From left Best Actor Daniel Day-Lewis Lincoln, Best Actress Jennifer Lawrence Silver Linings Playbook, Best Supporting Actress Anne Hathaway Les Miserables and Best Supporting Actor Christoph Waltz Django Unchained. (Picture: www.oscar.go.com)
As is my wont, let me quickly deal with material extraneous to the main theme of this post about last night’s Oscars.
There is this little game I play with myself while watching ‘Family Guy’ as to which character may best approximate its hyper talented creator Seth MacFarlane. I have always suspected it is Stewie Griffin, the youngest child of Peter and Lois Griffin who is so undiguisedly sinister. Watching MacFarlane host last night’s Oscars I felt several times that he was struggling to keep Stewie from leaping out of his finely cut tuxedo. Of course, there were a few times when the devilish little child did manage to break free.
For instance, MacFarlane’s stinging reference to Chris Brown and Rihana. While talking about Quentin Tarantino’s ‘Django Unchained’ he said, "This is the story of a man fighting to get back his woman, who's been subjected to unthinkable violence. Or as Chris Brown and Rihanna call it, a date movie." If squirming has any audio, it was heard after this joke. And then Stewie scrambled right back.
Host Seth MacFarlane (Picture: www.oscar.go.com)
Stewie also came out early when, while referring to Daniel Day Lewis as Lincoln, he said this: “Daniel Day-Lewis, your process fascinates me. You were totally 100 percent in character as Lincoln during the movie… So when you saw a cell phone, would you have to go, “Oh my God, what’s that?” If you bumped into Don Cheadle on the studio lot, did you try to free him? How deep did your method go?”
There was another one about actors who had played Lincoln in the past and how they had managed to get inside their character’s head. "I always thought the actor who got most inside Lincoln's head was John Wilkes Booth," MacFarlane said much to the discomfiture of many in the audience. He mocked asking, “Too soon?” I thought this was MacFarlane at his finest even if it means he caused many to cringe and groan and squirm.
I am partial towards Seth MacFarlane. Whatever he says works for me because I can tell that there is about 95 percent that he has had to strangle and leave to die unsaid before he said whatever he eventually did. So that’s that about MacFarlane. He was brilliant.
I am writing about the Oscars mainly because for the next few hours at least that would be the most searched keyword in all search engines. That is always good to bring some eyeballs to this blog. Also, it can only help that those looking for Oscar Pistorius and ‘Blade Runner’ might also get algorithmically misdirected here.
Speaking of misdirection, about a trillion or so words will be written to analyze whether the Academy members got their Oscars right or not and whether there was more than just artistic consideration at play behind their decisions. The Academy members seemed to be trying to strike a balance in their choice of the big prizes of the evening—Best Picture, Best Editing and Best Directing. I mention these three in particular because I think I have a compelling point to make. Compelling is my own value judgment. You do not have to agree just as you do not have to read this blog.
Ang Lee got the best director, ‘Argo’ got ‘Best Picture’ and ‘Best Film Editing’ for Ben Affleck and William Goldenberg respectively. On the face of it this seems like a clever division of the honors. But I find this division irreconcilable.
When a director is recognized in the best directing category at the level of the Oscars (for that matter any comparable awards) there is that implicit acknowledgement that he or she helmed a film which is the best among the nominees. The recognition comes in the particular context of a movie. One cannot possibly divorce the idea of best directing from the movie that has been directed. I am finding hard to accept that Ang Lee, or for that matter any director who is so honored, gets the award without ‘Life of Pi’, or any movie, not simultaneously getting ‘Best Picture’. It is not as if Ang Lee is being given a lifetime achievement Oscar which is in recognition of his lifetime’s work and not for a particular movie. What are you the best director of if not the best picture?
To extend that logic, how is Argo ‘Best Picture’ without Affleck being recognized for its direction? ‘Argo’ could not possibly have become ‘Best Picture’ without Affleck making it so. Of course, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences can always argue that ‘Best Picture’ is not just about the art of directing but also about production and overall execution. If that is the rationale, then I suppose I am beginning to look like a fool just about now.
I am equally intrigued by the best film editing category. Any film that wins in this category should, by logic, get ‘Best Picture’ as well. In Argo’s case it did but that is not always the case. My point is more about how the best film editor is chosen. Cinema being such an intensely collaborative medium, particularly between the director, cinematographer and editor, I am not entirely sure how the distinction between the three works. In particular the director and the editor are almost like conjoined twins during post production. My interest here is more academic than any real criticism of the latest awards. Imagine, for the sake of making this point, that there are 100,000 feet of raw footage that a film editor has to contend with to turn it into a 20,000-foot final cut. This requires tremendous technical, cinematic, narrative and visual skills.
That said, the fact remains that unless the editor has a lot of original material to choose from he or she would not have been able to create a tight final product. That in turn means that the director has consciously and, sometimes, unconsciously shot enough for the editor to play with. Against this backdrop, how is an outsider, in this case voting Academy members, to decide what the editor had had to slice through and clean up before giving the film a solid and cohesive visual narrative logic? Those who judge this category cannot possibly know what the director had given the editor to work with in the first place. However brilliant the editor may be, he/she does need footage to cut and trim.
That brings me to my (hopefully sensible) point about why a film that wins in the best film editing category is hard to decide because we don’t really know what the original material was. Of course, what is being judged is what we see in front of us and whether that has editing excellence. However, we also need to bear in mind what ought to have gone on behind-the-scenes in the editing room and during actual filming. It is entirely possible that the director devised the screenplay such that it already had very tight editing built into it.
Just about now I am beginning to wonder if there is any point to what I am saying. And I do not even have the mitigating circumstances of having drunk and partied all night to explain this rather fractured post. The only consolation is that it is about a bunch of self-absorbed people doing what they do best—applaud themselves. In their defense, the world does want to watch them. After all, not many of us would watch for four straight hours the annual ceremony recognizing excellence in hosiery manufacture, unless it concerns Victoria’s Secret.