The Oscars - 2005
Did They Get It Right?
The nominees for Best Picture this year were: Brokeback Mountain, Capote, Crash, Good Night, and Good Luck, and Munich. There were two excellent films; one good but not great; and two poor films.
Crash won Best Picture but it really shouldn’t have. I don’t think it was even second best among these.
My ratings, out of ten, for these films were: Brokeback Mountain (5); Capote (4); Crash (7); Good Night, and Good Luck (10); and Munich (9).
To be honest I can hardly remember Crash at all that is how little impact it had on me. Looking over synopses of the film it sounds like my issues would have been that none of the stories could have had the time required on the screen to have the full impact.
Coupled with this is the fact that the film attempted to look at the very real and complex issue of race in the US. Without giving the stories the time required to analyse this topic I would have found it very shallow. Let’s leave Crash there until I find my notes.
Capote is more problematic for me. Mainly because it had the potential to be so much better. Philip does a brilliant job of portraying this arrogant and unlikable character.
But Capote is also brilliant and captivating. Perhaps it is the researching a novel that isn’t interesting – but that isn’t true. You just need to look at films like Spotlight to see how research can be exciting on film.
This just wasn’t for me despite all the pieces being great.
Brokeback Mountain, where to start. A relatively simple story. The performances of the leads were fine but you just felt that they weren’t given enough to work with.
As we saw later on in both their careers they are brilliant actors. The film rested too much on its laurels of being a controversial film – for the time. Or for telling a controversial story.
Munich is another kettle of fish altogether. We see the Israeli spy agency Mousad portrayed in the grey world they exist in.
Eric Bana (Black Hawk Down, The Castle) gives one of the best performances of his career. The power in this story is that it has such a clear right and wrong beginning which quickly ends up in the grey outside the law.
What is great about this is the leads are not confident in the rightness of their actions and very quickly begin questioning their orders. Everything that happens, all the assassination plots are very interesting and exciting. A brilliant film.
Good Night, and Good Luck was such a stand-out film this year I don’t understand how it didn’t win.
It was an important film about how the media responded, or didn’t to McCarthyism during the hunt for communists.
It was originally shot, capturing the news TV aesthetic of the time, yet keeping the story feeling modern, even though it is in black and white.
We get a real inside view of how the news shows of this period were constructed and the effort involved in developing them. David Strathairn (Sneakers, L.A. Confidential) is great as the lead and his relationship with his producer, George Clooney (Three Kings, Burn After Reading), is portrayed superbly. They are on the same page about wanting to stick it to McCarthy and have an understated way of communicating.
This means that when they do have a fight it is huge. A truly fantastic film heads and shoulders above the film that won this year. Either it or Munich should have won.
