The 2017 Oscars (or Academy Awards for those of you who like being old school) are right around the corner. Celebrities are going to get together to talk about who they're wearing, stroke each other's egos and make at least three Anti-Trump speeches over the course of three to four hours of glitz, glam and Hollywood. For the people at home, it means pretending that you actually watched all of the Best Picture nominees even though you've probably only heard of four of them, going to get snacks while the president of the Academy gives his annual speech and saying "THEY died?" and "Who?" a lot during the In Memoriam. It is truly a magical evening where most people, celebrity or everyday, honestly don't care who wins what at the end of the night, they just want a mixture of entertainment and drama to lighten up their lives a little. For some, however, it is so much more.
I believe I've expressed that I am, in the words of Andy Samberg, a "Major Cinephile". I love film in every shape and size, whether it be a pretentious art film, a gritty indie flick or a so-bad-it's-good-shlock-fest. Movies are a huge part of my life, always have been, and watching so many of them has taught me a lot. Specifically, I've learned a lot about Movie Making. If a movie is going for symbolism, I can usually tell you immediately what the symbol is and what it signifies. I can tell you why a camera is pushed in or pulled back during any particular scene. I can tell you why William Foster Kane is shot from below so often and why there are so many different colors used in The Theory of Everything. Over the course of 27 years of life, I have taught myself to be fairly decent at film analysis and theory and that, my friends, is why La La Land will win Best Picture.
Weren't expecting that, were you? Well, if I'm going to keep going, I need to give a proper explanation of this year's nominees so, in no particular order, here are each of the 2017 Nominees and a very brief explanation of them.
Lion: A F�ive-Year-Old Indian Boy is brought by his brother to his nightly job at the train station, gets lost and gets adopted by an Australian Couple.
Arrival: Alien Spacecraft land in 12 different spots around the globe and it's up to Amy Adams and Jeremy Renner to figure out what the Aliens are trying to tell us.
Hell or High Water: Two brothers are robbing banks in Texas and it's up to Jeff Bridges to stop them.
Hidden Figures: A True Story (more or less) about three African-American Women who were instrumental in getting John Glenn into space.
Fences: A word-for-word film version of a play about an African-American Couple becoming alienated from their kids.
Hacksaw Ridge: A True Story (more or less) about the only American to win the Congressional Medal of Honor in World War II without ever picking up a gun.
Moonlight: The life of a black man who realizes as a teenager that he is gay.
Manchester by the Sea: The story of a man who has to overcome depression and self-loathing to be his nephew's guardian.
La La Land: An homage to Golden Age Hollywood Musicals.
What you may notice is out of all of these, the only one I didn't really give any plot synopsis for was La La Land. It has a plot, any good movie has a plot, but in the long run, its plot isn't important enough to warrant talking about. La La Land isn't winning any Oscars because of its plot. It is going to win because it is a movie about movies.
That's not necessarily a bad thing, mind you. This isn't the same thing as 2013 where Argo undeservingly won an Oscar because it was a film about Hollywood saving the world (something that is greatly exaggerated for the movie, by the way. It was the Canadians who saved it.). The Oscars has had a bad habit lately of rewarding movies about movies because movies are what they know. Birdman, Argo, and The Artist all won Best Picture strictly because they were set in Hollywood or based on Hollywood and whether or not you believe they deserved those Oscars, the actual quality of the film probably didn't matter in the long run when the Academy was voting.
The Academy, like most other organizations or groups in the world, will vote for themselves when given the chance. If they were a bunch of Musicians instead of Movie Makers and were given a choice between La La Land and the other nominees, they would pick La La Land as well because it's about Music. It's the same principle. It's arguably not a bad thing, it's just human nature.
That being said, La La Land is absolutely phenomenal and I would highly recommend it. Remember, however, that I also said that I am, in spirit, a Hollywood Person. I love it because of its plot and trope subversions, its homages to Singing in the Rain and Rebel Without a Cause, the layered narrative, and meta-storyline. I know plenty of people, my own mother included, who saw the movie and thought it was "ok."
The household choice for Best Picture at the moment, despite my protests, is Hacksaw Ridge. I can completely understand someone seeing La La Land and not understanding why people love it so much but that is mainly because to truly appreciate it, you have to speak the language of film. If you don't, all you'll see is a cute but mediocre to badly sung musical romance with flying and jazz in it. If you still have fun with that (and I know people have), that's absolutely wonderful! It is definitely a movie that can be enjoyed at surface level. When it comes to the Academy Awards, however, they aren't going to be rewarding that surface level movie at the end of the day. They are going to be rewarding Hollywood because that's what they do best.
