Oscar Talk!, or, Just Another Day Here at The L Magazine's YourBlogAbout Juno-Induced Fits of Apoplexy and Impotent Rage and Existential Angst

Oh, so the Academy Award nominations came out this morning. I'd preface this post with "not that it really matters," except that that would be a lie: every year, highbrow critics bunch their panties about the Oscars, only to claim that it doesn't really matter, of course. There's a bit of a contradiction there, methinks.

Yeah, it's studio politics and horse racing and rarely if ever reflects the year's significant contributions to film culture (in most consequential ways, the NYFF selection is a better bellwether). But there's a VHS-raised suburban movie nerd deep (or not so deep) inside every eloquent snob (I mean that as a compliment) decrying the limp Best Foreign Film selection, so this time every year we all hope, irrationally, for the best possible slate of nominees. "The best possible slate of nominees" meaning, of course, the one that leaves us jarred as little as possible by the disjunction between what we admire most about contemporary film culture, and what the rest of the world does.

So right away, it's rather disheartening to know that, despite the exhortations of a whole professional class, who take their jobs and their love of movies really seriously, and believe in the role of the critic in an enlightened society that values discourse regarding the arts... everybody really, really likes Juno. Ugh, Diablo Cody was nominated for her backstory, and also for unloading her storehouse of quips onto a script that panders to "indie" culture and then moralizes about it (and creates some kind of conservative fantasy world where sex ed and birth control either doesn't exist, or are rejected with a joke). And it's also apparently one of the five best movies released this year; that or the stampede towards over this year's designated lovable underdog has gotten way out of hand (I vote for the latter). If There Will Be Blood and No Country for Old Men split the smart-person vote, and Juno actually wins, I will understand, even better than I do now, how the Unabomber felt in his cabin all those years.

Sorry. That was more time than I had hoped to have to spend thinking about that movie any more. Although Ellen Page is very good in it and good for her. Elsewhere, I basically feel the same way about the nominations as anybody else does, namely glad to see a bit of recognition given to some people whose work I admire. I'll single out Roger Deakins, for a couple decades one of our best, most versatile cinematographers — so versatile, in fact, that he was nominated for shooting two different movies, and will as a consequence win for neither of them. Also, Sarah Polley — nominated for her Away from Her script, adapted from Alice Munro's "The Bear Came Over the Mountain" — continues to be lauded for, basically, having really really good taste in short fiction, and really I think it's nice to see us prioritizing something like that for once.