Best Picture 2004

This year's choices feel like a very typical Academy group. Big budget movies, biopics, an indie/little seen movie. It hits all the notes of what the Academy seems to like as I go back in time. I'm so glad they expanded to anywhere from 5-10 nominees. There were some good films left out of the final 5 here. It would be interesting to figure out what other films could have made it in. Perhaps for another blog!

2004 Best Picture

Million Dollar Baby

So let's be real for a minute. This was the toughest movie for me to initially watch in a while because I'm not a big Clint Eastwood fan and boxing has never interested me. So it took me forever to watch this movie and when I finally did I actually liked it! For the first hour and a half, that is. It started off as a crowd pleasing sports movie about a woman following her dream and having success at it. It had me going and I was thinking ok, this isn't bad at all. Then the movie does a complete bait and switch and takes a left turn out of nowhere. If you've seen the movie, you know what I'm talking about. That's when I officially decided to hate this movie because it already had a lot going for it and the heel turn just felt completely unnecessary and done purely to manipulate the audience into thinking the movie was way more important than it actually was. What really frustrated me was that the last 45-30 minutes just crammed all kinds of extra shit into the story as if Paul Haggis, the writer, wasn't sure which of the points would stick. Now all of the sudden there is family issues for Maggie, a right to die/assisted suicide plot, and some unsettling (brief) sexual tension between Maggie and Frankie that all feels tacked on and rushed. It's bizarre to me and just reeks of an urge to make the movie have some kind of moralistic quality, that it had to be about something Very Important and controversial. I just don't get why it was added to what was becoming a pretty nice feel good sports movie. Eastwood does a fine enough job with the directing but I felt he put too much trust into Haggis' screenplay. Obviously that paid off with a Best Picture win but the whole thing feels extremely cheap to me. The performances were good and the story was interesting up until the turn. I just wish the movie would have continued down that path because I was intrigued about where it was heading.

The Aviator

The main thing that The Aviator suffers from is a story that doesn't do Howard Hughes much justice. Mr. Hughes is a very interesting person and that's evident in this film but unfortunately his life's story is not fully fleshed out. Instead, what we get is a sort of greatest hits of Hughes' life: making Hell's Angels, dating starlets, building and flying great aircraft and a battle with a Senator. Just writing all that out makes it plainly obvious that there is a lot going on in this film. It's fun to see Hepburn and Gardner and the like on the big screen again but the lack of real character development, or at least exploration, is too noticeable. We know Hughes was an eccentric man but we don't really get to see how he becomes that way. The script seems too in love with showing the spectacle of Hughes' life and of the early Hollywood time that it really loses focus on Hughes the man. We are shown some OCD moments here and there and they get increasingly absurd but the motivation behind it is mostly lost. In the beginning we see his mother bathing him and talking about pestilence or being unclean or whatever but that is about as in depth as it gets. The story moves from one event in Hughes' life to the next without really stopping to examine how these moments affect Hughes. Things that seem like they would be huge moments in anyone's life like surviving a plane crash or suffering heartbreak are given short shrift. We as the audience are left to wonder about these moments and long for the film to slow down and dive in instead of plowing ahead to the next event. I did enjoy the scenes where Hughes is holed up in his theater room in his mansion, however. It has a very surreal feeling that perfectly captures the deterioration of Hughes' mental state. You could call it heavy handed but I felt it really fit well within the scope of the film. It's the best part of the film for me and hints that there was something more interesting in the story. In the end, there is just too much going on without really saying all that much about Mr. Hughes. The Aviator is more a Hollywood spectacle than a true biopic. There's a difference between being the work of a genius and being a genius work, this is the former.

Finding Neverland

This obviously got in because of the Weinstein's; those fat, ugly fucks. That hate aside, this is a delightful little movie. It's just not really a Best Picture Oscar movie. It just is really light. I can't stress that enough. Honestly, I'm not too terribly interested in Barrie's relationship with the mother of the 4 boys. I'm really engrossed in how Peter Pan came into being. We get a bunch of looks into the imaginative world of Barrie that sets the stage for Peter Pan. That's what we want to see as the audience but instead the relationship always seems to get in the way. I do really enjoy the film as a whole. It's one of those feel good movies. I do love Depp's accent. It seems real enough. It's just that the whole movie is a very light affair. It moves with Depp, who really gives the movie life. So as I said before, we get some imaginative looks into the mind of Barrie and how he dreams up his plays. Those scenes are quite good because they are so unique and break up what could be a pedestrian biopic. This is a lightly dramatic film that speaks to the child in all of us without talking down to us. In a 5-10 film field, I'd be happy for this to get in but there's just a couple other films that are better and more deserving. Not a bad film, just not an Oscar film.

Ray

When it comes to musical biopics like this, Walk Hard has forever made them a lot harder to take serious since it lampooned many of the tropes found in films like Ray. It's kind of unfair but the film hits all the familiar notes of films like this so we know what's coming before it comes. That familiarity is a burden. Some films can handle it, some can't. Ray is able to handle it on the strength of Jamie Foxx's Oscar winning performance and the fact that the film focuses on Ray and his story instead of being a glorified concert like some other biopics. That's the misstep of a lot of these types of films, moving from famous song to famous song and only briefly diving into what makes those songs and the person performing them. Ray at least get it mostly right, zeroing in on the personal ups and downs and allowing us to feel alongside Foxx. That's what I look for in these biopics. I don't much care for the music (I do enjoy Ray's songs, though), that's just a backdrop or a theme running through the story. I'm more interested in the relationships and drug use and all that stuff. That's why I like Ray for the most part. It runs a bit too long and needs to be trimmed but the story is what is compelling. There's some stylistic choices that are slightly annoying or feel needless. The flashbacks overstay their welcome but I do like the album flyby things, not sure how else to describe them. Ray is a good musical biopic. But the main draw is watching Jamie Foxx just absolutely kill it as Ray Charles. It's a hell of a performance and definitely one of the best I've seen since I've started my little Oscar project.

Sideways

I've dreaded this movie for a number of reasons first of which is the middle aged men go on a wine road trip thing. That's all I ever knew about this one before I watched it and honestly the conceit did nothing to interest me. However, since this movie came out, Director Alexander Payne was nominated for BP for The Descendants and Nebraska. He's definitely grown as a director so that piqued my interest a bit even if I find both of those movies as only slightly above average. Payne certainly has a style that's best described as comedy for grown ups. That style is at its most pretentious here, unfortunately. He found a less grating style as he matured for his next two films but this one can easily annoy. Second reason I dreaded this movie is because I hate Paul Giamatti and Thomas Haden Church to a lesser extent. I don't know what it is about Giamatti but he plays characters I detest and his face and voice certainly don't do him any favors. But in Sideways he is actually one of the best things about the entire movie. I don't know why he wasn't nominated for Best Actor because he actually got me to not hate him in this which means he did a great job in his role. The movie itself was funny at points and engaging to the point that my dread was unfounded. The wine for life metaphors were heavy handed, though, and laid on a bit too thick as if the viewer wasn't smart enough to make the connections without being expressly told them. Yes the movie was about a trip to wine country but not everything needed to be equated to some kind of wine or way of drinking it to get the message across. The movie is about two male friends who decided to spend a week in wine country before the one gets married with the goal of Giamatti teaching Church about wine and Church banging and drinking as much as he can before he gets married. There are times when the story is sensitive and poignant but it never capitalizes on those moments. The women disappear two thirds of the way through even though Giamatti and Madsen were the most interesting parts. It blows my mind that this was the best reviewed film of 2004 and that it had so much love from everyone. It's an interesting movie but it seems like maybe the critics were starved for an adult comedy and jumped all over this. I hated that the movie itself looked washed out or that they used too much soft focus. It really dated the look of the movie and if I watched it without knowing the year, I would have said mid to late 90s. Sideways delivered an interesting take on friendship and relationships but got caught up in the hype of Hollywood - it's a decent movie that's just not good enough to be great.


So this was the year before I started really paying attention to the Oscars. For me, I'd had heard of some of the movies, had actually seen a couple of the movies, but never really cared about the process or really anything detailing the nominees. At that time, I was big into hardcore music, some emo stuff, indie stuff, just music in general. That transitioned over to film and I'm glad it did because I get so much more enjoyment out of it. This is actually a tough year to call for me. Nothing really wows me. I guess my vote would be for Ray but it's a tepid vote. I like The Aviator second probably followed by Finding Neverland, then Sideways, then Million Dollar Baby because of that stupid ending. I know that's in direct opposite regard for most people but I feel those that disagree are crazy. I'd have voted for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind easily if it were in the running.

Oscar Winner: Million Dollar Baby
My Winner:   Ray
The Aviator
Finding Neverland
Sideways
Million Dollar Baby