Moving Pictures: This Year’s Oscars were cream of the crop

A glum year for the annual Oscars TV show, but what a wonderful, bumper year for the movies! This year’s Academy Awards recognized two authentic masterpieces (“Gravity” and “12 Years a Slave”) though their success squeezed out formal acknowledgement of a third (“Captain Phillips”). Still, given how good those movies were, why should we complain?

“Gravity” swept seven Oscars including one for best director, as well it should. Like James Cameron’s “Titanic” and “Avatar,” “Gravity” and its director and co-writer/co-producer Alfonso Cuaron have simply redefined our conception of what the movies can do. It’s hard to think of (m)any directors beyond Chaplin, Welles, Ford and Kurosawa who have ever managed to achieve that.

12-years-a-slave-posterIt was also fitting that “12 Years a Slave” brought home “Best Picture” and “Best Supporting Actress.” In one of the few injustices of the night, the Best Actor award should certainly have gone to Chiwetel Ejiofor in “12 Years a Slave.” Matthew McConaughy was very good in “Dallas Buyers Club”, but he really wasn’t that good. However, as Tom Hanks can certainly testify, the Academy always falls for AIDS victims finding their existential nobility. Works every time.

But truly, McConaughy’s work, fine though it was, didn’t hold a candle to Ejiofor in a performance of searing, primordial intensity and authenticity. Shame on you, Academy!

And Shame! Again for passing over Barkhad Abdi for best supporting actor in “Captain Phillips.” The Academy always falls for cross-dressing and transvestite performances. Just ask Hillary Swank. And again, while Jared Leto was really, really good in the role, he was given a simple slam dunk to put in the net. Abdi’s performance was so elemental it convinced you he was a real pirate who’d somehow broken into the movie and would machinegun Captain Hanks, director Paul Greenglass and the entire ship and movie crews at the twitch of an eye. His performance compares with the immortal Toshiro Mifuni himself in Kurosawa’s “Throne of Blood.”

Oscar, bless him, is a well-meaning, simple-minded old duffer – very much like Walter Cronkite, or at least the character that the shrewd, calculating real Walter Cronkite played so well for so long.

captain-phillips-posterYou can easily work out the clockwork chunderings of the Academy’s mental processes. Abdi’s character is too disturbing, too radical, too frightening in a real world way. “Captain Phillips” was just thrown into the Oscar mix this year anyway because there always has to be at least one really good film that will lose in everything except some category like sound editing. And Tom Hanks already has two Oscars to his name so, much as we love him, why should he or his movies ever need more? (The same kind of calculation will haunt George Clooney and Sandra Bullock for many years to come).

There was no surprise that Bruce Dern was passed over for “Nebraska.” The popular perception was that he was just playing himself. (An assumption, it should be noted, that didn’t prevent Jeff Bridges from winning for playing a bad, washed-out Country and Western singer when he’d been passed over for so many better and more important performances.) Can the Academy at least get round to presenting Dern next year an honorary Oscar for so many of the know-out roles he’s played before? After all, 40 years ago, Dern was already playing the kind of roles Abdi and Michael Fassbinder were passed over for doing so well this year.

At least in the Actress categories, the Academy batted two for two. It would have been a lasting outrage if either Cate Blanchett or Lupita Nyong’o had been passed over, and truth to tell, none of the other actresses in either category, deserving of their nominations as they all were, held a candle to those two. The beautiful, luminous Nyong’o deserves a respite now from so much on-screen suffering. Cast her in a couple of sparkling Jane Austen remakes. She can carry them.

Truly, there weren’t many glaring misfires. This year’s nominees were a crop for the ages and, by and large, the Academy did them the honor they deserved. Thank you, Oscar.