{"id":2002,"date":"2017-02-26T15:21:36","date_gmt":"2017-02-26T15:21:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/?p=2002"},"modified":"2017-02-26T15:21:36","modified_gmt":"2017-02-26T15:21:36","slug":"oscars-2017-hell-or-high-water-hidden-figures-predictions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/2017\/02\/26\/oscars-2017-hell-or-high-water-hidden-figures-predictions\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscars 2017 \u2013 Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, predictions"},"content":{"rendered":"

Hell or High Water<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

This was still showing at a couple of rep cinemas but I missed it and had to catch up with it on iTunes. Maybe it would have cast a stronger spell over me in a cinema, but watching at home on my own I was immensely struck by how ordinary it was, especially in the light of the other nominees. It\u2019s not a bad film by any means, but nothing in it is in any way striking, original or important.<\/p>\n

Chris Pine and Ben Foster are fine as the brothers resorting to bank robbery for reasons which (to create a bit of extra false suspense) are not immediately clear and Jeff Bridges is in good form as the laconic sheriff on their tale. The sprawling rural setting, casual violence and Bridges in particular all call the Coen Brothers to mind, but this is even more straight down the line than True Grit<\/em>, arguably their most conventional film, and it sorely lacks the kind of idiosyncrasies which they or someone like them might have been able to bring.<\/p>\n

Taylor Sheridan\u2019s script is unhurried (good!), the characters do more than simply go through the motions, and David Mackenzie photographs and paces it well, but I couldn\u2019t find anything to excite me. It’s all fine, but it’s all been done as well or better elsewhere, notably on TV in shows like Justified<\/em> and especially Breaking Bad<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Hidden Figures<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

More problematic is Hidden Figures<\/em>, which aims higher and misses much more comprehensively. On paper, this looks like ideal Oscar fodder. Like Best Picture Winners before it including The King\u2019s Speech<\/em>, Argo<\/em> and god help us, Shakespeare in Love<\/em>, it appears to tackle important issues but does so in a way which is ultimately reassuring rather than challenging. While this is not as cack-handed as either, this film reminded me not of the foregoing but rather of previous nominees The Help <\/em>and The Imitation Game<\/em>.<\/p>\n

To begin with, this was a story which deserved a wider airing and if people who had not known about their contribution beforehand leave the cinema able to cite the names Dorothy Vaughan, Katherine Johnson and Mary Jackson (as well as appreciating that they were three of an entire team of African-American women who contributed to NASA in very significant ways over several decades) then that is a very good thing indeed.<\/p>\n

But it\u2019s a shame that the movie itself is so generic, bland and unconvincing. As with The Imitation Game<\/em>, I am not unduly worried about historical accuracy (although it\u2019s reassuring that unlike with that film, someone on set knows how to pronounce the name Euler). I did feel that I didn\u2019t learn an awful lot, compared to, say Selma<\/em> for example, but to be fair it\u2019s not entirely to Selma<\/em>\u2019s credit that I was rather uninformed about that period of Dr King\u2019s life, nor is it a slam against the makers of Hidden Figures<\/em> that I was rather more aware of the facts that movie is based on. But whereas Selma<\/em> viscerally made me feel what life was like for black people in the segregated south, Hidden Figures<\/em> feels like the carnival float version, depicting the pain and struggle in very broad and familiar brushstrokes.<\/p>\n

So I don\u2019t mind at all that in reality Katherine Johnson just went ahead and used the whites-only ladies\u2019 room, nor that although John Glenn did ask for her personally to check the calculations, she had a couple of days to do it. What I do mind is that the depiction of these women\u2019s struggle is not on its own terms convincing, illuminating or even terribly interesting. Compared to the depiction of sexism (and to a lesser extent, racism) in Mad Men<\/em>, although the fictional versions of Dorothy, Katherine and Mary do face a lot of road blocks, most of them are overcome fairly easily once they make an Impassioned Speech. When in 2017, Donald Trump is trying to stop transgender people from using appropriate bathrooms and stopping green card holders from being with their families, the cosy come-on-in-and-join-us, racism-is-solved moments come across as smug and complacent, rather than punch-the-air triumphant. The slow thawing of Kirsten Dunst\u2019s character towards Octavia Spencer is the sole exception, as this is at least presented without the implausible grandstanding seen elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Screenwriter Allison Schroeder does little to really establish who these three women are and what sets them apart from each other, so we must be thankful that the three leads do such amazing work. Taraji P Henson, Octavia Spencer and Janelle Monae all manage to find moments to elevate the largely sit-com style script to something a bit deeper and more complex, but these opportunities are frustratingly rare. Meanwhile Director Theodore Melfi has failed to learn the lesson of Apollo 13<\/em>, where Ron Howard used all-CGI shots of rockets and spacecraft, but made them all look as much like real footage as possible. Here we have science-fiction style sequences where virtual cameras whirl around shiny capsules, cut together with archive footage which clashes horribly.<\/p>\n

So, I fear that one of the films I was most looking forward to ends up as probably the weakest of this year’s bunch.<\/p>\n

Now \u2013 predictions. The big question is: will this be La La Land<\/em>\u2019s night? I\u2019m going to say yes. Moonlight <\/em>is gathering a lot of buzz but faced with a choice between the feel-good musical about Hollywood itself, or the low-key drama about a black, gay man whose life is turned around by the drug trade, the very conservative Academy is going to stick firmly in the middle ground, so La La Land <\/em>takes Best Picture and Damien Chazelle takes Best Director, although I wouldn\u2019t entirely rule Barry Jenkins out of the running.<\/p>\n

Denzel Washington has probably done enough to eclipse Casey Affleck in the Best Actor stakes, but if it is going to be La La Land<\/em>\u2019s night, then Emma Stone will take Best Actress. The Best Supporting categories are far easier to predict, with Mahershala Ali needing to write a speech and Viola Davis probably having already cleared space on her dresser.<\/p>\n

As they are nominated in different categories, Moonlight<\/em> and La La Land <\/em>can expect to split the screenwriting awards and I\u2019d expect La La Land<\/em> to take Best Song, Best Score and maybe Best Cinematography too.<\/em><\/p>\n

Let\u2019s check back here tomorrow and see how I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Hell or High Water This was still showing at a couple of rep cinemas but I missed it and had to catch up with it on iTunes. Maybe it would have cast a stronger spell over me in a cinema, but watching at home on my own I was immensely struck by how ordinary it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":true,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[25,11],"tags":[507,506,13,495],"class_list":["post-2002","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-at-the-cinema","category-culture","tag-hell-or-high-water","tag-hidden-figures","tag-oscars","tag-oscars-2017"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p5JY5l-wi","jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2002"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2007,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2002\/revisions\/2007"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2002"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2002"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/tomsalinsky.co.uk\/blog\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2002"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}