historically GIs did not torture German prisoners they captured in the European Theater in World War II.  One of Clint Eastwood’s pair of Iwo Jima movies (both also worth seeing), “Letters of Iwo Jima”, shows American soldiers shooting Japanese prisoners, but things like this actually did happen in the Pacific Theater, and the scene is shown briefly and is important for the plot.

The IGB scene doesn’t portray the reality of World War II at all and doesn’t really advance the plot of the movie.  The “Bastards” in the title don’t make many appearances in the movie, the main plotline is about the efforts of a French Jewish woman to obtain revenge for her family, and never quite intersects with the Bastards plotline (at the end they come close and sort of run in parellel, but remain separate).

So in the torturing prisoners scene you are basically watching a snuff film.  The whole point of the scene is to show sadism.  Its violence porn.  Its the equivalent of porn films where there is sort of a weak plot and half hearted dialogues to manuever the characters into situations where they have sex with each other.

So why on earth was this movie nominated for an award?

I agree with you Ken/#21.  I went to see a midnight showing with my girlfriend the weekend it debuted at the Mall of America.  We both absolutely loved it, when we left the theater we were hyper-energetic.  It was a movie experience equaled only once in my movie watching life, which is when I accidentally saw Doom (that’s a story for another day).  But the short of it is we were both very excited during the long walk back to the parking lot.  That didn’t stop us from lambasting the awful plot.  In the words of a snob, it was a movie, not a film.

Wells, you’ve obviously never seen Raptor.  Now that’s an awful movie that I think is great (on account of how awful it is).

#33, Ed, that is a nice articulation as to why IGB was not a great movie despite being a very good one, and one reason why I am not a big fan of QT.  He clearly loves gratuitous violence…

Ed/22

Can you please explain why “violence porn” is bad?  I personally loved the IGB scene because it was gratuitous.  Not everything has to advance the story.

Agree w/ Nick/25 again, don’t understand why violence is a minus for a movie. Lots of war movies do this and are heralded for it.

Mickey, if we assume there are “mistakes” made by the voters, I have to argue that there are a lot more of them than you seem to think. I mean, just look at the list of Best Picture winners of the last 30 years and consider how many have been rendered irrelevant by history. “Ordinary People” instead of “Raging Bull”? “Shakespeare in Love?” “Crash” over “Brokeback Mountain”? “Forrest Gump”???

I don’t know how to explain why gratuitous violence is bad.  This seems to be one of those things that you either get or you don’t.

The best I can do is to compare it to sex porn.  If you had a movie where one third of the movie was straight up porn, and the other two thirds was a “normal” movie, parts of it very good if not great, it simply wouldn’t be considered for an Oscar.  We have a higher tolerance for violence over sex in the US.  But porn movies are simply not considered to be aesthetically good movies for all sorts of reasons. 

If you watch movies to get gratuitous thrills, then you have a very different aesthetic sense than I do.  I basically judge movies by how well they tell a story.  I like to see interesting plots, character development, and some sort of point of view.  With porn, everything in a movie is there to deliver a thrill.  You can have porn that has nothing to do with sex.

Tarantino can be a very good storyteller, but he tends to stray into porn.  IGB tells Shoshana’s story very well and that is why it is watchable.  I thought the Bastards’ portions terrible, they simply don’t develop as characters or even accomplish much.  Scenes with them are only interesting when they intersect with some of the better storylines in the movie, such as that of the German actress.  Its a very uneven movie at best.

Also, though this is a political consideration, I’m surprised that Americans aren’t more upset about a movie that portrays American soldiers as war criminals, especially in a case where the movie is being historically inaccurate.  The German characters in the movie are more sympathetic than the American characters on the whole.

ones level of tolerance for gratuitous sex or violence or whatever is certainly a matter of taste, but i think tarantino should at least get credit for recognizing what he’s doing is completely gratuitous.  from reservoir dogs on up, hes usually given winks and nods to the viewer when thinks get real graphic (eg the camera panning away to the ear slash in res dogs and the switch to black and white when the bride annihilates the 88 ninja’s - best scene EVAR btw).

and i think its going to be tough to get anyone worked up about historical inaccuracies in a movie so obviously based in a fantasy world. IGB was as realistic as Kill Bill, it just happened to be set during WWII, or at least in something that resembles what we know of WWII.  I mean i don’t want to get into spoilers but if you made it through the entire you movie than you know that this is clearly not a historical accurate film.  why should any americans take offense that a completely made up group of commandos committed totally fictional war crimes against germans that never existed? 

personally, i was offended by the movie Crash’ depiction of Iranian-American immigrants, stereotyping them as ignorant shop keepers who don’t know the difference between a broken lock and a broken door and are prone to commit irrational premeditative murder of locksmiths when their store get robbed. man that movie was terrible.

Rob #27, you are certainly right about some of their selections.  I was more than a bit hyperbolic when I said that the Academy made few “mistakes.” In general, though, I think they do a good job (perhaps to a point of actually being too predictable), they take the awards seriously, and there is not as much “politicking” as some people and some media suggest.

In fact, I find the notion that a movie needs to lobby the Academy in order to get recognition ridiculous.  It’s not as if the voting members of the Academy get an email that says, “I think you should check out this movie Hurt Locker,” and they think, “Wow, I’m glad they told me about that movie.  I never even heard of it. I guess I’ll go see it.” They obviously see all the movies.  What do they need in terms of lobbying?  An email that says, “Our movie was really good.  I think you should vote for it?”

Speaking of emails and lobbying, the emails that the Hurt Locker producer sent to Academy members was indefensible and I am glad that he was banned from the ceremonies.  It is clearly against the rules and there is not reasonable explanation as to why he sent them.

Man, referring to IGB as “war movie” just boggles my mind. It’s about as much of a war movie as Sgt. Rock comic book is a war journal.

Tarantino takes B-movie exploitation plots and makes them into amazing movies with great dialog and interesting story-telling. He likes to make people laugh at things that aren’t funny - like when Madsen’s character says “hello” into the dismembered ear in Res Dogs. I was laughing and horrified all at the same time. I can’t watch that movie again specifically because of that scene. But it sure left an impression which is a lot more than I can say for most of the movies I see.

If it’s not your cup of tea, that’s fine. But declaring it a “bad” movie because you don’t “get it” is mistaking your own taste for what makes a movie good - which I think was MGL’s point (even though he seems to be making the same mistake regarding IGB he criticizes). 

Shakespeare’s plays have plenty of gratuitous scenes in them. He seems to have held up pretty well over the years.

I have seen both the Hurt Locker and Inglourious Basterds, but I have not seen Avatar.  With that being said, I thought the Hurt Locker was the best movie I saw all year.  The top three would break down like this for me:
1) Hurt Locker
2) Inglourious Basterds
3) Up

Forget Avatar, this is hilarious:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AVm-HwAkVp8

Avatar, Hurt Locker, IGB: Gung-ho English-speaking military men enter the lands of non-English speaking people, engage in fraught and complicated relationships with the natives, big explosions, many people killed.  Shows us where the American mind-set, or at least the American media mind-set, is these days.

#18 kendynamo
Agree that the Academy Awards often default to lifetime achievement awards whenever there isn’t a standout performance in a certain category.  This works to the benefit of veteran actors, writers and directors and the detriment to young ones or those who have already won before (see Meryl Streep).

I correctly picked the winner of 14 of the 24 statues this year including the big five.  This was easily done by trending towards picking the “favorite” in most of that categories.  The “favorites” included lifetime bumps for Bullock, Bigelow (also gender bump) and Bridges.  I think Boal was bumped by some sort of “reality” bump because he was an embedded journalist which added credibility to the raw naturalism which was the mantra of The Hurt Locker. 

Right before the awards started, I saw that Avatar was picked by somewhere around 70% of yahoo’s pick ‘em users to win Best Picture and Hurt Locker with around 20%.  This makes some sense when you take into account about 50-60 times as many people saw Avatar at the theatre as saw Hurt Locker (740 million BO compared with 12.5).

I did see Hurt Locker, IGB and Avatar and I would rate them in that order of quality films.  Hurt Locker is technically proficient in all aspects (cinematography, sound, visual, editing, direction, acting, script) but the whole thing is held together by the character development (they are not over the top but they aren’t boring either)and the nature of the lives of those characters (the imminent danger, physical toughness contrasted with utter frailty in the face of IEDs).

Beyond those things, maybe its highest quality is the fact that like No Country For Old Men, it is a very serious film without being a message movie or propaganda tool trying to beat you over the head.  It presents a story filled with flesh and blood characters and it only asks that you give these people the benefit of the doubt because they present almost no agenda.  It’s a survival story, both physically and metaphysically if you want to look at the motivation and emotional lives of the characters.