Oscar Nominees 2015: Part 6 of 12

Part 1. Part 2. Part 3. Part 4. Part 5.
Part 6 of 12:

Nightcrawler

1 Nomination

• Original Screenplay: Dan Gilroy

Director: Gilroy

Cast: Jake Gyllenhaal, Riz Ahmed, Rene Russo, Michael Hyatt, Price Carson, Bill Paxton, Sharon Tay, Pat Harvey

Smart, vicious satire, a Network for 2015, although this film is not intended to be funny – it feels all too real, not distant and absurd the way that Paddy Chayefsky and Sidney Lumet's film did in 1976. Gyllenhaal is great in this, and he was close to getting a Best Actor nomination, but it was a very crowded category this year, and the Academy didn't nominate David Oyelowo for Selma, so Gyllenhaal's chances always seemed slim to me. Nightcrawler is too small a picture for the Academy, it seems to me, although it is a very "Los Angeles" film, and I'm sure that gained it some points with viewers. Better yet, the acting is stellar. Gyllenhaal and Riz Ahmed are just excellent. This Oscar nomination for writer-director Gilroy means that lots more people are going to see his movie, and that is good news for everyone. It's a picture that deserves the notice it's getting. It's creepy and disturbing and seat-of-your-pants tense.

Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #32 out of 80

The Judge

1 Nomination

• Supporting Actor: Robert Duvall (A Civil Action, The Apostle, Tender Mercies, The Great Santini, Apocalypse Now, The Godfather)

Director: David Dobkin

Cast: Robert Downey Jr., Duvall, Vincent D'Onofrio, Jeremy Strong, Vera Farmiga, Billy Bob Thornton, Dax Shepard, Emma Tremblay, Leighton Meester, David Krumholtz, Lonnie Farmer

I'm going to state here and now that The Judge is the worst movie of the year. This movie thinks its audience is so stupid. I found this unbearable. It's stupid sequence after stupid sequence. We're supposed to love this judge who (as far as I can tell) is an actual murderer, a terrible father, and an awful person. Worse yet, we're supposed to believe that this adorable town that is functioning as a movie set here is actually a small town in Indiana. Every bit of it looks like New England, except for the CGI cornfields, of course. I can't even remember why I hated this as much as I did. But I will try: for some reason a hotshot lawyer who hates his father feels guilted into taking care of this father of his (who literally never stops being an asshole). I am not sure why Hollywood feels intent on trying to convince us that it would be really awesome to live in a small town in the midwest, but I see this all the time in the movies and can't understand it. In The Judge, they want to convince me that the midwest is so great that they've shot the whole thing in New England. Anyway, whatever. Hardened, crusty, curmudgeon of a father finally tells his kid he's proud of him after years of being a total asshole. Wow. Zzzz. And the son is supposed to have learned... what? I'm not sure. I couldn't have cared less. Every bit of this movie is preposterous.
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #80 out of 80

Maleficent

1 Nomination

• Costume Design: Jane Clive & Anna B. Sheppard (The Pianist, Schindler's List)

Director: Robert Stromberg

Cast: Angelina Jolie, Elle Fanning, Sam Riley, Sharlto Copley, Imelda Staunton, Lesley Manville, Juno Temple, Brenton Thwaites, Isobelle Molloy, Michael Higgins, Ella Purnell, Jackson Bews

This wasn't terrible or anything, but it wasn't great, either, and it turned the fabulously evil Maleficent into a copy of Elphaba the Green Wicked Witch of the West in the musical Wicked. "Wicked" could only be used ironically to describe the Maleficent in this movie, who is apparently a goody-two-shoes and not evil at all. Angelina Jolie is perfectly cast, but the script is terrible and the movie never manages to compete with the awesome 1959 film. I've already complained about this film at length, so I won't retread all of that, but this movie ends up being a kind of amalgam of Wicked and Frozen. The costumes really are pretty fabulous, so I'm glad they got some love her. (Incidentally, the Costume Designers branch really has been choosing great films these days; I'm delighted that they've taken to honoring fantasy films in this category. It shows a delightful lack of snobbery and an appreciation for real invention.)
Will Win: N/A

Could Win: N/A

My Rating: #65 out of 80

Your Drag Mother's True Love Kiss

When I was a kid, I loved Disney's 1959 film Sleeping Beauty. To begin with, it is beautifully animated. I loved the straight lines of the castle and the characters (even Prince Phillip's horse), the gorgeous colors, and pageantry of royal christening. I loved the Tchaikovsky-inspired score and the main song's catchy lyrics – And I know it's true / That vision's are seldom all they seem / But if I know you / I know what you'll do / You'll love me at once / The way you did once / Upon a Dream. But mostly I loved Maleficent.

She was fabulous. All dark and brooding and incredibly powerful. She was also cruel and greedy and rather ugly. But unlike the silly, bumbling, good fairies, Flora, Fauna, and Merryweather (what in the hell is something called merryweather doing with flora and fauna anyway?), Maleficent was regal. She walked with poise. She wielded an awesome staff. And she could turn into a fucking dragon. This was clearly everything I wanted to be in life. And Eleanor Audley's voice was just too good. Deep and rich and calm: it was everything my little soprano voice was not. I used to mimic her tone, her way of speaking, her clipped diction. And I used to practice issuing stern commands to my minions (clearly I was an ENTJ when I was a child and not the solitary, introspective INFJ I am now).

Clearly this is all some kind of drag fantasy that the little genderqueer boy that I was performed and enjoyed. But since I've gotten older I've noticed that lots of people that I know identify with the villains of the classic Disney movies rather than those movies' heroes or heroines. It is a kind of disidentification practiced by queer people, people of color, or otherwise misunderstood people, who don't see themselves in the inamorati of the Disney cartoon. I never wanted to be a princess. No thanks. And I never wanted to be Prince Phillip, either, or even (at least I don't think so) have Prince Phillip or Prince Eric or Prince Charming or any of those dudes come save me. Such a thought never would've occurred to me. But the evil, uncontained, dark female character, who tries to rule the world and ruin the lives of the pale protagonists of the story? Sign me up!

For the record, I loved Jafar, too, and used to quote him extensively, and I obviously loved me some Ursula the Sea Witch.

On first glance, Angelina Jolie's casting as Maleficent is perfect as a fulfillment of my childhood villain-identified fantasies. She is by all accounts a lovely person and obviously an incredible humanitarian, but on the screen she has often played bad girls and misunderstood women. She is obviously gorgeous, but she has something dark about her. Anyway, this is excellent casting.

But the film is just not great. It has an awesome dragon, to be sure, and it also contains one really good sequence (right before Aurora pricks her finger), but less than a year after Frozen, Maleficent hinges on a trick identical to that film. And the plot – greedy power-seeker destroys the land of the fairies – is an old, boring one. Worse yet (and this is where the movie falls absolutely flat), Maleficent isn't evil at all. In fact, she's good. She's actually a saint, as it turns out. And what's worse: she learns a lesson. Gross.

I didn't identify with this character at all. Maleficent, the powerful, fabulous creature of my childhood fantasies, turns out to be a sentimental, jilted lover, who never does anything really bad or anything she might actually regret. She gets revenge for what is done to her, but she is always in the right. She never takes things too far. Only the cheekbones of this Maleficent could ever be described as excessive. Everything else is reasonable. All of this is toothless and boring, but I also see it – and this is actually rather awful – as a kind of foreclosure of the disidentification I experienced as a child when I wanted to be Maleficent. Transforming the villain into someone who is a good person deep down enacts some kind of ridiculous twenty-first century fantasy where we seem to believe that "bad" people are actually just "misunderstood", and you can always get through to someone who is doing something you don't like simply by talking to him or her and appealing to his or her reason.

But this isn't true, first of all, and second of all it still assumes a version of good and evil to which I have no desire to subscribe. In this fantasy, the bad girl's heart can be changed by motherhood, and by the beautiful smile of a happy blonde child. Well, no thanks. Happy blond children do not make me want to smile, and I don't wish to think of my own badness/queerness as actually good. See, for me, the villain of the 1959 film was someone with whom I could identify. In 2014, Disney hasn't given me anyone who I would want to be.