I feel very caveat-y about weighing in because a) I've seen few of the nominated films and b) I missed the first.2.5 hours of the ceremony. I actually can't recommend this strategy highly enough; you see most of the good stuff and get to hold on to your soul. You do miss all the comedy, though: were the boys good? I rate that last joke about Avatar now being in the past about a B.
First things first: a little gloating. I totally called White Ribbon losing out on best foreign film. That shit's way too dark for the Academy.
Sunday night mostly made me feel really guilty, because I feel like every man I know who's really into film has been telling me about how great Kathryn Bigelow is and I have yet to see any of her films. It's a not particularly nice reminder of how much I stay inside my comfort zone. I don't consider myself to be a particularly girly girl, but I think because academically my interests lie along the lines of sex and gender, I tend to watch a certain subset of films and maybe I don't step outside it enough. But I'm seeing The Hurt Locker Monday night and you shall have my thoughts.
Again, I have yet to see the movies involved, but it's hard not to see Sunday night's proceedings as a triumph of all that's right in the world over the forces of doom and gloom. And even as I type that, I feel it's not really fair. Cameron is a purveyor of shmaltz and there's a legitimate place in the world for that. I haven't seen it in a long time, but I'm going to tentatively argue that Titanic is how you do shmaltz well. And just because his movies are popular doesn't mean they're easy to make. The technological innovations of Avatar have been well established.
It's just that normally the Academy loves shmaltz, you know? Prizes it above all other things. So to have some more complex virtues be rewarded for a change just felt really gratifying.
I thought it was interesting that Bigelow mentioned film being a collaborative process. She's absolutely right of course; but i wondered if it didn't play into gender stereotypes; women ate collaborators, men are mavericks. Of course, the most auteurist of the auteurs, Hitchcock, assembled a crack team with the likes of Bernard Hermann and Saul Bass that he worked with again and again, and Citizen Kane wouldn't be Citizen Kane without the gorgeous deep-focus photography of Greg Toland.
The other nagging question I had was about the particularities of Bigelow as our first female winner. She's a director who works in a very specific, very badass milieu and I wonder if (not to disparage in any way her achievements) that's why she was an OK choice. In other words, is she an acceptable woman winner because her movies are so butch?
