The Anti-Oscars

In “The Anti-Oscars,” I make a list of the Best Movies and Performances of the Year that don’t stand a chance at getting nominated.

This article will not help you win your Oscar pool.

On this Oscar Nomination ballot, you will not find any Streeps, Clooneys, Plummers or Spielbergs.

No, this is the Anti-Oscars! This is the opposite of what will happen when nominations are announced on Tuesday, January 24.

I’ve made picks in five of the six major categories, but while these certainly don’t reflect what will happen, they aren’t even necessarily what I think should happen. The Academy gets some things right some of the time.

Rather this list is my personal ballot dedicated to the not-even-out-of-the-gate contenders that were marvelous in 2011 but for whatever reason will not receive the attention they deserve at the biggest award ceremony of the year.

I’ll also use this space to discuss why they are not in the race and what that means for the actual contenders. So if any of these names are in your predictions, rethink your decisions now, and watch me eat my words when I predict the real ballot next week.

 

Best Picture

  • Drive
  • Beginners
  • Super 8
  • Incendies
  • The Skin I Live In
  • Certified Copy
  • Weekend
  • Melancholia

If there’s one thing the Best Picture hopeful lineup is missing, it’s a good dose of darkness. Is “Moneyball” really the darkest movie this year’s Oscars have to offer? My list, which conveniently resembles all eight films in my Top 10 list not solid contenders for nomination (the other two being “Midnight in Paris” and “Hugo”), shows a much more even split of heavy and lighter entertainment. Continue reading “The Anti-Oscars”

Margin Call

The Occupy Wall Street Protestors should watch “Margin Call.”

In fact, let the whole 99 percent watch it, as this intricate and cerebral character drama is not only an engaging dramatization of the start of the 2008 credit crisis but is also the finest 21st Century movie of the year.

It is possibly the finest fictional film yet made about the current financial crisis, and it is so because “Margin Call” makes out to humanize the 1 percenters that got us into this mess. It does not view these people as evil nor as idiotic, but as flawed, misguided and ultimately trapped people struggling like the rest of us.

As we attain pity for their sins, it has the power to educate us and immerse us in a realistic re-imagining of how this mess started.

The film focuses on a fictional investment-banking firm in a 24-hour period just as the markets began to collapse. Not afraid to spew jargon, “Margin Call” explains how the volatile derivative formulas that virtually no one in the firm can actually understand and yet governed the whole market ideology, proved to be completely wrong. It left the banks with bad mortgages and investments that had been bundled together and bought and sold globally to create a big housing and market bubble. Rather than simply tank and instantly bankrupt the entire company to ensue mass havoc, the banks disposed of all their bad investments in a fire sale, ruining everyone else in the process. Sorry to spoil that ending.

“Margin Call” views this action as a last ditch effort of these powerful people who now realize they have made a fatal mistake just to stay alive, even if it means compromising moral integrity and rational future business plans. And the film’s moral ambiguity coupled with its awareness of the inevitable fate in the future makes the film wonderfully compelling and poignant.

This is a strict dramatization, but one would like to think these ideas actually bounced around boardrooms. There are sinister ideas, but also feelings of remorse, panic and concern that make this screenplay by first time director and writer J.C. Chandor convincingly multi-dimensional.

What’s fascinating about “Margin Call” is how theatrical it is. You will not see graphs or numbers of any kind watching this film. At times the execs seem to understand as little as you do about the financial mumbo jumbo.

And everything about the film is calmly and carefully constructed drama befitting a play. Millions are being lost in seconds, and the movie does not devolve into mass panic and melodrama of bulls, bears, bells and whistles.

“Margin Call’s” star and producer Zachary Quinto is far from the young, hyper business student stock broker rattling off words at a mile a minute. He’s a cool and collected key in a marvelous, weakness free cast.

Jeremy Irons as the firm’s CEO is as commanding as he’s been on screen in years. Kevin Spacey is in full “Glengarry Glen Ross” mode. Simon Baker is a riveting Wall Street mogul that would give Gordon Gekko a run for his money and yet never feels too similar to that now cliché stereotype. Paul Bettany has two of the most memorable and poignant monologues together in one film this year. And Stanley Tucci is the most relatable of all as a manager who has just been laid off in a scene reminiscent of “Up in the Air.”

“Margin Call” is well aware of the now bleak economic future we live in, but in that way it is more relevant than ever. It provides the rationality that we have always and will always prosper and ruin ourselves in an endless cycle of capitalism.

As Kevin Spacey’s character does as the movie closes, the only thing left for us to do when it comes to expecting change in the market is to start digging our own graves.

4 stars