[Alex Leo Serban]

mai jos, unul din cele mai bune comentarii la oscarurile 2005.
dupa el, o cronica excelenta la 'aviatorul'...
enjoy!


Oscar Without Glamour
by Scott Holleran
March 1, 2005


Show business glamour is gone, long gone. That was
clear from the moment crude Chris Rock stepped on
stage to host the 77th annual Academy Awards and
received a standing ovationЧfor just being there. By
contrast, one of the show's classiest hosts, the late
Johnny Carson, received a polite round of applause
after a taped tribute. Thirty years of a top-rated
show and several Oscar telecasts, no ovationЧone
minute of one show hosted by a foul-mouthed cable
comedian, instant ovation. Is it any wonder more
people don't watch?

Not that it matters; Hollywood's elite is too busy
inflating their own importance, that is, among those
who attended (and most starsЧHanks, Cruise, GibsonЧdid
not). Sunday's awards were dominated by a gaggle of
shrill, red carpet mongers, twittering about something
called swag (free stuff), bling (flashy clothes and
jewelry) and the Academy's stupid new rules.
Presenters were relegated to the aisles and nominees
were herded on stage as if they were being lined up
for a firing squad, not an Academy Award.

At times, the show reflected the drift from director
Martin Scorsese's HollywoodЧwhere ability can be
measured by how deeply one cares about making
moviesЧto actor and director Clint Eastwood's
Hollywood, where you get noticed with a slew of
squints, sneers and gimmicks in pictures that are
typically tragic and really about nothing at all.


Best actor winner
Jamie Foxx
Photo credit: AMPAS

Yet another promising actor reminded us that, in the
new Hollywood, one's value is based, at least partly,
on one's raceЧnot solely on one's ability to act. Best
Actor winner Jamie Foxx, like Halle Berry before him
(and many before her), transformed an award granted
for an individual's performance into a statement of
allegiance to his race, which is racism. This attitude
is exacerbated by people like Oprah Winfrey, whose
quasi-Black Panther salute from the audience is rock
bottom for a guilt-ridden billionaire with more power
than practically everyone in Hollywood. What a fraud.
Cheering a winner for a characteristic beyond his
controlЧrace, sex, nationalityЧis among the ceremony's
worst traditionsЧit is an insult to every actor.

Racism's corollary, multiculturalismЧthe idea that all
cultures are equalЧhad time in Oscar's spotlight, too,
with Salma Hayek, Penelope Cruz and Antonio Banderas
celebrating a folk song sung in Spanish that was
awarded Oscar's Best Song over superior work by Andrew
Lloyd Webber and Glen Ballard among others. Million
Dollar Baby's toothy Hilary Swank chimed in, citing
her own subcultureЧtrailer trashЧas a claim on the
Best Actress award. Someday, sometime, some lone actor
will have the self-confidence to rise and say, simply,
"thank you." And walk away.

Of course, there were the movies. Mr. Scorsese's The
Aviator, whatever its flaws, was lavish, grand
moviemaking about a larger than life subjectЧand that,
apparently, was its downfall. Too little death, gloom
and doom and not nearly unremarkable enoughЧthe new
Hollywood regards high aspirations, Mr. Scorsese's
trademark, as showy and arrogant. There is no place
for the exaltedЧonly the downtrodden, preferably done
with mediocrity.


Mr. Eastwood, like other conservatives, appeared
content to have gained the approval of others,
especially liberals. His Best Picture winner, Million
Dollar Baby, seems to have dragged even producer
Albert S. RuddyЧwho produced Mario Puzo's The
Godfather and once sought to make Ayn Rand's Atlas
ShruggedЧinto what Miss Rand called "the cult of moral
grayness," which in Mr. Eastwood's case means a bleak
world drained of color, purpose and life.

We watch the Oscars for a sight of Hollywood at its
best. While it hasn't been pretty for years, we keep
looking, hungry for a glimpse of someone who sparkles
with the confidence of having achieved
somethingЧsomething good. We look for our favorite
movie stars, we root for our favorite movie, we wait
to be moved, touched, humoredЧand, in that rare
instance, enlightened. But, year after year, it does
not happen. That's why Hollywood is losing its luster,
in television ratings, in theatrical attendance and in
general.

The glow of Hollywood's Golden Age stems from splendor
on the screen, and that was replaced by unending
assaults on both sense and sensibility long ago. Real
glamour is gone. Increasingly, and encouragingly, so
is the audience, which may cause Hollywood to give
them a reason to return.


THE AVIATOR (2004)
**** (out of four)

About a third of the way into Martin Scorsese's
fabulous The Aviator, a young Howard Hughes (Leonardo
DiCaprio), with ingщnue Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani) on
his arm, attends the premiere of Hughes' lavish WWI
epic Hell's Angels (1930)--a picture that burned a
significant portion of Hughes' millions before
becoming a smash, and one that still contains some of
the most daring, astonishing aerial sequences ever
shot for a motion picture. As paparazzi throng,
smothering Hughes with flashbulbs and red carpet
questions, he looks dazzled, confused: a consequence
of his deafness in some part, sure, but also, I'd
suggest, a clue into this idea of Scorsese's--which
he's had since at least Taxi Driver--that film is a
waking dream, a kind of bad yet thrilling
hallucinogenic dope trip, and this Howard Hughes is a
sleepwalker who is, at this moment, struggling to stay
asleep. Later, Hughes takes his lover Katharine
Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) up in his airplane where they
cruise the sky above the Hollywood hills and share a
(gulp) bottle of milk. (No small step for the
pathologically germ-phobic Hughes.) The source for
Hughes' mental illness is traced to a haunted opening
scene where as a child he is bathed by his mother
(comparable in repressed eroticism to the notorious
bathtub sequence in Jonathan Glazer's Birth) and
warned that the world outside can only hold for him
the promise of abandonment and mortal contamination.

Lost in the clamour to excoriate Scorsese as a
sell-out for finally helming a broadly appealing piece
is the idea that The Aviator is actually
extraordinarily subversive in its success, made as it
was in the middle of enemy territory and essaying as
it does another of Scorsese's hopeful loners striving
against his own insanity for a place in the madness of
the public eye. This Hughes is Rupert Pupkin and
Travis Bickle, Henry Hill and Paul Hackett, and, by
the end, more than a little Jake LaMotta in his
isolation and steadily bottoming self-delusion.
Scorsese's take on the legend is the culmination of a
career of holy misfits, infiltrating the promised land
of Tinsel Town with an outsider's mentality and
ultimately being swallowed whole like a Billy Wilder
antihero--left a shell for all his success in molding
himself into the image of his gilded gods. The Aviator
is a success story that ends with the hero sitting on
a pyrrhic throne, naked in a screening room watching
an endless loop of The Outlaw and Hell's Angels and
collecting his urine in jars. Scorsese the Hollywood
outsider wins with The Aviator, and he comments on the
cost of that victory in the same breath.

DiCaprio is perfect as Hughes. There's a carefully
disguised desperation to his performance that mirrors
Hughes' own struggle against the demons that would
eventually consume him. DiCaprio does the impossible:
he makes the image of a mad recluse shuffling around
in his sealed hotel room with a pair of tissue boxes
on his feet one that's tragic instead of comfortably
derided. He plays mental illness well (What's Eating
Gilbert Grape?, The Basketball Diaries), well enough
that when he looks at the lip of the milk bottle
Hepburn has just touched, pauses, then takes a drink
himself, you develop a sense of hopeless melancholy
for wanting Hepburn to be his salvation even though
you know that it was not to be. As his illness
progresses--despite the firm hand of business manager
Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly) and the ministrations
of one-time lover Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale, no Ava
Gardner)--and pressure from rival airline Pan Am's
ruthless boss Juan Trippe (Alec Baldwin) as well as
corrupt Senator Ralph Owen Brewster (Alan Alda) mounts
to a well-publicized congressional hearing concerning
Pan Am's attempt to monopolize international air
travel, DiCaprio performs a breathless tightrope
between competence and incoherence. Although I
couldn't see how he would live up to the challenge
before, he impressed the hell out of me here. Step for
step is Blanchett: saddled with the thankless task of
impersonating the imitable Hepburn, she starts out
rough but ends like a dream.

The Aviator is about ambition as it manifests itself
in the pursuit of immortality through the phallic
pastimes of pointing cameras and producing fast
machines. It's a story of the American Dream of being
fast and having someone capture it on film; like the
American Dream, the courting of it ends, and often, in
the wreckage of surreal expectations. It's that sense
of artificial inflation that lends the picture a
strained, burnished lustre: The Aviator is itself as
interested in image creation as Hughes, conflating the
billionaire with Scorsese (as all of this year's
biopics have done with their auteurs: Oliver Stone and
Alexander; Kevin Spacey and Beyond the Sea; Mel Gibson
and The Passion of the Christ), and in so doing crafts
a film that feels like a millionaire's Xanadu.

The Aviator is Scorsese's love and knowledge of the
mystique of Old Hollywood presented through the prism
of an obsessive eccentric haunted by the dream of
being loved by phantoms of his own desire. William
Blake's idea of gods created in the breast of man is
transmuted in the picture into the cult of personality
and the patina of nostalgia for the titans of the
silver screen's golden age. This is a shrine to
individualism and a critique of the dreadful cost of
individuality, an ambiguous and ambitious picture
that, for its epic scope and towering craft, never for
a moment feels anything but intensely personal. A
great film and great filmmaking, The Aviator plays
like an ode to needing to make movies, and to needing
to watch them.

-Walter Chaw