Extremely Well Made and Incredibly Boring: My Review of The Revenant

I struggle with The Revenant. Not in the sense that it was a purposefully tough movie to watch, but I struggle with it in the sense of trying to respect it on a rational level while despising it on an emotional level. Now I fully admit that I wanted to dislike the movie coming into it, but there are plenty of movies that I’ve only watched solely because they were nominated for Oscars and the quality of the film made me change my mind. Unfortunately, The Revenant was not one of those films. 

But that being said, my feeling of the film and your feeling of this film from watching the trailers won’t be changed by seeing the film. To me, the film looked like a journey that I did not want to experience, and I was correct in my assumption. I know people who couldn’t wait to see this film, and it’s one of their all-time favorites. Ultimately, it will not matter what I write in the rest of this review, because how you feel going into the film based upon the trailers and TV spots you’ve seen is basically how you will feel coming out.

Nonetheless, you cannot deny the masterful and technical achievement it took to get this picture made despite what your opinions of the film are. I do not think that having an arduous shoot is a good enough reason to give a film Academy Awards, but there are a plethora of aspects to this film that are technical masterpieces and worth studying in film classrooms for decades to come. Yet it is extremely difficult to respect something you dislike so much.

Using Oscarmetrics to Rank The Eight Best Picture Nominees' Chances

I love to use Oscarmetrics to determine winners at the Academy Awards. Most writers who cover awards season love to talk about the inside information they get, and I just sit here and use my numbers to out-predict them. Not only do I not have the access that most award season writers have, but that information either tends not to be accurate or that information just seems to confuse the situation. I have been extremely accurate in my predictions the past couple of years once I have learned the ins and out of the system. If you had listened to me last year when I told you to bet on Birdman for Best Picture and Best Director in mid-January when Boyhood was the favorite or to bet on Eddie Redmayne when Michael Keaton was the favorite, then you would have won a handful of shekles.

2016 has been a crazy Oscar season, and one that hasn't felt so up in the air since 2006 when Martin Scorsese and The Departed snuck in under the wire to steal the entire she-bang. On one hand, that leaves me feeling the least confident I have in a while in my selections; however, on the other hand, that means the betting is ripe for the taking. So if you would like to bet on the Best Picture Oscar race, here is my helpful guide:

8) Brooklyn

Brooklyn does not have: an Oscar or a Director's Guild of America (DGA) nomination for Best Director (two keys necessary for a Best Picture win), an Oscar nomination for Best Editing (surprisingly, but not really, necessary for a Best Picture win), a BAFTA nomination for Best Picture, or a Screen Actor's Guild (SAG) nomination for "Best Picture". Further, it only has three total Oscar nominations. To the film's credit, it is an acting nomination for Saoirse Ronan and a Best Adapted Screenplay nomination, both of which are good nominations to have if you want to win Best Picture, but the few total nominations it has plus the minuscule buzz there is surrounding the film means that Brooklyn unfortunately is not really in contention- which is a shame because it is a great film.

2016 Oscar Preview: Best Cinematography

THE NOMINEES:

- Ed Lachman (Carol)
- Robert Richardson (The Hateful Eight)
- John Seale (Mad Max: Fury Road)
- Emmanuel Lubezki (The Revenant)
- Roger Deakins (Sicario)

SHOULD BE HERE: Maryse Alberti (Creed)

Former Hitfix.com and current Variety writer Kristopher Tapley creates a list every year of the best shots in film of the year. Wouldn't you know it, Creed ended up at the very top of the list. Almost everyone currently nominated for an Academy Award earned a spot on Mr. Tapley's list, but one of the very best films of the year ended up at #1. I personally would have gone with the oner fight scene in the middle of the film- a piece of technical mastery that instantly rose to the top as one of the best fight scenes in the history of cinema (not a hyperbole)- but that's just me. Alberti's camera work in Creed is just incredible, much like everyone who worked on the film, and her nomination would have not only made the Oscars not so white, but would have been well deserved.

2016 Oscar Preview: Best Soundtrack

Unfortunately, the Best Soundtrack Oscar does not exist. It is a fake category that I first heard about from Alex Pappademas on Grantland, and an idea that I have loved ever since. Mr. Pappademas proposed adding a category to recognize the use of previously already existing songs in film. For the past two years since I have been doing these Oscar Preview posts, I like to throw in a Best Soundtrack post as well. Music and movies have become an indelible part of our culture and the music supervisors that are able to blend the two together deserve to get awards for what they do. I love writing these posts because I am firm believer in the addition of this category. There already is a Best Score category, so why not add one more category to honor those who successfully use original music to score their film?

Click here if you want to read more about why The Academy should add a Best Soundtrack category.

The specific rules for this category have been a bit flimsy over the years. I've "nominated"films that have a great original soundtrack like Frozen and Begin Again; however, I've realized that those nominations go against the spirit of this category. The purpose of the Best Soundtrack category is to nominate films that effectively incorporate already existing songs. Therefore, if your film is full of songs that are eligible for a Best Song Oscar, you're out. I have also decided that music created by the artist that's the source of the film and/or biopic is out. N.W.A. and Kurt Cobain made some incredible music over the course of their careers, but Straight Outta Compton and Kurt Cobain: Montage of Heck NEEDS to feature their respective artist's music. While those films of course have incredible soundtracks consisting of already existing music (Montage of Heck especially which features unreleased versions of Cobain's music and different versions of his songs so fucking well) they also violate the spirit of this category.

So with all of that being said, here are my personal nominees for the Best Soundtrack category:

Room and The Benefits of the Oscars Nominating Films That Make No Money

Even in a year that saw Guardians of the Galaxy and one of the Hunger Games films being released, the highest grossing film of 2014 was American Sniper. Despite earning multiple Oscar nominations last year including a Best Picture, Best Director, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Actor nomination, American Sniper's only win came for Best Sound Editing. This of course caused outrage among conservatives claiming that Hollywood was out of touch with "the real America".

That being said, it wouldn't be an unfair criticism of The Academy to say that they're out of touch with the vast majority of the movie going public. Jurassic World, Furious Seven, and Avengers: Age of Ultron, grossed a gazillion dollars between the three of them in 2015 (rough estimate), and have a combined 0 Oscar nominations. Star Wars: The Force Awakens is the highest grossing domestic film of all time, and it didn't earn a Best Picture, Best Director, Best anything Actor, or Best Screenplay nomination. The original Star Wars is the second highest grossing domestic movie all time when adjusting for inflation, and did earn a Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Original Screenplay nomination in 1977, but lost all three to friggin' Annie Hall.

#OscarsSoWhite: Does The Academy Have A Race Problem? Part II

The #OscarsSoWhite hashtag was born in 2014 after the 2015 Oscar nominations were released. The Academy failed to nominate an actor or director of color which led many of us to ponder the state of this seemingly antiquated institution. I even chimed in on the issue wondering if The Academy had a race problem last year. Last year, I felt as if the lack of nominations for people was not the fault of The Academy, but basically the result of Hollywood’s latent racism. I didn’t feel as if it was The Academy’s fault that they weren’t able to nominate quality from people of color that wasn’t there (and frankly even if The Academy did nominate Selma, the larger lack of quality to choose from still remains).

However, that argument just doesn’t hold as much water today where, for the second year in a row, the Oscars are still so white. There most certainly is still a lack of opportunity for people of color to tell their stories, but there were plenty of deserving nominations for people of color at this year’s Oscars and plenty of ways to make the Oscar nominations more diverse while still honoring craft and talent. 

Brooklyn: The Most Charming Film of 2015

Maybe because I saw Brooklyn immediately after watching the incredibly dark and somewhat boring The Revenant and Room, or maybe because Brooklyn is just a great film that stands on its own in its own right, but I really enjoyed this film. Brooklyn is a romantic tale starring Saoirse (rhymes with inertia) Ronan as an Irish immigrant coming to America in the early 1950's. A girl with lots of potential, but no promise, Ronan's Ellis hops on a boat to find a better life for herself in New York City. She gets a job at a local retail store and eats up meeting a nice and incredibly charming Italian boy played by Emory Cohen. The two meet and fall in love. There's not a whole not to the story itself, but it's the execution that makes it so exquisite.

Part of the charm of Brooklyn is that there's very little that goes wrong. Normally tension and drama are necessary for a story to work, but the lack of it in Brooklyn that makes it so endearing and watchable. You see Ellis grow stronger as she comes into her own in The Big City, and you see how that affects her relationship not only with Cohen's Tony, but with her housemates. Ellis lives in a boarding house, and the scenes where Ellis and her housemates (most notably the banter between the characters played by Emily Bett Rickards and Eve Macklin and the Den Mother played by Mary O'Driscoll) eat dinner are some of the best parts of the film. Brooklyn is a film about living and enjoying your life, and by having these characters grow and charm their way into your hearts, you'll love it from not giving you the normal melodrama you'd expect from a romantic movie.

Brooklyn is what Nicholas Sparks adaptions should aspire to become; romantic without feeling cheesy or forced. A film where you root for the main characters to get together and where you know the main characters will get there without being forced to watch unnecessary obstacles. There most certainly are obstacles to Ellis's and Tony's relationship, that's the entire third act of the film, but it feels earnest and earned in Brooklyn.

Ultimately, Brooklyn is a film that will just make you happy. It's pleasant and enjoyable, and I'm glad it got nominated for Best Picture. The original intent of expanding the Best Picture nominees was so that great tent pole films like The Dark Knight wouldn't get snubbed. Ironically, the big tent pole film of 2015, Mad Max: Fury Road, probably would have gotten a Best Picture nomination no matter what and it's the smaller Brooklyn that ended up being the beneficiary of The Dark Knight Rule. Brooklyn is the reason that I love being an Oscar competitionist. It's the type of film I wouldn't have probably seen normally, and I film I would strongly recommend to all.

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