Obligatory Oscars Dream Roundup 2011

So the 83rd Academy Awards – the only awards show that still kind of matters! – is tomorrow night.  Sadly, I will be unable to watch unless I stumble across a television.  But that won’t stop me from making a list of the nominees I’d like to see win.  I don’t care about who actually has the best chance of going home with the Oscar.  These are simply who I’d vote for if I were a member of the Academy.

BEST PICTURE
Seen ‘em all
In terms of sheer enjoyment, my favorites were True Grit, Black Swan and Toy Story 3.  But The Social Network strikes the ideal balance for a Best Picture winner: it speaks to the times it was released, but I could also see people studying it in film school 30 years from now.  Besides, I’m not going to hand it an award in another category anyway.

BEST ACTOR
Not seen: Biutiful
Truly, 2010 was the year of THE FRANCO.  He was great in 127 Hours, great in Howl, great (I assume) in General Hospital and great at playing “James Franco” in “real life” (or is it???). I can’t hate on any of the nominees in this category, though. Biutiful looks kind of terrible, but I could buy that Javier Bardem brought the goods.  I’m sort of getting Mickey-Rourke-in-The–Wrestler vibes for Colin Firth, by which I mean he’s a talented actor who’s unlikely to get another fighting chance at a Best Actor win, at least until he ages into an elder statesman.  And it would be kind of cool if Jesse Eisenberg won – but still not as cool as FRANCO.

BEST ACTRESS
Not seen: Blue Valentine, Rabbit Hole
Consensus pick! I never had any particular affection for Natalie Portman, but she somehow manages to go balls-to-the-wall cuh-RAZY while still being vulnerable enough to invoke sympathy.  Kudos to Darren Aronofsky for following The Wrestler with another brilliant stroke of meta casting.  PS: Did Rabbit Hole ever actually come out?

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR:
Seen ‘em all
This is a toughie.  I guess Jeremy Renner’s just getting automatic nominations now post-The Hurt Locker.  I like him fine, but his work in The Town wasn’t his best.  John Hawkes was an interesting baddie in Winter’s Bone, but his performance wasn’t as memorable as Jennifer Lawrence’s.  I’d be happy with any of the other three, but I have to give special props to Christian Bale for actually being less over-the-top than the real Dicky Eklund.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Seen ‘em all
In contrast, this category is pretty humdrum.  Melissa Leo and Jacki Weaver are basically playing variations on the same Supporting-Actress-Oscar-Bait-role-for-women-of-a-certain-age (Leo the comic version, Weaver the creepy version).  Helena Bonham Carter’s barely a blip in The King’s Speech.  Amy Adams got nominated because her character swears and wears low-cut blouses, which is completely not what her persona is in real life! So we’re left with Hailee Steinfeld, who shouldn’t even be winning the Best Supporting Actress Oscar.  She should be busy winning the Best Actress Oscar instead.

BEST DIRECTOR
Seen ‘em all
David O. Russell and Tom Hooper made pretty conventional directorial decisions, which is especially shocking because Russell fashions himself an auteur (though I only really liked Three Kings; admittedly I still haven’t seen his first two).  The Coens are my favorite working directors, so I’m kind of always rooting for them, but I’ll save up my wishing dust for another day.  I’ll instead give Darren Aronofsky a slight nudge over David Fincher, mainly because I already picked The Social Network over Black Swan for Best Picture.

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Not seen: Another Year
Inception, of course.  Haters gonna whine that it was all exposition.  But if the exposition is entertaining, then what’s the problem?

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Seen ‘em all
Here I’ll give it to the Coens, for somehow improving on a film that was already great.

BEST ANIMATED SHORT FILM
Seen ‘em all
If you saw Toy Story 3 in theaters, then you remember Day and Night.  Even after watching all of the nominees, it stood out as the most visually inventive and had a satisfying story arc.  Second place goes to Madagascar, a Journey Diary for its beautiful and clever use of mixed media.  Special bonus points to Bill Plympton’s short-listed (but not nominated) The Cow Who Wanted to Be a Hamburger, which was unfortunately shut out in favor of the one-note Let’s Pollute and the overlong The Gruffalo.

BEST LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM
Seen ‘em all
God of Love, God of Love, God of Love. God of Love? God of Love! Not only was the short itself totally charming and funny, but it was the only one that made me excited to see a feature by the director.  Sadly, I doubt it’ll win, precisely because it is charming and funny.  It’s also the only nominee that’s not about Bad Things Involving Children.

BEST DOCUMENTARY SHORT FILM
Seen ‘em all
This was the strongest of the short film categories, but the two that stood out the most were Killing in the Name, in which a Jordanian Muslim whose wedding was bombed confronts the extremist group responsible, and Poster Girl, about a female Army sergeant who was trouble adjusting to life after Iraq.  I just slightly connected with Poster Girl more, but both are worthy contenders.  This category is also one of the few where I suspect my favorites will be the Academy’s as well.

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
Not seen: GasLand, Inside Job, Waste Land
This may be the most frustrating category because of all the films that aren’t nominated.  Then again, maybe the three I haven’t seen are works of genius: Inside Job and Waste Land aren’t out on DVD yet, and GasLand has been a “Very Long Wait” since I pushed it to the top of my Netflix queue.  I’m split on the two I have seen.  Restrepo contains some astonishing, invaluable footage that in itself probably deserves the Oscar, but it could have used a real filmmaker to give it shape. Exit Through the Gift Shop, on the other hand, is highly entertaining.  It sure would be fun for it to win, especially since Banksy is bound to have some delightful prank cooked up – but it also feels kind of unfair to have it compete in the documentary category.  And really, Amir Bar-Lev’s 2007 doc My Kid Could Paint That is a more incisive examination of the modern art scene. (Bar-Lev also directed The Tillman Story, the film that should have won this category.)

BEST FOREIGN LANGUAGE FEATURE
Not seen: Biutiful, In a Better World, Incendies, Outside the Law
OK, so the only nominee I’ve actually seen is Dogtooth.  And if the Academy gives the award to Dogtooth, then it would mean everything I thought I knew about the Oscars is wrong, and also I’m trapped in the wrong Fringe universe with Faux-livia.  The Academy will either give it to Biutiful (name recognition) or one of the three unknown picks (whichever is the most heartwarming).  But a morbidly dark comedy with a disturbing premise and several cringe-inducing scenes? Even if it is brilliant? Whatever’s Greek for “not a chance.”

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Not seen: How to Train Your Dragon, The Illusionist
Again, I’ve only seen Toy Story 3, but I have a hard time believing the other two could possibly be better.  It’s a wise rule to never bet against Pixar, and Toy Story 3 is in my (probably unpopular) opinion the studio’s best movie since Toy Story 2.

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Destroyed by Madness: James Franco in “Howl”

In every interview I’ve seen of Allen Ginsberg – and if you’re interested in documentaries on 20^th Century literature and/or Bob Dylan, you’ve seen a lot – there’s always a level of performance, a sense that Ginsberg’s playing himself.  Some of the tics and mannerisms that arose from his innate nebbishness are amplified into a sort of performance art.  There’s some sense that Ginsberg was reclaiming these odd vocal cadences, unusual word emphases, and random interjections of “mmmhmmm” from the target of mocking into a sort of trademark. 

Appropriately, Ginsberg is portrayed in the new film Howl by James Franco, whose recent career has been devoted to playing the role of “James Franco.”  From his forays into modern art, to spending a year as “Franco” on the soap opera General Hospital, to racking up an absurd amount of graduate literature degrees, Franco shows himself eager to wrap his Hollywood persona in air-quotes.  Even at the pre-premiere screening of Howl that I attended in September, Franco seemed to be playing an exaggerated version of the Hollywood-star-slash-artistic-genius: arriving late, shifting in his seat, never quite giving a straight answer but still charming the audience all the while.  As with Ginsberg, it’s difficult to discern the line between the “real” Franco and the “stage” Franco, or whether there is even a line at all.

It’s no surprise that a role that allows Franco to explore his fascination with self-awareness ends up not only becoming the best performance of his career, but also the best thing about the movie.  Like Philip Seymour Hoffman in Capote, Franco transcends physical dissimilarities (in this case, being far better looking than the real Ginsberg) to create an emotionally authentic portrait.  Even in well-done biopics, the conscious mind can still easily separate the actor from the real-life figure.  Howl, on the other hand, seems to center around a strange Franco-Ginsberg hybrid.  Obviously, it’s not the actual Allen Ginsberg, who died over a decade ago, but it doesn’t quite seem to be James Franco, movie star, either. Franco has Ginsberg’s speech patterns down pat, but this isn’t Ray-style mimicry.  It’s the sort of performance that comes from understanding the fluidity of identity – how easy it is to become someone else, even if that someone else is yourself.

The film itself is a collage of four different vignettes: Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl in 1955, shot in black and white; a blue-tinted interview with Ginsberg that takes place two years later; the 1957 obscenity trial of Howl & Other Poems publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and an animated sequence illustrating the poem itself.  Howl is directed by documentary directors Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman, whose past films include The Celluloid Closet and The Times of Harvey Milk.  The resulting film, albeit fictional, leans hard on the conventions of the documentary.  Real photographs are intermixed with the actors’ recreations of familiar images. Characters are introduced with subtitles listing their names and occupations.   Verbatim excerpts from the Ferlinghetti trial and interviews with Ginsberg form the basis of the script.  It’s as if Epstein and Friedman wanted to make a documentary, but lacking actual courtroom footage, reconstructed their own.  The result is a bit distracting.  The subtitle may read, “Jake Erlich, defense attorney,” but your brain protests that it’s “Jon Hamm, mad man.”

Of the four segments, the strongest are the ones that focus on Franco as Ginsberg.  Maybe the best is the 1957 interview, which also happens to be the most fictionalized.  (The Life magazine interview it was based on was never published and has since been lost.)  There, Franco/Ginsberg addresses an unseen interviewer and talks about the creation of the poem and interprets some of the symbolism.  These segments also include flashbacks to the events in Ginsberg’s life that inspired Howl, from his time in a mental institution to befriending Jack Kerouac and Neal Cassady.  Franco/Ginsberg’s 1955 reading of Howl, while also strong, falters a bit by cutting to the reactions of the cheering beatniks in attendance.  While the motive may have been to show the poem’s instant status as definition of a subculture, it instead reminded me of why Jonathan Demme was a genius not to show the audience in Stop Making Sense.

The courtroom scenes, where Franco/Ginsberg is absent, come the closest to standard biopic fare.  Despite a number of welcome actors, the scenes are undercut by a somewhat simplistic take on the proceedings.  The opponents to Howl are treated as one-dimensional figures not hip enough to get the poem.  Grace Potter (Mary-Louise Parker) smirks in disgust at the poem’s content; ADA Ralph McIntosh (David Strathairn) homes in on the most lurid phrases; Professor David Kirk (Jeff Daniels) talks in circles about the poem’s lack of literary merit.  A film that would have given serious weight to both sides of the obscenity issue would have been more compelling.  Judge Clayton Horn (Bob Balaban) was conservative and deeply religious, yet he recognized Howl’s worth and ruled in its favor.  I wish the filmmakers would have trusted the audience to do likewise.

However, the biggest misstep is the animation.  At the screening I attended, Epstein and Friedman discussed how they wanted the film to be a “poemopic”: that is, focused on Howl rather than Ginsberg.  In assembling the film, they decided on using animation based on Eric Drooker’s Illustrated Poems collaboration with Ginsberg to illuminate the poem’s content.  In theory, this is not a bad idea.  But once the first animated sequence began, I had to suppress a grimace.  When I discovered Howl at age 14 on the shelf of my public library, what intrigued me was its earthiness: the dark, gritty descriptions wrapped in syncopated meters; the beauty that arose from simple, ugly words.  This was a poem told in black and white and endless grays, of people slouching toward nonexistence.  The animation in Howl, however, is dynamic, ethereal – these are not minds destroyed by madness, but liberated by it.  Howl the poem becomes a celebration rather than a lamentation. It’s most useful in the “Moloch” segment, where it’s unafraid to make some metaphorical leaps. Otherwise, it verges on the redundant, simply showing a literal interpretation of Ginsberg’s words.

While I have a number of criticisms Howl the film, though, I still recommend it.  The subject matter is certainly worthwhile.  The editing weaves through the fractured chronology with sense and electricity.  While the pseudodocumentary style isn’t entirely successful, it’s nevertheless a noble attempt at creating a different type of docudrama.  And above all, there’s James Franco’s disappearing act, the year’s best performance that won’t be nominated for an Oscar.  Howl as a film does little to illuminate its namesake poem.  But Franco’s performance is the closest thing to revealing the artist, trickster, yearner behind the Allen Ginsberg mask.

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