Nostalgia, The Oscars and "The Artist"

LAST night's Academy Awards confirmed expectations that movies pining for the art of the past (the French past, in some cases) would walk away with the most trophies. The big winner, of course, was The Artist, which snagged best actor for Jean Dujardin, best director for Michel Hazanavicius and best picture.

Scorsese's Hugo, set in a Paris train station in the '30s and with a backstory involving early, experimental French cinema, picked up five technical awards, and Woody Allen's deeply nostalgic Midnight in Paris won best original screenplay.

Douglas Fairbanks, a model for Jean Dujardin's Artist 

At about the same tine, a recent LA Times story looking at the demographics of Academy voters -- as heavily weighted toward older white men as the Iowa caucases that often help determine the presidential races -- shows that some voters have quite a direct connection to the art of the past.

On Friday I was part of a good group -- including the Times' John Horn -- on Warren Olney's To The Point -- discussing nostalgia and the Oscars. Here is a link to that show.

We only scratched the surface, especially since I took the conversation a bit off track, into music and politics -- but I think it was lively. I should point out that I think The Artist and Hugo are very fine movies and do not need nostalgia to make them appealing.

(When I met with Michel Hazanavicius, the writer/director of The Artist, for a feature on the film, he talked about his love of Murnau, Fritz Lang and other silent filmmakers. But he didn't see the movie as being entirely about the silent era, but rather about a character caught in a universal struggle. "I think he's afraid of changing. One of the themes of the movie is a man in a transition -- something we all go through. It's something that happens to everyone at least once in their lives." And Hugo was, its setting aside, more deeply about a search for the father and the origins he represented.)

But with Academy voters, pining for the good old days didn't hurt, especially these anxious times.

The issue helps explain why otherwise strong films -- Bridesmaids, Melancholia -- were virtually shut out this year.

The 2012 Oscars and Actors of a Certain Age

THIS week I have a brief piece on SecondAct, the site devoted to people 40 and over. (A demographic I joined four years ago today, and am happy to belong to if it includes Brad Pitt.) I look at some of the actors nominated for this year's Academy Awards -- George Clooney (The Descendants), Meryl Streep (Iron Lady), Melissa McCarthy (Bridesmaids) and five others.

Not sure there's an unalloyed masterpiece this year. But seems to me this year's Oscars includes some really smart movies and a wealth of great performances.

Cinematography, the Oscars and "Tree of Life"

AS everyone in Los Angeles knows well, Oscar nominations were just announced today. I've written about some of the films nominated, including The Artist, which drew 10 nominations.

One article I've not posted, because I can't seem to find an online link, was a story in which I spoke to cinematographers from five films: My Week With Marilyn, The Descendants, Drive, Margin Call and The Tree of Life. Emmanuel Lubezki of Tree of Life was just nominated for an Academy Award which he seems to have a good shot at.

(The Mexican-born Lubezki, by the way, also shot Children of Men, The New World, Y Tu Mama Tambien and Ali.)

Whatever you make of this film -- which has become the love-it-or-hate-it movie of the last year -- it's visually distinctive, from its verdant recollections of 1950s Texas suburbia or its more cosmic sections that recount the history of the universe.

Here's a bit of what he told me -- the full story is in AwardsLine's Issue 5.

Though the film has been compared to “2001: A Space Odysssey” and Renaissance painting, Malick’s edict was that the film capture the chaos of life itself. “He wanted the film to feel found, not rehearsed, not designed,” Lubezki says. “You had to wait for a moment that felt real, before you rolled the camera. We could not control the butterfly that flew by, or the wind, or what a baby might do: It’s watching, helping Terry and everybody else get to these moments that felt almost like an accident.”