2009 Oscar Nomination Predictions

Jeremy BeckOscars

In the words of See-Threepio, here we go again.

The nominations for the eighty-second annual Academy Awards will be released this Tuesday morning (by Anne Hathaway!), meaning Oscar season is officially upon us. As Hubie Brown might ask, what does that mean? Well, in theory, it means that the Manifesto will kick into high gear over the next month and generate detailed, category-specific posts, each laden with cogent analysis, prescient predictions, and my trademark “Oh great, he just made another fucking Harry Potter reference” witticisms. In practice, it’s entirely possible that my brain will short-circuit while trying to balance my blogging responsibilities with my academic duties, and my family will stage an intervention and fit me with an electronic collar that zaps me with 500 volts whenever I even think about the Oscars. We’ll see what happens – it’s really 50-50.

Alright, before I get to my nomination predictions, I feel obliged to address one of the ballsiest decisions the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences has ever made, and no, I’m not talking about selecting Alec Baldwin and Steve Martin to co-host the show (terrific move, by the way). Earlier this year, the Academy announced that it was expanding the Best Picture category from the usual five nominees to a more hospitable 10. In historical terms, this was akin to FDR deciding, “Screw it, just because the first 31 presidents respected the unwritten rule of two term limits doesn’t mean I’m leaving the White House”. For anyone who follows the movie industry, this was, to say the least, a big deal. But the question is, was it a good decision?

The answer: No. But not for the reason you might think. Read More

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The Best Films of the 2000s (Part I)

Jeremy BeckTop 10 Lists

Well, that was grueling.

Alright, in case you missed it, my Best Performances of the 2000s post articulated my attitude toward lists, namely that they’re inherently absurd but also compulsively readable. That list was also incredibly difficult to make, but compared to my next task, it was easier than playing Seeker while high on Felix Felicis. A top 10 list of the best movies of the entire decade? Now that’s intense. In terms of the most nerve-wracking, pressurized, “I feel like Ron Burgundy reading the news without a teleprompter” moments in my life, creating a list of the decade’s 10 best films fell somewhere between “Taking the LSAT” and “Shooting two free throws with my team down two and no time left on the clock”.

And I failed. Miserably.

I’m sorry, I just couldn’t do it. I can’t precisely quantify how many movies I’ve seen over the past 10 years, but I’m guessing the tally is around 800. Do you honestly think I can coherently assemble a compendium representing the best 1.25% of those films? It would be like being tasked with choosing the 10 best baseball players of all-time, or the 10 best Emma Watson moments in film history. You can’t possibly do it without omitting contenders that merit a mention. It would be a moral violation of all things just and true. Read More

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The best performances of the 2000s

Jeremy BeckFeatures

Lists are idiotic. I love them.

O.K., so I know that’s one of those glib contradictions that invariably results in eye-rolling, but it really does represent my paradoxical attitude toward lists, at least when it comes to ranking works of art. In a sense, lists are an extension of star ratings because they provide a hard-and-fast method of numerical comparison; movie #7 is ranked higher than movie #8, so therefore, movie #7 is better by definition. And this notion, taken in its purest form, is simply farcical. The reason I’m so staunchly opposed to grading movies with star ratings (for the record, I hereby solemnly vow that you will never see a star rating at the Manifesto) is that I firmly believe that the notion of assigning a quantitative value to a work of art is profoundly stupid. I recognize that one of the primary functions of a critic is distillation – we’re supposed to condense our thoughts on a two-hour movie into a reasonably short, readable piece that concisely and clearly represents our overall opinion – but there’s a line between summing things up in a handful of paragraphs and just picking a number that mystically functions as a conclusive evaluation. Adherents of the mechanism will stress that star ratings supplement the text of their review instead of merely substituting for lucid writing, but how many readers, when given the option, choose to skip the words and glance at the number? It’s the easy way out.
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The king of the world shows us a magnificent new one in Avatar

Jeremy BeckReviews

Perhaps the most breathtaking moment in James Cameron’s Avatar – a movie that takes the breath from its awestruck audience with startling regularity – occurs roughly 45 minutes into the film. It introduces us to Neytiri, a blue-skinned warrior with amber-gold eyes and a supple 12-foot frame. Perched gracefully on a tree branch, Neytiri has spotted an intruder (who happens to be Jake Sully, our story’s hero), and she moves silently to eliminate the threat. Pulling her bowstring taut, she is poised to strike when, suddenly, something catches her eye: a wispy, jellyfish-like organism, floating delicately in midair. The ethereal life form drifts toward Neytiri, eventually settling on the tip of her arrowhead. Neytiri, for reasons unknown to us at the time, takes this as an admonition of her combative instinct; she lowers her bow, and Jake Sully is allowed to live a little longer.

This is a beautiful scene. It takes place in complete silence (with the exception of James Horner’s soft, reverent score), yet it constitutes a moment of both exquisite suspense (what will happen?) and slack-jawed wonder (just what are these creatures?), plus it effectively advances the movie’s story. But the scene is particularly noteworthy because it is possible – indeed probable – that none of what we see was ever actually filmed, instead constructed within the confines of a computer. (I use the word “confines” loosely, as Avatar suggests that any alleged boundaries of computer-assisted filmmaking may in fact be illusory.) Yet watching the scene unfold, I never for a moment questioned the authenticity of Neytiri, the tree branch, or the wispy creature. I was simply transfixed on what was happening, wondering who this Amazonian was and why she suddenly refused to kill.
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A moping moon, but some light still shines through

Jeremy BeckReviews

“It was pretty terrible. I really enjoyed it.”

 
That was me, one year ago, on the phone with my father, giving him my brief and not entirely rational assessment of a little movie called Twilight, which has now become America’s latest mega-franchise – the second installment, New Moon, raked in a cool $142.8 million this past weekend, good for third all-time behind The Dark Knight and Spider-Man 3. And while I’m impressed (and more than a tad awed) at the remarkable commercial success of the Twilight films, I have to admit that I’m a little confused as well.
 
Mainstream movie nut that I am, I’m generally a sucker for the studio-manufactured charms of a big-budget, multi-volume, special-effects-laden blockbuster franchise, but I can’t confess to being a devotee of the Twilight saga. Maybe that’s because it isn’t marketed to my demographic (I am not, in fact, a lovesick teenage girl, despite my occasional indulgence in emotionally devastating female-empowerment pop music). More likely it’s that I haven’t read Stephenie Meyer’s books (partly because I hardly read anything these days, partly because even Meyer’s ardent fans seem to concede that the novels are poorly written). But most of all it’s that, in all honesty, I don’t think the Twilight movies are very good.
 
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