With the award season in Hollywood coming to an end, the nominees are now gearing up for the biggest night — the 84th Annual Academy Awards which will be telecast in over 225 countries on February 26. While speculation is rife and predictions are already being splashed across news channels, the Academy is known to surprise many with its final decision.
Though Gary Oldman’s pitch-perfect depiction of an espionage veteran in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy and Demián Bichir’s heart-wrenching portrayal of the struggles of an undocumented Mexican day labourer in A Better Life are Oscar-worthy, they are likely to be passed over. There is also Martin Scorsese’s fantasy tale, Hugo with 11 nominations. The fight for the Best Picture, however, seems to be between three films — Bennett Miller’s Moneyball, a biographical sports drama starring Brad Pitt, Alexander Payne’s family drama, The Descendants, with George Clooney in the lead, and French director Michel Hazanavicius’s black-and-white silent movie, The Artist, starring French actor Jean Dujardin. Pitt, Clooney and Dujardin will also be competing for the Best Actor Oscar.
Moneyball, based on Michael Lewis’s book by the same name, is an unconventional, almost irreverent take on American baseball — not the glory and the passion of the sport already captured in films like The Field of Dreams (1989), but the money involved in the game. Pitt plays Billy Beane, the frustrated general manager of the Oakland Athletics baseball team, who has recently lost his star players to “richer teams” and now faces the Herculean task of assembling a winning team on a small budget. In a decision that meets the ire of his sponsors and coach, he hires Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), an insecure, chubby and awkwardly endearing Economics graduate from Yale, as the assistant manager of the team. Together, Beane and Brand use Mathematics and “cold logic” to form a team of average players selected exclusively on their “base percentage” — a measure of how often a batter reaches base.
Pitt, who is also the producer of the film, in one of his career’s most convincing performances emulates the real Billy Beane to perfection — be it the grunts to mock others, the guttural noises to express his disagreement with the old talent scouts or the habit of spitting tobacco into a cup. Perhaps the most striking aspect of Pitt’s performance, one that any ardent fan will be able to point out, is his charming smile in Moneyball — one that expresses his fatigue, despair and even his lack of say in parenting his daughter. Pitt doesn’t smile often in his movies, but in this one he resembles a young Robert Redford from the 1984 film( also on baseball), The Natural. The film does not indulge in any theatrics — there are no lofty speeches about believing in oneself on or off the field. For an Indian viewer, the film with its obsession with baseball gets monotonous in places, but the scenes between Pitt and Hill make up for it. In one remarkable scene, Pitt throws light on the business of trading players as he states with a sardonic smile, “I can't get attached to the players...I have to trade ’em, send ’em down, sometimes cut ’em.” The fact that he is yet to win his first Oscar in this category might work to his advantage.
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Pitt’s close friend Clooney isn’t far behind. The Descendants has already won the Golden Globe for Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor. Clooney is Matt King, the struggling, haggard (you can see the lines on his face in one too many shots) father of two girls. The real star of the film, however, is its director. There is nothing special about the story — the mother is rendered comatose due to a motorboat accident. Naturally, Clooney has to step in as “the back-up parent, the understudy”. Payne’s grasp over what troubles contemporary society has already been seen in films like About Schmidt and Sideways; in The Descendants he depicts the process of grieving in his trademark style — using humour, satire and avoiding clichés. Payne sets his cast up in Hawaii — captured beautifully with a promising Hawaiian soundtrack — , a location more befitting for a romantic comedy than a family drama. Yet, the gripping screenplay makes the paradox work. At over two hours, the film is long.
Though American media is hailing this as Clooney’s best performance yet, his Oscar-winning performance in the 2005 thriller Syriana and in The Ides of March (2011) was superior. In The Descendants, Clooney is almost too patient with his daughters as they dabble with drugs, alcohol and boys (scenes between Clooney and his daughter’s perpetually stoned friend make for great comedy). One keeps waiting for him to lose control but that moment never comes. The closest he comes to a breakdown is when he cusses at his comatose wife for cheating on him. It is, however, refreshing to see Clooney not as a suave, double-crossing thief as seen in the Ocean’s 11 trilogy and Out of Sight (1998) but as a man at the end of his tether. Scenes between Clooney and his elder daughter (Shailene Woodley) are simply delightful, as he asks himself, “What is it with the women in my life wanting to destroy themselves?”
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While Pitt and Clooney are batting for each other — Clooney declared himself an ardent “Pitt fan” in his Golden Globe acceptance speech —, it is likely that the elusive Best Actor Oscar will be handed over to Jean Dujardin — unheard of till now — for his charming portrayal of a fading silent movie star in The Artist. Michel Hazanavicius’s decision to make a silent movie in this day and age is commendable. Set up in Hollywood between the years 1927 and 1931, Hazanavicius tells the story of George Valentin (Dujardin), a proud silent movie star, who refuses to join the bandwagon of the “talkies” that threaten his reign. Without any dialogue to convey his emotions, Dujardin evidently had a tougher job to do than Clooney or Pitt, increasing his chances to win by a huge margin. While the film hasn’t done good business in comparison to the other two, it manages to hold the viewer’s attention successfully.
Dujardin uses every muscle on his face to convey a wide spectrum of emotions — including wiggling his eyebrows to seduce the beautiful Peppy Miller (played by Bérénice Bejo). Hazanavicius uses a soundtrack composed by Ludovic Bource to depict the decline of the era of silent movies. The first ‘dialogue’ — a “bark” uttered by Uggie, Dujardin’s dog and best friend in the film followed by women’s laughter — feels like an interruption in the serene plot. Watching Valentin tap dance his way into the heart of his lady love as well as his fans, one wishes that the era of silent movies had gone on just a tad bit longer. And that in itself, makes The Artist a clear winner.