On This Year’s Oscar Line-Up

This year’s draw of Oscar-nominated films is one of the strongest in recent memory. It’s not as oppressively cynical as 2007’s line-up, that featured the stoic ruthlessness of capitalists (There Will Be Blood), or the stark reminder the West hasn’t improved much since it’s more heady days of lawlessness (No Country For Old Men). Jon Stewart was spot-on when he quipped the most lighthearted screener of the year was about teenage pregnancy (Juno).

But take away that strong year in film, a sort of return to the auteur days of Hollywood, and the start to the new millennium was an overall bummer. Some of the winners were veritable duds, achievements in production rather than actual film making, especially the first four best picture winners of the 2000s, The Gladiator, A
Beautiful Mind, Chicago, and (deal with it) Lord of The Rings: The Return of the King.

But whereas the best films of 2007 reflected the sapped vitality and grim outlook of our country following half a decade of two wars, a scornful Democratic primary, and the tell-tale signs of an economy about to unravel, the awards season recognizing the best of 2010 offers us more choice in feeling, and commentary on a year that paired hope and resignation in a trying minuet.

The Social Network, this writer’s favorite, did more than just tell the imagined story of a multi-billion dollar company. David Fincher and Aaron Sorkin, playing loose with the details because the real Facebook wouldn’t cooperate with the film-making, managed to distill what’s most fascinating about social networking: in our efforts to be inter-connected, a callousness and social ineptitude emerge, feeding on the solipsism that comes from being tied to a media device all day. It’s either ironic or very appropriate Harvard’s biggest loser created a program that lets hundreds of millions of people remind themselves of how much fun they have.

The diffuse nature of social interaction, and its pitfalls, on display in The Social Network is quite the opposite of what’s going on in The King’s Speech. A figurehead charged with comforting a declining empire must overcome a speech impediment to perform his one meaningful role. The film harks to a time when paternalism was king, and social interaction was much more formalized, and unilateral. The audience is comforted by Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, wife of George VI, wryly putting royal pageantry on its head when first meeting the family of her husband’s speech therapist. She democratizes the relationship between her and a commoner, allowing for an open exchange in a country (still) bedeviled by socio-economic roles. But despite the comity of the scene, and the royal family’s good-natured attitude to the Logue household, the relationship isn’t dynamic, but permissive. One side allows the other to engender itself, and there are enough social walls to cut-off the ‘friendship’ at any moment.

The Social Network exists in a world where interaction isn’t a one-way street, or even a two-street; it’s multilateral, a nexus of inputs that shapes the zeitgeist for social critics who don’t have to mime nearly as much to get a handle on what’s making the population tick. Except for the occasional labor dispute in Britain, the spirit of the times was determined by the upper rungs of the kingdom almost exclusively.

On the other hand, it’s too reductive to paint the best films of 2010 as motifs representing dueling generations. Reviving a film that was the swan song for John Wayne (True Grit) is as much a desire to bank on Hollywood’s more glorious (read: racially and sexually puritan) period as it is a quixotic look into how much easier it must have been to make a movie people enjoyed. The King’s Speech is similar in that regard. Both films are excellent, but they pay tribute to an era that was a bit too antiseptic.

The remaining films, meanwhile, are by no means a mimesis of contemporary America. The Kids Are Alright is progressive only in the family arrangement it depicts; take away the gay pairing and you have a haughty, mildly racist, upper middle-class family with one working parent and a stay-at-home mom. Most families aren’t gay, and very few are wealthy. Rarely are people afforded enough second chances to score a payday, and if The Fighter tells us anything, it’s that crawling out of squalor is the exception, not the rule. The Black Swan is timelessly neurotic, but hardly youthful. It reflects on nothing specific for this generation—other than it’s a bad choice to adopt the rictis of obsession from your sociopathic mother. And Blue Valentine is a 21^st century reminder love is hard, especially for the anti-hero worshipping hipsters permanently clad in the livery of 70’s Lower East Side.

What’s most interesting, though, is that the featured films are exercises in dissemblance. Madness is slowly uncovered, a sperm-donor is revealed, and the cloistered affair of a young couple erupts like a supernova. Even the invasiveness of Facebook is countered by the hostility Jesse Eisenberg’s Zuckerberg has in store for his interrogators. This seems to be a growing novelty—we’re still watching films where privacy is possible.

Nonetheless, there’s hope in these films; the worst, it seems, has bottomed out. We’re no longer running scared like we did in 2007. The films of 2010 give us hope in the sanctity of close relations, in the backdrop of a raw and very exposed world.

Mikhail Zinshteyn is a staff writer for Campus Progress. You can e-mail him at mzinshteyn@googlemail.com.

Related Stories

• HBO’s ‘Girls’—More Progressive Than Carrie Bradshaw, But Still White-Only
• British TV Ad Asks: Watching Yourself, ‘Would You See Rape?’
• Fashion Line Refuses to Reveal Aboriginal Artist Behind Newest Collection
• Transgender Miss Universe Contestant Cleared for Competition [UPDATED]
• Why A Diverse ‘Dancing with the Stars’ Cast Isn’t Making Progress