Like anyone who’s been covering what’s become, as the party line goes, “the closest Best Picture race in recent memory,” I’ve gone through many mental rewrites of this top-prize breakdown.
Oscar’s documentary lineup typically constitutes the black sheep-iest of the award show’s 24 races, but this year’s crop of nominees is less odd, less disreputable, than usual.
It’s a classic case of two wrongs inciting the Right, from a branch that lately can’t seem to make up its mind whether to nominate too many songs or too few.
Sadly, unlike Tiny Fey and Amy Poehler, we can’t all get what we hope for.
These Academy members possess an elementary school understanding of art, where films operate in a purely denotative register.
Perhaps “Michael Haneke” himself best elucidates the success of Amour by describing the film it could have been but no one, except possibly for us, would have wanted to see or give an Oscar to.