Oscars rehash: ’10, Year of Not Feeling Blue

How does a flawless movie go almost completely ignored then win Best Picture? Forget it, it's Hollywood.Now that one of the lowest-grossing Best Pictures in history has officially knocked off the highest-grossing movie ever, The Hurt Locker's win is already starting to seem a little underwhelming.

A few arguments for why it really was Best Picture:

-- It's a war movie about the war itself and not propaganda either for or against it. Such movies are surprisingly rare. Even the best filmmakers cannot help themselves from making a comment about War when talking about a war.

-- It's a flawless movie.

-- It's an excellent argument for using awards to expand the audience of a quality movie. How many people weren't moved to see this movie until it started showing up on year-end lists? It should have been seen by more people earlier, myself included.

-- It represented a breakthrough moment in Oscar history. Kathryn Bigelow's win for both Best Director and Best Picture is huge for many reasons, but I think primarily because she is a director not some subspecies of female director that Hollywood only feels capable of making costume dramas or romantic comedies. She makes movies adrenaline junkies like the Scott brothers and her ex-husband usually line up for. It's a crime that it has taken this long, but with so much attention focused when someone would be the First Female Best Director, she is the right sort of director to break through. She defies the stereotype and might actually open the door for women directors to regularly make a more diverse selection of movies.

A few arguments for why it really wasn't Best Picture:

-- Almost nobody saw it. I'm generally not a fan of the most successful movies; the more money a movie makes is usually a sign of its middling (or worse) quality. But at least average box office success is a legitimate factor in determining Best Picture. As many Top 10 lists had Up in the Air -- which won nothing -- and Inglourious Basterds -- which won just a single acting award -- as the best film of the year. Real students of film will dig for movies that even fewer people saw like The White Ribbon or Liverpool or Goodbye Solo. The point is that the definition of "Best Picture" is highly subjective based on taste, background and mood. Even the best Best Pictures are often seen as deeply flawed by people who study them, rather than watch them. What a large number of people choose to see in a given year is, while not the primary qualification, a valid assessment of a film's perceived quality to a diverse audience.

-- I look at the list of 10 Best Picture nominees, and I've already seen Up twice, will certainly buy Up in the Air, Inglourious Basterds and A Serious Man on DVD. Two of those movies -- Basterds and A Serious Man -- I will need to watch mostly by myself for the rest of my life as my wife doesn't think as highly of Tarantino as I do and was bored by A Serious Man while I found it thrilling. Another part of the definition of Best Picture -- also highly subjective -- is what movies resonate not just in a given year, but over time. What movies do you want to see over and over and over again? I have seen The Godfather or parts of it at least 60 times because it still plays regularly on cable on Saturday afternoons, and I have never tired of it. Even Titanic, when I pass it on TNT, will make me stop and watch a few minutes while I continue the now decade-long internal debate about whether I actually like the movie or not. No Country For Old Men, Goodfellas (not a winner), The Constant Gardener (not a winner), Traffic (not a winner), Syriana (not a winner), Pulp Fiction (not a winner), The Quiet American (not a winner), Talk To Her (not a winner), Sideways (not a winner), WALL-E (not a winner): these are the movies that linger with me, that I will see over and over and over again and not get tired of them. Personal resonance and a collective historic resonance matter. It not only took me (and many, many others) months to finally see The Hurt Locker, only finally persuaded by its year-end performance, it will be a while before I see it again. It seems like a movie I will pass on cable and watch and marvel at, but never be in the mood to see again. Maybe I'm wrong about that; only time will tell.

What should have won: So what will we think of these movies 10 years from now?

Avatar, thanks to its encouragingly poor showing -- just three wins, all technical, and not even a sweep of its technical nominations -- seems likely to be relegated to its proper place in history. A huge, ambitious, but deeply, deeply flawed box office success. Given the money it's made and that James Cameron has already talked about it, a sequel or two seems inevitable. Maybe it's too much to hope that Cameron will understand why his movie went from Oscar favorite to feeling blue and actually bring in a screenwriter to work with him on any follow-ups.

Up in the Air did not get the credit it deserved. It was lost in the battle between Avatar and The Hurt Locker and overshadowed by high-concept brilliance like Inglourious Basterds. It resonates with audiences because it tells the story of our time. But it doesn't resonate in quite the same way in Hollywood, where unemployment -- while real and a way of life for young actors and screenwriters -- is really just time waiting for the first or next gig. So maybe the people who vote on these awards missed the significance of it. How the movie works when/if the economy turns around will be its real test. Does it become an intimate historic document or a quaint fable.

A Serious Man is another example of the what the mature, rejuvenated Coen brothers are doing these days, and a complete mystery to a lot of people. It will not be a cult movie like Big Lebowski or a true Best Picture like No Country For Old Men, but one a favorite of those of us who love their movies, along the lines of Miller's Crossing or Barton Fink. No one will want to watch it with us, but we'll watch it again and again.

Precious seems likely to fade from as an Important Movie, but its two Oscar wins are hard to ignore. District 9, Up, The Blind Side and An Education were nominated as a result of the expanded field. Up ranks as one of the best Pixar movies yet and will linger accordingly. The Blind Side will sell a ton of DVD copies to the same people who saw in a theaters, and be seen by almost no one else. The others -- while quality movies -- are more likely to be seen as novelties a few years from now, while Star Trek and The Hangover will be seen again and again.

What will become of Inglourious Basterds and The Hurt Locker? Two movies about war with two very different approaches (and two very different wars). Basterds is the Anti-World War II movie about World War II. Storming-the-beach and Holocaust movies have become an Oscar cliche, but Basterds revisits the war with anger, revenge and even humor. Because there isn't much left to say, World War II has now entered the realm of revenge fantasy in Hollywood. Pulp Fiction is probably the most accessible among Tarantino's movies, but Kill Bill and Basterds are the sort of virtuoso epics his first movies promised. Basterds may be his best movie, but also the hardest for some people to watch because the cinematic World War II cliche has become so pervasive that it is difficult, if not impossible, for many people to see history through the eyes of revisionist history.

And The Hurt Locker? The book has just opened on this war and this period in our history. A handful of early movies about the Iraq and Afghanistan Wars -- Lions for Lambs and In the Valley of Elah -- felt like efforts to end them. But The Hurt Locker -- along with The Messenger and the upcoming Green Zone -- seem to view the war in the past tense or at least are viewed by audiences that way. Bigelow's movie is a good place to start when trying to assess the past decade. It shows us the war, it shows us the people who fight the war, but it leaves it up to us to make judgments about the war. Maybe some of us won't seek out the movie again, but we will see many other movies that were influenced by it. In the end, that will be its resonance.

Better movies that got screwed: (500) Days of Summer. Not nominated for anything. A crime.

Worst award: I admit I liked Sandra Bullock's acceptance speech for Best Actress and briefly remembered why she didn't annoy me way back when. She's normal. She's funny. She's gracious. When she talks, she's nothing like Julia Roberts. She doesn't appear to take herself too seriously (even though she probably does). But is this really a performance that ranks with the best ever or, more to the point, anything Meryl Streep has ever done?