I dread this
time of year. If the Summer is for Blockbusters, then the Fall (or
the Holiday season) is for Academy Awards. Not the show, the statues.
For the most part, every film that is to be considered for an Oscar
is released after mid November, but before January first. All they
have to do is release the picture in one theater to be in the running.
The theory around the Oscar contenders all showing up between Thanksgiving
and Christmas is this; who remembers what they saw last February?
Here is the reason for my dread. There will be approximately forty
theatrical releases between now and New Years day. As a member of
The Phoenix Film Critics Society, I have to vote for all the same
awards as the Academy, so I am obligated to see as many of the new
releases as possible (if not all of them).
If you have paid any attention to who gets nominated and who has
won over the last few years, this is what it looks like; women who
play prostitutes, men who play drug addicts, or anyone who portrays
an actual person, living or dead, is a shoe-in for a nomination.
A man who plays a drug addicted prostitute who actually existed
would steal the statue right off the podium.
The hard part isn’t watching forty movies. The difficulty lies
in the subject matter of the Oscar hopefuls. They’re a huge
batch of downers. Death, disease, war and other atrocities only
scratch the surface of the “man’s-inhumanity-to-man”
theme that runs through these candidates. Here’s the catch
22, people don’t just line up to see downers; it’s the
Oscar win that makes people buy tickets in droves. That’s why
you usually haven’t heard of a number of the films that contain
nominated performers.
By choice, I don’t go to see a movie about a mother of two
young children who tragically looses her husband in a random event,
who is forced to rely on her husband’s ex-best friend, who
incidentally is a heroin addict. I don’t want to see how these
two reorganize their lives and survive the death of their loved
one. Then I have to go, I get invested in the stories, and I walk
away glad that I went.
The first of these total bummers that I’ve had the privilege
to see was “Things We Lost in the Fire”. If you read the
previous paragraph, that is a brief plot synopsis. Halle Barry (Monster’s
Ball, 2001 – Catwoman, 2004) is the mother; Benicio Del Toro
(Traffic, 2000 – Sin City, 2005) is the addict. The former
was great; the latter was brilliant. Both Oscar winners already,
they seem poised for at least another nomination.
Don’t let the ads for this film fool you. This is not the feel-good-romantic-comedy
of the year. It’s as depressing and tragic as losing a loved
one and as gritty and graphic as heroine addiction. And still, I
loved this movie. The arduous chore of bumming myself out was rewarded
with a conversation piece about life, love, passion, humor, reverence,
self-preservation and vulnerability. One down, thirty-nine to go.
