Actor in a leading role

Who should win: Colin Firth
Who will win: Colin Firth

Actor in a supporting role

Who should win: Geoffrey Rush
Who will win: Geoffrey Rush

A win for Bale would be great since he was equally excellent, but tie goes to the better film.

Actress in a leading role

Who should win: Natalie Portman
Who will win: Natalie Portman

To quote myself from elsewhere: She went down the “How to Win An Oscar” list and checked every box. Lost an unhealthy amount of weight for the role? Check. Straight actor doing same-sex love scenes? Check. Commenting on a comfortably damnable subject? Check.

Actress in a supporting role

Who should win: Hailee Steinfeld
Who will win: Hailee Steinfeld

There were some very weak contenders in this category. Steinfeld is the only sane choice.

Best motion picture of the year

Who should win: Black Swan, True Grit or The Social Network
Who will win: The King’s Speech

Anything but Inception will do, really.

Achievement in directing

Who should win: Tom Hooper or Darren Aronofsky
Who will win: Tom Hooper

Sometimes, precision and reserve can win the day. The lack of a nomination for Nolan seems to indicate that the Academy is feeling that way this year.

Adapted screenplay

Who should win: The Social Network
Who will win: The Social Network

Honestly… they made a movie about a website gripping and intense.

Original screenplay

Who should win: The Kids Are All Right
Who will win: Inception

I just have a bad feeling about this one. I hope I’m wrong.

Best documentary feature

Who should win: Exit Through the Giftshop
Who will win: Inside Job

EXtG was amazing. A Banksy acceptance speech would be potentially mind-blowing. But Inside Job lets Hollywood think it’s super-duper-important, so it’s got a leg up there.

Best animated feature film

Who should win: How to Train Your Dragon
Who will win: Toy Story 3

Not a great showing this year for this category. Toy Story 3 was deeply mediocre, especially by Pixar standards. HtTYD was at least wacky fun.

Achievement in art direction

Who should win: Inception
Who will win: Inception

I think Inception will pick up a lot of the more technical awards and get snubbed in all of the major categories.

Achievement in cinematography

Who should win: Black Swan of The King’s Speech
Who will win: Inception

People seem to think that CGI, slo-mo and practical gags Kubrick pioneered in the 70s are a revolutionary visual styling.

Achievement in costume design

Who should win: True Grit
Who will win: The Tempest

Not much thought going into this one. Alice in Wonderland shouldn’t win because it was pure CGI rubbish. The Tempest has Shakespeare on its side and sometimes that seems to help. True Grit had cowboys and I like cowboys. Meh.

Achievement in film editing

Who should win: Black Swan
Who will win: Black Swan

That movie scared the bejeezus out of me. Mostly due to its editing.

Inception is a very good film. If you’re one of the handful of people who haven’t seen it yet, you should make time to do so. It’s well-acted, tightly-directed and provides a story that unfolds in a generally satisfying way. Its most successful moments are almost entirely visual and those portions of the film are truly unique and compelling and make it a worthy effort entirely on their own.

That being said, I found its core philosophical and narrative challenges to be rather uninspired and some of the story’s choices (particularly near the end) were disappointingly shallow. Inception is a movie defined by new vistas, but not new ideas.

In my view, it exists on the film spectrum occupied on one end by The Matrix and on the other by Dark City. In fact, it felt very much like a movie that has been written and re-written numerous times in the shadow of those earlier films. The result is a partial success – it is better than The Matrix and not as good as Dark City.

Spoilers follow from this point forward:

Once upon a time, I, Zhuangzi, dreamt I was a butterfly, fluttering hither and thither, to all intents and purposes a butterfly. I was conscious only of my happiness as a butterfly, unaware that I was Zhuangzi. Soon I awaked, and there I was, veritably myself again. Now I do not know whether I was then a man dreaming I was a butterfly, or whether I am now a butterfly, dreaming I am a man.

- Zhuangzi – Chinese philospher (369-286 BC)

That’s Inception in a nutshell – ideas that have been rattling around in recorded human consciousness for the better part of two and a half thousand years. Hundreds of years before Zhuangzi, the Greek philosopher Gorgias tackled the same issues. And later Descartes (he of “cogito ergo sum” fame) and hundreds of others weighed in as well.

In fact, it’s hard to imagine that Inception was scripted without some rather direct inspiration from good ol’ Zhuangzi. See if any of this rings a bell:

He who dreams of drinking wine may weep when morning comes; he who dreams of weeping may in the morning go off to hunt. While he is dreaming he does not know it is a dream, and in his dream he may even try to interpret a dream. Only after he wakes does he know it was a dream. And someday there will be a great awakening when we know that this is all a great dream. Yet the stupid believe they are awake, busily and brightly assuming they understand things, calling this man ruler, that one herdsman – how dense! Confucius and you are both dreaming! And when I say you are dreaming, I am dreaming, too. Words like these will be labeled the Supreme Swindle.

Some of that is nearly word-for-word from the film.

But my point is not to accuse Christopher Nolan of theft or plagiarism or anything other sort of intellectual dishonesty. My major criticism of the film is that it chickens out and presents a rather banal consideration of the philosophical challenges that inspired it.  It asks the Big Question (“Is it ALL A DREAM?”) and then opts for the cop-out answer (“It’s up to the audience to decide for themselves.”).

It’s a bit of a tall order to expect a film to offer something truly NEW to an issue that’s been puzzled over by many of history’s great thinkers, but to fail to stand behind even the most juvenile, surface interpretations of the issue is disappointing.

Which leads me back to The Matrix and Dark City. Both films – like Inception – deal with concepts of “reality” and with the so-called “problem of other minds”. You can only know what’s in your OWN mind and you can only understand other people and even the world around you by analogy. You can’t trust your perception – only that you are, in fact, CAPABLE of perception, which leads to all sorts of Philosophy 101 queries:

Is the world real?

Are the people around you real?

Is your world real or a facade?

If the world you perceive is false, but more pleasant than reality, would you want to “wake up”?

All three films splash around joyfully in this rather shallow pool and the audience is understandably amused by the display. It’s like a late-night, freshmen year bull-session – fun and engaging enough while everyone is just killing time, but goofy and mostly pointless in the long run.  Its value is as a catalyst for fun – not as a sustaining motivator.  Only Dark City seems to REALLY be in on this gag.

The Matrix fails because it thinks these ideas are revelatory and Dark City succeeds because it never loses sight of the rather trivial nature of its core inspiration.

Inception fails because it puts too much stock in the narrative value of the “secret” philosophical challenge. By failing to fully clarify itself throughout its climax and into its final scenes, the result feels both lazy and uncertain. The resulting crisis of narrative confidence ripples back through the rest of the story and makes it just feel like a stylish – but futile – exercise. The Matrix suffers from the same problems.

In contrast, Dark City revels in its “secret” and presents it clearly and without equivocation. This leaves us with a complete and extremely satisfying narrative journey. It doesn’t “leave the top spinning”, so to speak.

Inception mistakes this narrative equivocation for depth.  Have the top spin perfectly or knock the damn thing over and the film immediately improves.

All of that being said, Inception is a noble – and FUN – failure. Like I mentioned previously, the visuals are worth the price of admission and – perhaps best of all – they AREN’T available in 3D.

One line review:

A cheap, purely emotional ending to what had been (at least initially) presented as a smart, methodical narrative.

Detailed thoughts:

The writers made a point to say that “not everything would be answered” and that the show was “always about the characters” which, to me, is pretty lame.  Seinfeld was a show about its characters.  The Sopranos was a show about its characters.  LOST was a show about a magical mystery island full of surprise polar bears and monsters.

From the very beginning, it was structured such that the overarching narrative was preeminent and where the “point” of the entire affair was that there was a “Big Mystery” at the center of it all that would eventually be revealed.  For the first few seasons, it seemed to coherently move in that direction.  Clues were given, small mysteries were uncovered and then resolved.  Half the fun of watching the show was trying to piece the puzzle together.

Somewhere along the line (Season 4-onward, in my opinion) they stopped delivering satisfying explanations for ANYTHING and got tangled up in a mess of parallel, time-displaced narratives, followed by ACTUAL time travel and a slow, relentless descent into metaphysical vagueness and seemingly endless side-track narratives that never got resolved.

I think it’s pretty clear that the gag was ALWAYS supposed to be that the island was some sort of “Limbo” analog.  The fact that EVERYONE in the audience got that in the first season sent the writers down a largely fruitless path of trying to find a way to stick with that basic concept while not TECHNICALLY having it be “Limbo”.  After all, your “Big Mystery”-focused show is going to have a tough go of it if everyone figures it out from the very beginning.

It’s a hell of a problem and I don’t know what the right response would have been.  Stick to your original plan and likely lose a large chunk of the audience or deny the obvious and then try to layer on tons and tons of red herrings, subtle variations on the original plan and oodles of dead-end side-stories and hope for the best?  There’s not a good answer.  I CAN say that they never should’ve let it drag on for six seasons.

I definitely found the touchy-feely pseudo-religious focus of the final part of the finale to be DEEPLY disappointing.  Obviously, LOST was always a show with a pronounced sense of the metaphysical, but that was (at least initially) tempered with an effort at grounding everything in some sort of rational, “scientific” context.  The worst kind of deus ex machina is one that ACTUALLY just uses god to explain its loose ends.

Overall, I think that LOST is a noble failure, similar to Battlestar Galactica – another serial sci-fi drama that ran off the rails into confusion and that ultimate cop-out: “It’s up to the VIEWER to decide.”  Like BSG, its first two seasons were rock-solid and it ran into trouble when it became clear that the network wanted more than three seasons worth of storyline.  In addition, it was GREAT sci-fi that got ruined by bad pseudo-religious silliness.

In the end, I’m grumpy because I liked it a great deal and wanted to see it live up to its full potential.  Let me be clear: You can do MUCH worse than LOST.  Despite all its warts, it’s still better than most of the stuff on TV.

Check them out here.

And leave some comments so he knows you’re out there watching.

Chicken-fried kudos to everyone involved!