David Luhrssen: Champion of the Middlebrow

Let's get something straight from the jump: the Oscars are a joke, a ridiculous parade of self-important meat-puppets stroking each other off in a frenzy of ego and delusional granduer. The Academy Awards have as much to do with recognizing excellence in American film as the invasion of Iraq did with creating democracy in the Middle East. Nevertheless, I always find myself getting invested in the nomination process and I inevitably watch the whole turgid mess on Sunday. Partly, I enjoy handicapping the winners in the same way I like fantasy baseball and political prognostication, but I'll admit that I root for my favorite films when they're nominated and am usually somewhat annoyed when they fail to win. Much as I find myself secretly dreaming that a Barack Obama presidency might (just might) lead to a mass political movement for social democratic reform at home and abroad, the hidden, starry-eyed idealist in me hopes that Oscars being awarded to excellent films will result in more people demanding excellence in film. Unlikely? No doubt. But goddamn it, a motherfucker can dream, can't he?

That's why shit like Shepherd Express film critic David Luhrssen's article Embracing the Dark Side: Have the Oscars Left the Public Behind? chaps my ass. In the piece, Luhrssen shits all over what is without a doubt the strongest slate of Best Picture nominees in decades for being too dark and challenging. Instead of downers like No Country For Old Men and There Will Be Blood, Luhrssen suggests that the Academy should have nominated American Gangster and Charlie Wilson's War, which he calls "engaging films on important subects, dramatizing reality through memorable storytelling and brought to life by stars that light the screen with charisma." Besides sounding like an Us Weekly review, this article is notable for just how incredibly wrong it is about everything. From the premise to the most basic facts, there's nothing but dumb all the way down to the bedrock here.

To start with, Luhrssen's essential premise: that movies like American Gangster are superior to ones like No Country because they are just as "serious" in their content but are more engaging to a popular audience, is astoundingly wrong. On the merits, No Country is a vastly better film than American Gangster. Luhrssen claims that Gangster has "something to say about the challenges and ambiguities of politics and society while packaging (its) message entertaingly." On the "entertainment" tip, American Gangster has its moments, but the film as a whole is unfocused and riddled with crime film cliche. As for the claims of being a relevant commentary on the contemporary world, the only real stab the film makes for social context is a repeated and insanely lazy trope. Whenever the filmmakers want to illustrate the realities exisiting outside of the world of the film, they show one of the main characters watching television news reports on exactly what they want the audicence to have in mind. It's cheap, easy, and fails to weave the social context into the lives of the characters. Luhrssen also makes the bizarre claim that No Country and Blood are "not entertaining in any normal sense." This kind of shit should be grounds for impeachment. Does this mean that Luhrssen watched Javier Barden and Josh Brolin play cat and mouse in the deserted streets of a Texas border town or Daniel Day-Lewis navigate the thunderous majesty of the Little Boston oil derrick fire and wasn't entertained? If that's true, I honestly don't know what to say to the man. If he did find those scenes entertaining but ended up forgetting about it because the rest of the films bummed him out, I do know what to say to him: you're lame.

My central objection to Luhrssen's premise is his apparently belief that the role of the Academy Awards should be to celebrate the joys of big budget, star-studded period pieces that are embraced by audiences. This has certainly been the MO of the Oscars until recently, and what has it resulted in? A parade of "Academy Award Winning" films that will be forgotten within a decade. Does anyone really think that A Beautiful Mind or Forrest Gump or Crash or Gladiator will live on in the minds of anyone a generation from now who isn't watching them on basic cable at that very second? If we're going to go to the trouble of staging a grindly-long Hollywood circle jerk every year, I say we might as well use the opportunity to expand the horizons of what constitutes a "great" movie. It isn't just production value, star charisma and "grand scope" (whatever the hell that means). It's courage and vision that make films "great", and that's just what this year's "dark" nominees have and what pedestrian shit like American Gangster sorely lacks. Yes, film is a profit-maximizing engine and a popular source of entertainment. But it's also an art form, and art is at its most vital when it challenges the viewer. Challenging films don't tend to win huge audiences, but they do stand the test of time. People remember the films that stick with them, that haunt them like that shot of Tommy Lee Jones' eyes as the screen goes black at the end of No Country. People also remember Oscar winners, if only because it gives them an edge playing Trivial Pursuit. When you look back at those winners in years to come, wouldn't you rather think "damn, that's a great movie, I need to see that again" than "wow, that fucking thing won an Oscar?" Yes, it's meaningless, but in a culture that is obsessed with convienence at all costs, including the destructon of the planet, any current that moves us as a people in the direction of embracing the difficult and the thought-provoking is to be encouraged.