Mark Radcliffe hopes the Academy learns from past mistakes and takes a risk… for once.
The Oscars are tonight.
And I’m praying they don’t break my heart again.
While I love the event in principle, they rarely pick the movie I (and others) feel should win best picture. There’s a curious tendency from the Academy to play it safe rather than bet on the brave loner, which, ironically, is the opposite of Hollywood, and the very making of art itself should be based on.
In 2005, rather than picking Brokeback Mountain, they picked Crash. Is anyone talking about Crash these days? But Brokeback Mountain has become a permanent part of the American cultural dialogue.
And while 1994’s Oscar-wining Forrest Gump was a good film, it has not nearly stood the test of time as well as the then-jilted Shawshank Redemption, one of my favorite films and currently the highest rated film of all time on Yahoo Movies.
Then there’s the fact that Star Wars, Apocalypse Now and Citizen Kane all lost the Best Picture nom, too.
And the word on the street this year is that The Artist will take home the big prize.
Now, while I really enjoyed this film, I think that would be yet another example of Oscar playing it safe—and frankly, patting itself on the back a little too much; after all, it’s a movie about two actors, and glorifies the legacy of Hollywood.
To me, giving the Best pic win to The Artist is roughly akin to giving it to Shakespeare in Love instead of Saving Private Ryan. (You tell me which one of those two films has better stood the test of time.)
So what’s the equivalent of Saving Private Ryan for me this year?
If it doesn’t win Best Picture tonight, they’ll have missed it again. Because I think that movie will have a larger place in people’s hearts over the long run.
And I think they actually might pick it, but just in case, I want to register my protest now.
The Help has all the proper ingredients—great writing, miraculous directing, politically correct stance on the civil rights issue, dramatic story lines, great performances (Viola Davis, Octavia Spencer, Bryce Dallas Howard, Emma Stone) and redemption for the downtrodden. It’s an important story. I don’t think you can say that about The Artist, though it’s certainly a crowd-please. But maybe they’ll side with the strong but less charged The Descendents (who can resist George Clooney’s gravitational pull?). Hugo has a lot going for it and some thing it will pull a big upset—that I would actually support. I can see a strong case being made for the artful The Tree of Life, but how can we vote for a movie whose dialog was mostly unintelligible? Who knows, maybe they’ll even succumb go 9/11 sympathy and give it to Extremely Loud (but I don’t think so). If so, it would be a sympathy vote—not because it was the best film.
Because while those films are strong, and have multiple merits, The Help is the one that truly stands for something:
The notion that just because a certain trend is generally embraced by society (oppressing blacks, not letting the people you trust to raise your children use the same toilet as you) doesn’t mean it’s not wrong. And we should shine the light on injustice.
Yes, I realize a film condemning racism isn’t exactly new territory. But it’s the particular execution of that perhaps tired angle that is so impressive here. I think this is the film we’ll still be talking about down the road. Which is the one thing Oscar sometimes forgets to keep in mind when handing out the big prize.
There’s a line Emma Stone’s character “Skeeter” says to an editor she’s trying to impress that sums up not only the whole point of the movie, but perhaps the whole point of art: “You said to write about what disturbs me, particularly if it bothers no one else…”
And that’s what all great art should be trying to do: put the spotlight on what others are missing. Illuminate the truth for more to see.
If we don’t salute a film that is based on that idea, we’re missing the whole point of not only movies, but story-telling in general.
About Mark Radcliffe
The Help was feel good self-congratulatory BS. It was callous and dumb. It’s a shame it got the nom.
Mark what do you make of the pretty widespread condemnation of The Help among African American studies professors and intellectuals as being almost racist in the way it uses some but not all dialect and portrays the african american women of that era in the deep south?
Following Tom’s question, I’d have to say that I found “The Help” quite problematic in that is seemed to suggest that progress for African-Americans was brought about by white people. A bit much on the white-man’s-burden side for me.
I think the criticism makes some valid points for the sake of discussion, but simply shows a flawed approach to evaluating a movie. The criticism seems to be that it didn’t depict the real lives and suffering of black women accurately enough. To address Melissa Harris Perry’s comments, the fact that it doesn’t show “the rape and lynching of real women” doesn’t mean it’s saying those things never happened. This is not a documentary. It never claimed, “This movie will represent 100% of the actual and horrifying historical experiences of all black women during the 60′s.” It’s a film, wherein the author/ director exercised their artistic prerogative to use editorial discretion to select where to direct the lens to create a story to reveal that achieves emotional effect. It can’t tell every single real moment of all black women in the 60′s, or the full effect of the murder of Medgar Evers. it only has two hours. This is also a story about the coming of age of a white woman who grew infuriated by the hypocrisy around her. The criticism almost implies that the creators don’t have a right to tell that story. You could make an argument that that isn’t as important a story to tell as the deeper suffering of other black women not represented here. And perhaps those movies should be made, too. But that’s their right as filmmakers—to tell what stories they feel are interesting.
Yes, there could have been a movie strictly showing the most atrocious actions of that time. Here they chose to focus the lens on stories relating to the rich white families who arrogantly thought they were being “nice” to The Help, and failed to realize how unjust their actions truly were. This movie shines a light on white hypocrisy.
Another argument she makes is, “Black women never needed anyone to speak for them.” My reply is, “In this movie, they did speak for themselves. It was their words and stories that drew the impact. But due to the social inequities in place at the time, it took a white woman to give them a microphone.”
I would also say that complaining that the accents are inaccurate is missing the forrest for the trees (and more of a criticism of the actors’ performances, perhaps). The more important thing is that the movie rendered these women with extreme humanity and dignity. It portrayed them as having three times the moral vision of their owners. The essence of the movie was that it showed injustice, and the importance of speaking out against it.
My wife read the book, she and I saw the movie.
I was disappointed in a director’s mistake. Here we are in MS in summer and nobody’s hot. No theatrical gasping, no damp armpits, no fruitless hand-waving at the face. You want to pull the audience in and in this case, the director missed an opportunity to pull us to his side of the screen. Makes the rest of the movie less gripping, since it’s just a play.
The issue of accent is nuts. The folks complaining about that are annoyed somebody trespassed on their turf, and they don’t have a bestseller between them. Not to be stood.
I wondered if you could realistically assemble such a collection of airhead bitches. My wife said that, in the book, the ringleader Hilly (iirc) was vile and manipulative, influencing less rotten people to her side. The process was probably shorthanded out for economy’s sake, but not explaining how this coven came to be was an error.
Whether the employers of black maids treated them unjustly but didn’t care, or didn’t see injustice, is a question. Clearly, the wage scale took advantage of the place of blacks in the South of the time, so that could be considered unjust. When you have an employer-employee relationship, nobody is required to love one another, even if it’s one way. If they hate one another, the er-ee relationship won’t last long, anyway. As regards wages, anybody who pays an undocumented worker below minimum wage, or below a good wage, for, say, yardwork is doing the same thing. But working for lousy wages is better than not working.
No reason to think a woman wouldn’t love a kid, even if mom’s a bitch, and perhaps even more so.
As to whether most of the folks thought the maids were reasonably happy, that’s a complicated question.
Decades ago, Stanley Elkin wrote “Slavery, A Problem….” in which he posited the “sambo personality”, suggesting that between infantilization, a version of the Stockholm Syndrome (which came after his book), and a desire to get along with the least amount of trouble, blacks in slavery developed what he called the “sambo” personality. Due to this, slave owners and non-slave owning apologists were led to believe slaves were reasonably content. Or at least make the argument.
IMO, as Elkins said, the words of the abolitionists were hitting home. American slavery was the first in history in which the slaveowners felt it necessary to excuse it. Prior to that, it was, “tough luck, buddy, better you than me”. Elkins doesn’t take this far enough. To protect themselves from the moral reproach of abolition, slave owners had to convince themselves that slaves were reasonably content. Otherwise, they were vile people.
That the movie didn’t touch on all the atrocious behaviors of post-Civil War south is lame. To Kill a Mockingbird didn’t, either, and escaped blame. Parenthetically, in the same year, 1960, Woody Strode starred in a movie with the same theme, except the good guys won. Lyrical, moving review of “Sergeant Rutledge” on Amazon.
My primary objection is that the maid who stuck with the not-quite-in-group family took on the mammy role, with earth-mother advice. Seen that too many times. And, as the woman’s husband said, “you’re helping her”, or words to that effect. I couldn’t see how the advice thing was helping, since the primary problem was a series of near-fatal miscarriages.
So I figured the director and writers had taken too many shortcuts to make a movie that didn’t, from time to time, reach out from the screen and say–IT’S A MOVIE.
I spent the summers of 67 and 68 up the road from Ole Miss at Rust College (HBCU) pre-mediating kids who would start their freshmen year that fall. We visited Ole Miss several times. Once, in the library, we were going to see the Faulkner room which included translations of his books into no less than twenty-seven languages. O frabjous day. Anyway, the library’s first floor was like an atrium. One of the women staff went to the restroom there. We didn’t leave anybody alone, so I waited outside the restroom area. There I was, short hair, wheat jeans, madras shirt, looking pretty local. A middle-aged woman came up to me, pointed to the last of the group of students and staff going up the stairs to the Faulkner room. How many of them are there, she said, with expressions of scorn and contempt. Just then my colleague came out of the rest room. I said to the nice lady, “Forty-nine students and seventeen instructors. Come on, Judy.” Judy hadn’t seen the prologue and didn’t know why I was convulsing. Not the first time I’ve been misunderstood.
But the woman’s attitude…the director got that right.