The 2012 Oscar List

It's Oscar time again, with a fresh roster of films to review: "The Artist"; "The Descendants"; "Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close"; "The Help"; "Hugo"; "Midnight in Paris"; "Moneyball"; "The Tree of Life"; "War Horse." The list of Best Picture seems much less stylistically diverse than last year, and for me, a lot less enjoyable from a horse-race perspective. Again, I will be commenting on all of the Best Picture nominees... or as many of the as I can catch before they start handing out the short gold trophies. In the meantime, here's a review of one I saw just recently.

● It seemed like whoever wrote and directed "The Iron Lady" had such a dislike for Thatcher, that they tried to temper it by making her something pitiable. And so it was less biography than a 'Look how the mighty have fallen!' uppercut. The interspersing timeline and flashback narrative style doesn't allow for us to get an undistracted glimpse of her glory years. There's always this slap in the face that the woman is now senile, physically seeing her deceased husband and thinking she's still the PM. But even then, they took to task that metaphor of the "Iron Lady," careerist, giving her own children the cold shoulder, and the requisite "shop-keeper's daughter" quips. It would be like a film of Ronald Reagan's life concentrating hard and viewed through the extrapolated, exaggerated prism of his secluded Alzheimer's years that few people would even be able to speak of --- but that would be more appropriate, given that some of the signs did show in public. There weren't more important things to focus on that happened in her longest reign as PM? They had to assault her with this, during her lifetime? Yes, some people get old and some people develop dementia, but the decline is not the most important part of someone's life. I fundamentally disagree with this period of Thatcher's life being used as the basis.

I suppose the excuse would be that it's a "King Lear"-like drama that focuses on the final fall of its subject, laying out where he'd gone wrong and the ignominy of no longer having power coupled with the loss of wit and vigor. But Shakespeare with a quill and moving his players, this was not. The performances were good with what they were given, but it's a shame that Meryl Streep and Jim Broadbent were used so ill here.

No surprise that Hollywood gave it a political nomination. As Sean Penn himself said after he won for "Milk" in 2009, God knows they can't resist lauding "commies and homos." And, I would add, the cutting-off-at-the-knees of strong women who happen to be politically conservative --- just about the only thing most Academy members do judge to be an unnatural abomination.

Frankly, it looks like they hope to use the cachet of "The King's Speech" win last year (Firth's performance aside, something I was very disappointed with, given the screenplay's reductive and overwhelmingly fast and loose portrayal of history) and hope that a film about a British upper-cruster's personal battle with disorder can catch lightning for Ms. Streep in the Kodak ______ Theater a second time in the "Best Actress" category.