2014 Annual Oscar Whoo-Whoo Thingy

With the coming spring is a perpetual event over which we all salivate hungrily in anticipation, procuring salty snacks and drinks, hiring babysitters, pump up with predictions and insightful analysis, and after which we go all go our separate ways and discuss for weeks on end, perhaps until June’s arrival, musing on this celebratory bonfire of artists embodying the multifaceted energies of human problems.

But enough about Wrestlemania.

Rather, it’s Philomania that’s runnin’ wild. The 86th Annual Academy Awards ceremony is this Sunday. In line with how wonks try to perfect a science applied to election predictions, Oscar bloggers and prognosticators continue to have a fun time going over the formula for what will win Best Picture, studying the timing of ballots in relation to the unpredictable atomic evolution of buzz, the impact of critical circles, guilds, the Oscars’ drunk kid-brother the Golden Globes, and what happens across the Atlantic with the BAFTAs. Last year was on a suspenseful track as, beginning in September 2012, Argo was hands down favorite with its premiere in Toronto and Telluride, its spot usurped by David O. Russell’s bipolar romantic comedy Silver Linings Playbook, which was itself tossed aside when Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln proved to not be the schmaltz many predicted but rather one of the filmmaker’s most sophisticated and masterfully woven films, and reaching a peak of excitement with Kathryn Bigelow’s unnerving and stark CIA procedural Zero Dark Thirty–which would win 2012′s first Best Picture prize from the New York Film Critics. Then a controversy sparked by cinematic illiteracy torpedoed Bigelow’s chances, people complained that Lincoln was too austere, and Argo, a fine but hardly extraordinary work of plot-driven proficiency steered by Ben Affleck’s affable direction, swept everything–the smaller critics’ groups, the Globes, the guilds, the BAFTAs. And so a good movie would blemish its legacy by somehow besting a half-dozen more deserving pictures by Oscar night’s end. Not that I at all cared (whatever, I was pissed off; I mean how does Argo beat Tony Kushner’s impeccable work in the adapted screenplay category; total bullshit. But I digress).

FOR THE FULL 2014 OSCAR COLUMN GO TO L'ETOILE MAGAZINE

"Gravity" and Alfonso Cuarón's Great Below

“Nothing can doom [humankind] but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of Return.” — Martin Buber

Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock) and Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) in "Gravity"

Alfonso Cuarón makes myths. As a mainstream entertainer, ambitious artist, and passionate activist, his motion pictures are simultaneously fantastic escapes and symbolic mirrors brewing a Borgesian stew of realism, magic, philosophy, and politics, under the masks of myriad genres: children’s film (A Little Princess), romance (Great Expectations), erotic coming-of-age road movie (Y Tu Mamá También), fantasy (Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban),  and noir dystopia (Children of Men). All of these films have a fairy tale flavor within respective realities (or vice versa–his Prisoner of Azkaban, the best of the Harry Potter franchise, rescues the series from the burdensome and overbearing confines of restrictive special effects, the actors finally appearing relaxed so they can act in J.K. Rowling’s fantasy world), and Cuarón desires to have us reflect on the real world that birthed such stories, to open our eyes, ears, and mouth, to see and to honestly communicate rather than passively look on. One of the most important Information Age filmmakers, he understands the present’s technological magic, compressing time and flattening the Earth, and he senses that, with the treasures of inventive progress, we’re becoming increasingly disconnected from contexts (temporal and spatial) and from each other. The Earth seethes with conflict and tragedy, and the filmmaker displays how people cocoon themselves from duress and compassion in money, sex, work, televisions, and now outer space.

His newest film, Gravity, is an astounding 3-D visual feat where Cuarón’s troubled Earth is a beautiful background mural. His fledgling hero, Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), is a novice astronaut who finds herself disconnected and adrift in the inhospitable and silent void of outer space after an unexpected satellite explosion cuts off NASA’s transmission and destroys her mission’s spacecraft. As a bare bones thriller, the picture is a triumph of finely crafted intensity, with Ryan moving from one module of inhospitality to another, the perils of debris, physics, time, and technology working against her. But what lingers long after the visceral excitement fades, and is palpable throughout the levels of daring and contingency, relates to the divide between space’s infinite silence and isolation and what’s happening down there on the crowded Earth, so serene from the stratospheric vantage.The sound that bursts withGravity’s introductory title card, moving to the threshold of what’s sonically possible in a movie theater, anticipates not only the frenzied struggle of survival, but also a desperate longing pulsating beneath the film’s surface spectacle. “In space…there is nothing to carry sound,” we’re reminded by a written prelude, “Life in space is impossible” being the final declaration to offset the hubris of exploratory science.

To read the full column, go here at LETOILEMAGAZINE