An Alternative Best Picture Oscar Nominees List

Synecdoche, W, Che, Rachel Getting Married, Flight of Red Balloon

Feb 4, 2009

Forget Slumdog Millionaire and the rest. Here are five other films that are sure to offer much more worth thinking about as you leave the theater

If last year’s crop of Best Picture Academy Award nominees—including There Will Be Blood and eventual victor No Country for Old Men—provided an uncommonly strong selection of challenging, uncompromising cinematic works, this year’s list of Best Picture contenders disappointingly reverts back to typical types of bland fare favored by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences over the course of the award show’s 81 years: biopics, sentimental fairy tales and “triumph of the human spirit” pabulum.

For each one of this year’s nominees, there was a film covering similar subject matter in more challenging and sometimes more profoundly moving ways. Thus, offered below is an alternative Best Picture nominees list. All of the alternatives, whatever you may have thought of them, were worth engaging with and arguing over, unlike any of the nominated films, most of them more notable for choking off complex viewer responses rather than inviting considered reflection.

David Fincher’s inflated adaptation of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s satirical short story—in which a baby is born with all the infirmities of old age and ages backwards—may have the most Oscar nominations, but it is a cold and lifeless affair, a visually appealing film with a gaping hole at its center where human emotion ought to be. Three hours is a long time to sit and watch two fatally remote ciphers go about their preordained life paces.

Far preferable, if no less problematic, is Charlie Kaufman’s maddening and messy Synecdoche, New York, an even more ambitious and imaginative consideration of life, death and the ways we human beings deal with those givens. Theater director Caden Cotard may be as off-putting a lead character as Benjamin Button—frankly, he’s a pretty dour fellow, as is the movie—but first-time director Kaufman, relying on surrealistic conceits as he usually does in his previous screenplays (including Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind), is much more in tune with the character’s state of mind than Fincher is with Button’s. Love it or hate it, it’s a film that is far less easy to shake than Fincher’s wannabe epic.

Ron Howard’s reasonably entertaining adaptation of Peter Morgan’s stage play is ultimately as simplistic and reductive as most of his other films (like A Beautiful Mind, perhaps most egregiously), shoving potentially interesting looks at media representation and an anguished man behind a broken crown into smug underdog-drama formula. Oliver Stone’s W. is, despite its own pat oversimplifications and overall sense of restraint, a more interesting, nuanced and somewhat empathetic portrait of President George W. Bush and his troublesome legacy than Frost/Nixon is of Richard Nixon and his own legacy.

In this portrait of trailblazing gay rights crusader Harvey Milk, Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black barely attempt to imagine Milk as something other than a saintly martyr-to-be. It’s faintly dull hero worship that is “good for you” in that bland, respectable Oscar-baiting way; the fact that its release came on the heels of the troubling passage of California’s Proposition 8, banning legal same-sex marriage, must have also weighed heavily on critics’ heads.

Steven Soderbergh’s ambitious two-part, four-and-a-half-hour epic Che is also arguably a huge chunk of hagiography; its Che Guevara is more symbol than human being, and the atrocities he sanctioned in Cuba after his successful revolution are left disturbingly ignored. Nevertheless, Soderbergh, to his credit, at least makes an admirable intellectual attempt to bypass all the biopic conventions Milk sanctimoniously falls into, creating something more contemplative, personal and fascinating to watch.

Stephen Daldry’s distant, occasionally risible adaptation of Bernhard Schlink’s novel starts out like a period-drama version of The Graduate—older Kate Winslet seducing young, naïve David Kross—and then shoves in Holocaust melodrama to really signal its "seriousness." Winslet’s Hanna Schmitz is revealed to have been a Nazi guard—a realization Kross’s Michael Berg doesn’t know how to deal with, leading to all sorts of regrets and tearjerking attempts at redemption.

Jonathan Demme’s Rachel Getting Married is also about how people cope with shocking revelations, tragedy and guilt, but it’s a livelier and more resonant consideration of human anguish than The Reader’s studied self-seriousness.

Contrived and condescending, Danny Boyle’s supposed feel-good movie of the year is totally phony in its calculated “innocence,” preferring to drown the Indian poverty it depicts in both an impersonally flashy style and Hollywood—or, rather, Bollywood—plot clichés. There’s not a moment here that feels emotionally authentic or even deeply felt; "destiny"—one of its stated main themes—has rarely felt so hollow. Still, coming as it does in the middle of a major economic recession, it was perhaps guaranteed to strike a chord no matter how silly it is (or how ugly it looks).

Look no further, then, than Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-hsien’s sublime Flight of the Red Balloon for a film that presents just as much of an outsider perspective toward France as British director Boyle does toward India. Hou’s film, however, is a far more profound look at ordinary everyday personal struggle and the way those struggles sometimes blind us to the innocent beauty of the world around us. Where Boyle constantly hammers you to feel something, Hou, with his characteristic patience and sensitivity, allows us to experience our own epiphanies, fully earning its moments of glorious uplift.

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