Academy Awards 2010 - some final thoughts

I'd always wanted to see those short films that get Academy Award nominations, so I rented a DVD of the nominated shorts for 2007, live action and animated.

And I found out that the shorts that make the cut are a microcosm of the rest of the Academy Award process: the strange and exciting films are long gone and we're left with films that are well-meaning and earnest. Even the comedy was earnest. And unremarkable.

But it was the animated films that were a revelation: every one was stop-motion animation with computer assistance, in other words, puppets with computers.

So things have changed: we all grew up with cartoons that were based on drawings. I remember someone saying in film school: "I'm not signing up for Animation because I can't draw."

So instead of cartoons originating with ink on paper, now we have the work of hi-tech puppeteers. There was a cartoon clown in the 30's that climbed back into the ink bottle at the end of each episode...I'm thinking of those surreal black and white cartoons (I think "Betty Boop" is the only one commonly known today). Puppetry is not a bad thing, because puppeteers are mainly interested in creating a character and telling a story in a theatrical way, so it's a good match to the movies. But, let's face it, a puppeteer is used to being ruled by theatrical conventions, so I'm not surprised that the results, with or without computers, are conventional. As opposed to a wild guy with a pen and a blank piece of paper (or clear plastic) where anything goes.



We saw "God of Carnage" last night. With Lucy Liu ("Kill Bill") and Jeff Daniels ("Dumb and Dumber" and "Something Wild"). It was written by someone who knows what theatre is all about: talking. This was all talking and almost no spectacle (I hate that "Miss Saigon" helicopter stuff.) Great opening: the curtain rises to a pitch black stage, the lights come on and the four characters are already there, so there's none of that "enter stage right" business. Sal saw it with James Gandolfini ("The Sopranos") and I'm sure he was great, but Jeff Daniels was great too.
Reminder: "Something Wild" (1986) by Jonathan Demme was a very well-made comedy with a climax that takes place on Long Island...very good.