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SO how
do you like your
America—as
a mildly flawed Mayberry or a seething pit of lies,
corruption and greed?
That’s
the battle shaping up at the 2008 Oscars, as films as
brutal as There Will Be Blood, No Country for Old Men
and Michael Clayton line up against the sunny
up-start Juno for the top prize. The entirely
British but equally dark Atonement is the final
film battling for the Best Picture spot.
Putting
aside Atonement for a moment, the Best Picture
nominees are quintessentially American stories, and all
but Juno can perhaps best be analyzed on a
bleakness scale of 1 to 10.
On the
dystopian end of the spectrum are Joel and Ethan Coen’s
No Country for Old Men, whose random violence is
echoed in the harsh landscape and ill winds that howl
through its desert Texas landscape. Paul Thomas
Anderson’s There Will Be Blood also focuses on
brute, animalistic greed, albeit against the backdrop of
legal capitalism—specifically, early 20th century oil
wildcatting.
And then
there’s Michael Clayton—a throwback to such
anticorporate
Hollywood polemics as Silkwood and Erin Brockovich—starring
George Clooney as a morally defeated corporate fixer who
must bring down the outsized evil he’s spent decades
enabling.
The most
redemptive is Atonement, the World War Il
romantic drama in which a young girl’s accusation leads
to tragic results. But at least there is peace at the
end.
Against
all this tide of despair is the little lifeboat Juno,
about a pregnant teenager, which takes an upsetting
subject and turns it in a wry and ultimately hopeful
look at the American family.
“[Studios] thought it was a dicey thing to do, to have a
comedy dealing with such a serious subject, about a
minor, about a girl who doesn’t regret having sex with
her boyfriend and calls it ‘magnificent,’” said Juno
producer Lianne Halfon.
The
movie’s explosion as a mainstream entertainment
invariably helped its evolution from small indie to
Oscar contender alongside films with more rarefied
pedigrees.
Juno
was made for $7.5 million and has already earned $85
million at the box office, becoming the top-grossing
movie of all time at Fox Searchlight.
For the
last few years, the Oscars have reflected the
globalization of the film business, with
attention-grabbing nominees such as
Babel
and
Pan’s Labyrinth. This year the only nominally
global movie is Atonement, a Hollywood-funded,
all-Brit production. Based on Ian McEwan’s novel, the
movie is this year’s lush, period WWII nominee, the kind
of nod that feels safer, in its way, than the others.
Around
the virtual
Hollywood water cooler (no doubt supplied by
Fiji),
talk will focus on the auterish square-off between the
venerable Coen brothers and the legend-in-waiting
Anderson. But their films are so male-centric and
violent that they’re liable to split the vote—possibly
creating an opening for Juno.
The
film’s nomination alone represented a generational torch
being passed—from Ivan Reitman, director of
Ghostbusters, to his 30-year-old son, Jason, the
now-Oscar-nominated director of Juno. Juno’s
whole team is young: The film’s
stripper-turned-screenwriter, Diablo Cody, is 29, and
its star, Ellen Page, is 20.
Contemplating his film’s out-of-left field success,
Reitman Jr. said, “Right now, there is a lot of really
rough dramatic films that deal with things we don’t know
much about. Most of us haven’t gone to war in Iraq, but
most of us are in a family. Most of us understand about
growing up. We live in a time where 16-year-old girls
grow up too fast and 35-year-old guys don’t grow up at
all. Diablo [Cody] portrayed three generations
perfectly, and there is something to relate to no matter
who you are.”
For the
record, No Country for Old Men and There Will
Be Blood both landed the most nominations, with
eight each.
Producer
Scott Rudin hit the same resonance theme talking about
his No Country that Reitman did talking about
Juno. To Rudin, the film works as a metaphor for
people who feel unsafe in an unsafe world.
“It
deals with what people are feeling right now,” he said.
Michael
Clayton’s
Tom Wilkinson, nominated in the Supporting Actor
category for his role as a high-profile litigator whose
meltdown begins to reveal a complex conspiracy, added,
“Things are rather kind of bleak at the moment, aren’t
they, with that wretched war and downturn in the
economy. I think people aren’t feeling as upbeat as they
might want to. Perhaps they feel their movies should
reflect a sobriety of the times.”
In the
Lead Actor category, Daniel Day-Lewis (There Will Be
Blood) will vie against Clooney (Michael Clayton),
a singing Johnny Depp (Sweeney Todd), a mournful
Tommy Lee Jones (In the Valley of Elah) and a
famously naked Viggo Mortensen, who plays a Russian
gangster in Eastern Promises.
In the
Lead Actress category, Page was nominated alongside
Julie Christie, who played an Alzheimer’s patient in
Away From Her; Marion Cotillard, who inhabited Edith
Piaf in La Vie en Rose; as well as Oscar darlings
Cate Blanchett (Elizabeth: The Golden Age) and
Laura Linney (The Savages).
At the
moment, this year’s Oscar ceremony remains imperiled by
the ongoing Writers Guild of America strike, which
rendered the Golden Globes into a shabby news
conference. While optimism is running high in Hollywood
that the strike will be settled by the February 24
broadcast of the Academy Awards, this year’s nominations
underscore the power of the screenplay.
Unlike
past years, when nominees such as Saving Private Ryan
and The Lord of the Rings seemed powered by
directorial visions, six of 10 nominations for
screenplay belong to writer-directors such as the Coen
brothers, Tamara Jenkins and Ratatouille’s Brad
Bird.
“I think
you’re seeing singular visions. People who have final
cut,” says Michael Clayton writer-director Tony
Gilroy, who was nominated for both hats. “They’re very
personal [films]. In the Directors Guild nominations,
four out of five are writer-directors.”
The crop
of nominees for adapted screenplay runs counter to the
Hollywood adage that good books make bad screenplays.
This year’s movies are based on exquisitely rendered
interpretations from such worthy tomes as McEwan’s
Atonement, Cormac McCarthy’s No Country for Old
Men and former Elle editor Jean-Dominique Bauby’s
memoir The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, which
Bauby blinked out with one eye after he was left
paralyzed.
Furthermore, four women were nominated for screenplay in
one year, a stunning record when one considers that only
a handful of women—including Callie Khouri and Sofia
Coppola—has ever even won the award. While much of
Hollywood has rushed headlong to embrace comic books and
other properties that can be branded and turned into
toys and towels, these nervy women opted for personal
screenplays and are being rewarded by Oscar this year.
The one
who’s garnered the most press has been Juno’s
Cody, both for her edgy humor and her equally edgy past.
Others nominated include Sarah Polley, who translated an
Alice Munro short story for Away From Her;
writer-director Tamara Jenkins, who created a vivid
portrait of siblings coping with their dying father and
their failed dreams in The Savages; and Nancy
Oliver, for her offbeat boy-loves-blowup doll story
Lars and the Real Girl.
Given
the unease bred by months of a writers’ strike, many
nominees declined to give interviews or sounded cautious
when discussing their good news.
At least
Page, in
London promoting Juno, provided some youthful exuberance.
“I’m extremely lucky to be in the film in the first
place. This is just ridiculous icing on some
ridiculously delicious dark chocolate cake.” |
