The Oscar Nominations

Some personal observations in the wake of the announcement of the Academy Award nominations earlier this week.

• The hue and cry from the general movie going public was the "snub" of Greta Gerwig, who did not receive a nomination for Best Director for "Little Women."  Personally, I am not remotely qualified to judge all of the movies and directors out there, but "Little Women" was one of the best movies that I saw last year, and I would have loved to see Ms. Gerwig snag a nomination, if not the Oscar itself.  Whether sexual politics were involved in the nominations is an argument that I will let others fight.
• I have seen four of the nine Best Picture nominees: "Ford v Ferrari", "The Irishman", "Little Women", and "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood."  All are worthy nominees.  Of these four, my personal favorite was "Once....", and it would get my vote, although I would be delighted if "Little Women" grabbed the top prize.
• My thoughts on the five Best Picture noms I have not seen:
• "Jojo Rabbit" - A story where Hitler is played as comic imaginary friend, does not appeal to me, although enough people whose opinions I respect say don't let that turn me away from this one.  I may need to see this one.
• "Joker" - Everything that I have heard about this one tells me that it is just not my kind of movie.  Doubt that I will see this.
• "Marriage Story" - The story of a marriage falling apart.  A custody battle for the kid.  Oh, yeah, THAT'S something I want to see.  I am also told that it is writer/director Noah Baumbach's own personal story, so I want pay to see his self-therapy?  Mrs. Grandstander watched this and she said it was "okay", but she also said that she knows that I wouldn't like it.  I don't care how good the acting is, and I am sure that it is, I don't want to sit through her people's misery.
• "1917" - I am not drawn to this one, although I am intrigued by the idea of how it was shot in a series of long continuous takes.   I will probably check this out at some point.
• "Parasite" -  I am also not drawn to a foreign language film with subtitles, but, again, enough folks whose opinions I value say that this is really a good one, so I may try to catch the one.
• A big surprise was the lack of love shown by the Academy for "A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood."  Its only nomination was for Tom Hanks for Best Supporting Actor.
• Speaking of Best Supporting Actor, that is the category that can best  be described as a true All-Star Ballot: Tom Hanks, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, Joe Pesci, and Brad Pitt.  All have Oscars on their resumes (although's Pitt's is as a producer, not an actor).  The front runner for this one appears to be Pitt, and I hope that he does get the win.  
• No love for Robert De Niro for "The Irishman"????
• Scarlett Johansson get nominated for both Best Actress and Best Supporting Actress.  When this has happened in the past, the actor usually snares the Supporting award.
• "The Irishman" garnered ten nominations, and it will be interesting how the Academy will treat this one since it is a Netflix production.  Will be there anti-Netflix, anti-Movies-made-primarily-for-streaming-services bias?  That will be an interesting storyline to follow.  (This applies to "Marriage Story"  and "The Two Popes" as well.)
• My guess is that the Best Director winner will be between two of Hollywood's darlings, Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino.  Two factors will tilt it towards Tarantino, I think.  One, the anti-Netfix factor against Scorsese, and two, Tarantino's movie as almost a love letter toward Hollywood, and Hollywood loves to honor itself, so QT finally gets his Best Director Oscar.
• The Best Actor/Actress categories seem to be fait accomplis  for Joaquin Phoenix ("Joker") and Renee Zellweger ("Judy").   Nominated for a fourth time, I would love to see Saoirse Ronan win her first Oscar, but it will be hard to top Zellweger's performance.
• The Academy could make up for Gerwig's Best Director snub by awarding her the Oscar for Best Adapted Screenplay, although Steven Zallian could get this one as a way to honor "The Irishman".
• The Original Screenplay award could go to Tarantino if he doesn't get the Director Oscar for "Once Upon a Time...In Hollywood."  That has happened for him in the past ("Pulp Fiction" and "Django Unchained").
• Every year there is a movie that gets a ton of nominations in different categories but ends up getting shut out on Oscar night.  What will be that movie this year?  I fear that it could be "Little Women."

The Grandstander will put forth some official predictions as the night of the awards draws nearer.  In the meantime, a couple of plugs for my favorite movies of the year....

"The Irishman"

So Mrs. Grandstander and I decided upon a Saturday Night at the Movies date night this weekend, and settled in to watch perhaps the most anticipated movie of 2019, Martin Scorsese's "The Irishman", and what can I tell you, it did not disappoint.

This is an epic of a movie.  Three and one-half hours long and and all-star "mob movie" cast of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci.  It is the story of the rise of Frank Sheeran (De Niro), the Irishman of the title, within both the Mob in Philadelphia and the Teamsters Union of the 1960's, and how he became a favorite of both mob leader Russell Bufalino (Pesci) and teamsters head man Jimmy Hoffa (Pacino).  It has all the trademarks of Scorsese - the long single take that takes us through the halls of a nursing home (and a few other such takes elsewhere in the film), the sound track featuring period music, the voice over narration of the main protagonist, and the freeze frame shots of characters that tell us "whatever became of" them.  "The Irishman" is reminiscent of all great Scorsese movies, and it is just as good, and perhaps better, than all of them.

The main thrust of the movie is the story of "what the hell happened to Jimmy Hoffa, anyway?"  Scorsese and screenwriter Steven Zallian posit their theory on how Hoffa came to his end, and I won't spoil it for you.  There are so many great scenes in this movie.  One of my favorites involved a meeting between Hoffa and mobster Tony Provenzano (played by Stephen Graham, who played Al Capone in "Boardwalk Empire") wherein Tony Pro is late for his meeting - an unforgivable sin with Hoffa - and most of the meeting is the back-and-forth between the two of them as to why you should never be late for a meeting, per Hoffa, and who-gives-a-shit-I'm-here-now, per Tony Pro.  Fantastic.

The three stars are great. No surprise with De Niro, who's always great. Pesci plays a very different type of mobster, not the bombastic, fly off the handle type you are used to seeing him as, but quiet and perhaps even more chilling.  And Al Pacino will probably get an Oscar nomination for his portrayal of Jimmy Hoffa.  

I really, really liked the movie, but I wish that I could have seen it in a movie theater.  As I wrote about earlier in the month, this is a Netflix production that was released to a few theaters in selected cities for a three week period so as to qualify for the Academy Awards and then pulled and sent straight to the streaming service.  I would like to have had the experience of seeing it on a big screen with a crowd of people in a theater, but this is the wave of the future, so I guess that there is no point shouting at the clouds about it.  And with its three and one-half hour length, I was able to hit PAUSE for both a bathroom break and a break to get myself a dish of ice cream, so there is that.

About that length.  At first, I was put off at the thought of it.  Hey, a good movie should be no more than two ours, tops, amiright?  After watching "The Irishman", though, I can't think of any part or parts of it that were superfluous or that could have been done away with to tighten it up.

One final thing.  The movie is based on a book by  Charles Brandt called "I Heard You Paint Houses".  You can guess what "painting houses" is a euphemism for.  Anyway, both the opening title and the closing credits did not say "The Irishman", rather they said "I Heard You Paint Houses".  Wonder what was up with that? 

"The Irishman" gets the full Four Stars from The Grandstander.

Martin Scorsese, Marvel Movies, and Changing Paradigms

Martin Scorsese, undoubtedly one of the great movie directors of this or any other generation, is much in the news these days for a couple of reasons.  One, is the release of his new film, "The Irishman", a three and one half hour epic centering around the death of Jimmy Hoffa.  The movie stars Robert De Niro, Al Pacino, and Joe Pesci and is one of the most highly anticipated films of the year.

The second reason revolves around a comment made by Scorsese in a recent interview.  When asked about the popularity and preponderance of movies based on Marvel comic books, he responded by saying that they weren't for him.  I've tried them, he said, but "they are not really cinema."  This created a firestorm of response from both the creators of and fans of the comic book flicks, and the controversy was exacerbated when fellow filmmakers Francis Ford Coppola  and Steven Spielberg jumped in and agreed with Scorsese.  "Not really cinema" they agreed while looking down their noses. 

Normally, I would tend to brush off these comments and say something like "Let Scorsese yell at the clouds.  He's earned a right to his opinion" and go on my way.  However, I feel the need to opine on this, and it revolves around the production and distribution plan for "The Irishman."

The movie was produced by Netflix, and if you haven't been paying attention, this streaming service has gotten heavily into the production of top shelf feature films over the past few years as programming for its subscription service, which is fine.  Netflix also thinks that these films should qualify for Academy Awards. (Something that Spielberg, I believe, has lobbied heavily against.)  In order to qualify, films must be shown in actual  movie theaters, or "cinemas", if you will, in either New York or Los Angeles, during the calendar year.  So, Netflix, presumably with Scorsese's blessing, began a very limited release of "The Irishman" last week and it will expand a bit this week (not even sure if it will be on a theater screen in Pittsburgh)  and then it will be pulled from movie theaters, I believe, in the third week of November. After that, the only way you will be able to see "The Irishman" will be via streaming on Netflix.

So, while Scorsese may sneer at popular films like the Marvel comic book franchise, he is okay knowing that most people will only see his latest masterpiece on their home TVs, laptops, iPads, or four inch telephone screens?  Where is the cinematic value in that?  Maybe this is the way of the future for full length motion pictures, and if so, give the 76 year old Scorsese credit for recognizing and embracing this new paradigm, but don't do so and then look down on other popular movies and labeling them as so much mindless trash.  The truth of the matter is that while Marvel movies may never win Oscars or make Ten Best lists, the hundreds of millions of dollars that they rake in at the box office allow the doors of actual, honest-to-God movie theaters to remain open and in business, and that is no small thing, and auteurs like Scorsese, Coppola, and Spielberg should be glad of that.

Full disclosure:  I am not a Marvel Movies person myself.  Just not my cup of tea, but good for them and the movie going public that does enjoy them. Also, I can't wait to see "The Irishman", even if it will mean becoming a Netflix subscriber once again.  One good thing abut these services, you can cancel them and come back to them at your convenience.  I was going to re-up anyway once Season Three of "The Crown" becomes available.