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Victor Dwyer
I've got to ask you, Mr. Oscar, and give it to me straight: Has turning 80 got you peeved? Because you are in one strange mood this year. Your short lists are long on baseness, terror, regret, and on films whose titles alone — No Country for Old Men, There Will Be Blood, The Savages, Atonement — point to your foul disposition. And the acting you encourage: Daniel Day-Lewis and Javier Bardem as psychopaths, Johnny Depp as a throat-slitting barber, Viggo Mortensen as an eye-impaling hit man, Julie Christie and Marion Cotillard each a doomed paramour. You've pretty much left it up to Juno's perky, pregnant Ellen Page to keep us from serving our guests martinis shaken with Zoloft on Sunday night.
Johanna Schneller: Well, maybe I need that Zoloftini (Victor, you should patent that now and retire), but I'm thrilled with this year's list. All 20 acting nominees deserve to be there; ditto the 10 screenwriters, five directors and most of the best-picture nominees. (I'm not a big fan of Atonement. To me it's like a local news anchor, handsome but hollow.)
This year's honorees are about filmmaking at its best. Not box office, not who's "owed" a nomination, no fake nod to some oldster. And about all this darkness in the material — well, guess what folks, life is dark. Spouses and parents die, greed makes people brutal, hideous accidents happen. Art is supposed to show us that stuff, to illuminate life's corners, to impress upon us that we're not alone. Obviously, not all movies can be classified as art. This list can.
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Elizabeth Renzetti: The thing that I loved this year was the importance of artifice. The best films were so over-the-top, so rococo in their violence and baroque in their construction, so arch in dialogue, that it was like a big finger up to naturalism. Thank God for it. I think the most conventional Oscar-nominated movie I saw was Sweeney Todd, and when Tim Burton's delivering the normal, you know you should lock the doors. And yes, Atonement's a pretty show dog, but it won't make it to the ribbons with all these bloodthirsty terriers around.
Victor: Vacuous it is, but it won the Golden Globe for best drama, and the best-film BAFTA in Britain, although in a year when bleak's the new black, maybe that's because the first half-hour felt like a horror movie. As the snitch from hell, who knows whoopy when she barges in on it, saucer-eyed supporting-actress nominee Saoirse Ronan was right out of Village of the Damned.
As for there not being a single babe on the list, Johanna, two words: Viggo Mortensen. He's a good enough actor, but the academy would have been more forthright had it also nominated his (formerly) private parts in their supporting roles in the Turkish blood-bath scene.
Johanna: At the risk of being the most earnest panelist ever, Viggo (we're on a first-name basis, in my mind) earned and deserves his nomination. Bless him for not figuring out some way to coyly cover up in the sauna. Think of Demi Moore's ridiculously modest blow-drying scene in Striptease — she's a stripper, but she wears a towel while alone in her bathroom at home? Or the post-coital scene in Notting Hill, where Julia Roberts and Hugh Grant discuss her breasts for five minutes, but only peek at them under a sheet. In an honest film, these people would have been uncovered, and that insistence on the real made a huge impact in Eastern Promises.
Elizabeth: Yes, Viggo seemed authentically terrifying, not that I've ever met a finger-chopping Russian gangster. However, nothing I lived through this cinematic year was as heart-stopping and awful as the moment they sewed up poor Jean-Dominique's one eye in The Diving Be ll and the Butterfly. If they'd called it My Left Eyelid maybe actor Mathieu Amalric would have got the nomination he deserves. Every major character in the films we're talking about was trapped somehow — Juno by her growing belly, Julie Christie's Fiona by her deteriorating mind, Daniel Plainview by his psychosis — but no image was as potent as the impotent man flailing in his diving bell.
Johanna: That's the greatest thing about this year's nominees: They don't flinch. That is so welcome right now, not just because the world is chaotic or scary or at war; not because of the recession or the election. It's welcome because so much pop culture is willing, even eager, to dive straight into the toilet, to be as low, as mind-numbing, as flinch-y as possible. Pop culture is too often flattened by committee decisions, by pandering and compromise. These films don't compromise.
Elizabeth: Not one of them seems designed by committee. Even if There Will Be Blood or No Country seem crazed to the eye at first, both have a perfect internal logic. It's like looking at a Gaudi building and realizing the explosion is actually a set of rules. Think about some of the movies that have been nominated for best picture in the past — Fatal Attraction, Working Girl, The Prince of Tides, in the name of all that's holy — and you'll want to offer up a goat to the movie gods of 2007.
