My immediate tendency when the Oscar nominations are announced each year is to place everything into a specific context. What is this the “year of?” What is the Academy trying to say with their choices? What’s it all about?

Many opinions have been offered and digested in the last week about the niche this year’s announcement may or may not carve into the history of cinema. The experience has been a polarizing one to say the least. There are many who consider 2005 to be the weakest year for films in a long time, less-filling, nothing more than a sampling of lesser content. And there are those – again, many – who seem to view it as one of the most resilient, triumphant, with something more beneath the surface.

It is far too easy to filter everything down to a cinematic year of “political” or “social” statements. Those sentiments are obviously happening on the surface, but the deeper you look, especially within the Academy’s Best Picture candidates, the more the focus seems to tighten. More than any year I can think of, this year’s nominees are representative of the human experience as it relates to civil interaction and personal relationships.

In Brokeback Mountain, Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist are two men drawn together in a world that admonishes their attraction. They are two pieces of a puzzle that fit together in a story that dictates the endurance and importance of love and the boundaries it doesn’t know.

In Capote, writer and journalist Truman Capote manipulates and connives his way through relationships with those who can assist him in reaching his ends. He is a man skilled at the art of the relationship – at the art of human interaction – and he knows how to use discourse and sympathy to get what he wants.

In Crash, Paul Haggis and Robert Moresco tell a story about the fear we have of one another as individuals, and how that fear keeps us from forming solid, or at least trusting, relationships with one another. The sprawling and disconnected setting of Los Angeles is used to further prove their thesis that people long for that interaction and yearn for any connection, despite their fears. Notions of race merely float on the surface of what Crash is really talking about.

In Good Night, and Good Luck., George Clooney brings to the screen the story of Edward R. Murrow‘s stand against civil injustice. The yarn is at once cautionary and familiar as it presents the notion that a government is not meant to impede on a civilization’s rights to interact and to engage with one another as they see fit.

And, in Munich, Steven Spielberg tackles the ages old debate over the Middle Eastern conflict. Realized in a similar stylistic vein as the greatest of 1970s cinema (The French Connection, The Godfather, Serpico), the film asks more questions than it answers (or even wishes to answer) about what two races of people are to do if they are to co-exist. The film therefore deals heavily with the ultimate civil struggle, in many ways serving as a microcosm for the rest of the line-up.

It’s also interesting how the above-mentioned theme of fear can be threaded throughout this list of films in some way, small or large, and even how that thematic is present in some of the year’s most diverse offerings (Batman Begins, A History of Violence, Cinderella Man, The New World).

It is often said that socially and politically conscious art comes to the surface most emphatically under a conservative regime of government. More than that, though, we live in times of uncertainty. We live in times where, unbeknownst to us, our telephone conversations might be tapped, a portion of a terrorist cell could be residing in our neighborhood. As Murrow recognizes in Good Night, and Good Luck., the fear is right here in this room.

Whether you agree with Oscar’s eventual choices or not, this is a year the Academy has, consciously or not (likely not), dedicated to the examination of homogeneity. Considering the times in which we live, I think it is always important to look beyond what seems the easy classification. Just as each of the films nominated for Best Picture, regardless of quality, is about something much more than its logline, the line-up itself is equally representative of depth.

February 7, 2006

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