Traveling Light: Kelly Reichardt: New Auteurs

River of Grass

The pair meet at a bar, shortly after the guy nearly hits the girl with his car on a dark rural road. “You’re not from around here, are you?” asks the girl. “Nope,” the guy replies, “I’m from Dade.” A seemingly unremarkable exchange, until you consider that the bar these lonesome souls occupy lies somewhere in Broward County, somewhere apparently very close to the Broward/Dade County line. The exchange then becomes ironic, except that the girl and the guy don’t seem to find it all that funny. These lovers on the run in Kelly Reichardt’s debut River of Grass (1994) inhabit what many viewers would deem a decidedly small world, but to them their immediate surroundings feel just as vast and difficult to traverse as any sea or continent. This is a road movie where the protagonists can’t get past the first tollbooth, having embarked on a crime spree with very little in the way of actual crime. At one point the girl (actually a woman, probably in her early 30s) mentions how every place seems the same. This may be a subtle wink to Jim Jarmusch’s Stranger Than Paradise (1984), in which a similar sentiment is expressed when it’s New York-based protagonists find themselves in Florida, which just so happens to be the setting of River of Grass. (Reichardt’s vision of Florida, dingy, eccentric, a place for wanderers, seems somewhat akin to that of novelist Joy Williams). But in this context, the sentiment assumes new hues, because the person who expresses it has hardly gone anywhere.

Ode

River of Grass feels very much like a first film (albeit one by an unusually gifted maker of exceedingly personal films) in that it carries the traces of an artist trying out as many things as she can (the camera movements, the cutting, and the use of voice-over would be tempered or eschewed altogether in her future work) and still craft something with an unmistakable signature. That word, signature, calls to mind things written by hand, and things handmade. The first word expressed in Reichardt’s newest film, Meek’s Cutoff (2010) isn’t spoken but rather traced upon a stone: “LOST.” There could be no better single-word summary of Reichardt’s body of work thus far, stories about people trying to get somewhere and having a tough time of it, unassuming, quiet films made with the bare minimum of participants and equipment. A record gets played in River of Grass: a rendition of ‘Traveling Light.’ A theme song perhaps. Reichardt has often spoke in interviews about her refusal/inability to “move up” to larger scale productions (something that helps explain the decade’s hiatus between her first and second features). This should not be mistaken for lack of ambition. On the contrary, one of the things that make her one of the finest, most distinctive, rigorous American filmmakers alive is her ability to cultivate so much feeling, atmosphere, narrative, character development, and even polemic out of the simplest of stories (many of them coming from collaborations with Jonathan Raymond) and humblest of materials.

Meek's Cutoff

Meek’s Cutoff, Reichardt’s mesmerizing western about homesteaders lost in 19th century Oregon, seen largely through the eyes of women, opens today at TIFF Bell Lightbox, and I urge you to see it. The film’s Toronto premiere has also prompted a most welcome retrospective of Reichardt’s work. They’re showing everything save the short-shorts. (1999’s Ode, a mid-length work, shot on Super 8, which I’ve been waiting years to see, screens on Sunday afternoon.) River was last night, but still to come are multiple screenings of Meek’s, two screenings of Old Joy (2005), two of Wendy and Lucy (2008), and one screening of Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952), which was selected by Reichardt for TIFF’s Carte Blanche series. The retrospective is part of TIFF’s New Auteurs series.

2009: the year in movies

Let me first confess that I still haven’t seen at least one movie that I predict I’m going to adore. It's been a busy winter! Fortunately, I don’t think there’s any lack of love out there for Fantastic Mr. Fox and it’ll surely be heartily celebrated elsewhere. This may not be case however with my first pick for the best of 2009, which barely screened anywhere in Canada but is now at least available on DVD. In fact so many of my favourites didn’t hit theatres or had only limited runs that I’ve decided to comprise my list from anything that debuted in theatres or on DVD in 2009. This is hardly news of course, but given the current state of exhibitors, unless we all get to attend major festivals we need to look to screens of all sizes if we’re to embrace the spectrum of what’s exciting in movies these days.


The Headless Woman
A hit and run occurs. We don’t see the victim, but neither does the driver. We see the driver work through her decision not to look—the process is oddly transfixing. We then see her do many strange yet finally instinctively logical things in response to the accident. We’re dream-deep in noir territory, but the author of this beguiling movie is Lucrecia Martel, who made The Holy Girl, so along its periphery are unforgettably peculiar, unnervingly funny details, and troubling questions of class solidarity and willful blindness. María Onetto gives an immensely absorbing performance, like Gena Rowlands on Quaaludes.


Summer Hours
A final family reunion precedes a matriarch’s death. Her adult children, now spread across the globe, must reconvene to sort out mother’s legacy. Olivier Assayas’ most emotionally rich work is about things, “bric-a-brac from another era,” the residue of a life, its memories and secrets. It offers a sobering sense of mortality, followed by the consolation of renewal: the last characters we see are the matriarch’s teenaged grandchildren, whiling away the summer hours at grandmother’s old house one last time, before it becomes the property of someone else.


The Limits of Control
“As I descended into impassable rivers, I no longer felt guided by the ferryman.” The opening Rimbaud quote says it all: surrender to the drift, the buoyancy of the texture, mystery and playfulness will carry you along. Thus unmoored, Jim Jarmusch made one of the loosest, most chimerical and, it would appear, most divisive works of his career. Smartly suited Isaach De Bankolé slips across Spain, meeting with shadowy figures, deciphering cryptic messages, drinking twin espressos and even enjoying some after-hours flamenco on his way to complete a sinister mission. Pitched somewhere between Point Blank, The Passenger and Jarmusch’s own Ghost Dog, this is a cinema of wanderlust and hypnosis, far more concerned with architecture, atmosphere, jokes, musical logic, naked ladies, sensation and sensibility, than it is about, say, espionage. My second viewing was approached very skeptically. I still loved it completely.


Inglorious Basterds
Here’s some synchronicity for you: 17 years after Reservoir Dogs Quentin Tarantino finally goes completely bananas and reaches the peak of his maniacal, pastiche-frenzied craftsmanship at the same time. Who else could have made this insanely verbose, over-the-top epic about resistance in war-torn Europe that fantasizes both a scalp-collecting Jewish revenge squad and the complete annihilation of the entire Nazi elite in one explosive screening at a Parisian movie palace? I rest my case.


35 Rhums
This was Claire Denis’ entrancing and moving tale of a closely bound father and daughter gradually finding their individual paths after years of living together. Denis’ touch is so light as to seem weightless, her exposition so minimal as to seem neglectful of plot, yet no one makes movies like this, so alive, so warm and sometimes funky and funny, so sensitive to everyday rhythms and nuance, so trusting in story to reveal itself once nurtured. I could curl up on a rug and drift away with her films for ages.


A Serious Man
Remember the story of Job? Well, this is funnier. A physics professor’s wife leaves him. His brother is arrested. He could any moment be accused of taking a bribe from an alarmingly deadpan student from Korea. He’s inexplicably hounded by the Columbia Record Club. This is the Coen Brother’s vision of the universe, set in the Minneapolis suburbs, circa 1967. A tornado might come along and kill everybody. Uncertainty is the only certainty. There’s no comfort in religion, though it’s kind of fun to look for it anyway. As the Korean student’s dad advises, “Accept the mystery.”


Two Lovers
Speaking of Jews in trouble. A Brooklyn dry cleaner’s son trying not to be suicidal, Joaquin Phoenix loves the sweet girl his family has implicitly selected for him. He also loves Gwyneth Paltrow, who’s clearly bad news but is so much more exciting. He also loves his mom, who happens to be Isabella Rossellini. James Gray is a master storyteller, and this is his best work, a vision of the abyss we traverse when we surrender fully to romantic longing, and of those harrowing moments when compromise wollops us upside the head until out ears ring.


Che
The first part of Steven Soderbergh’s portrait of Ernesto Guevara is a puzzle made of trial and error while the second arm-wrestles with The Thin Red Line for the title of Most Hypnotic War Movie. The whole thing eschews Guevara the T-shirt icon, yet it doesn’t hoist phony biopic vulnerability on him either. It’s by turns lyrical and strategic, a manual on armed revolution and a consideration of violence as a tool for social change.


Sugar
Miguel ‘Sugar’ Santos is hardly a revolutionary, but his story provides us with much insight into the uneasy alliances that span the Americas. Recruited to play ball, he leaves the DR for the US, discovers French toast and TV on the Radio, as well as the simultaneous warmth and cool conservatism of the semi-rural Midwest. So much more than a sports movie—though the baseball is rendered excitingly—Ryan Fleck and Anna Boden’s follow-up to Half Nelson is a beautiful, profoundly resonant tale of the unpredictable paths that characterize the immigrant experience.

Wendy and Lucy
One needn’t be an immigrant however to understand how riddled with obstacles American life can be. Kelly Reichardt’s neorealist story of a young woman stranded in Oregon, trying to find her dog and get to Alaska, uses the simplest of narrative elements to forge both a lament for the outsider in the ostensible land of plenty and an ode to the kindness of strangers.

Liverpool

A sailor goes ashore in Argentina. He says he wants to visit his home, a tiny village in the mountains, to see if his mother is still alive. It's winter, and the sailor drinks, swigging off a bottle he keeps in his small bag. But it may not only be the cold that he's bracing himself for. Lisandro Alonso's rigorously observational approach is employed with special elegance here, gradually gliding away from the protagonist to someone else, someone he's forgotten, until we rest on the image that explains the enigmatic title, and offers up some touchingly subtle gesture of things passed along from one generation to another.

Maybe not quite as good but still very good: Hunger, The Hurt Locker, Let the Right One In, Pontypool, The Road, Tulpan.

Stolen moments: Bicycle Thieves

By 1948 the war was already three years gone, yet Italy stills looks exhausted—back then, as today, the process of recovery could seem endless. Life went on, grudgingly, chaotically. So in some tattered, flaking, sun-beaten suburb, Antonio Ricci (Lamberto Maggiorani) emerges from a mass of jobless men to accept employment pasting up posters of Rita Hayworth. Any work’s to be envied, regardless of how menial, and his peers are far from congratulatory, especially since they all know Antonio doesn’t possess the one item required for the gig: a bicycle. But Antonio rushes off to find his wife Maria (Lianella Carrell), who solves the problem easily enough. She sells their bedclothes. We can sleep without them, she says. The money the sheets gain from the pawnbroker is just enough to get Antonio’s old Fides out of hock.

Antonio’s new career however is short-lived. His Fides is stolen. We were waiting for this, of course, the pay-off on the title. But the pay-off isn’t complete until Antonio and his son Bruno (Enzo Staiola), a shoeshine boy, have scoured the city streets in search of the thief, and finally, out of pure desperation, Antonio himself becomes a thief. This is the most persuasive point of the movie, that we are all potential bicycle thieves, subordinate to the vagaries of money, opportunity, and luck. Antonio’s story is famously simple: guy loses bike, guy tries to get bike back. Yet the story of Bicycle Thieves lies not just in Antonio’s actions but in the faces, gestures and voices of everyone he encounters, crowds of mostly ordinary, equally struggling people who collectively alternate between moments of solidarity and mercenary measures. The movie starts with Antonio emerging from a crowd and by its end he’ll vanish into the crowd once more. One of my favourite things about Bicycle Thieves is its ambiguity as to whether that crowd is meant to offer any consolation.

Vittorio De Sica directed several films that would become central to the movement known as Italian neo-realism, Bicycle Thieves chief among them. It was shot mostly in real locations, mostly under natural light, with non-professional actors—though their performances are certainly theatrical, you might say very “Italian,” nonetheless. The movie spoke of banality, drudgery, fleeting pleasures, and simple tasks, yet there’s much diversion, and there’s tremendous visual poetry in Carlo Montuori’s fluid camerawork, the images of bikes and ladders flooding the streets, the busy market place, the chorus of street-sweepers, and in an especially memorable scene, men running to take shelter from a downpour while carrying gramophones. De Sica finds beauty in hard times. Some viewers grumble about the aestheticization of poverty, but I’m more concerned with the romanticization of naïveté. I hope I’ve made it clear, should it need repeating, that Bicycle Thieves is of monumental historical importance and is a pretty great movie. The resigned finale, with Maggiorani's speechlessness, is terribly moving. But it’s also a movie that strains a bit for my taste. It’s tough to make a fully fleshed-out story when the story’s trying so hard to make a point. It’s noble to speak for those who have no voice, but it’s precarious too.

It’s instructive to compare Bicycle Thieves not only to, say, the work of Roberto Rossellini, that other great, far harsher Italian neo-realist most famous for Rome: Open City (1945), but also to other movies with similar themes and tactics. Luis Buñuel’s Los Olvidados (50) depicted impoverished kids in Mexico City, but it eschewed the sentimental, embracing petty cruelties and perversion, imbuing characters with greater specificity and greater possibility. Charles Burnett has paid tribute to Bicycle Thieves as a formative influence, but Burnett’s Killer of Sheep (77) portrays the plight of Los Angeles’ downtrodden with far more idiosyncrasy, humour, and personal vision. The Dardenne Brothers, in movies like L’Enfant (05), revitalized neo-realism’s task-oriented narrative structures through a distinctly dogged, rivetingly relentless mise en scene. Most recently, Kelly Reichardt’s Wendy and Lucy (08) used the premise of a girl search for a lost dog—a premise superficially similar to De Sica’s Umberto D. (52)—to comment on the status of the non-upwardly mobile or economically disadvantaged in contemporary America. While actually watching Wendy and Lucy I was completely immersed in Wendy’s personal, immediate story—its commentary on the larger social issues started to sink in only later on. By contrast, while watching Bicycle Thieves, for all of its marvels, I could rarely forget that the movie was building a thesis.

Drawing on the margins: Kelly Reichardt on Wendy and Lucy

Wendy is the stoic young woman setting out in the hopes of finding work in Alaska’s fisheries. Lucy’s her dog, and clearly by far the most beloved person in Wendy’s life. They get stalled in Oregon when their car breaks down, and with a budget that’s unforgiving of unforeseen obstacles, their journey ripped from the pages of Jack London is already in danger of a most un-romantic collapse. Wendy’s troubles are exacerbated by a run-in with the police, some unwanted attention from strange forest dwellers, and, worst of all, Lucy’s disappearance.

A girl needs to find her dog and fix her car: Wendy and Lucy is so refreshingly simple and immediate it seems almost a throwback to the task-oriented narratives of Italian neo-realism. Yet Kelly Reichardt’s third feature, which stars Michelle Williams and Reichardt’s own pooch, is rich in atmosphere and in implications about how we live today, our fortress of ostensible prosperity, and who among us is most in danger of slipping through its cracks. Reichardt and Jonathan Raymond adapted the film from Raymond’s story ‘Train Song,’ and for all the desperation, the call of those long steel rails is indeed alluring, as are the images that recall the photography of Walker Evans or Gary Winogrand. It begins with the sounds of a tune softly hummed and a passing train. It ends with the image of a landscape blurring by.

Such elements have become Reichardt’s signature. Her previous film, 2006’s Old Joy, about two old friends who reunite to go camping and begin to realize how time has silently betrayed their youthful ideals, also traversed the Pacific Northwest in the company of characters who exude a certain discomfort with conformity. Reichardt has a special gift for penetrating the lives of such characters with an absolute minimum of artifice. Her films, suffused with humour and subtle eccentricities—Will Patton has a marvelous supporting turn—give off a warmth, linger on the unspoken, allow us to live with these people just long enough to know something about them, to care, and likely feel troubled about where they might be heading.

Reichardt’s a teacher by profession and filmmaker by vocation. From 1994’s River of Grass through 1999’s mid-length Ode and her more recent projects, she’s worked with skeleton crews and skeletal budgets. Her sets operate more like campsites than corporations, and that’s how she likes it. The posh comforts of the hotel room where we met during last September’s Toronto International Film Festival seemed a somewhat incongruous place to discuss such an arduous, no-frills production. But the fussiness of our surroundings fell away soon enough, and we could have just as easily been sitting round a fire in Mount Hood National Forest.

JB: There’s this quality to Michelle Williams in Wendy and Lucy I hadn’t seen before, a severity, a containment that builds to this transcendent, almost Bressonian level of release when we finally get to see her smile. Is it a gamble, figuring out how long audiences will go along with this kind of restraint?

Kelly Reichardt: That was our ongoing conversation. It was a little nerve-wracking for Michelle, but it was important for us to stick with it. It’s funny you mention Bresson because I was thinking of Bresson’s Mouchette a lot while shooting. Its protagonist is a character who’s really buttoned down emotionally and it’s only through small gestures that we gain any access to her interior world. Joan Bennett in Max Ophüls’ The Reckless Moment is another example of a woman who we see really just dealing with the tasks at hand and it’s only at the very end where we see that single-mindedness start to break down. So those are examples of this idea working brilliantly. But basically, I just think that when you consider what’s in store for Wendy, going off to work in the canneries, which is a pretty rough and tumble scene, she can’t be this delicate flower. I thought of Wendy as someone who just keeps looking at her to-do list, who worries about what’s right in front of her, because the big picture would just be too overwhelming. I think the tipping moment with the scary homeless guy in the park is really, amongst other things, a realization of how close her situation is to his.


JB: That scene strikes me in one sense as a response to the end of Old Joy, where we last see Will Oldham’s Kurt looking kind of lost on this street at night, and we’re not sure what he’s destined for. We’re left with a sense that he may not be that well equipped to move forward in his own life and there’s something about those people surrounding him that makes him uncomfortable, something he recognizes.

KR: I think for Kurt it’s more a lifestyle choice, though it still addresses questions regarding how the accepted way to live in America continues to narrow. How does anyone who doesn’t fit inside that model operate? We’re in the middle of this election just now, coming off the heels of the Republican convention and the much-celebrated Sarah Palin speech, which I thought really laid bare the absolute animosity towards people that are living in peril or dealing with poverty. It’s not just that we don’t care about you. It’s aggressive. There’s this meanness to it. With Wendy and Lucy Jon Raymond and I started by thinking about the aftermath of Katrina, this attitude that says, “If these people had their shit together they wouldn’t be in the situation they’re in.” We were wondering about how you pull yourself up if you don’t have an inheritance, if you’ve gone to a shitty school, if you don’t have a job that offers you anything other than a paycheque to get you through the week. If you have the drive but lack the financial or social means, can you really get a toehold in the middle class? So we took this classic American “go west” impulse, this character who does have the drive and desire and determination to get herself into a better situation, and we made a road movie. Now, hopefully all that stuff falls away and what you finally see when you’re actually watching the film is a personal story.

JB: Both Wendy and Lucy and Old Joy have characters that don’t really traverse a lot of distance, yet these films indeed really capture an essence of the road movie. They engage in a dialogue with those themes the best road movies tend to address, such as the illusion of freedom or the way one sees oneself reflected in one’s surroundings.

KR: Well, my first film, River of Grass, is also a road movie. The characters set out to embody the mythology of the road movie but never even get out of their neighbourhood. I seem to have specialized in stalled road movies for some reason. There’s no release or power until there’s movement, and maybe that’s a sort of metaphor for not being able to have a piece of that pie that is the American dream.


JB: Your films do retain these distinctive themes and atmospheres despite there being a considerable gap between River of Grass and Old Joy. Throughout all these years, have you deliberately set about nurturing a certain sensibility? Would you say you have a specific strategy?

KR: I don’t know that there’s a strategy. When I made River of Grass it was with a 13-person crew. People didn’t get along, I was young, and every day was really a struggle. But when I made Ode, which was shot on Super 8 and had only two actors and a two-person crew, which included myself, there was this thrilling intimacy. It was just the ultimate artistic experience. In between River and Ode there’d been these lost years where I was supposed to make this much bigger film and I went to LA. It never materialized and it was a very hard experience. But then I just went back to what I did in college. I dug out my Super 8 camera and had this epiphany. I discovered the sort of environment where I felt I could be creative. A lot of people I know can really feed off of the stress of a bigger production, but it’s not for me. So with Old Joy it was a crew of six, two actors and a dog. We went and rented these cabins, lived in this old growth forest and ate dinner around the fire at night. There wasn’t a lot of separation between the actors and the crew. You’re all in it together, finding it together. With Wendy and Lucy we again tried to keep the apparatus as small as possible. So Michelle really had to come into our world. We’d have to say to her, “I know this isn’t what you’re used to, but when you’re done with that scene pick up that apple box and bring it over here.” [Laughs] And she just got into it. There’s something about having everything that small, you know, there’s no one watching us, no producers coming to set to see what we’re doing. And I guess this has sort of become my method. For however long we can pull it off. We’ll see.

Would you give this man an Oscar?

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?