It would feel like a dream, or at least an elaborate joke. Indeed, if I were to suggest a candidate for the single strangest possible moment that could transpire during next Sunday’s Academy Awards broadcast, it would have to be the vision of Werner Herzog, preferably in a tux, receiving an Oscar. Of course, Herzog’s Antarctica essay Encounters at the End of World couldn’t be more deserving. It wasn’t merely among the best documentaries of last year but one of the best movies, period. But I still can’t quite wrap my head around the sheer weirdness of the notion of Herzog’s presence amidst the glitz, the tears and thanks-to-god, the microphone-wielding babbling ninnies. Herzog, director of Aguirre, Wrath of God, Strozek and Grizzly Man, is a living legend—but he’s an outsider’s outsider, a deeply eccentric, autodidact maverick. Since when do such people win Oscars? But then it begs the question, what is Oscar?
The official line is that Oscar rewards cinematic excellence, but everybody knows that’s far from the truth. The dismissive cynic tells us it’s all politics, advertising and self-congratulation, but this too seems a bit of an over-simplification, and hardly accounts for the fact that, in the acting categories especially, the Academy actually does single out superlative work as often as it does sentimentalist blubbery. So the Oscars are a nebulous, persistent beast, and a lot of us still watch despite it all. They satisfy a desire for summation, catharsis and unabashed glamour. And maybe it’s that last part that catches us up when we try to hold it to a certain standard.
Kelly Reichardt's Wendy and Lucy won the Toronto Film Critic’s Association Award and was nominated for an Independent Spirit, but it has yet to open in most markets in Canada at least, and its complete shut-out among the Oscar nods won’t help it circulate any faster or bigger. It stars Michelle Williams—note: a previous nominee—in the best work she’s yet done. But it is in every sense of the word a small movie, concerning America’s socio-economic fringe. Is this why Wendy and Lucy is ignored? Do recessions naturally turn people away from stories of economic hardship? At least Williams is in good company as one of the year’s most notable snubs. Sally Hawkins, the widely celebrated star of Mike Leigh’s Happy-Go-Lucky, also failed to receive the Best Actress nod, though Happy-Go-Lucky at least managed to snag an Original Screenplay nomination, the art-house ghetto/unofficial consolation prize for any movie that fails to garner its due kudos in the ostensibly major categories.
To give credit, the Academy did acknowledge Anne Hathaway for her sublime work in Rachel Getting Married and Melissa Leo’s heart-rending turn in Frozen River. But how do we explain Angelina Jolie for Changeling, a movie that wasn’t especially embraced by audiences or critics and gave Jolie nothing especially interesting to do? Perhaps politics—ie: being insanely famous and becoming an international symbol for maternal altruism—shouldn’t be underestimated any more than glamour. Jolie’s got both on her side. And her even more famous other half also got nominated this year, but I can’t argue with that so much. I’ve never been a great admirer of Brad Pitt’s, but I submit that The Curious Case of Benjamin Button gave him the role of his life, playing a man condemned to get everything backwards, doomed to live his life as a permanent alien, watching, never fully participating. Pitt’s performance may be necessarily adorned in multiple layers of make-up and CGI, but is there any moment in its trajectory more astonishing, more strangely moving, than the one where Button finally arrives at the point in his life where he simply becomes Brad Pitt? In this sense, an actor’s beauty is as essential to performance as the tricks used to disguise it. And in the movies, folks, a well-harnessed beauty is a force to be reckoned with.
Still, Pitt has noting on Mickey Rourke, who also found the role of a lifetime in The Wrestler, and likewise elegantly exploited his distinctive physicality to embody it. Come to think of it, Richard Jenkins, whose nomination for The Visitor was among this year’s most pleasant surprises, also gave a superb performance that was heavily dependent on the actor’s appearance, that long, pock-marked face that conveys disappointment and inwardness so immediately that a simple smile emerging from it feels like some sort of miracle. To be sure, I can think of only one performance that was the equal of these guys yet excluded from their company. Benicio Del Toro’s portrayal of Ernesto Guevara falls into two of Oscar’s pet categories—the famous actor portraying the famous historical figure; the repeat nominee—but that wasn’t enough. Che, like Wendy and Lucy, is about people normally invisible in American movies. And it’s long. And it’s tough. It’s also extraordinary, iconoclastic, educational, in its way, truly revolutionary. It should have gotten Best Actor, Best Director, Best Picture and Best Cinematography.
Cinematography however is one of those categories whose nominee list most consistently lacks imagination or even sense. How could they neglect the inspired imagery of Paranoid Park? (Let's not even get into directing, where we would have to discuss the phenomena of Ron Howard.) It’s not unlike editing, an award that should most often be preceded by the word ‘Most’ rather than ‘Best.’ How else could the Academy manage to nominate Laurent Cantet’s The Class for Best Foreign Film and not notice that its lively classroom scenes, filled with comments and bits of behaviour coming from so many of its actors, are partially the result of some of the finest possible cutting? We’re talking about an editor—Robin Campillo is his name—whose contribution was so integral to the movie that he was given his own writing credit.
And what of that other remarkable Foreign Film nominee Waltz for Bashir, an ideal candidate for Best Animated Feature—not to mention Best Documentary—if there ever was one? Was it really not on par with Bolt? Need every Animated nominee be for kids, be rife with superfluous spectacle? Is this why neither of Richard Linklater’s wondrous animated movies Waking Life or A Scanner Darkly went without nominations in their respective years? Such are the mysteries of Oscar, I suppose. We mull them over, we get pissed off, we get happy and occasionally satisfied when we see work we believe in get rewarded and perhaps even reach a larger audience. In any case, we keep watching. Okay, I keep watching. Do you?
The major highlight of last night's 81st Oscars, certainly the most impressive acceptance speech in any case, came from Japanese filmmaker Kunio Kato, who took the award for Best Animated Short for 'La Maison en Petits Cubes.' Future winners may want to accept some coaching from this guy. With great concision and deadpan delivery the man managed to invoke the spirit of Styx at their most pop-savvy and thank an inanimate object, which in itself much surely constitute some sort of precedent. "Thank you, my pencil... Thank you, animation... Domo arigato, Mister Roboto..." So much more charming than the weirdly superior-sounding A.R. Rahman, who won in both the Song and Score categories and talked about how all his life he chose love over hate. I mean, what the hell does that mean? 
Anyway, considering the frustrating number of overt snubs and the ratio of genuine excellence to blandness that clogged the nominees this year, I unreservedly applaud this renovated approach to the acting categories that has five past winners come on stage and introduce each of the nominees personally, bestowing equal attention on all and taking undue emphasis away from the winner (the selection of which does so often feel like the result of a popularity contest even when the nominations sometimes convey a greater sense of adventure and observational powers on the part of the academy). Having the quintet of warm assessors play their parts made these individual moments feel far more intimate and less catty. They imparted (like Penelope Cruz's gorgeous 60-year-old gown and her heartfelt nod to Pedro Almodóvar's role in her career development) a deeper sense of tradition, and made more transparent the essence of what these awards are, or at least should be, really about, which is peer acknowledgment, a sense of community, and a love of the art. The results were far more moving than is normally the case. And Whoopi Goldberg was actually really funny! 
