THE KING’S SPEECH, THE SOCIAL NETWORK, THE FIGHTER… and the Oscar delusion
I haven’t written much about the Oscar race this year. That’s in no small part due to The Social Network’s critics award sweep early on in the race. Yes, I’ve had a chip on my should since David Fincher’s Facebook thriller, dark comedy, social satire, Shakespearean morality tale… whatever it is… won the National Board of Review’s Best Picture award in December and flattened the competition in every major critics poll after that.
The Social Network reigned until Oscar nomination day, when The King’s Speech scored 12 nominations, more than any other picture. The King’s Speech has since won the PGA prize. And the SAG ensemble acting award. And the DGA prize for Tom Hooper’s direction, which is the most consistent Best Picture bellwether.
Hooper’s victory and the sudden surge in popularity for The King’s Speech isn’t really surprising. Sony/Columbia can’t campaign for Oscar like Harvey Weinstein can. The Academy also has a streak of Anglophilia that goes back decades. And from my perspective, The King’s Speech always was the better movie. (Kudos to EW’s Dave Karger for predicting The King’s Speech all race long.)
Suddenly though, it feels like another critically-lauded American un-masterpiece, The Fighter (with 7 nominations), has a chance to come in and steal major prizes away from The King’s Speech (Best Director being one of them, though I still don’t buy a Christian Bale win for Best Supporting Actor).
The Fighter’s rise made me realize that it wasn’t just The Social Network that turned me off from this year’s Oscar race. Never before in all of my own Oscar watching has a slate of nominees seemed so weak while at the same time being so highly praised. True Grit? The Fighter? Black Swan? The Social Network? The Kids Are All Right? I said it bordered on delusional in my Year In Review. Now that delusion has been shattered.
Even as The King’s Speech surges, support for The Social Network and The Fighter still bothers me the most and for similar reasons. Both films focus on two enormous cultural changes: a seismic shift in human communication (TSN) and the remains of life in America’s post-industrial cities (The Fighter). The ideas are there. The execution, in both cases, isn’t.
The Social Network feels tonally disjointed, with Sorkin’s script in Fincher’s hands. The script is better than the film, which adds an impenetrable layer of cynicism to a script that didn’t have any. It’s the exact opposite feeling you get watching a true masterpiece about change in communication, Network, where the differing style of director and screenwriter complemented each other. After watching The Social Network, older viewers seem to understand–even fear–the Facebook generation and love the movie because it. Author Zadie Smith addressed that in her New York Review of Books article on the film:
In The Social Network Generation Facebook gets a movie almost worthy of them, and this fact, being so unexpected, makes the film feel more delightful than it probably, objectively, is.
Pete Hammond’s Deadline.com Oscar Poll also demonstrates the disconnect between older and younger audiences:
Younger voter: “Not finalized with what I’m doing. Still need to see a handful of films based on the nominations and then I’ll make the call. I will say that I’m not voting for The Social Network. Good movie, but definitely not Best Picture. I’m so happy that it got shut out of the last few awards. Enough of certain organizations, like critics groups, trying to act cool and hip by voting for it. And besides, it peaked too early.”
Most people under 35 don’t think The Social Network is a masterpiece. Most everyone over 35 seems to think otherwise. Call either group myopic, which I’m sure both are in their own ways, but this generational divide just shows that The Social Network‘s status is still unwritten. That’s Fincher’s fault.
The Fighter, likewise, doesn’t sit right, with David O. Russell’s film often crossing a line between focusing on the plight of those working class families in decaying industrial cities and lampooning those same people. Big hair and foul mouths. Throwing pots and pans, and jumping out of crack house windows. These things add to the setting. The question of why the family members are they way they are, however, is never directly considered, and the boxing tale–Micky’s rise in spite of and because of his family–can only convey part of the story.
Trying to dig beneath the surface of family members like Dicky, the crack-smoking former pride of Lowell, Mass., and Alice Ward, Dicky and Micky’s mommy dearest, is difficult in the face of such outrageous characterization. Melissa Leo, who likely will and should win the Oscar for playing Alice, is able to straddle both world better than anyone in the film, while Bale just chews the scenery.
When you put The Social Network and The Fighter up against The King’s Speech, a handsome, competently-made British period drama, you see the difference between a film praised for what it is and ones praised for what the audience desperately wants them to be. But there’s something more troubling then that.
If we look at The Social Network as a film about a generation of self-absorbed, perpetually adolescent, overly stimulated future leaders of America, we forget the story in Best Picture nominee Winter’s Bone, that of a teenager, who burdened by the mistakes of her parents, must struggle to save her family’s house. Atlanta Mayor Kasim Reed recently said, “There must be a generation tough enough to stick out its chin and take the hit.” Looking out at the landscape of America today, Ree’s situation in Winter’s Bone is a more likely scenario for the Facebook generation.
Then there’s The Fighter. In the Best Supporting Actor category, Christian Bale is up against Jeremy Renner, who plays a character with essentially the same interests in Ben Affleck’s The Town, only with a taste for robbing banks instead of smoking crack. Affleck’s heist movie, which takes place in the working class Boston neighborhood, is much more adept at showcasing the hopes and fears of post-industrial Americans than The Fighter ever is. Bonded by blood, afraid of outsiders, and with no plans for the future that don’t involve the past. Those sensibilities run through The Town while they are nothing more than makeup in Russell’s boxing movie.
The Fighter and The Social Network have something else in common: They wobble on a line between mainstream and art house, never really committing to their real destinies of exceptional Hollywood pictures. The stories are classic, but the execution is muddy. The King’s Speech,Winter’s Bone, and The Town are essentially genre movies–period drama, American indie, and heist movie. They play by those rules, and they transcend.
I question why so many critics so quickly fell in line behind The Social Network and other unexceptional American films, not simply because of the Oscars.(The Academy hasn’t kowtowed to critics in the past and they certainly weren’t going to start this year.) There were better films this year, and many of them weren’t American films to begin with. Even the Academy realizes this because The King’s Speech will likely be the second British film in three years to win Best Picture. Sasha Stone at Awards Daily said it look like the 1970s this year, but for me, it looks like the early- to mid-1960s when British films dominated Oscar because they were making better movies.
In a global world, and a world where we have so much access to cinema on Netflix, Mubi, and even digital films inside a theater, that critics groups aligned behind an American picture that takes a cynical look at the technology that changed they do their jobs makes them seem trivial, even spiteful. And if Facebook makes them uncomfortable, if working class people with little means make them laugh, then just wait… The world of film is changing just as fast as everything else and people who haven’t had opportunities are getting them (thanks to Kickstarter andIndieGoGo). It may not be the 1970s yet, but there’s a reinvention of American cinema underway. The Social Network, The Fighter, and so many other films this year just weren’t part of it.
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