Oscar Night 2013

For those of you who keep score, I got four out of six predictions right. Go me. The ones I missed were arguably the toughest to call: Best Supporting Actor and Best Director. And those were about the only surprises for me on Oscar Night 2013. The show itself was … boringly agreeable. There was nothing hideously inappropriate, despite what many feared when Seth MacFarlane, creator of the raunchy Family Guy and Ted, was announced as the host. MacFarlane understood that the only way to host these things is to put quotation marks around everything you do; in short, to do a routine about “a guy hosting the Oscars.” (The “We Saw Your Boobs” bit, for instance, was a way of “doing the joke” without really doing the joke; it was a Family Guy-style “Remember that time when I actually did that joke on Oscar night?”) I could see why the Academy picked him: he’s funny, he’s slick, he’s presentable, and he can sing. As the night wore on, the quotation marks faded and MacFarlane became a real guy hosting the real Oscars, making the time-honored jokes about the show running long (guys, the show always runs long; not a one of us expects to be out of there before 11:30 at the earliest).

Still, MacFarlane acquitted himself smoothly, and I don’t think he has to worry about those “Worst Oscar Host Ever” headlines Captain Kirk warned him about. Like MacFarlane, the show was restrained, even though the night’s theme was “movie musicals of the last decade,” which meant we got a number from Chicago and a cast reunion from Chicago, because one of the show’s producers, Craig Zadan, also co-produced Chicago. There was no shortage of divas: Shirley Bassey performing “Goldfinger” and flinging a gauntlet down for Adele (“Let’s see you do that when you’re 76” was the subtext); Catherine Zeta-Jones and Jennifer Hudson; Adele herself, of course, performing “Skyfall” and then winning for it; Barbra Streisand bringing some Broadway bathos to her tribute to Marvin Hamlisch; and Kristin Chenoweth joining MacFarlane for the end-credits song “Here’s to the Losers,” surely the first Oscar-night number to tease viewers into thinking they might hear a very R-rated synonym for female anatomy. Oh, Seth, such a card.

The night was disappointingly short on tackiness and incomprehensible moments; even Quentin Tarantino minded his manners and kept his speech brief. As always, I was annoyed by the “lesser” winners being rudely played off — by the theme from Jaws, yet — while more famous people get to blather with impunity. You might not care about the guy who wins for Best Documentary Short Subject or the lady who wins for Best Costume Design, but they’ve worked hard for many years to get up there, they may never get up there again, and they deserve better than to have the orchestra cutting them off during their moment in the lights. Every damn year, I grumble something like “They have time for montages” — in this case, a “fifty years of James Bond” thing — “but they don’t have time to let people talk.” Ah, well. That’s the Oscars.

It’s rare for a Best Picture winner not to win Best Director as well. Rarer still is when the director of a Best Picture winner isn’t even nominated. It hasn’t happened since Driving Miss Daisy 23 years ago, and Argo became only the fourth such Best Picture winner in the history of the Academy Awards. As one of the film’s producers, though, Ben Affleck got to hold a trophy and say a few words anyway. A rare tie happened, too (“No B.S.,” said presenter Mark Wahlberg, “there’s really a tie”), in the Sound Effects Editing category. Life of Pi emerged as the clear winner of the evening, taking home four awards; Lincoln, with 12 nominations, had to content itself with two wins. All of the nine Best Picture nominees got something for their troubles except Beasts of the Southern Wild, shut out in the four categories in which it was nominated. Maybe next time, Quvenzhané.

I don’t know that expanding the number of Best Picture possibles from five to nine or ten has helped much. Most observers say this was done as a response to the disappointment that The Dark Knight wasn’t nominated in 2008. The reasoning was that, by creating a larger playing field, crowd-pleasing hits could make it onto the roster, which they couldn’t have when the field was limited to only five, and that this would help give the mainstream audience more of a rooting interest in the Oscars and thus increase the number of eyeballs. Of 2012’s ten biggest hits, though, only Brave won anything significant (a surprise to some, since it wasn’t considered one of Pixar’s best), and the biggest blockbuster, The Avengers, garnered but one nomination (which it lost to Life of Pi).

I’m not saying the Oscars should become a way to throw awards to big moneymakers on top of their piles of cash. That’s what the People’s Choice Awards are for. The Oscars ostensibly reward excellence (although we still live in a world where master cinematographer Roger Deakins, a loser again this year for Skyfall, has no Oscars), and though we may quibble over what constitutes excellence, we can probably agree that Argo has a more solid claim to excellence than do, say, Snow White and the Huntsman or Hotel Transylvania. Both of which, incidentally, made more money than Argo. But now that it’s officially Best Picture, Argo may make another million or two in a theatrical re-release, and will likely sell that much better on DVD and Blu-ray. That’s what the Oscars can and should do — bring more attention to movies that deserve it, rather than fawning over movies that don’t need it.

Would You Rather

Ah, it’s always good to see Jeffrey Combs, especially in a film of some quality. The busy actor, best known for his iconic work as Dr. Herbert West in three Re-Animator movies, is diabolically front and center in the indie thriller Would You Rather. Combs plays Shepard Lambrick, a decadent moneybags who invites financially strapped folks to a dinner party and then obliges them to join in a competition. The winner gets his or her money problems sorted out. The losers … well, when candidate Iris (Brittany Snow) asks Lambrick what happens if you don’t win, his reply is simply “You don’t win.” Of course, it’s a tad more complicated than that.

The game and the movie’s title take off from the popular children’s thought experiment, wherein the choice is usually “Would you rather do this unpleasant (or gross) thing, or that unpleasant (or gross) thing?” Here, though, the players at the elegant dinner table are surrounded by bulky armed guards (in tuxedos, though; this is a classy environment, after all), and “elimination” from the game means elimination from breathing. Iris is there because she desperately needs money for her brother’s bone-marrow transplant; others in the game have similar hard-luck stories, including a recovering alcoholic (John Heard), an Iraq war vet (Charlie Hofheimer), and a gambler (Robb Wells).

Early on, Lambrick offers the alcoholic, who’s been dry for sixteen hard years, $50,000 if he finishes a snifter of brandy. Lambrick also waves $10,000 at vegetarian Iris and coaxes her to eat steak. He’s just warming up; the real plates on the menu include electrocution, stabbing, whipping, drowning, and self-mutilation. To his credit, director David Guy Levy doesn’t rub our faces in gore — most of the harsh stuff goes down off-camera. This isn’t a blood-soaked charnel-house mind-game like the Saw flicks; it leans more towards psychological violence. Most of it unfolds around the dinner table, in the fine tradition of “bottle episodes” on TV or low-budget filmmaking.

Would You Rather is a minor compelling entry in the subgenre of puppetmaster thought-experiment thrillers (another recent one was Compliance, based on a true story), and the actors have all been coached to keep their voices down; there’s little irritating hysteria, just ordinary people trying to stay in the game. Except for Iris, we don’t learn much about why the contestants have wound up in desperate straits, though there are teasing hints here and there. We root for Iris by default because we know what’s at stake for her, and Snow does a fair job of not squandering our inherent sympathy for Iris; she makes Iris a decent person, not insufferably so.

But if you’ve read this to the end it’s because I didn’t bury the lede: Jeffrey Combs is pretty much the reason to see this (or just about any) film. Combs knows how to be overtly creepy, but he’s done that in so many roles he no longer needs to make a big show of it. His Shepard Lambrick is quietly reasonable within the insane context Lambrick has created. Lambrick has more money than he knows what to do with, and he enjoys spending it by putting people to the test. Combs brings out Lambrick’s one-percenter vibe by making it seem that his little game is simply undiluted capitalism: If you’re better than anyone else at doing terrible things, you get the grand prize. Combs presides over this financial morality play with spirit and wit, a dry sense of self-amusement. He deserves to be far better known and appreciated outside of horror-fan circles.

Warm Bodies

A young man in a hoodie shambles aimlessly through an airport. He can’t remember his name, but he thinks it begins with an R. The R may as well stand for Romeo, because he soon finds his Juliet, though he has to eat her boyfriend’s brains first. Warm Bodies is a “zomromcom,” a term inaugurated by 2004’s witty modern classic Shaun of the Dead, and while this film isn’t as funny, it’s more romantic and has some intriguing twists on the zombie theme. R (Nicholas Hoult) is a relatively thoughtful and sensitive zombie — he provides self-deprecating narration, and he collects things that remind him of when he was alive. He stumbles across Julie (Teresa Palmer) when she’s on a run for medicine in the city. He seems taken with her even before he consumes her boyfriend Perry’s gray matter and experiences Perry’s memories of — and feelings for — Julie.

In 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, we were told that zombies eat brains because it alleviates “the pain of being dead.” Warm Bodies pushes that notion further towards an emotional anodyne: eating brains takes a zombie out of his listless existence for a while, like a drug. R and a few other zombies of his acquaintance (including Rob Corddry) may be zombies, and they may kill and eat humans because they have to, but they’re not as far gone yet as another kind of zombie. “Bonies,” these others are called — skeletal ghouls who “gave up” and have become true anti-life monsters. Compared to them, R looks pretty decent, and Julie (who doesn’t know R ate her sweetie’s skull meat) allows R to look after her after he rescues her. Eventually she develops feelings for him, which is unfortunate, because her father (John Malkovich) is the gung-ho leader of a militaristic band of zombie-killing survivalists.

Warm Bodies isn’t a romantic twist on the zombie movie so much as a zombie twist on the romance movie. There’s a nicely fragile rapport between Hoult (who’s delivered on the promise he showed in About a Boy a decade ago) and Palmer (who resembles Kristen Stewart but has more verve and humor). R and Julie look good and feel good together. We’re asked to believe that their love not only slowly heals R but inspires his fellow zombies to do likewise. Mostly we do. We can take or leave the implied message that we must embrace life to avoid being dead — literally, in this case — but R and Julie are a strange enough couple to make the bromide go down easy. The movie also appealingly suggests that if you were a bit of an outcast in life, you’ll manage to resist becoming one of the Bonies — you’ll try to find ways to make death interesting, like piling up snow globes or listening to Guns ‘n Roses.

This is director Jonathan Levine’s second horror-themed film, after his debut, the slasher flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane; some might also count 50/50, with cancer as the remorseless serial killer. Levine’s work here is amiably rumpled, relaxing into the scenes of R playing his old ’80s vinyl records for Julie or haltingly trying to converse with her. The movie doesn’t stand out much in memory — nothing in it really pops — but it’s enjoyable while it lasts. It provides a surprisingly nuanced showcase for Rob Corddry, who is often pretty funny but too often lapses into a cartoon of himself. Here he gives us an amusingly polite zombie, and his first non-conversation with R strikes the tone the movie needs. They could be just two regular guys mumbling at each other at an airport.

Warm Bodies is not anything like the Twilight of zombie movies — for one thing, it doesn’t take itself stupidly seriously enough for that — though some horror fans offended by the softening (and sparkle-fication) of vampires in that series may likewise bristle at this film’s apparent thesis that even if you’re a zombie, all you need is love. Zombies, such people may say, eat people; that’s all. (The villain of the piece, the gun-happy Malkovich character, agrees with them.) Some of us horror fans, though, get tired of the binary us-vs.-them formula and welcome some shading, especially in a subgenre as exhausted lately as the zombie film. When World War Z opens this summer, it’s possible I’ll be looking at some of the zombies slaughtered by the heroes and thinking “Wait, one of them could be R.”