Picked up the pieces while watching every Best Picture winner in order.

There were several films that pleasantly surprised me and other films that disappointed me. At the time I started this exercise, I hadn’t seen 42 of the 86 films that at that time had won Best Picture. Birdman won when I was roughly half way through. Some notable pleasant surprises were A Man For All Seasons, which I put in my top 10 favorite Best Picture winners; The Best Years of Our Lives, which is textbook technical filmmaking with a captivating story; The Greatest Show on Earth, which had a much better story than I anticipated it would; Ben-Hur, which I’d always heard was a great film, but it was even better than I was expecting; and Crash, which is the type of film I generally dislike, but had such powerful performances from the actors and had such a gut-wrenchingly emotional ending that I was greatly moved by it.

Some notable disappointments are Gentlemen’s Agreement, this Gregory Peck film should have been powerful, but was all talk and too preachy; Chariots of Fire, a film that I went into with low expectations, and I was still disappointed; The Broadway Melody, which was the first “talkie” to win, and I was expecting a more complete film than the one I saw; The Life of Emile Zola, which was otherwise a good film, but missed out on an opportunity to be great by blowing off the social issues within the story; Driving Miss Daisy, a film that came close several times to being very dramatic, but then would back away for fear of making things uncomfortable for the characters.

One of the best things that happened for me while I was watching these films was my re-exposure to films that I swore I’d never see again, or at the very least had no desire to see again. I’m talking about films like Platoon and Schindler’s List which I saw in the theater when each one came out. I’m also talking about The Deer Hunter, which I saw when I was in college. All of those films scarred me on my initial viewings of them, and I never wanted to put myself through watching them again. Then I had to for this exercise, and I was dreading each film as they approached. Then, without exception I realized after watching each of them that they were all brilliant. With the benefit of time, maturity and a film degree I can now see that all of those films scarred me precisely because they were great films that did exactly what they needed to do. I would certainly re-watch any of them now at a heartbeat.

On the same note, this project also forced me to watch films that I either had always wanted to see but never gave myself the time, or otherwise wouldn’t have been interested in seeing. The aforementioned A Man For All Seasons is one of those films. I can’t imagine a scenario where I would have just come across that film, thought that it looked interesting and watched it. It wouldn’t have happened, and I’m sure that there are many people out there who have never seen that film, perhaps don’t know it exists, and even if they do know it exists they have no desire to see it. Well this exercise made me see it, and I couldn’t be happier that it did, because I was missing out on a great film for no other reason than my own ignorance. I can’t recommend that film highly enough. If you haven’t seen it, find a copy and see it as soon as you can. The Best Years of Our Lives was another film like that. Yes, I’d seen the title on the AFI top 100 list, but I still had no real hard desire to see it, again due to my own ignorance. But it’s a powerful and extremely well-crafted film that deserves your attention.

There were also the films that I had always wanted to see but had never gotten to like Ben-Hur, Patton, The Bridge on the River Kwai, All Quiet on the Western Front, All About Eve, From Here to Eternity, and Midnight Cowboy. All of these films were great in their own way, and I feel like I have a better understanding for the language and history and craft of filmmaking for having seen them. They all are exceptional films with great stories, powerful themes and stirring performances that will leave you wanting more from each one that you see. They’re films that, while you’re watching them, you don’t want them to end because they’re giving you such a great storytelling experience.

I tried looking for trends, but there weren’t a ton. Two of the first three winners used World War I as a back drop. World War II played a big part in several winners in the 40’s and 50’s. Also, starting in 1956, four straight winners were shot in CinemaScope or some other widescreen format. All four of those films were also in color, and the streak of widescreen color films would be broken by The Apartment in 1960, but at least two of those four films beat out what would prove historically to be more deserving pictures that were in black and white. One other interesting trend was between 1958 and 1968, five of the eleven winners were musicals.

I ended every blog by answering the question, “Did the Academy get it right?” About half the time the answer was no, and some times that was due to my personal taste and other times that was due to which films have stood the test of time and become classics, or at least remembered as great films. One thing that quite often put the answer in context was the time it was released and what was happening in society and around the world. For instance, one of the great Oscar mistakes was in 1944 when Going My Way beat Double Indemnity. I think most people would watch those two films today and come away thinking that Double Indemnity was the superior film. But coming to the end of World War II and on the heels of the Great Depression, it’s not surprising to see why the former won over the latter. Double Indemnity is the purest of film noir. It’s a film about bad people doing bad things that end badly for them. It has a downer of an ending where the anti-hero gets his comeuppance, but we still don’t feel good about it. Going My Way is a musical with Bing Crosby where he plays a priest who saves a failing parish by turning local street kids into an alter boy’s chorus. The day is saved and everyone feels good at the end. With that context, it’s not surprising at all that a feel-good film like that would be rewarded with the Oscar for Best Picture.

And as the project went along, I found myself also carving out time to watch as many of the nominated films that I hadn’t seen as well. I knew if I was being bold enough to determine the worthiness of the winner, then I also had to see as many of the losers as possible. Many of them I had seen at various points of my life, but many I had not. A lot of the earlier films were too difficult to find, but it became easier to do as the project wore on. I must say that knowing all of these films now has enriched my life. Not because I was watching movies, per se, but because I was exposing myself to stories. If you want to be a storyteller, then you need to know a lot of stories. If you want to be a filmmaker or a writer or a producer, these are all films that you should know and that you should know well.

Overall this was an enlightening and fascinating project. Most of all, however, it was entertaining. With a few exceptions even the films that shouldn’t have won were still fine films. I would recommend doing this exercise to anyone who is interested in movies and wants to take a walk through the history of American cinema.

94. Tom Jones – A bawdy and Avant-garde English comedy that was sloppily made and boring to watch.

93. The Broadway Melody – The first “talkie” to win. This film demonstrated why synced sound set movie-making back by a decade or more.

92. Around the World in 80 Days – A visual spectacle that is too long with characters we care nothing about.

91. An American in Paris – Great singing and dancing; terrible storytelling.

90. Oliver! – Overall not a good film, but was nearly saved by a terrific third act.

89. The Lost Weekend – Nothing more than a makeup call to Billy Wilder for Double Indemnity not winning the previous year. There are some interesting things going on, but you need to be able to root for the main character, and I couldn’t get engaged with him.

88. Gigi – This is a film with many memorable songs, but a completely forgettable story and uninteresting characters. It also hasn’t aged well.

87. Gentleman’s Agreement – Perhaps the most frustrating of the Best Picture winners, this film tried to make a statement about institutional anti-Semitism, but came off as preachy and was ultimately ineffective.

86. Going My Way – A nice film, but not a great one. It probably won on sentimentality, but beating Double Indemnity is one of Oscar’s greatest mistakes.

85. Cavalcade – Following the lives of well-to-do Londoners from New Year’s Eve 1899-1933, the triumphs and tragedies of the early 20^th Century play themselves out in this melodramatic film that might have been more at home on the stage than the screen.

84. Chariots of Fire – This is one of the most overrated and least deserving of all of the winners. Vangelis’ score leaves it terribly dated and the story lacks organization, drama and tension.

83. Terms of Endearment – The saving graces for this film are the terrific performances by Shirley MacClaine and Jack Nicholson. Otherwise it’s little more than a movie-of-the-week.

82. Marty – At 90 minutes, it’s the shortest Best Picture winner, and that’s too bad, because a longer film would have allowed more development in the main relationship and more time for drama to build. This could have been a great film, but the opportunity was missed.

81. Cimarron – An epic film about the western expansion and the toll it took on the land and the people.

80. Driving Miss Daisy – Another one of the least deserving winners, considering what was nominated against it. It has very strong thematic elements about friendship and aging, but a meandering and poorly structured plot.

79. How Green Was My Valley – One of the great injustices of Oscar history was this film winning the Oscar over Citizen Kane. It’s not a terrible film, and actually has some strong thematic elements in regards to capitalism, environmentalism and family. However, it’s long and slow and boring and wasn’t the best movie of the year.

78. All The King’s Men – A powerful story about how power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely as a well-meaning public servant becomes a corrupt politician as his power grows.

77. The Last Emperor – A beautiful film about the difficult transition from one historical era to the next and how it affected a simple man who was forced to live a complex existence.

76. Wings – The very first Best Picture winner, and a sophisticated anti-war piece that had some surprisingly effective special effects and a riveting story. For 83 years it was the only silent film to win the award.

75. The Greatest Show on Earth – I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed this film. Lots of subplots, but it was mainly about the struggle to keep the circus afloat. Plus it had the added benefit of Jimmy Stewart in clown makeup for the whole film.

74. Gandhi – Bio-pic of the great Indian leader who accomplished unprecedented political change through peaceful protest. Ben Kingsley deservedly won Best Actor, and this epic film shows that even when dreams work out, they sometimes don’t become what you thought they would. Despite its epic scope, the film drags.

73. Ordinary People – Robert Redford’s directorial debut was another 80’s Best Picture winner that felt like it should have been a movie-of-the-week. However, the performances of Timothy Hutton, Donald Sutherland and Mary Tyler-Moore give this dramatic film an ocean of emotion.

72. Mrs. Miniver – An English woman copes with the trials and tribulations of World War II, even as it comes to her very doorstep in the countryside.

71. West Side Story – A modern musical adaptation of Romeo and Juliet with memorable songs and strong performances. While it’s a good film, it would be more at home on Broadway than on the big screen.

70. Midnight Cowboy – One of the iconic films of the 60’s that was a metaphor for the transition and upheaval the country was going through at the time. That makes it very much of its time, and it doesn’t hold up well through a more modern perspective.

69. The Life of Emile Zola – A bio-pic of the writer of J’Accuse, an essay that exposed a corrupt government and eventually set an innocent man free. It’s a powerful film, but it missed out on an opportunity to make a statement about institutional anti-Semitism.

68. Moonlight – One of the more controversial winners, this is a film about finding yourself in a world that wants to define you based on how you were born. It’s a deep and powerful film.

67. The English Patient – The acting of Ralph Feinnes won Best Picture for this movie. There are also stellar performances from Juliette Binoche, Willem Dafoe and Kristen Scott Thomas. Outstanding acting. Mediocre story telling.

66. My Fair Lady – A grandiose musical that pulls out all the stops. The songs are great, but the story is too long and we’re halfway through the film before the story really gets going. Even the individual scenes are insufferably too long.

65. Out of Africa – Another film that was too drawn out and took too long to get going. I also had a hard time rooting for the main character, as she brings a lot of her problems onto herself and doesn’t go through any real character growth.

64. Parasite – The first foreign language film to win Best Picture, this was a complex story about a struggling family masquerading as something else in order to gain access to the wealth and privilege of a wealthy family. This is a fun film until it isn’t. It gets real dark real fast.

63. Chicago – The first musical in more than a generation to win, this film also suffers from a lack of characters to root for, which makes the story less compelling.

62. Titanic – This film perfectly demonstrates James Cameron’s strengths and weaknesses as a director. The first half, which is mainly romance, drama and character driven is almost unwatchable. The second half when the ship starts to sink and is action driven is riveting and highly entertaining.

61. The Shape of Water – A fantasy film that was surreal and strange. At its core, it was a story of forbidden love.

60. Slumdog Millionaire – A true rags to riches story about never giving up on your dreams, no matter how low you start on life’s ladder. This is an uplifting and inspiring film, although some parts are very hard to watch.

59. The Hurt Locker – A gripping and no-holds-barred look at the trauma and monotony of a soldier’s life during the Iraq war, and the difficulties these men had acclimating back into regular society.

58. A Beautiful Mind – A true story of a genius code breaker and mathematician, as well as the internal demons that followed him throughout his life and almost ruined him.

57. Hamlet – Laurence Olivier produced this accessible version of one of Shakespeare’s best known works. Excellent performances by Olivier and Jean Simmons help make this a film anyone could love without having to be a Shakespeare aficionado.

56. Crash – An ensemble cast with disparate stories that all come together at the end deal with racial tension and bigotry in modern day Los Angeles. This is a strong film with a powerful, yet depressing ending, and leaves us feeling pessimistic about our current state.

55. The Silence of the Lambs – The only horror movie to win Best Picture, it has not held up over time. However, it has clearly influences many of the cop shows that have dominated television over the past decade and a half.

54. The French Connection – One of the few straight action films to win Best Picture. This film had an interesting narrative and entertaining action, but lacked the strong thematic issues you usually find in a Best Picture winner.

53. Annie Hall – One of Woody Allen’s signature films, this film shows depth in relationships and is ultimately character driven. It’s a very funny film, but should not have beaten Star Wars.

52 The Great Ziegfeld – This is a Musical/Bio-Pic of the creator of the Ziegfeld Follies, and follows him through the ups and downs of his career from a simple vaudevillian to a man who built and lost one of the great entertainment empires in history.

51. Nomadland – A story of coping with loss. The main character has to lose who she was to find out who she is and who she can be. It’s a long and slow story, but is thematically, one of the strongest winners in recent memory.

50. From Here to Eternity – This film is much more than the scene of Burt Lancaster and Deborah Kerr kissing on the beach. It’s a powerful World War II drama about friendship, loyalty and love, and how to hold on to those things when the entire world is coming apart around you.

49. Rebecca – A haunting story with complex characters and relationships. Directed by Alfred Hitchcock, this film masterfully reveals only what is necessary when it is necessary. There are no wasted words and there is no wasted time.

48. The King’s Speech – This is an elegant film about overcoming internal and external adversity to achieve greatness that no one expected you had.

47. You Can’t Take it With You – A film that provided farcical escapism for movie audiences in the depths of the Great Depression. This film was a romantic comedy that was clever, effusive and loose all at the same time, and yet still told a tight and disciplined story.

46. Green Book – One of the more controversial winners, this was a film that was based on a true story about men of vastly different backgrounds learning about each other and learning to appreciate each other.

45. The Sting – Powerhouse actors Robert Redford and Paul Newman run a con on Robert Shaw as revenge for his killing of their friend. This film has high entertainment value and is fun to watch, but doesn’t quite feel like a Best Picture winner.

44. The Artist – The first silent film in more than 80 years to win Best Picture, this film showed the death of the silent film era and one man’s futile attempt to hang on to the glory that left him and would not return unless he changed with the times.

43. Spotlight – A riveting and powerful film about the Boston Globe uncovering the sexual abuse scandal in the Catholic church. An all-star cast provides powerful performances in a story that shows the dangers of loyalty and provincialism.

42. Rain Man – A man discovers that a brother he never knew he had is an autistic savant and holds the key to a large inheritance. What he unlocks instead is the door to his own humanity and suppressed emotions.

41. The Departed – Loosely based on Boston mob boss Whitey Bulger, this crime drama keeps us guessing and keeps us on the edges of our seats. Great performances. Great direction. Great film.

40. All About Eve – Another film about holding on to glory that is slipping away and finding redemption in your new place in the world. Ironically that redemption brings a form of respect that could never have been achieved otherwise.

39. Mutiny on the Bounty – A story that pits doing your duty against doing the right thing. It’s a classic bit of conflict that creates a very dramatic story. It also has terrific acting as the three main stars were all nominated for Best Actor.

38. No Country for Old Men – Suspenseful and sinister, this Coen Brothers film follows a series of dishonorable characters, most of whom have just enough positive traits to be likable. If not for an anti-climactic ending, this film would rank even higher.

37. Gladiator – Ridley Scott’s epic about a Roman General sold into slavery after his wife and child are murdered by a usurper emperor. This is a dramatic, action-filled and bloody spectacle that is both entertaining and thoughtful.

36. Braveheart – Mel Gibson’s epic story about William Wallace and his fight for Scottish freedom from English oppression. More than your typical action fare, this is a story about the lengths a man will go to for love.

35. Forrest Gump – This is a highly episodic film that is also about the lengths a man will go to for love, and the only think that gets it to rate this high is the emotional punch that it packs, along with Tom Hanks’ Oscar winning performance.

34. All Quiet of the Western Front – An early anti-war film that exposed the folly of World War I and the different attitudes between the people who stayed home and the men who actually went to fight. It’s a very sophisticated rendition of the traumatic experience they suffered.

33. Unforgiven – Clint Eastwood’s last western about a retired gunfighter who is dragged back into the business. This is a powerful film that uses violence to create an anti-violence message.

32. Shakespeare in Love – One of the most controversial winners, this film is a romantic comedy at its core, and sets up the story so that it is told in a parallel fashion to Romeo and Juliet. Whether or not yo agree with it winning Best Picture, you still have to admit that this is a fine film.

31. Grand Hotel – A story about lost souls, some of whom find solace in the hotel and others of whom meet one sort of end or another. It actually has a strong story with great actors like Greta Garbo, Lionel Barrymore, John Barrymore, and Joan Crawford. It’s definitely worth your time.

30. The Bridge on the River Kwai – A dynamic action film about men trying to survive a Japanese labor camp and the conflicted loyalties and motivations that occur there. Not just an action film, there is enough dramatic conflict in this film to keep it interesting all the way through. This film is an example of how no one knew how to do the action/epic like Director David Lean.

29. CODA – A beautiful, witty, charming, and emotionally powerful film about a girl who is the only person who can hear in a family of deaf people. It has a classic storytelling motif of being stuck between your own desires and the needs of the ones you love.

28. Kramer Vs. Kramer – One of the most dramatic Best Picture winners, this is a film about a father starting out the story not really knowing what it takes to be a good father. Only when his ex-wife threatens to take the boy away, does he realize what he could lose. It’s an almost perfect drama.

27. The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King – The third in the epic series that closely followed the story laid out by J.R.R. Tolkien in his novel. Perhaps the least deserving film in the series to win the award, it still carries on the many strong thematic elements of the first two films. This film won largely as a tribute to the whole series.

26. The Deer Hunter – You can’t go home again. That is the overarching theme in a film about a group of young men who go through the trauma of the Vietnam War only to come home to Pennsylvania and realize that they no longer know their place in the world, resulting in tragedy. This is a quietly powerful film.

25. Patton – Bio Pic of the larger than life WWII general and his exploits in North Africa and Europe, and his fall from grace immediately after the war ended. A good mix of action and drama, along with superb acting from George C. Scott and Karl Malden make this film a winner on many levels.

24. 12 Years a Slave – A film that forces us to look inwards at one of the darkest periods in our history. This is a serious film about a serious subject that is as necessary to watch as it is difficult. Be that as it may, it is an engrossing film that demands to be noticed.

23. It Happened One Night – The mother of the modern day romantic comedy, Clark Gable and Claudette Colbert light up the screen in this romp on the road and in the bedroom decades before Harry met Sally. Using lots of suggestion and innuendo, it’s one of the first films that showed what clever screenwriting can accomplish.

22. Rocky – One of the more surprising winners, that is until you watch it again. The prototypical underdog story, this is a film that tells everyone they have a chance to be great and to go the distance, no matter how humble your beginnings or your current state. This is one of the more inspirational films of all time.

21. The Best Years of Our Lives – A long but engaging film about three WWII veterans who come home to the same town and have their lives intertwined as they each deal with their separate issues in readjusting to home and peace. Wonderful cinematography and direction add to the great performances of the actors and superbly written screenplay.

20. One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – A film about trying to beat the “system”, and helped launch Jack Nicholson to super stardom. Surprisingly this is a thinking person’s film, as the thematic elements about beating the system serve as the backbone to the whole story and motivate the characters’ actions.

19. The Sound of Music – One of the great musicals of all time, this film is almost two stories in one. It starts off about a nun trying to bring a family together before she becomes a part of that family and then they have to flee the Nazis. This is a compelling, entertaining, deep story and is one of the great films of all time.

18. American Beauty – A film about the images we project to hide the less attractive reality of our actual lives. This is a thematically deep film that has a lot to say yet never loses focus. Splendid acting and visually interesting production design and cinematography round this into a complete film that’s brilliant on multiple levels.

17. Argo – Based on a true story of the Iran Hostage Crisis, this film helped turn Ben Affleck into someone to be taken seriously as a director. It’s a serious and suspenseful film with just enough wit to keep it balanced.

16. The Apartment – The last black and white film to win until Schindler’s List, this film about loneliness and the triumph of the little guy is a marvelous comedy/drama that starts out with a simple idea and becomes a complex story with many moving parts. It’s funny and sad and thoughtful all at the same time.

15. Platoon – Oliver Stone’s seminal and autobiographical Vietnam War film that forces us to look internally and see the divisions within ourselves and our society, as well as the disconnect between the values we espouse and our actions. This is a powerful film that should not be forgotten.

14. Dances With Wolves – Kevin Costner’s epic film about the western expansion and the toll it took on the indigenous people and the environment. This is a fish-out-of-water story as an American soldier befriends a tribe of Native Americans and they learn to live together. The most dramatic aspect of this story is that it shows us what might have been just before it’s ripped away.

13. In the Heat of the Night – A contemporary story about race relations in the South in the late 60’s, and its timeliness must have played a part in its winning the award. It’s a fine film, however, on its own merits with tense drama and a compelling mystery to solve. It also has one of the great iconic lines of all time.

12. The Godfather Part II – The first sequel to win Best Picture, it tells dual stories of the Corloene’s rise to power and the current generation’s desire to maintain and expand that power. The driving theme to this film is about how power corrupts and how powerful men can be their own worst enemies.

11. On the Waterfront – This gritty film showed the struggle that working class men had to deal with in the 50’s and pokes holes in the Pollyanna view we sometimes take of that decade. Marlon Brando’s character is a simple man with a deep internal conflict that drives this very dramatic story.

10. Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) – This is a film about our struggles with transition and our attempts to hold on to a past that is always remembered as being greater than it really was. This is a terrific story and an amazingly crafted film that is a worthy entry to the Best Picture pantheon.

9. Ben-Hur – An epic film that has one of the greatest and most iconic action sequences ever filmed. This is a story about revenge and how the driving passion for that is a duel edged sword that can drive you to persevere through unlivable situations, but can also be a fire that burns you up inside.

8. A Man for All Seasons – For me this was the most pleasantly surprising film. It’s the story of Sir Thomas Moore and his refusal to approve of Henry VIII’s divorce of his wife so he could marry Ann Boleyn. This is a complex story and a thinking person’s film that requires active engagement on the part of the viewer. That effort leads to the reward of enjoying an excellent and underrated film.

7. Million Dollar Baby – Clint Eastwood’s great film about overcoming adversity and persistently chasing our dreams. It’s all worth it, even if reaching our dream comes at the ultimate price as long as you’ve squeezed everything that you can out of life. This film is tragic and uplifting at the same time.

6. Amadeus – This is a complex film about a complex character. Mozart was a musical genius but had the maturity of a child. His own inner demons and the raging jealousy of another conspire to destroy him in this dramatic, but also beautiful and witty period piece.

5. Schindler’s List – Steven Spielberg’s seminal holocaust film showed the small drops of goodness in an ocean of evil, and showed us how those small drops were able to triumph. This is one of the most difficult films to watch, but it’s also brilliant and riveting.

4. Lawrence of Arabia – One of the most beautiful films ever shot, this was the first film to really use widescreen format to its full effect as a means to help tell the story. Thematically, this is a story of man vs. nature as well as being about man’s overinflated sense of self leading to his downfall.

3. Gone With the Wind – The iconic and classic Civil War epic about a woman’s search for her place in the world as she pines for the love of a man she cannot have while refusing the love of a man willing to give it to her. This film is one of the great masterpieces of cinema history.

2. The Godfather – The mob film to which all mob films must be compared. But this film is about so much more than that. It’s about family and what men will do to take care of their families. It’s about corruption and honor and doing what is right by your family. This is a powerful film.

1. Casablanca – This is as close to a perfect film as there is for me. The structure of the screenplay, the layers in the story and the performances of the actors make this one of the greatest films of all time.

Birdman: Or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) is thisclose to being a masterpiece. The bulk of the film is told in a way that is stylized, witty and thoughtful all at the same time. This is a very entertaining film that has a well-told story, characters that are engaging and deep and have relatable issues, and a universal theme in which a man who is past his prime is trying to recapture lost glory. This is also a clever story and as the audience we’re never sure what’s happening in the mind of the main character and what’s real. That ambiguity helps keep the audience guessing (in a good way) and helps add depth to the story.

The film falls just short of being a masterpiece in my opinion due to the ending. I don’t mind the very ending so much. It’s a very open ended, and Director Alejandro González Iñárritu has purposefully stated that “the ending of the film, (it) can be interpreted as many ways as there are seats in the theater.” A lot of times an open ended ending like this can enhance the overall film and allow the audience members themselves to decide how it ends. That can be risky, just ask the makers of The Sopranos. Personally, I find the very end of the film to be very uplifting (no pun in intended), as Riggan (Michael Keaton) has moved beyond the insecure nature that he’s had throughout the film and has found peace in himself and with his life.

The problem that I have is with the scene that takes place just before he’s in the hospital. His play is a triumph, and yet he believes that the lead New York Times critic is going to bury his show due to a personal grudge that she has against him. The last scene in the show calls for him to shoot himself in the head and we see him put live ammunition in a real gun and then we see him shoot himself in the head and fall to the stage. The audience then erupts in thunderous applause and we see the critic leave her seat and exit the theater. We then cut to the hospital where Riggan’s best friend and attorney Jake (Zach Galifianakis) mentions that he shot off his nose. Well, he didn’t shoot off his nose. We saw him shoot himself in the side of the head. He should be dead but he’s still alive and relatively well.

Now, this ending is so ambiguous that it’s entirely possible that the last hospital scene is taking place inside his head as he’s dying. His play is a success, he’s healed his relationship with his daughter Sam (Emma Stone), and he is at peace with what his life has become. That’s the problem with ambiguous endings. They can either be over-interpreted or under-interpreted. There are two sides to every coin, and while an ambiguous ending can allow the audience to fill in the blanks and see it how the want to see it or how they think they see it, the downside is that the audience can see it how they want to see it or how they think they see it. Sometimes that will work in your favor and other times it will work against you.

Initially it worked very much against the film makers from my point of view when I first saw this film. For whatever reason, I wasn’t in the right frame of mind when I saw it the first time. It was prior to the Oscar ceremony, and I saw it on an Academy Screener that a friend had let me borrow. I thought it was fine, but I wasn’t really blown away by it. Then when it ended the way it did, I was pissed. The film totally lost me because I wasn’t as engaged as I should have been. Watching it again this past weekend, I was fully engaged, and it was almost like I was watching a completely different film. I was more in tune with the very powerful thematic elements that were going on in the film and I was a much more willing passenger on the ride on which the film was taking me.

That’s the thing about a film like this, and the risk filmmakers run. As long as the audience is engaged in the film and are open to interpreting an ambiguous ending like that, the film will be successful. However, if the audience is not engaged, either through their own faults or because the filmmakers didn’t do enough to develop that engagement, then the film will suffer. An ambiguous ending requires voluntary participation on the part of the audience. The members of the audience have to like the fact that the ending is open to interpretation and then they have to actively work out in their brains what that interpretation will be. The first time I saw Birdman I was not engaged and was not forgiving of how the film ended.

Seeing it this past weekend, I was engaged and I was willing to participate in how I believed the story ended. Even with all of that said, however, I’m still not a huge fan of the ending. I can’t say what I would have done differently, but I think it would have been more powerful emotionally if Iñárritu had given us just a little more to hang our hats on. We’ve been following Riggan through this emotional meat grinder, and Iñárritu and Keaton did a marvelous job of getting us inside Riggan’s head and making us care deeply about what happens to him. Then Iñárritu kind of cheats us out of our emotional outlet at the end by not telling us what happened. Don’t get me wrong. The ending of Birdman was a completely valid way to end the story, and a lot of people found it very satisfying. While I appreciate it more than I did before, I was still left wanting.

My own interpretation is that Riggan dies on stage. The scene in the hospital is the last thing he thinks of as he’s dying. His nose has been rebuilt to look like a beak, and it’s allowed him to discover his true self. He has also reconciled with Sam, and once she leaves the room he can now fly to a better place. When Sam comes back to the room and sees the open window, she looks down at first, concerned. Then she looks up and sees that he’s in a better place, and she smiles, happy that he’s been able to make this transition.

Up to that point, this film is sensational. I don’t know if there is anything other than the ending about which I could be critical. Birdman has a high level of craftsmanship in all of its components. The acting is superb, and if not for a sublime performance by Eddie Redmayne in The Theory of Everything, Michael Keaton almost certainly would have walked away with the Oscar for Best Actor. Edward Norton and Emma Stone were also nominated for their performances, and they both took their acting to another level. I’ve been a fan of Emma Stone since I saw her in Crazy Stupid Love. I enjoyed her spunk and fun attitude. I enjoyed her performance even more in The Help as she took her game into material that had more gravitas, and her part in Birdman showed that she is an actress of substantial range and will likely be a part of our popular culture for at least the next couple of decades.

As far as Ed Norton, his acting chops were well established long before he performed in this film, but there is one scene in particular that really shows how great he is. Just after he’s been hired to replace an actor who was (accidentally?) injured by a falling light, he and Riggan are rehearsing the pivotal scene and Mike (Norton) puts all of his emotion and guts into the reading. When the scene ends, he stops abruptly and gives Riggan a look as though to say, “What do you think? Not bad, huh?” The acting and the timing are top notch and do so much to add to the entertainment value of the story.

I would be remiss if I didn’t say something about the cinematography and the editing. Director of photography Emmanuel Lubezki took home the Oscar for his cinematography and the editing by Douglas Crise and Stephen Mirrione is terribly under rated. This film takes place in what looks like one long take, as the camera follows the characters through the labyrinthine hallways of the theater, into their dressing rooms, onto the streets, into local bars and shops. There are several cuts, but most of them are done so seamlessly, we can’t see where they are and it just looks like the takes go on and on. What’s great about the way it’s shot and edited and that it’s frenetic. It creates an uneasy feeling in the audience because we’re used to seeing more edits. We’re used to a more mainstream style of film making than Birdman presented to us. It also gives the film a Broadway-esque feeling since the film is about putting on a play, and there is obviously no editing in a play, so we watch as the action and drama unfold around us in an organic and real-life way. It’s brilliant film making.

The strength of Birdman in my opinion is in its storytelling. This is a remarkably well-told story. We are instantly given access to the inside of Riggan’s mind. He’s a perfectly designed character who has difficult internal issues as well as a challenging external problem. We’re not sure if he really has super powers or of these events are just happening in his mind. But thematically, this is a strong film about a man trying with all of his might to relight the fire in his soul that was extinguished a long time ago. He is a man who was once on top of the world, and now he can’t even get respect from his own daughter. He’s a has-been who has surrounded himself with never-will-be’s and even his ex-wife looks at him with pity. His whole story is encapsulated in a scene where he accidentally gets shut outside the stage door in nothing but his underwear. He then has to walk around through Times Square to get in to the front door of the theater. Just like the dream that many people have had about showing up at work in just their underwear or naked, he walks the street, and people recognize him as Birdman, but no one seems to care that he’s just in his underwear. However, Riggan has a look of terrible embarrassment and discomfort. That dream is characterized by psychologists as showing feelings of anxiety and powerlessness. This external condition reflects the internal issues that Riggan is having.

The script itself is also very well written from a standpoint of dramatic structure. It hits all of the necessary beats, and when the critic tells Riggan that she’s going to destroy his show by giving him a terrible review because she personally doesn’t like him, we don’t see any way for Riggan to accomplish his goals. He needs the show to be a success to show the world that he’s still relevant, but he needs to feel relevant himself as well. Now before he even has a chance to do that, this person who has all of the power is threatening to take it away from him. He won’t be able to re-establish his career. He won’t be able to gain the respect of his daughter. His best days will be behind him and they will stay there. This is the essence of drama, and this is a script you should know if you’re an aspiring screenwriter trying to create drama in your script.

Did the Academy get it right?

It’s interesting because going into this weekend my favorite film of the year was Whiplash. I also preferred American Sniper and The Imitation Game to Birdman before re-watching it this weekend, and I must say that my mind has been changed. I still love those films very much, but Birdman is much closer to being a masterpiece than are those films, as great as they are. This was another very tough year, and many of the films nominated could have won in other years. I especially loved the tension and the drama of American Sniper and Bradley Cooper’s performance was spectacular. Boyhood was a film that generated a lot of buzz. I saw it and liked it, but to me it’s more of a work of art than a narrative film. I applaud Richard Linklater and all of the actors for taking on the herculean effort of making this film over the course of 11 years, and the end product is worth seeing for its artistic value, but it wasn’t the best film of the year. I enjoyed Selma and the aforementioned The Theory of Everything, but they were a notch below the top three. Actually, I should say the top four, because I also loved The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson is hit or miss for me, but his last two films have been by far his two best films. Although I preferred 2012’s Moonrise Kingdom to The Grand Budapest Hotel the latter was one of my top 5 favorite films of 2014, and Ralph Fiennes gave yet another stellar performance, yet again showing that he’s one of the great actors of his generation. However, Birdman was the winner for 2014, and it was it’s hard to argue against it being the best film of the year.

12 Years a Slave is the type of movie that makes you mad. Much like Platoon did nearly 30 years earlier, 12 Years a Slave forced us to confront one of the darkest periods of our history in a way that was uncomfortable, disturbing and sometimes difficult to watch. What makes it even more troubling is that it’s based on a true story. A real human being actually went through this ordeal.

This was the second time for me seeing 12 Years a Slave, the first having been when it was first released. I liked it a lot the first time I saw it, and I liked it even more this time because I think that I picked up on a few things that I missed out on the first time I saw it. Mainly, I really picked up on the thematic elements of the film when I watched it this time. I think they kind of went over my head the first time because the film was just so shocking and induced so much anger. But thematically speaking, this is a very simple, yet strong film. This is a film about survival, and we’re introduced to that theme early on. After being kidnapped and wrongfully sold into slavery, Solomon Northrop (Chiwetel Ejiofor) tries to plan an escape with another slave Clemens, who seems to be educated as well, as they sail from Washington, D.C. to New Orleans. Clemens has been a slave before and he tells Solomon that he needs to keep his education secret, and that he should just be concerned about survival. Having been a free man just days before, Solomon vows that he doesn’t want to survive; he wants to live. However, Solomon’s tune changes very quickly as he’s exposed to the brutality of slavery where every day is a fight for survival.

Another thematic element that gets heavy use in this film and is somewhat related to the idea of survival is the fight against despair. When Solomon is initially kidnapped, there is a woman slave with him named Eliza, and she has a young son and daughter with her. At the slave auction in New Orleans, Solomon and Eliza are bought by Master Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who appears for all intents and purposes to be a good man. He attempts to buy Eliza’s son, but he’s buying on credit and another man comes in and is willing to pay cash for the boy. Ford then tries to buy the daughter as well, but the auctioneer Freeman (Paul Giamatti) refuses to sell her at any price because her peak value will happen in the years to come when she gets older and can be sold for a variety of purposes.

Being taken from her children causes Eliza to fall into despair. She weeps all the way back to the plantation and she weeps nonstop after they’ve arrived. No longer able to bear it, Solomon yells at her to stop and not to fall into despair. She chastises him for not despairing over his own wife and children, to which he responds that he’s saddened every day by his separation from them, but he refuses to fall into despair. A short while later while Ford is giving Sunday services, Eliza cannot stop weeping and it draws the ire of Mrs. Ford, and the next scene shows Eliza being dragged away. At that point we see that these two thematic elements of survival and pushing back despair are what will keep Solomon alive during his ordeal.

With those dual backbones in place, we are given a compelling and riveting narrative by Director Steve McQueen and Screenwriter John Ridley. I’ve not read the book, but I would imagine that the dialogue is written in the style of the book, since it was written by Solomon Northrup himself in the mid 1800’s, and the language they use reflects those times. I must admit, there were times when I was watching it that I felt like the performances of the actors were somewhat Shakespearean. Indeed, there are times in this film where characters are conversing in a language that is clearly English, but the vocabulary is so removed from the way people naturally speak today that I felt like I was listening to dialogue that was written by Shakespeare. There are points in the script where the dialogue is in fact that poetic.

There is also great subtext to much of the dialogue, and this is certainly a screenplay with which any aspiring screenwriter should be familiar. In fact, John Ridley would win the Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay for his efforts on this script and it was one well-deserved honor. Aside from the dialogue that was poetic when it needed to be, brutal when it had to be, and was a script in which every character had a clear and individual voice, the story also had a beautifully developed structure that was so subtle and so precise that you wouldn’t even know it was there unless you were looking for it. There is a clear Hero’s Journey in this script in which all of the stages are met at the appropriate times, and the act breaks are clear as well. But again, they’re so subtle and the story flows so naturally, you don’t even notice the story’s significant changes in direction.

The first act ends when Solomon is actually sold in to slavery. That is the Crossing of the First Threshold, and the point at which there will be no return. He is out of his Ordinary World as a well-to-do musician and in to the Special World of slavery. Quite often a screenplay will change directions in the midpoint of the second act in what Christopher Vogler refers to in his book The Writer’s Journey as the Ordeal. This story has that moment when Solomon runs afoul of Tibeats, one of Ford’s men who was embarrassed one too many times by Solomon, who had a hard time initially at not showing how smart he was. Looking for any excuse to beat him, Tibeats goes after Solomon for using the wrong nails in building a barn, even though they were the ones he asked for. Solomon fights back, and Tebeats gathers some friends to hang him. However, they’re stopped by Chapin, another of Ford’s men who tells them that if they kill Solomon, they’ll owe Ford for his debt. The Ordeal happens for Solomon after Chapin chases Tibeats and his friends away, but leaves the noose on Solomon whose feet are barely touching the ground. As the rest of the people on the plantation go about their business, Solomon spends an interminable amount of time on his toes trying not to slip in the mud which would result in him hanging himself. Finally Ford shows up and cuts him down, but he has to sell him to get him out of danger because he’s certain that Tibeats will come back.

The second act ends after Solomon is betrayed by Armsby (Garrett Dillahunt). Ford could only sell Solomon to Edwin Epps (Michael Fassbender), a drunkard and pseudo-religious man who misinterprets passages from the bible to justify his quickness with the whip. Late in the second act, Armsby, a former plantation worker joins the crew to pay off a debt of his own. He befriends Solomon and gains Solomon’s trust to the point where Solomon asks him to mail a letter to people in the north who can help him. Armsby agrees to do it, but instead betrays Solomon to Epps. Epps confronts Solomon about it, but Solomon is able to convince Epps that Armsby is lying in order to curry favor for a job. We next see Solomon burning his letter in a classic all-is-lost moment as it would seem that all hope for freedom is burning with that paper. The next time we see him he has the look of someone who has fallen in to despair.

These are all subtle moments in the film that taken on their own don’t seem to be more important than the moments that surround them. They’re just the next stage of the film. But if you take these moments in context of the dramatic structure that they’re supporting, you see that they are actually very powerful moments that propel the scenes that come after them in significant ways. This film has a screenplay that is excellently written on a multitude of levels and should be studied by anyone who wants to improve any aspect of their own writing.

The third act of the film is just as well structured with the next stage of the journey being the Resurrection. In this scene, Solomon’s hope is resurrected, for this is where he meets the general contractor Bass (Brad Pitt), who has been hired by Epps to help build a gazebo. Bass is Canadian and can’t abide slavery. In a private moment, Solomon confesses to him his true identity and asks if Bass can help him. After some reluctance Bass does, and eventually we see one of Solomon’s former friends from New York arrive to take him home. The Return with the Elixir shows Solomon arriving home, 12 years later, his children grown and his daughter with a son of her own. He apologizes to them, and the family comes together in a warm and tight embrace.

I remember being somewhat afraid that this film would feel episodic. Bio-pics always have that danger because a person’s life rarely fits naturally into a dramatic structure where the drama builds over time and scenes flow naturally into each other. 12 Years a Slave accomplishes that on a number of levels. There is a natural progression to the storytelling that doesn’t ever feel episodic and has a natural tension that rises right up until the very end.

There is all of this, and I haven’t even gotten to the Oscar-winning performance of Lupita Nyong’o as Patsey, the slave who has drawn the perverted attention of Epps and the ire of his wife. Nyong’o’s performance was at once fragile and delicate and then tempered and strong. There is a scene where she begs Solomon to take her down to the river and drown her and then bury her in a lonesome grave. Solomon refuses obviously, but Patsy tells him that God isn’t here and there is nothing in her life but pain. A few scenes later, Patsy is missing, but then comes back with soap that she borrowed from a neighboring planter’s wife. Enraged with jealousy, but unable to whip her himself, Epps orders Solomon to do his dirty work. Solomon is unable to do it until Epps threatens the lives of all of the slaves there. He finally starts whipping her lightly until Epps’ threats become all too real, and Solomon has to really let her have it. When Solomon stops, Epps pulls the whip from him and mercilessly pounds her to the point where we see her flesh coming off with every hit. During the next scene as the other slaves apply salve to her skin, she gives a painful look to Solomon that seems to say, this wouldn’t have happened if you had just done what I asked. It’s heartbreaking and real.

Did the Academy get it right?

It’s hard to say otherwise, although it’s actually not the film that I would have voted for. There were nine films nominated for Best Picture of 2013, and I break them in to three tiers in terms of how deserving they were for the Oscar. The bottom tier is Philomena, Nebraska and Her. I liked all of them, but didn’t love any of them. To be honest, I’m not sure how Philomena got nominated. Judy Dench is awesome in it, and it’s a fine film, but it isn’t a great one. I know a lot of people really liked Nebraska, and I liked it a lot as well. I thought it was a very thoughtful and engaging film, but I didn’t think it was quite at the level of a Best Picture Winner. I could say the same thing about Her. In fact, I loved the message that Spike Jonze was trying to make in Her much more than I liked his execution of the story.

The second tier was made up of American Hustle, Dallas Buyers Club and Gravity. The latter was an amazing film to look at and an amazing piece of art, but if you watch it again you’ll see that it has a really boring story, a lead character who is not particularly engaging and the film doesn’t really give us much reason to care about anything. American Hustle was a fun caper movie with terrific performances by all of the actors, but somehow came out to be less than the sum of its parts. Matthew McConaughey won Best Actor for his performance in Dallas Buyers Club as a homophobic man who becomes afflicted with HIV and needs to go around the FDA in order to find treatments for himself and others afflicted. In doing so he becomes a hero to the gay community.

The top tier nominees for me in 2014 included 12 Years a Slave, Captain Phillips and The Wolf of Wall Street. Any one of those films could have won Best Picture and I wouldn’t have had a problem with it. I thought that Wolf of Wall Street was an amazingly entertaining film that was like a 2 and a half hour roller coaster ride. It was fun. It was irreverent. And if not for McConaughey’s performance, Leonardo DiCaprio would have been a shoe-in for Best Actor with the performance that he gave. I’ve been through the merits of 12 Years a Slave, and it was an amazing film to be sure. However, the film that would have had my vote in 2013 was Captain Phillips. Much like 12 Years a Slave, this was a film about survival; however Captain Phillips handled that thematic element in a different way where we’re on the edge the whole way through. Once the second act starts, Captain Phillips and his crew could all be killed at any given moment. It is so intense and there is such a release at the end that it is impossible for me to watch that film without being overcome with emotion at the end of it. With all that in mind, I’ll say that the Academy did get it right in 2013, but there were three possible right answers.

Argo is one of my favorite films of the decade. This is a balanced film that does everything that it needs to do. It’s a mature film that is serious and yet has just the right amount of wit and humor and sarcasm to make it entertaining without being overly heavy and too dark. Argo is as tense as it is entertaining and that tension runs from the opening moments right through to the last few minutes of the film. I remember thinking the first time that I was watching the film that there was no way that it could keep up this pace, and yet it did without ever doing anything absurd or unrealistic. Again, this is a mature film that showed a new maturity for Director Ben Affleck and completely changed Hollywood’s perception of the star.

Affleck had been in Hollywood for 20 years before he made Argo, starting out in films like Dazed and Confused and making a name for himself by co-writing Good Will Hunting as well as costarring in it with Matt Damon. But after that film was nominated for Best Picture and won Affleck and Damon the Oscar for Best Original Screenplay, Affleck’s career went through several peaks and valleys with the valleys outnumbering the peaks, and there were many rumblings about the tenability of his career. Then Affleck made a name for himself as a director with Gone Baby Gone in 2007, which was critically acclaimed (scoring 94% on Rotten Tomatoes), but had a somewhat lackluster performance at the box office. Affleck came into his own as a director with The Town (93% on Rotten Tomatoes and $92 million domestically), a crime drama about robbing banks in Charlestown, MA. Both are excellent films, and shows the potential that Affleck has as a director, and reinvigorated his career.

Argo took Affleck’s career to the next level, and one of the great Oscar tragedies of the Academy’s history is the fact that he wasn’t even nominated for Best Director, because this is an exceptionally well-made film. I say that because there is a level of detail in Argo that you don’t often see in films that are based on true stories. I realize that some of the story was embellished for dramatic purposes, but watch the end credits where they show the actors next to the real life people that they played. They did an astounding job of making the actors look almost exactly like the real people. They then took news footage of the actual storming of the American Embassy, as well as footage from Tehran during the hostage crisis, and matched it with what they were shooting in the film to an incredibly close degree.

As far as the story of the film goes, it is expertly crafted and dynamically told. It starts out in the early days of the Islamic Revolution in Iran and a narrator gives us some background of the history Persia and of the Iranian Shahs leading up to 1979 when the Shah was exiled to Egypt and fled to the United States for cancer treatment. The pro-western government was replaced by an Islamic dictatorship led by the Ayatollah Khomeini. Since the Shah was given asylum in the United States, Iranian students protested outside of the American Embassy in Tehran demanding the Shah’s return until their tensions boiled over and they climbed the gate and stormed the building. Seeing what was coming, six Americans escaped and found refuge in the home of the Canadian Ambassador (Victor Garber).

Sixty-nine days later in Washington, D.C. CIA Agent Tony Mendez (Affleck) is brought in by Jack O’Donnell (Bryan Cranston) to formulate a plan to get the six Americans out, because if the Iranians capture them, they’re sure to be killed badly, violently and publicly. The plans that the State Department has come up with range from the ridiculous to the absurd, and Mendez is at a loss himself to figure out a realistic way to get them out until he’s having a phone conversation with his young son while they both watch Battle of the Planet of the Apes on TV. Seeing the desolate desert world in a science fiction movie gives him the idea of creating a fake movie production and go to Iran under the pretense that he’s scouting locations as a Canadian film producer.

This ends up being the idea that they go with, and Mendez flies to Hollywood where he meets up with Academy Award winning makeup artist John Chambers (John Goodman) who puts him in touch with Producer Lester Siegel (Alan Arkin), who reluctantly agrees to this crazy plan after seeing footage of the hostages on his television. For all intents and purposes, they put an entire movie production together, complete with a marketing plan and a press release in Variety. Even people on the lot are asking Seigel about his new project, and he and Chambers remain an integral part of the plan as they have to be ready to answer the phone in case anyone from Iran calls to verify their existence.

Mendez arrives in Iran posing as a Canadian film producer and keeps up the ruse by visiting official offices and requesting the necessary permits. He finally gets to the Canadian ambassador’s residence where he meets the six Americans and tells him his plan to get them out, and that they all have to learn and memorize their Canadian credentials and identities. Needless to say, they’re less than optimistic about their chances. Joe Stafford is especially reluctant to try anything because he fears not only for his life, but for the life of his wife Kathy, who is also one of the six. He thinks that staying put is best, but the ambassador knows that all of their safety is more and more at risk with each passing day. Tensions are also building because they believe that the Iranian housekeeper suspects that they’re the six Americans that her countrymen are looking for. However, when given a chance to reveal them to the Revolutionary Guard, she does the right thing and lies to them, which forces her to flee to Iraq at the end of the film.

Reluctantly, they go with Mendez to scout the Bazaar as a potential location with someone from the Iranian cultural contact. Kathy is posing as the film’s art director and is taking pictures of the bazaar, which draws the ire of a local shopkeeper and starts to draw a crowd of interested people. Unbeknownst to the Americans, all of their pictures have been taken while in the bazaar, and they luckily get away without further incident. Everything seems to be going as planned until O’Donnell calls Mendez and tells him that the operation has been called off because the government is too afraid of being embarrassed in an international incident if they get caught. Mendez is crushed. He’s never failed to get anyone out, and he’s developed a bond with these people and desperately wants to get them home. He despondently goes back to his hotel as the six Americans, not knowing the change in plans, celebrate.

Overnight, Mendez decides that this is not how it’s going to be, and he calls O’Donnell to tell him he’s disobeying orders and moving forward. The problem now for O’Donnell is that since the plan had been aborted, the only person who can reauthorize it so that the plane tickets are waiting for them at the airport is President Jimmy Carter. The tension of the film goes to an almost unbearable level as Mendez and the six Americans make their way through the checkpoints at the airport while O’Donnell is simultaneously and improbably getting word from the President that it’s a go, and the tickets are released at the very last moment.

Oh, and one other thing is happening as well. The Revolutionary Guard has discovered who the six Americans are and is racing to the airport to stop them. Then in a not-so-subtle bit of irony, they’re all detained by a guard at the gate to get on their plane. The only one among them who speaks Farsi is Stafford. Cooly and calmly he tells the guard about the movie and what it’s about and what they’ve been doing there. He shows them the storyboards that have been mocked up, and nearly convinces the guard, who takes one of Mendez’s business cards to call the studio. Unfortunately Chambers and Seigel were away from the desk and can’t cross a street in the lot because a shoot is happening. Then the phone starts ringing and for a couple of unbearable minutes we’re not sure what’s going to happen. Finally Seigel says screw it, and ruins the shot and Chambers answers the phone to save the day.

If you are an aspiring screenwriter or film maker, this is a film you should study. Argo is a well-crafted film that starts out tense from the beginning and then the tension slowly builds from that beginning point and builds higher and faster as the story progresses. The ultimate crescendo of the story is completely satisfying, and the story hits all of the requisite beats along the way.

As mentioned above, it’s a serious film, but there is a lot of wit to it supplied by John Goodman, Bryan Cranston and Alan Arkin. They all have some great and memorable lines, like when Tony Mendez and Jack O’Donnell are pitching their idea for the rescue to the Secretary of State, they’re asked if this is their best bad idea and O’Donnell responds, “This is the best bad idea we have, sir. By far.” When Mendez goes to see Chambers about pitching the idea to him, Chambers is on the set of a monster movie and tells him that the target audience is going to hate this movie. Mendez asks who the target audience is, and Chambers responds, “Anyone with eyes.” Finally there is Lester Seigel, who steals several scenes, like when he and Mendez pitch their fake idea to a studio flunky who tries to tell Seigel he’s past his prime. Seigel then eviscerates the unsuspecting flunky by debunking all of his reasons for not moving forward in one of the great movie rants of the decade. He also has what may be the signature line of the film when someone from the press keeps asking him questions about what Argo is about and he can’t answer them. Finally, when they ask him what Argo means, he replies, “Argo, fuck yourself.”

I should also point out that John Goodman (The Artist & Argo) joined Guy Pierce (The King’s Speech & The Hurt Locker) Russell Crowe (Gladiator & A Beautiful Mind), Walter Pidgeon (How Green Was My Valley & Mrs. Miniver) and Clark Gable (It Happened One Night & Mutiny on the Bounty) as people who have starred in back to back Best Picture winners. Goodman has had a really nice career in both television and films, and comes across as one of Hollywood’s nice guys. Personally I like seeing someone like him join this list.

Did the Academy get it right?

Yes they did. There was some good competition in 2012 from films like Django Unchained, Life of Pi and Lincoln, which I feel was Steven Spielberg’s best film since Schindler’s List. Any one of those three films would have been a worthy winner, but I feel that Argo was better than all of them. I also thought that Zero Dark Thirty was very good, and the rest of the films nominated probably wouldn’t have been had we still been in the 5 nominee cycle. I liked Silver Linings Playbook, but didn’t love it as much as I hoped I would. I thought Les Miserable was interminably slow for the first half, but did pick it up and was very good in the second half, but you can’t win Best Picture if you’ve only made half of a good movie. I did not like Beasts of the Southern Wild, although the performance by Quvenzhane Wallis was remarkable. I didn’t see Armour so I can’t speak to that film. For my money, Argo is one of the best films so far of the decade and was definitely the best film of 2012.

Eighty-three years after the very first Academy Awards ceremony in 1928 when Wings took home the Academy’s highest honor, another silent film won Best Picture. The Artist wasn’t actually silent, as it did have musical accompaniment and there were a couple of sequences with synchronized sound, but it was still a silent film for all intents and purposes. It used many of the same motifs with title cards showing important lines of dialogue, and a largely visual story. There were also great uses of visual cues to tell us what we would have otherwise been hearing. It was also the first black and white Best Picture winner since The Apartment in 1960. Even though this is a seemingly simple film with little or no special effects, it’s still a visually powerful and compelling film that is enjoyable. I greatly admire what the filmmakers were trying to accomplish, and I love the fact that this film got made. This film should be an inspiration to filmmakers everywhere to try to think outside the box

I remember having high hopes for The Artist when it first came out. I was already a fan of this team’s work. Director Michel Hazanavicius had already directed Jean Dujardin and Bérénice Bejo in the French spy comedy OSS 117: Cairo, Nest of Spies, which is one of the top five funniest films I’ve ever seen in my life. In that film, Dujardin plays a French secret agent who is one part James Bond and one part Inspector Jacques Clouseau, and Bejo (who is married to Hazanavicius) played the love interest who was more similar to a “Bond Girl” than a classic romantic interest. If you’ve never seen it, do yourself a favor and try to find a copy. I was in absolute stitches from laughing while watching that film. A couple of years later Hazanavicius and Dujardin teamed up again for OSS 117: Lost in Rio, and while it was not as funny as the first film, it was still funnier than most other films I’ve ever seen and is worth watching as well.

So when I heard that the three of them were getting back together for The Artist, a silent film about the death of the silent film era, I was as excited as I had been for the release of a film in a long time. I wasn’t expecting it to be as funny as the OSS films, and really, I wasn’t sure what to expect other than an entertaining film. And an entertaining film is what we got, but we didn’t get a whole lot more. In fact, at one hour and forty minutes, it’s one of the shortest films to ever win Best Picture, and yet on my initial viewing I felt like the film dragged through the second act. Dare I say I even felt a little bored? Whatever the case, I walked out of the theater that night feeling slightly disappointed. I wasn’t disappointed enough to be upset, and I still enjoyed the film for the most part, but I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as I expected I would.

I hadn’t seen The Artist since that one time, and in watching it again this past weekend I feel like I’ve gained a new appreciation for it. Is it a spectacular film? No it is not, but it is a very solid film that tells a compelling story about two people headed in opposite directions in their lives. One of them helps the other one out to start the story and then the other one helps the original out to end it, so there is a lovely symmetry to the story as well as a well-structured story arc and well-developed characters.

The main character is George Valentin (Dujardin), the greatest silent film star in Hollywood, and a character seemingly modelled in the mold of Douglas Fairbanks. He is charismatic and sophisticated and he lives a life of luxury in his ostentatious Beverly Hills mansion. He always gets the girl, at least in the movies, however in real life, his female so-star Constance (Missi Pyle) hates him because he soaks up all of the spotlight, and his wife Doris (Penelope Ann Miller) constantly shows her contempt for him by defacing images of him that she finds in Variety, The Hollywood Reporter and other magazines and newspapers. She’s also constantly jealous of the women he stars with and the fact that their marriage is clearly one that is on the rocks is obvious to everyone except George. In fact George is so self-absorbed that when studio head Al Zimmer (John Goodman) shows him a “talking picture”, he dismisses it as a novelty. Even when he’s forced out of the studio, he claims to be an artist who will not condescend to what he feels is a fad. He ends up spending almost every dime he has to produce his own silent film.

Meanwhile, Peppy Miller (Bejo) is ascending the heights of Hollywood just as George is crashing down. Ironically, the two of them literally bumped into each other as George was leaving his latest premier. A connection was made, and when Peppy is cast as an extra on George’s next picture, the two of them connect even deeper during a scene where they’re supposed to dance briefly together, but George is infatuated with her, and he can never complete the scene. Later, he has to prevent Zimmer from firing her because of that. Peppy then sneaks in to his dressing room, and pretends that she’s being caressed by his tuxedo until George walks in. Rather than being angry, he tells her that she needs to separate herself from the crowd, and he puts a beauty mark on her face. That seems to get people’s attention because Peppy starts to work her way up the ladder until she gets a starring role in a talkie that will come out the same day as George’s independent feature. Peppy’s film is a smash, and George’s film is a disaster. Peppy embraced talkies and became America’s Sweetheart, and combining the stock market crash with his losses on his picture, George went bust. Doris has also left him, and he’s been kicked out of his house and has had to sell everything off.

But Peppy never forgot about George. She went to see his movie when hardly anyone else did, and she’s always happy to see him during the random times that they run into each other. But the main crux of the second act of The Artist is about George coping with his lost fame and lost fortune. His growth as a character shows him ultimately losing his pride and accepting help from others. After his movie bombs and he loses his fortune, he’s forced to sell all of his memorabilia. He watches the auction as a mysterious man buys up all of this sculptures, paintings, clothes, and furniture. Unbeknownst to him the mysterious man is buying the items on behalf of Peppy. Another scene shows George’s pride get scarred when he’s sitting in a restaurant the next table over from Peppy, who doesn’t see him and is being interviewed by a reporter. She tells the reporter that sound allows actors to act, rather than having someone just mugging for the camera. “Out with the old and in with the new,” she says. This is a blow to George’s pride as well as his self-esteem and he confronts her about it before leaving the restaurant.

After moping around for a while and drinking too much, George falls into a fit of despondency. He goes back to his small apartment and sets all of the reel canisters containing his films on fire. Realizing there’s one he needs to save, he dives in and clutches it in his hands, but the smoke causes him to lose consciousness. We later see that the film is when he and Peppy were dancing. His faithful dog runs and fetches a policeman to the scene, and George is rescued just in time. Peppy sees an article about the fire in the newspaper and has him moved to her home so that he can recover.

George awakens to see that perhaps his luck is turning around and he and Peppy profess their love for each other. She then tells him about a script for him, but he is still too prideful to accept the notion of starring in a talkie. She leaves to go out on a shoot, and George’s former chauffeur Clifton (James Cromwell), who is now employed by Peppy, comes to his bedroom, tosses the script on his bed and warns him about being too prideful. George then spends his free time wandering the home and stumbles upon a room that is filled with his old belongings. Ashamed, George takes off his bandages and leaves them on a table in the foyer before going to his burned out apartment. His pride is now gone, but he feels like he’s lost everything with it.

Meanwhile, Peppy has convinced Zimmer to give George a role in her next picture. She arrives home to see that George is gone and she get in her car and recklessly drives to his apartment, where George sits with a gun in his mouth and his dog furiously pulling on his pants leg. The title card shows a “BANG!” We then see that was because Peppy crashed her car on a tree outside. She runs in and keeps George from doing the unthinkable, and tells him about the role. He doesn’t think that people will want to hear him talk, but he doesn’t have to. The next time we see George and Peppy, they are tap dancing partners, performing a rousing number that has Zimmer jumping out of his chair. The director asks for another take, and George says, “With pleasure.”

After giving this film another look, I realized that it’s better than I initially thought and has a deep and compelling story. It’s very strong thematically, and the driving thematic idea of the story could be summed up in the sentence, “Pride goeth before the fall”. Yes, this is a movie about moving beyond the past and embracing the future, but that sometimes means that you have to humble yourself order to be able to attempt something new. George didn’t take seriously the introduction of sound to movies because he was afraid of it. He had built himself an amazing life through silent pictures, and he didn’t think there was a place for him in films with sound. The story shows him fighting against it, and then giving up before realizing that there can in fact be a place for him without him having to give up his artistic integrity.

I also realize on the second viewing that what I thought on my initial viewing was a dragging story was actually time for character development so that we could see what George was going through. He had been at the very top, and now he was at the very bottom, and Hazanavicius did a great job of showing the pain and confusion and lack of direction that George was now experiencing. This was a great reminder to me that sometimes when it doesn’t look like there’s a lot happening on the screen, there’s actually quite a lot happening in the story and/or with the characters.

Not only does this film have a strong story, but it is primarily shown to us, rather than told to us, since there is no dialogue, save for a few dialogue cards and the last scene. I mentioned before that there are also some great moments ironically where visual cues tell us what we would normally be hearing. One example of that is at the beginning when George Valentin is backstage at the theater that his new film is premiering in. The film ends and he stands there for a moment in anticipation and then snaps to in relief as he clearly hears the audience start to applaud. It’s great visual storytelling that shows us in a dramatic way what we need to know.

This is overall a very enjoyable film that’s worth another look if you haven’t seen it for a while.

Did the Academy get it right?

I won’t say that they got it wrong. I realize I was just espousing how strong the film is, but I’m not sure if it was really worthy of being named Best Picture. I think it was the novelty of it was what won The Artist the Oscar more than the actual quality of the film. Personally my favorite film of 2011 was Moneyball, but I am an admitted baseball movie fan. I also really liked The Descendants and The Help, and probably would have voted for any of those over The Artist. As for the other nominees, I liked Midnight in Paris quite a bit, and while I’m not a huge Woody Allen fan, that is one of my favorite films from him. I also like Hugo a lot, and loved how it seemed that Martin Scorsese stepped way out of his comfort zone, even though he was essentially making a film about cinema, which is right in his wheelhouse. I was disappointed with War Horse. It was essentially a road movie that was episodic and should have been much more dramatic than it was. Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close was a moving film that brought us all back to the days after 9/11 as we were all searching for answers that were difficult to find. All I can say about The Tree of Life is that it was impossible to get through. Overall, The Artist was not my first choice for 2011, but I’m not disappointed that it won, and I wish that it had encouraged more mainstream filmmakers to think more outside the box.

This is going to be a difficult one for me. I remember hearing all of the buzz surrounding The King’s Speech when it came out, and how wonderful a movie it was and how it was going to clean up come Oscar night. Then I saw it for myself, and while I did enjoy it, I didn’t think it was as special a film as people made it out to be. I hadn’t seen it since, and my hope was that in watching it again, I would see the specialness that everyone else apparently saw in it. Well, while I did see more layers to it than I had in my previous viewing, it didn’t blow me away in the manner that a Best Picture winner should. There was one film that came out in 2010 that did blow me away in that manner, which I will get to at the end.

Now please don’t get me wrong. The King’s Speech is an exceptional film about overcoming adversity and locking up the demons of your past in the cages of your new found strength. It is a powerful film with extraordinary performances by Colin Firth (winner for Best Actor), Geoffrey Rush (nominated for Best Supporting Actor) and Helena Bonham Carter (nominated for Best Supporting Actress), as well as many of the other supporting roles. Coming off of a small, yet important role in The Hurt Locker, Guy Pierce (joining Russell Crowe, Walter Pidgeon and Clark Gable as actors appearing in back-to-back Best Picture winners) gave a powerful performance as King Edward VIII, the man who would abdicate the throne for the love of a twice-divorced American woman, thus making it necessary for Prince Albert (Firth) to overcome his flaw so that he can lead his nation in a time of turmoil as King George VI.

The problem with Bertie, as his family calls him, is that he stammers. He stammers quite badly, as a matter of fact, and it’s to the point where he really can’t speak in public without being humiliated. Plus, the late 1930’s was a time where a stammer was seen by many as a sign of stupidity. Bertie’s father, King George V (Michael Gambon) would occasionally ask Bertie to fulfill his royal duty and make some speech over the radio or make some other public address, but these speeches always turned into disasters due to his stammering. We also find out over the course of the story that Bertie had a difficult childhood with a series of health problems and an older brother who took sadistic pleasure in tormenting him.

There were a couple of things in The King’s Speech that were done exceptionally well by Director Tom Hooper (Oscar winner for Best Director) and Screenwriter David Seidler (Oscar Winner for Best Original Screenplay). The first thing that they did very well was setting up Bertie’s condition and his reluctance to make it better due to his belief that it never could be better. The driving force behind this story is Bertie’s flaw and its hold over his personality. If causes him to be overly temperamental, it causes him to lack self-confidence and it causes him to become withdrawn. However we’re simultaneously shown a character who is a devoted family man and is completely in love with his wife and adores and is attentive to his children. In fact, he’s willing to crawl on the floor and pretend to be a penguin in order to tell a fanciful story to his daughters, and he does this with nary a stutter to be heard. He is comfortable with his own family, but his royal duties are too much for him to bear.

The other very effective thing the film makers did, and this could have been a product of historical fact, but they forced Bertie to have to confront his flaws and they provided dire consequences should he fail. Bertie’s brother was the exact opposite of him in every way. He was adventurous and debonair and sophisticated, and on the outside looked to be the perfect heir to the throne. The role was played perfectly by Pierce, who carried himself with a sophisticated and cock-sure attitude that belied the inner conflict that was forcing him to choose between the woman he loved and the Crown. As it turned out in a nice bit of dramatic irony, the royal duties were too much for King Edward III to bear as well. So at this point, Bertie was forced to be crowned King just as the United Kingdom was preparing to enter into war with Germany, and the nation needed him to allay their fears with words of hope and comfort. But he couldn’t speak. The one thing that he needed to do was the one thing that he could not do. That is outstanding storytelling and the key to setting up a dramatic situation. That simple idea that he had to speak and yet couldn’t speak is the dramatic crux that carries the whole story, and probably is what made it resonate for so many people.

That’s where Lionel Logue (Rush) comes in. Bertie’s wife Elizabeth (Bonham Carter) provides the inciting incident for this film when she goes to his office to recruit for his services. He’s a speech therapist who uses techniques that are eccentric and unconventional. This is a nice way to create tension between characters because the last people you would think of who would be accepting of eccentric and unconventional behavior are the royal family. Starving for results since no other speech therapist has been able to produce any, Elizabeth convinces Bertie to give Logue a try. Logue’s unorthodox practices are made apparent right away, but so are the results. This quirky man who seems as unprofessional as he could possibly be seems to be the one man who holds the key to solving Bertie’s issue. However, Bertie’s stubbornness prevents him from opening up fully to Logue, and that stubbornness is what drives the story going forward.

I would like to take a moment to point out that I don’t think anyone could have played the role of Lionel Logue any better than Geoffrey Rush did. In thinking about his most iconic roles from films like Shine, Pirates of the Caribbean and Shakespeare in Love, Rush has the ability to bring a natural quirkiness to his characters. And yet as other roles he’s performed in films like Elizabeth and The Book Thief show that he can bring the dramatic gravitas that is needed for more serious stories. Rush was able to combine these traits in The King’s Speech into a kind of quirky gravitas that not many other actors could naturally pull off. Logue was a character who took very seriously his job at hand, but knew that the need to go about it in a unique way was indispensable to achieve success. This depth of purpose makes Lionel Logue one of the great mentors in cinema, and another driver of this film.

There is one other very strong story-telling component that Hooper and Seidler gave us, and that is the motif of the ticking clock. After Edward has abdicated, he leaves Bertie as the head of a nation on the brink of war. Of tantamount importance is for the King to address his subjects and offer them some words of encouragement and comfort as the nation is about to start down a long, dark and dangerous path. He has to give a great speech and he has to give it soon. However due to his stubbornness and temper, Bertie has yet to become master over his stammer, and he has at various times sent Logue away out of frustration. Logue, for his part, has refused to give up on Bertie, and he assists him through the coronation right up to the time he has to give his speech, and in fact coaches him through it as Bertie speaks into the microphone. Their dual moment of triumph has arrived.

To me, The King’s Speech is a film that is made up of several well-crafted components and motifs, and yet is somehow less than the sum of its parts. It has several dramatic motifs, like the examples previously mentioned, and is yet somehow not a very dramatic film. A great example of how this happened is the ticking clock motif that I mentioned. The first problem with it is that they introduced it way too late. We’re into the third act of the film before Bertie even knows he’s going to be king, let alone before he knows he’s going to have to make this important speech. That means that by the time we get to the ticking clock, it doesn’t have enough time to build up any kind of tension. Therefor the ticking clock essentially loses its effectiveness as a motif.

I think the other problem this film has is that up until the third act, we don’t know what the stakes are, other than Bertie’s peace of mind. This is a character driven film. There is no clear antagonist in the film. In fact, the only one keeping Bertie from getting what he needs is Bertie himself along with his own flaws, and there are only so many times someone can refuse help before it becomes repetitive. With that in mind, we never get a good sense of what’s at stake if he never gets over his stammer. Why should we care if he stammers or not. We spend two thirds of the film without any substantive reason to care. Within the confines of the story, we don’t know that he’s eventually going to become king. We can see that it’s a possibility over the course of the second act, but for a long time it remains this vaguely nebulous idea more than an overhanging threat.

As likable and as deep of a character that Bertie was, I found myself having a hard time caring about what he was going through until the third act, when the stakes were raised by him becoming king and having to address the nation. And even then, I found the stakes that they proposed to still be somewhat vague, and to be honest, a little condescending as well. In fact, Bertie even says that as King he can’t do anything of substance. He has no power to levy taxes, declare war or sign laws. He’s a figurehead, and his speech is 100% about increasing the collective morale of the nation. For an historical drama such as this one, this style of storytelling works all right to the minimum degree necessary, but it is not a model that I would recommend to be followed by aspiring screenwriters.

That is my ultimate take on The King’s Speech. It is a film that is less than the sum of its parts. The parts were beautifully and meticulously created, but something was missing when they were all put together. The pieces by themselves are dramatic and rich, but the overall film, while entertaining and containing magnificent acting, is not dramatic, is not tense and is not all that compelling until the third act. As I’ve said in the past, the ending can save or ruin a film. The King’s Speech is a good example of a good film that was made great by a remarkable ending.

I should also mention that Colin Firth joined the Three-Timers’ Club, having had supporting roles in previous Best Picture winners The English Patient and Shakespeare in Love. Even though is roles were of a supportive nature in each of those films, he ended up being the antagonist to each film’s hero by the end, so his role in each film was important. Also, he’s one of the better actors of our generation. He’s demonstrated that he can do anything from romance to drama to action to comedy, and he does everything well. He’s a fine actor and a worthy addition to the Three-Timers’ Club.

Did the Academy get it right?

I am here to tell you that no, they did not. Even though The King’s Speech had all of the buzz coming into Oscar season, and Oscar night was a (no pun intended) coronation, there were at least a couple of films that were better. I didn’t see 127 Hours, so I can’t really speak to that film. I was not a huge fan of Inception, and the only reason I can think that it was nominated was that it did generate a lot of buzz, and it was a compelling film from a visual standpoint, but I thought the story was clumsily told and I could never get myself to care about the characters. I was a little disappointed that Toy Story 3 was nominated, but that’s another example of an amazing ending saving an otherwise ordinary film. I have a lot of problems with Toy Story 3 that I won’t get into here, but in my opinion it wasn’t even the best animated film released that year. That distinction should have gone to How to Train Your Dragon. Black Swan was a dark, yet compelling film that I couldn’t look away from. It actually had a very sophisticated screenplay and Natalie Portman did an amazing job of carrying the action. Ultimately, it was probably too dark to win Best Picture. I loved Winter’s Bone and felt that it might have been the most dramatic film released that year. It was an independent film that introduced a lot of us to Jennifer Lawrence, and it was very deliberate in its pacing, but it was a very powerful film. I also really like The Kids are All Right, but I don’t think it would have been nominated had the Academy still only been nominating five films per year. The same holds true with True Grit. It was one of my favorite films of the year, it wasn’t the best picture of the year. A lot of people felt that The Social Network was the best film of 2010, and it’s hard to disagree. The story of the creation of Facebook was dramatic, well-told and entertaining. It also had great performances and it was a dynamic film. However, my favorite film of the year by far was The Fighter. I felt The Fighter did everything The King’s Speech tried to do but didn’t. The Fighter was about overcoming your own flaws and the weight of your family and your past to do something remarkable. It has amazing performances by Christian Bale (Best Supporting Actor) and Melissa Leo (Best Supporting Actress), as well as Mark Wahlberg and Amy Adams. These characters all overcome demons and this film is more dramatic, more entertaining and better in almost every way than The King’s Speech. The Fighter is your true Best Picture of 2010.

Ever since 1944 the Academy had been nominating five films per year for Best Picture or Best Motion Picture or Outstanding Motion Picture. From 1931/32-1943 the Academy was nominating between 8 and 10 pictures per year. They went back to that model in 2009, and we had a whopping 10 nominees for Best Picture, including the second time ever that an animated film (Up) was nominated for Oscar’s top prize.

The Hurt Locker, the first major film about the Iraq War, took home the Oscar for Best Picture on a night when Director Kathryn Bigelow surprisingly beat out her ex-husband James Cameron’s Avatar, which had only become the highest grossing film of all time and set a new standard on cutting edge special effects. Bigelow also took home the award for Best Director on Oscar Night, and the film would total six Oscar wins, including Best Original Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Mixing, and Best Sound Editing.

I remember seeing The Hurt Locker right around the time it came out, and walking away underwhelmed. I’m not sure what I was expecting at the time, but I don’t think that I got it, and so it left me wanting more. Coming back this weekend and watching it for the first time since, I liked it much better than I did back then, but I still didn’t love it. Make no mistake though that this is an exceptional film that is one of the most intense and tension-filled films that I’ve ever seen. But at the end of the day, I feel that The Hurt Locker relied too much on that intensity and told a story that was episodic, disjointed and was lacking an overarching spine.

In fact my biggest issue with The Hurt Locker is the fact that it’s episodic. We are initially introduced to Sgt. JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Specialist Owen Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) as they’re on a mission to defuse a bomb with Staff Sergeant Matt Thompson (Guy Pearce), who is the demolitions expert of the group. They all get along well, and this is a group that clearly works well together. They find the IED, and plan on using a controlled blast with a robot to drop charges on it, but the robot breaks apart over the heavy terrain, and Thompson is forced to put the charges on manually. As he’s being covered by Sanborn and Eldridge, Eldridge notices a guy nearby with a cellphone that looks like he’s getting ready to detonate. Eldridge can’t get a shot off and Thompson can’t clear the blast zone before the bomb is detonated and he’s killed in the explosion.

We’re then introduced to Sergeant First Class William James (Jeremy Renner) who takes Thompson’s place in the group. He has a reputation as a maverick and he likes to do things his own way. This sometimes gets under the skin of Sanborn, who likes to run clean operations where everyone is on the same page. It also adversely affects Eldridge, who’s losing his will and is constantly thinking about how he’s probably going to be killed there. He periodically sees Col. John Cambridge, a psychiatrist, but his inexperience in the field doesn’t help Eldridge’s disposition, and James’ unorthodox tactics don’t do anything to ease Eldridge’s mental state either.

James makes waves on their first mission by not communicating with Sanborn and not following Sanborn’s advice which would have used Thompson’s protocol of using the robot to scope out the situation first. Instead James goes over the bomb, which turns out to be a cluster of bombs connected to each other and he disarms them after several very tense minutes. He also used a smoke canister to block Sanborn and Eldridge from being able to see him so that they couldn’t cover him adequately. He disarms the bombs successfully, but Sanborn and Eldridge are clearly unhappy with their new team member.

The next mission has James disarming a car bomb at a nearby embassy. This time he completely shuts off communication with Sanborn because Sanborn’s constant demands to know James’ location were messing with James’ concentration. James is ultimately able to diffuse the bomb, but he’s greeted when he gets back the Humvee by a punch in the face from Sanborn.

Their next mission takes them out to the desert to explode some ordinance they’ve captured. James tells them to stop because he left his gloves down there, and he drives down to retrieve them. While he’s down there, Sanborn wonders out loud to Eldridge if they could get away with killing him and make it look like an accidental explosion. Eldridge convinces him that it would be a bad idea, and James drives away before Sanborn can set off the explosives.

On their way back the base they come across an SUV with some British contractors and the team leader (Ralph Fiennes) tells them they have a flat. As they’re trying to repair it they come under sniper fire and the team leader and a couple of other contractors are killed. Sanborn is a good shot, and he manages to take out the snipers, who are in a structure several hundred meters away. As they wait for any movement, an insurgent prepares to shoot them until Eldridge sees him and fires first, killing the man before he can kill them. James tells him he did good but Eldridge is clearly not feeling good about himself.

Back on the base, James befriends a young local boy named Beckham who sells him videos and plays soccer. The kid is learning to be a con man, but James takes a liking to the boy. Unfortunately the next time the team is out they’re sweeping a bomb-making facility and they come across the bloody body of Beckham and a bomb has been surgically implanted in his body. Heartbroken, James puts packs on the boy’s chest to detonate him, but then decides to remove the bomb from the boy’s chest cavity and he carries him outside. Later on he tries to find the people responsible, but his search quickly goes nowhere.

Meanwhile, Col Cambridge has accompanied them on the mission and is trying to get people to disperse. James and the others get in the Humvee, but an IED goes off right where Col. Cambridge is standing, killing him instantly. Eldridge can’t believe it, but James assures him that Cambridge couldn’t have survived.

The next mission they go on is to investigate a blast zone that was possibly for a suicide bomber. Against the advice of Sanborn, James orders the team to go on a search, when that’s not what they’re really qualified to do. They get separated from each other and James and Sanborn reconnect to find Eldridge getting dragged away by a couple of insurgents. They give chase and kill the insurgents, but Eldridge gets hit in the leg in the cross fire. The next day, James and Sanborn go out to see him off, and Eldridge thanks James for saving his life, but then curses him for always recklessly looking for trouble.

The next day, James and Sanborn respond to a call of a lone man in a large plaza with a bomb strapped to him. Through a translator the man says he has a family and doesn’t want to die. James goes out to investigate and there is a bomb strapped to him with reinforced steel casing and pad locks. The bomb is complicated with a lot of wires and timed to go off in two minutes. Sanborn rushes out with bolt cutters, but there are too many locks, and James has to run away before the man explodes. He doesn’t get quite get out of the blast zone and is knocked unconscious.

The next time we see James he’s at home with his wife and young son. He tries to tell her stories of the war, but she doesn’t want to hear them. They go grocery shopping, and it’s nothing more than monotony to James. He loves his son, but this is a world in which James feels out of place. He is redeployed to Iraq and he has a slight smile on his face as we see him depart the personnel carrier.

Again, the tension in this film is unreal and at times it’s almost unbearable. The problem is that other than the sequence where he goes home, all of those scenes are interchangeable. You could mix up the order in any way you choose, and it wouldn’t change the film at all. There is no building of tension. All of the scenes are equally intense, which could be what Bigelow and Oscar-winning screenwriter Mark Boal were going for, but it just isn’t cinematic enough for me.

Also there was no real growth in James as a character. Some of the characters changed around him, but he had no real outer goal or inner need other than just survival to allow the audience to empathize with him. He’s disconnected from his wife and child back home, so we don’t necessarily root for him to get back there, and he doesn’t really fit in with the people he’s surrounded with in Iraq. Perhaps if he had been counting down the days before he could see his son, then we as the audience would have some sort of empathy with him as we follow him on this journey. Unfortunately with no real goal for the main character, the film is left without a spine. It’s really nothing more than a series of highly intense sequences with a loose narrative that holds them loosely together.

With those issues in place, I find The Hurt Locker to be an incomplete film, and I find myself to be somewhat schizophrenic in my assessment of it. On the one hand it’s an intense film that keeps you riveted and on the edge of your seat. But on the other hand it has a storyline and characters that are so disconnected that it’s difficult to get emotionally engaged with what’s going on. That’s the big difference between this film and previous war dramas that won Best Picture like Platoon and The Deer Hunter. The characters in those films experienced a level of disconnect, but they had inner goals and needs that allowed us to empathize with them and root for them. If The Hurt Locker had been able to accomplish that, we’d be able to put it on the same level as those films. As it is now, it came up just short.

One side note as well is that Ralph Fiennes joined the “3-Timers” club. He’s only in this film for about 5 minutes, so I hesitated in including him, but he is appearing in his third Best Picture Winner (Schindler’s List and The English Patient).

Did the Academy get it right?

I was just really happy that Avatar didn’t win. I thought that Avatar was stunning visually. I saw it in 3D, and it truly was spectacular to look at. The problem with Avatar was everything else. It had a contrived narrative that couldn’t decide if it wanted to be Dances With Wolves or Pocahontas and it wasn’t as good as either. I felt that the story for Avatar overall was very weak and the characters were color-by-numbers stereotypes that were as unimaginative as they could be. I liked The Blind Side, An Education and Precious: Based on the Novel “Push” by Sapphire, but I’m not sure if any or all of those would have been even nominated had the five picture limit still been in place. They all had compelling stories with amazing characters, but none of them feel particularly “Best Picture” quality to me. I loved District 9, and thought that was everything that Avatar was not. It raised compelling political issues, used special effects to enhance the story, and it gave us characters, even in the aliens, that we could empathize with. I also enjoyed Up in the Air. It was a dramatic film with great performances from George Clooney and Anna Kendrick, and it had a deep story about the downsizing of America and the toll that it’s taking not only on those being downsized but the people doing the downsizing as well. It’s a fascinating film. I’m not a huge fan of Up. Anyone who follows this blog knows that I’m an animation guy, and I’m a fan of PIXAR in general, but I think Up is great for the first 20-30 minutes and then it goes off the rails, especially in the third act. My favorite film of the year, though, and the one I would have voted for was Inglourious Basterds. I am a fan of Quinten Tarantino, and I would put this film just behind Pulp Fiction as my two favorite Tarantino films. I thought it was a brilliantly told story and the performances of Christophe Waltz (Best Supporting Actor winner), Brad Pitt and the other supporting actors were superb. I think it also had a much better script than did The Hurt Locker and it had a much more compelling narrative. While this isn’t one of the biggest travesties in Oscar history, I do believe that the Academy picked the wrong winner for 2009.