This Year's Annoying Film Prize Faves

Awards season is in full swing, the Golden Blobs, the Giant Dildo men, the President's Choice Awards, et al. It's hard to keep up sometimes. Now that the Vancouver Film Critics Circle Awards have wrapped, it's all downhill from here. This is the time of year when new releases are thin on the ground, so naturally, the national pastime turns to tea-leaf reading about the previous year in film. The Academy Awards nominees will be announced next Tuesday and prognosticators are on every street corner, holding forth about which actor, which actress will make the cut. If Eminem can win an Oscar, really, it's anyone's game.

Leaving aside the essential irrelevancy of prizes, which is another entirely tiresome discussion, let's have a look at the likely Oscar contenders. True Grit, Black Swan, The Social Network, 127 Hours, The King's Speech crowd together, jostling for position, throwing their proud heads in the air, and chewing savagely at their bits and bridle, threatening to bolt from the gate at any moment. A betting man or woman would most likely have their money down on the frontrunner, The King's Speech.

Firth likely to finish first

Colin Firth, every woman's dreamy English rose, appears to have the best actor category sewn up. Although it must be argued that perhaps the more difficult role in the film fell to Helena Bonham Carter, where it lodged in her hair and was never heard from again. Despite the heavy forces of history, the tortured emoting, and the heavyweight thespian action from Geoffrey Rush and Firth, the film itself feels slight. A drawing-room drama with aspirations, the film never quite made the leap into epic territory, even with the threat of the Blitz and the goose-stepping Nazis. The thunderhead of WWII is alluded to, but never genuinely experienced. Perhaps this is churlish, even greedy, wanting more moments of being overwhelmed, overtaken, bombed to pieces. Is that too much to ask? The film in its staid English way is charming enough, even occasionally thoughtful. But it drifts away the moment you leave the theatre, with barely a trace of feeling.

To paraphrase something John Cassavetes once said, I prefer to hate a film than have no feeling at all, then at least you know that you had some sort of genuine experience. (Somewhere Cassavetes is rolling in his grave, saying, "That's not what I said at all!")

Those genuine hating type moments were few and far between this year. Mostly it was mild annoyance, although there were a few cases of genuine ire.

What's wrong with 'The Kids Are All Right'

For example, the final scene in The Kids Are All Right, a paean to the sanctity of home, hearth and good old fashioned lesbian loving. The nub of the plot concerns a happy nuclear family composed of two moms (Annette Bening and Julianne Moore, both of whom could end up on the Oscar best actress ballot) and two kids threatened with annihilation when said kids contact the man (Mark Ruffalo) who donated the sperm that spawned them. Entanglements, both physical and otherwise, occur before a final ringing endorsement for familial solidarity is sounded like a trumpet blast.

Kicked to the curb by Bening in full butch mode, Mark Ruffalo, as the sperm baby daddy lurks at the window, looking as sad and starved as junkyard dog. This seemed an unnecessary bit of cruelty, ungenerous and, yes, it must be said, churlish. This sour moment managed to curdle the entire film. Although the film's tone of California privilege, well-appointed houses, lovely teeth and therapy-speak was ripe for rot. Maybe I just don't like rich folks and their white people problems.

But then, looking at this year's films highly praised (by other critics), I guess I don't care much for poor folk either. Winter's Bone is a full-tilt poverty porn smack down. What would we do without poor people to provide us with things to cluck over, and feel smugly satisfied about our own more clean and ordered lives? Oh, those terrible hillbillies with their lack of good dentistry, and their fondness for meth and guns, they are an endless source of horror film material and ponderous American drama in equal measure. Winter's Bone was lauded and applauded, even before it picked up the Grand Jury Prize at last year's Sundance Film Festival, where they apparently have an undying appetite for films about how crappy things are in the American heartland. Winter's Bone certainly looks the part, but there's something about its willingness to present every last cliché about growing up poor and rural that bugged me. Jennifer Lawrence's performance as Ree Dolly, a country girl determined to find her missing daddy and preserve the sanctity of her family home, oddly enough, has something in common with the California crew in The Kids Are All Right. She succeeds partially in her quest, in the most tragic of ways, but this being an American gothic. Happy endings are like a university education or medical insurance, things regularly denied to poor white crackers.

Great endings

When I cast my mind back over the past year, there were a few things I liked a great deal, such as the scene of glorious "fuck you" fatalism in Ben Affleck's Boston bank-robbing boy's adventure, The Town. In the film's bloody conclusion, Affleck's right hand toughie, Jem (played by the delectable Jeremy Renner, who always brings to mind a line from Sylvia Plath, "Every woman adores a Fascist") is pinned down on all side by po-po. Shot in the leg, Jem takes shelter behind a mailbox, spies a discarded soda and takes a lost last sip. It is the old tale of the warrior trapped on a cliff face, with tigers on all sides, who sees a strawberry dangling nearby and takes one last taste of life, as sweetly intense as it is brief. Jem's last stand, punctuated by a Boston honk of profanity to the coppers, ends in a Hail Mary of gunfire. It is a beautiful moment. Too bad no award exists for great exits.

Which brings me to another ignominious film exit. A word of advice to parents everywhere, never take your kids to a Coen Brothers film, even if it's presold as a kinder, gentler Coens. Don't believe it, lest you too have to sneak out of the theatre with a howling child, threatening to barf at the harsh, bloody reality of the Old West in True Grit. This crop of children, I ask you, they can shoot the shit out a million science fiction video games, but show them one little drop of dramatic bloodshed and they go to pieces.

Real women not allowed in 'The Social Network'

The only moment of genuine loathing arrived with a gentle computer ping. I'm still trying to wrap my head around the peculiarity of The Social Network. Did we really need a film about Facebook, full of pampered Harvard spawn who pout and fret through the entire proceedings but still come away at the end of all this sturm und drang millions upon millions of dollars richer? While I appreciate David Fincher's style, the film itself (poor little Zuckerberg happy at last) made me want to kick things. Anything really.

The film has some other ugly aspects, namely a thick streak of misogyny. Aside from exactly two thinly drawn female characters (the always unattainable good girl who got away, and a semi-friendly young lawyer) the rest of the women in the film are like writhing wallpaper, purely background skank. The fact that Mr. Zuckerberg was a victim of being stuck somewhere on the autism spectrum is terribly unfortunate, both for him and for the audience expected to care about the fact that the world's youngest billionaire lost his only friend, and the only woman he loved, by basically being an asshole. This is another exercise in style with a giant vacuum where real feeling ought to live. It will probably win big.

The Oscars are like an audience with Queen, you may not even believe in the antiquated notion of the monarchy, but you still have to show up in your fancy dress, curtsey nicely, and get on with it.

As soon as the announcements drop next week, the question will turn to that far more essential question -- what are you going to wear to watch, no matter where you are?