Who Will Take Home the Little Golden Man?

The Oscars are at hand. How many of the films nominated for Best Picture have you seen? If you are old like me, you remember the days when Bill Murray used to pick the Oscars on Saturday Night Live and toss films aside simply because he hadn’t seen them. There was something right about that in that day. But that doesn’t count anymore – at least since The Hurt Locker, a movie almost no one had seen, won the big prize.

I did add Hugo, another of the nominated films, to my viewed list last night, bringing me to five of nine. I don’t think I am ever going to see three of them: The Help, War Horse and Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close. (If you are a fan of one of those movies, change my mind.) They look too predictable, too maudlin, or too painful for me. I do want to see The Artist. At this point I’m waiting for it to come to the el cheapo theater by my house. Or just for the right invitation.

Hugo was fun and charming but I don’t think it has the gravitas to be the best picture. It’s a movie about the magic of the movies, and life as well, but after taking a deep bite of it one might realize you’d just swallowed something like meringue, which turns out to be a lot of sugar and air. This is an astonishing thing to say about a Martin Scorsese film, but the movie tightrope walked the line of sentimental fluff and just might have slipped over. That’s not to say it wasn’t entertaining – I had a great time watching it – but as I thought about it later and asked “what did it mean?” I was left thinking that Scorsese’s main point was that old movies should be preserved. There’s something self-aggrandizing about a movie about how valuable movies are. (Of course, nothing is more self-aggrandizing to the movie business than the Oscars themselves, but I still watch.)

The Oscar nominated movie with the most heft to it was The Tree of Life, a movie that I am going to write about next week on The 12. If you loved, say, 2001 or The Thin Red Line, you may love the Tree of Life. But if you like story and character development and something as conventional as a plot, then you may find, after watching it, that you’ve just lost 2 ½ hours of your life that you’ll never get back. To say this movie is ponderous and challenging to watch in our short-attention-span-world is to say something as obvious as noting that Mt. Everest is tall.

So, using the Bill Murray test and throwing out the four movies I haven’t seen, what movie would I choose for the Best Picture Oscar? Not Moneyball, which is about baseball, for goodness sake. Not Midnight in Paris, because it’s too quirky for such a mainstream award. Not Hugo or The Tree of Life for the reasons I’ve mentioned above. Which leaves The Descendants, a film I believe is truly worthy of the little golden man. But I don’t believe it will win, bringing me to pick The Artist, a movie I haven’t seen. Forget Bill Murray. I’ll be cheering when The Artist wins Sunday night, because I love picking a winner.