Left, Right & Center Awards
LAFCA sports about 11 full-time employed critics… NYFCC about double that. Meanwhile BFCA’s membership has grown about 25% this year.
Bad times for critics.
MCN’s Ray Pride is keeping up with all the tweeting… see, critics are still relevant… they have Twitter accounts…
I don’t have the stomach.
The whole thing is now so inside baseball that I am a little queasy pretending to be a piece of twine or rubber or whatever the balls are made out of nowadays.
It took all of one profoundly stupid – and yes, I know the author will be insulted, but he deserves it on this one and should take comfort in the fact that less than 10% of hot blog readers will know that he wrote this unless he outs himself – responses to an award – “black and white doesn’t equal award-worthy cinematography. Come on guys.” Which is true. B+W does not deserve awards for being B+W. But this is utterly irrelevant when it comes to the masterful work in The White Ribbon.
But that is where we live now. Everyone is a fucking expert in cinematography when very few people I know understand what makes quality cinematography… and sometimes, that even includes me…. but not always. Okay for the author to prefer another choice… but to suggest this work is unworthy is not only ignorant, but… well, mostly it’s ignorant… but also petulant. If you had the skills that Christian Berger has, you wouldn’t be spending your Sunday twittering over his award.
Nor should I.
The only thing close to a surprise so far is picking District 9 for Production Design over Avatar, meaning that they are happy to award a heavily CGed design… but are out of their minds picking a beautifully done version of the form over one that creates an entire world from scratch just as beautifully, if not more so. Crazy and political. Would have been fine with them picking a “real world” designed movie, but if Avatar is on your table and you are taking it seriously for design, you really kinda have to go there.
See. I got sucked in.
I am picking things to be irritated by… which makes me a bore… but there really isn’t anything else to do when nothing interesting is happening. Obviously, they have the right to like what everyone else likes and to give out awards accordingly. In fact, that’s 100% fine. But it’s still boring.
i will check in again later this afternoon and be, most likely, equally non-plussed. Some angry guy in NY will accuse me of being too angry because I’m not jumping up and down and shouting from the rooftops.
I am really enjoying this season. Lots of new people. Lots of very talented people. And many of them will not win much, even though they did great work. I guess that as I roll along, I am more about honoring the work of the horses than worrying about who will win the races. Parts of the handicapping game are still fun, but I guess I just care less and less about the race that was run 2 months earlier in Saratoga… and I know too much about how that race was fixed. Ignorance was bliss.
And for the record, BFCA, with a wider group of less experienced and involved members, is becoming less and less relevant as well. But more on that some other time.
Later…
“I am picking things to be irritated by… which makes me a bore…”
Can’t argue with you there, David.
Poland’s just pissed because LAFCA won’t let him join. Never has, never will.
How else to explain why a man who spends 20 WEEKS coming up with pointless crap to say about the Oscars suddenly thinks awards from critics groups are “inside baseball”?
Poland’s pissed that he can’t join LAFCA and that’s why he’s freaked out by the way award news is delivered? That’s a bit of a stretch.
I forgive you, Dave, for not caring about this awards season – if I had a baby coming within weeks (days?) I wouldn’t care much either. But for those who are mildly interested in the game, they can tune in to the clusterfuck on Twitter. I have to admit, the real-time access to other people has made this awards season different. It’s kind of like The Amazing Race squished down to the size of a match box.
And on the cinematography thing, the person who made that comment has been making comments like that about the tech categories for at least five years. So it’s nothing new. And I respectfully disagree anyway, re: The White Ribbon – it’s beautifully filmed, totally deserving.
Thanks, Sasha. What a concept… expressing actual ideas. I am fine with someone hating a choice by a voting group. I am not okay with dismissing it as some sort of gimmick vote.
Liek I said about District 9, I get why that choice is attractive. And I just can’t understand that if you find that attractive you can even think it compares to Avatar in that realm of work. I would never dismiss D9’s production design as winning because everything looks so dirty and rusty and critics are suckers for that. Besides it not being true, it is a lazy insult to the production team for doing the job in front of them so well.
I am on a borrowed computer – to fix my dumb misspell on Bigelow’s name – and it kinda sucks. So I will tell the story of why I applied to LAFCA once, was not voted on, and will never apply again some other time.
And Joe… you know.
Could it be that the LAFCA like District 9 as a whole more than Avatar? That would explain why they felt like giving it an award and not Avatar.
Having not seen White Ribbon (and thinking Haneke is non-starter as a filmmaker), my 2 choices for cinematography are Inglourious Basterds and Adventureland. Adventureland is beautiful work precisely because it dares to approximate the “look” of a mid-to-late ’80s teen comedy without being on-the-nose about it.
I also love the feverish look of Precious.
Anyone who knows anything about film/cinematography would award ANTICHRIST the cinematography award, hands down. But critics get so worked up and angered by feelings and the *GASP* horror in the film, they blow it off. ANTICHRIST is bar none the most wonderfully, beautifully shot film of the year. Even the scene with bloody ejaculate is gorgeously shot although, nauseating.
Then again, I think this is a great middle finger to the homogenized masses who like group think. It’s von Trier giving the finger to people yet again by making a gorgeous, well acted film that pisses you off. All awards movies need to make you feel happy or guilty dontchankow.
David: Yes, I do know. And as P.J. O’Rourke once noted: Sometimes, the more you know, the less you forgive.
Totally agree about the masteful B&W cinematography in “The White Ribbon.”
But an even more exquisitely shot 2009 B&W film is Francis Coppola’s”Teatro” which was actually shot on digital video (by
Mihai Malaimare Jr.).
Simply ravishing.
Absolutely, Jimmy. Doesn’t seem like a fair basis for awarding specific awards in my opinion.
And I would be misunderstood if some think knowing something about cinematography means that any one person has the “right” answer about what’s best. It’s a subjective question.
You must be very forgiving, Joe.
That’s actually one of the funnier things you’ve written lately, David. Comparatively speaking, of course.
To paraphrase Paul Schrader’s Blue Collar:
David Poland will buy Joe Leydon a bottle of Cutty and we’ll all go back to work.
Jimmy: Anybody who remembers Blue Collar well enough to paraphrase dialogue from it deserves a tip of the hat from me. Seriously.
Joe: I come from a union family. Pryor is an acting God in that film. Love the final shot. In fact, I’d vote for Blue Collar’s cinematography over a B&W Haneke film any day of the week.
Jimmy: My father was a proud member of the NMU for nearly 40 years. I, too, can remember some of the choice dialogue (“They pit the lifers against the new boy…”) — and, funnily enough, I remember reviewing it (while I was working for The Shreveport Times) and feeling compelled to warn readers that, despite the ads Universal was running, it most certainly wasn’t just another Richard Pryor comedy…
I just want to say that I meant the person that made that cinematography comment does, I believe, know the category well and has been covering it for years. It sounded dismissive, what I said, but I didn’t mean it to be. However, I still agree that the White Ribbon had GREAT cinematography (in my own limited knowledge on the topic).
And I also totally agree with you about Avatar v. D9 and nobody loved District 9 more than I did – but Avatar kind of blows out everything else. If, as you say, it’s on the table at all.
You know, we are just dealing with voting slips. It could be quite likely that D9 got one more vote than Avatar. In the end, it’s all about votes.
Poland thinks it’s unfair to shun a movie for a specific tech award even if the movie as a whole is less than successful. I agree on principle, but let’s face it, it is very hard to award a movie that one finds lacking. I mean, I’m still getting over the fact The Wanderers wasn’t even nominated for Best Picture back in 1979.
The White Ribbon is gorgeous all right, but in KT’s defense, he might be responding to the tendency of people who *don’t* know cinematography to think any b&w effort is inherently better work. This kind of instinct certainly prevails in people’s avatars of themselves smiling wryly — this time in black and white! — while awkwardly holding their cameras, and I’m sure at least a few critics are as easily swayed.
…of course, the problem with this defense is that it really is a beautifully shot film. Conceded.
I second Antichrist, though.
But an even more exquisitely shot 2009 B&W film is Francis Coppola’s”Teatro” which was actually shot on digital video (by Mihai Malaimare Jr.).
White Ribbon is digital too.
Interesting. I didn’t realize that Haneke was working in digital video.
Of course, that doesn’t take away anything from Malaimaire’s “Tetro” achievement. That’s one stunning-looking film.
“White Ribbon is digital too.”
Really? I thought it was, but the publicists have told me otherwise.
In regards to D9/Avatar on production design – just floating a theory – but could D9 have prevailed due to the resources available? They both have great production design, but one did it on a relatively tight budget, and the other with a virtually bottomless toolbox.
Not saying that makes it right – but could certainly see folks leaning that way.
Really? I thought it was, but the publicists have told me otherwise.
They might be right, googling it a little — although either way Haneke says it should be projected digitally, since apparently nobody knows how to do decent B&W prints anymore (??!?!?)….
Cache was definitely HD though, and about as blatantly “HD” as anything by, say, von Trier or Mann.