The 2013 Oscars (part one)

Ordinarily I watch the Oscars while on the couch in my pyjamas eating junk food. Damn this diet, the junk food is out this year, and I get the feeling I'm really gonna miss it (how entertaining is this show when you're not buzzing on a sugar high?). A friend suggested that I should get out of my pyjamas first thing in the morning, to put a nice psychological break between me and my usual Oscars routine ... but it's midday now, and it hasn't happened yet.


BEST PICTURE

Usually you can draw a line through anything which is nominated for Best Picture which isn't also nominated for Best Director. This year, though, the Director nominations fucked up big time, so the list of movies with snubbed directors (Argo, Django Unchained, Zero Dark Thirty) is incredibly strong. At the same time, films with no realistic shot did get Director nominations (Amour, which is too arty; Beasts of the Southern Wild, which is too not Hollywood; Life of Pi, which is too shit), so everything's all up for grabs. Argo is cleaning up all the lead-in awards, and Lincoln has the kind of pedigree Oscar loves, so I suspect it will come down to those two.

I liked both of those movies a lot, but there are two films nominated that I consider flat-out fucking masterpieces: Zero Dark Thirty and Amour. I'm assuming Michael Haneke's slow drama about old people dying has no chance (too real, too painful), but Zero Dark Thirty has a genuine shot, I think, so that's what I'm rooting for. I doubt they'll give it to two Kathryn Bigelow war(ish) movies in a row, but you never know.

Honestly, so long as they keep it away from Silver Linings Playbook, Life of Pi or Les Miserables, the rest are all very good movies, and I'm kind of not fussed who ends up taking it out. They'd all be fairly worthy.

My hope: Amour or Zero Dark Thirty
My prediction: Argo


BEST DIRECTOR

It's gotta be Spielberg for Lincoln. Michael Haneke for Amour and Benh Zeitlin for Beasts both deserve it more, I think, but their films are just too odd and unwieldy for Oscar voters (though apparently the demographics of the Academy skews heavily towards 'old as fuck', so maybe Haneke and his paean to approaching death has more of a chance than I'm giving it). I'm dismissing David O. Russell for Silver Linings and Ang Lee for Pi because, frankly, those films weren't good enough for them to deserve jack shit. So Spielberg is left by a process of elimination. Kathryn Bigelow, Ben Affleck and Quentin Tarantino can feel a bit cheesed off that they missed nominations (and their presence would have made for a more interesting field), but Spielberg did good work this year, so I'm happy for him to collect another win. At least Lincoln wasn't no fucking War Horse.

My hope: Michael Haneke
My prediction: Steven Spielberg


BEST ACTOR

Daniel Day-Lewis will win. That's a given, surely? The most respected actor in the world, playing the most respected man in American history ... hell, he'd won this Oscar before they even started shooting. If there's any chance of a shock, it's probably our Hugh for Les Mis, which in a way is fair enough. You could count the movie stars who can do what he did in that movie on one finger (evidence: Russell Crowe's spectacular failure in the same film). The performance I really loved, though, was Joaquin Phoenix in The Master. Bizarre, hypnotic, transcendent, whatever you want to call it, he was frickin' amazing. In the absence of nominations for a pair of brilliant French performances (Denis Lavant in Holy Motors, Jean-Louis Trintignant in Amour), Phoenix is a clear stand-out in this field. Shame that doesn't seem to be what matters. Bradley Cooper and Denzel Washington, on the other hand, are simply making up the numbers.

My hope: Joaquin Phoenix
My prediction: Daniel Day-Lewis


BEST ACTRESS

Jennifer Lawrence seems to be the front-runner for this one, for Silver Linings Playbook, and if she wins, I'll admit it, this would be the award that would piss me off a bit. She was charismatic as hell, sure, but her character was pretty one-note, a classic Manic Pixie Dream Girl who hinted at having greater depths but never actually revealed them. Quvenzhane Wallis is a gag nomination, and Naomi Watts (who did nothing but suffer) surely has been completely shown up by Emmanuelle Riva (who did nothing but suffer, but made it into something beautiful and sublime). Riva, for Amour, or Jessica Chastain, for Zero Dark Thirty, were both dead-set brilliant in their respective movies, but I fear they were both too subtle for the academy. There's acting, and then there's ACTING!!1!, and I fear they're gonna be seduced by the latter, and by Lawrence.

My hope: Jessica Chastain or Emmanuelle Riva
My prediction: Jennifer Lawrence


SUPPORTING ACTOR/TRESS

Supporting Actress is all about Anne Hathaway this year. She sung a couple of songs, she made us all cry, she's paid her dues, she's the shortest of short priced favourites (seriously, sportsbet has her paying $1.01; in a five horse race, that's ridiculous). And honestly, in this field, I won't mind (too much): Sally Field, Helen Hunt and Jacki Weaver were all fine, but none of them knocked my socks off either. The only worthy adversary for 'Crusher' Hathaway is Amy Adams for The Master, but again, obviousness is gonna beat subtlety, I fear.

Best Supporting Bloke is a bit more wide open. Using the process of elimination, Tommy Lee Jones is probably the favourite, and his performance in Lincoln was a hell of a lot of fun (and very nearly the best thing about the movie). Philip Seymour Hoffman, Alan Arkin and Christoph Waltz all won Oscars pretty recently, and I doubt the academy will love any of their performances enough to feel they deserve a second so soon. Which leaves Robert De Niro as the main contender, but surely they can't give a guy an Oscar just for (finally) deciding to start acting again? Can they?

My hopes: Amy Adams and Philip Seymour Hoffman
My predictions: Anne Hathaway and Tommy Lee Jones


ORIGINAL & ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

In the Original Screenplay list, I'm pretty comfortable dismissing the chances of John Gatins, for Flight, and Wes Anderson, for Moonrise Kingdom, simply because they're barely up for anything else, and that's just not the way this shit works (though a massive part of me wants to see Wes Anderson give an acceptance speech). After that, it gets interesting: Tarantino is up for Django, Haneke is up for Amour, and Mark Boal is up for Zero Dark Thirty. Everybody wants to see Quentin on that stage, but I suspect Django is a bit wild and dangerous for the academy to  give it a tick. Haneke's not a realistic shot at the Director gong, but they do sometimes use the screenplay awards as 'encouragement Oscars', basically saying "Look, we're not gonna give you one of the really big ones, but keep doing what you're doing, it's good stuff!" I wouldn't be surprised if Haneke actually pulls this one out. Mark Boal, on the other hand, won for Hurt Locker just a few years ago, which might count against him. So the academy has to choose: the uber-violent wise-cracker; the haughty European master; or a not particularly well known recent winner? I honestly don't know which way it'll go.

Adapted Screenplay is a little simpler. Chris Terrio is gonna win for Argo. You could make a case for Tony Kushner for breathing life into Lincoln, and I'm a little worried about David Magee (for Pi) and David O. Russell (for Silver Linings) winning 'encouragement Oscars' on behalf of their strangely well-liked films. But Argo is gonna win it. Terrio has won every lead-in award of note, and it's not possible that the film wins Best Picture without snagging either Director or Screenplay ... and Affleck's not nominated, so it has to win here.

My hopes: Mark Boal or Michael Haneke, and Chris Terrio
My predictions: Quentin Tarantino and Chris Terrio


ELSEWHERE

I suspect Life of Pi is gonna take out Visual Effects, which is probably fair. The CG tiger was pretty amazing. Anna Karenina, Lincoln and Les Mis are gonna go to the mattresses over Costume, and probably over Production Design as well, unless Pi can nip in and grab it by being stylised, rather than ye-olde-looking. If Hitchcock wins for Make-Up I will get genuinely angry, because Hopkins' prosthetic jowls were absolutely fucking terrible. Skyfall (from, um, Skyfall) is the only nominated song that anybody remembers, so it's a shoo-in (and will apparently be the first ever Bond theme to win the Oscar ... incredible!), and Amour surely wins Foreign Language Film given it's the only one nominated for other shit too. Zero Dark Thirty ought to win Editing, but Argo will probably take this one out too.

Cinematography is interesting. Roger Deakins (Skyfall) deserves it: despite my reservations about that movie, it was undeniably beautiful to look at in a way that Bond has just never been. But cinematography is a big award, and I'm not sure you can win it without also being up for the other biggies. If Deakins doesn't pull it out, it'll probably fall to Claudio Miranda for Life of Pi, because again, obviousness beats subtlety.


So there you go, I'm now one more lonely blogger pissing his Oscar predictions into the wind. I'll be back later for a debrief, but for now you'll have to excuse me, the couch is calling.

(Don't think about popcorn. Don't think about popcorn. Don't think about popcorn. Aagh, I thought about it.)

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
books to go: 72

Rabbit, Run (#75)

Rabbit, Run by John Updike


What I said then:

I bought this years ago, and really only because I knew Updike’s name and at the time that seemed like reason enough.

What I say now:

Though slim, this book was a slog to get through. There's something about Updike's writing style that just doesn't chime with me: it felt too studied, like it was trying too hard or something. His tale is one of small suburban decay, and often he'd be caught reaching too far in his attempts to give the details of his mundane setting the metaphorical weight he so desperately wanted them to have. Does that make sense? It was like, the main character could never just walk home beneath a row of streetlights, the streetlights always had to be symbolising something profound about the way the character's life was in constant flux between darkness and light, or some bullshit like that. Everything was freighted with meaning, but the meanings were spelled out and too obviously artificial. If you make everything poetic, then nothing is, you know?

So the plot basically runs thus: Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom is a massive selfish jerk who can't face the responsibilities of adulthood, and he proves this fact again and again. Rabbit was a star basketball player in high school, but those days are gone. Approaching his mid-twenties and stuck in a loveless marriage to a pregnant girl that drinks to escape her own boredom (and she is still a girl, as Rabbit is still just a boy), one night he snaps or something and just drives off and leaves her. He only makes it as far as the next town over, where he shacks up with a sorta-kinda prostitute for a few months. Having knocked the new girl up, he promptly ditches her and heads back to his wife when she has the baby ... only to argue with her and run out again (twice, somehow).

Seriously, Rabbit is a fucking arsehole.

You can write about arseholes, there's nothing wrong with that, but they've got to be interesting. I don't have to like your characters, but I do have to find them captivating. Rabbit was just an oaf, an uncomplicated oaf, and I found his company pretty much unbearable. Not because he was an arsehole, just because he was boring. It wouldn't have been so bad if Updike had seemed to have any insight into the guy, or was able to shed any light on his psychology, but he really didn't. At the moments of highest drama, the moments when Rabbit decided to turn one way or the other, it never illuminated anything. Those moments always sprang from moments of random impulse, and we never got a chance to properly understand them.

There were other things that bugged me. Updike has his (not particularly intelligent) characters participate in that silly literary convention where, in conversation with one another, they'll speak in 'meaningful' non sequiturs, giving poetic summations of something or other which have nothing to do with the conversation they're actually having. Also, when the sex scenes come, Updike switches modes completely, getting both deliberately vague and kind of breathlessly excited. That obvious excitement, coupled with his horribly old-fashioned gender politics, had me leaving those scenes feeling pretty scuzzy.

All in all, there just wasn't much to like about this book. At all. There are another three books about Rabbit Angstrom, but I've had my fill of him, and of Updike too.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
books to go: 72

Persuasion (#76)

Persuasion by Jane Austen


What I said then:

[One of] the last two unread books from my much-loved Folio Society boxset.

What I say now:

(Please note, that is NOT the cover on the edition I've got. I couldn't find an image of my version online, and this one was just too silly not to use.)

Persuasion was Jane Austen's final novel, and was written as her health went into its final, terminal decline. Lacking the energy to properly revise and edit her work, Austen left us a novel that is somewhat lacking in her usual masterful control (in terms of both plot and prose). In her finest works (massive Pride and Prejudice fan here), Austen's prose has that knack of being concise, witty, and true. But there are --- shock horror! --- inelegant sentences in Persuasion. There are plenty of elegant ones as well, but it was a bit of a shock to find myself having to read a sentence twice or thrice in order to grasp its meaning. That just doesn't happen with Austen, who ordinarily writes with perfect clarity.

In short: several years before the novel begins, Anne, the plain and oft-ignored (but supremely sensible and virtuous) third Elliot sister, was persuaded by her snobbish father to break off an engagement with Mr Wentworth, an impoverished naval officer. Since then the Elliot's fortunes have been frittered away, while Anne's sometime lover is about to return from the recently concluded wars a successful (and wealthy) man. Can their love survive her rejection of him, and the intervening years? Will she fall for her (way too obviously 'charming') cousin, William? There's also a plethora of subplots involving the romantic entanglements of Anne's silly, shallow cousins and sisters, and the machinations of their on/off flirtations with various gentlemen.

Though the scene in which Anne and Wentworth finally reconcile is quite wonderful and moving, and is the equal of anything in Austen's oeuvre, we've never really learned why we should hope for their reconciliation in the first place. Their love was formed and dashed before the novel ever begins, and we're never given much of an account of it. Then, for the vast majority of the book they act towards each other with cold formality, each wishing to bury the pain of the past. Austen relates this cold formality with considerable skill, but neglects to ever really delve into its inherent falseness, or to give us a glimpse of either characters' continuing love for the other. When the damn bursts, it feels less like a satisfying resolution to an ongoing story, than it feels like a bewildering bolt from the blue.

Several of the other, more minor subplots are resolved in similarly haphazard fashion. One of Anne's cousins, in the space of a couple of weeks in which we don't see her, falls out of love with one man and becomes engaged to another. This second suitor, given every single thing we've learnt about either character, should never have come to her notice at all (he's bookish and shy, she's wild and wilful). It's all a bit convenient.

Some of the subplots lead nowhere (and get resolved ridiculously easily), and there are dramatic events that are undeniably silly, and characters' interior lives seem to change in the blink of an eye to suit whatever purpose Austen requires. It's all a bit of a confused muddle. Don't get me wrong, there's still genius at play here, but it's only occasional, and you've got to look a little harder for it.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: The Glass Bead Game by Herman Hesse
books to go: 72

The Lost Dog (#77)

The Lost Dog by Michelle de Kretser


What I said then:

I saw her in a session at the Writer's Festival and she was impressive enough that I bought her book ... but not so impressive that I read it.

What I say now:

The Lost Dog is a strange old book, and I must admit I found it a bit of a muddle. It gestured towards being a lot of things: a romance, a mystery, a Garner-esque dissection of Melbourne's contemporary art scene. But it never really committed to being any of these things, leaving important story elements dangling all over the place, and ultimately ending up an underwhelming reading experience (despite de Kretser's obvious skill).

Tom Loxley, half-Indian academic, is staying alone in the mountain shack of a friend while trying to finish his thesis on Henry James. When his dog runs off while they're out on a walk, he assumes it'll be back soon. When it doesn't return, he spends the next ten days searching for it in increasingly frantic fashion. While the search gives the book its through-line, the narrative keeps jumping backwards in time to fill out Tom's family history, and to detail his unrequited love for Nelly Zhang, friend, shack-owner, and artist, as well as Nelly's mysterious (possibly murderous) past.

If that last sentence was confusing, good. The way the novel skips about in time makes it difficult initially to track who everybody is, where they are, who they know, and when this scene I'm reading is actually happening. De Kretser doesn't help us out, leaping from Melbourne in the present, to India in the past, to Melbourne in the slightly-more-recent past without doing anything much to make sure we know where we are at any given moment. Early on in particular, while all the characters were being introduced, I found it pretty difficult to keep track of who was who.

And then there's the mystery element. Nelly Zhang's husband went missing from the mountain cabin in strange circumstances years ago (suicide? murder? secret flight to a new life?) and during Tom's wanderings after his dog, he starts to delve into what exactly happened. Which made me think that, by the end of the book, I'd get to find out what exactly happened. But the investigation goes nowhere. Tom does come up with a theory, and in the penultimate chapter he explains it to Nelly ... and she explains it's not possible. And that's it. There was no revelation, no catharsis, no nothing. Look, I don't mind when writers get playful with genre conventions, but this just seemed perverse the way de Kretser set me up to expect an ending, then refused to give me one. It really stuck in my craw.

Prose-wise, she's a super talented writer (if occasionally a little verbose, using five complicated words when two simple ones would do) but it was the structural looseness that kept getting in the way of my enjoyment. Ultimately it was kind of a missed opportunity: there was lots of interesting stuff in it, but it didn't come together in a satisfying way at all.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Hello America by J.G. Ballard
books to go: 74

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (#78)

The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao by Junot Díaz


What I said then:

Won the Pulitzer a few years back, and is about a Dominican kid who's obsessed with comics.

What I say now:

Maybe I ought to steer clear of prize winners from now on, because I've gotta be honest, I was a bit underwhelmed by this one. Don't get me wrong, it was really entertaining: it's written in a casual, conversational kind of style that kept me turning the pages. I just found it pretty emotionally hollow.

Oscar, a second-generation Dominican living in the New Jersey suburbs, is an unsuccessful romantic. A true nerd's nerd (fat, ugly, loves comic books and Tolkien novels, plays Dungeons & Dragons ... it'd all add up to a a dumb cliche, except Díaz's own love for geeky stuff shines through), Oscar falls in intense, instantaneous love with every beautiful woman he meets. This love, which the novel kindly characterises as generous and genuine, rather than creepy and weird, is basically never reciprocated. As he suffers rebuff after rebuff, Oscar retreats into worlds of fantasy, either in the literature he loves, or in the novels he's writing.

Hey, I dig nerdy stuff (I'd estimate I understood around 75% of the references to geek culture), and I could definitely dig a novel that takes a character who's a cliched nerd and then, by giving him an interior life, busts him out of the cliche. Unfortunately, by the end of the novel, we really don't learn anything about Oscar that I haven't included in that second paragraph. His entire life he just repetitively does the same things, and encounters the same problems, and deals with them the same way. I never felt like I gained a deeper understanding of him, or really any understanding at all. It's like writing a novel about Comic Book Guy in The Simpsons, without ever delving deeper than "Worst ... [whatever] ... ever!"

Because Oscar's story is so thin, Díaz veers off on tangents about his mother and sister and, while he's doing so, delves into twentieth century Dominican history. As somebody entirely ignorant of twentieth century Dominican history (before reading this novel I'd never even heard of Trujillo, the Dominican Republic's murderous mid-century dictator) I found that stuff pretty fascinating, with its secret police and purges and distinctively Latin-flavoured fascism. Unfortunately even those aspects of the book begin to get repetitive, each subplot beginning with love (or at least sex) and ending in secret murder in the countryside. When the two halves of the story do meet up, it's not in a way that's thrilling or unexpected, it's in exactly the way I could have predicted two hundred pages ago.

The tone of the writing was really light and fun (and I'll always give bonus points to a book that throws in a reference to the Witch-king of Angmar), but even that wasn't without its issues: most of the book is narrated by an unknown person who knew Oscar and is relating the events of his life. Just who this person is is kept secret from us for more than half the book, for no apparent reason: when it's revealed to be an old college roommate of Oscar's, it doesn't mean anything (other than for us readers to go "Oh, him ... okay"). Why play coy, when it doesn't matter? I found it a little frustrating, I'll admit. It just seemed like a strange bit of mis-direction.

And then, to add to the issues with the narrative voice, some chapters aren't narrated by the old roommate. They seem to be narrated by the member of Oscar's family directly involved: the sister, for example. But the narrative voice doesn't change as the narrator changes, it's still written in exactly the same style. So, is the roommate pretending to be the sister? Do all New Jersey Dominicans speak exactly the same? Or is Díaz just unwilling (I'm not gonna say 'unable') to break out of this one tone of voice? I dunno, it just felt a bit lazy to me.

As I said up top, I found Oscar Wao to be a fun read. But it didn't touch me emotionally at all, and that's a problem.

Cheers, JC.


currently reading: Hello America by J.G. Ballard
books to go: 74