The Oscars are fast approaching, the long weekend is almost over, and it’s time to face the inevitable: you’re not going to see all the nominated films. You’re a busy person! It’s so cold outside! Why brave the elements and spend fourteen bucks to risk catching the measles from some unvaccinated stranger at the cineplex when you could curl up on a couch in the safety of your own home and watch Netflix?
But if you’re going to an Oscars party, or even if you’re just gathering ‘round the water cooler at your place of employment, you’re going to want to have something to contribute to any and all debates about worthiness of the nominees. Awards season is much more fun with a horse in the race, even if the horse is a movie you’ve never seen or even cared about until today. Fret not, readers: here is the first in a series of guides to sounding informed and opinionated about every nominee in all the major categories. We begin where the Academy Awards telecast will end: Best Picture.BIRDMAN OR (THE UNEXPECTED VIRTUE OF IGNORANCE)If you want to be pro: You can commend the movie as a commentary on the superhero-saturated landscape that is the current state of cinema, a meta bit of filmmaking that rewards you for paying attention to both the story within the movie and the context in which the movie was made. Also, comedies rarely score Best Picture nods — even though everyone claims to know that comedy is harder than drama, for some reason, the road to an Oscar is typically paved with tears, not laughs — so if this dark comedy-drama hybrid, it would be a small sign of the Academy’s willingness to take some risks and embrace humor, strangeness and daring as qualities worth celebrating.If you want to be con: You won’t have to come up with anything to say; there’s a 74 percent chance that no one at your Oscar party has seen this, and a 56 percent chance that most of the people there won’t even be able to rattle off the entire cumbersome title.
SELMA:If you want to be pro: Ava DeVurnay’s work is absolutely magnificent — it might be the first movie you’ve seen in years, or maybe ever, where people of color are lit as beautifully as white people are all the time — and, for reasons we can’t possibly explain (cough institutional racism ahem bad timing and poor promotion on the part of the studio cough), she didn’t score a much-deserved Best Director nod. How to right this ridiculous wrong and demonstrate that the Academy is not living in a bubble where Ferguson never happened? Hand the trophy to the most stunning film of the year: Selma.If you want to be con: Your safest bet here is to double-down on the controversy surrounding the film’s depiction of Lyndon B. Johnson. The director of the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library and Museum slammed the movie and, shortly thereafter, Joseph A. Califano Jr., Johnson’s top assistant for domestic affairs at the time in which Selma is set, accuses the movie of falsely portraying L.B.J. as being at odds with Martin Luther King Jr. and reluctant to support the Voting Rights Act. (Actually, the best story out there about this controversy is Amy Davidson’s piece in The New Yorker, which makes the clear case for why Selma is “more than fair” to L.B.J. But you don’t have to tell anyone at your party that you’ve read it.)
BOYHOODIf you want to be pro: This one’s pretty much a gimmie: it’s easy to argue for the astonishing feat of filmmaking here. We’re so used to seeing actors artificially aged on screen through makeup, wardrobe and costume, and artificially preserved at thirty-ish off-screen through surgery, photoshop and diet and exercise regimens so intense they border on the masochistic. Boyhood, then, captures two somethings that we rarely see: real people really aging, as they play characters who really age along with them. If you want to be con: Three hours, no plot.
THE IMITATION GAMEIf you want to be pro: Jump on that Benedict Cumberbatch bandwagon, people! He brings grace and dignity to a man who was treated with neither. “Helping the allies win World War II” is an easy cause to rally your party around — unless you’re running with a crowd that is still on the fence about Nazis, in which case, you have bigger problems than this article could hope to solve — and the film has been endorsed by the Human Right Campaign for raising awareness of the persecution of LGBT individuals in England under the anti-homosexuality law that ultimately brought about Alan Turing’s death.If you want to be con: I’ve made this case on this site before: The gist of the movie is essentially, “You know what’s great? Computers! You know what’s really bad? Nazis! Let’s focus on what we can agree on: we’re all super-happy that we have computers now, and also, it’s so cool that we don’t have Nazis anymore. Britain was bad, but Hitler was worse, and good triumphed over evil. You know, for the most part.” Little responsibility is actually taken for the horrifying way Turing was treated by the nation whose safe future he assured; also, in an effort to simplify Turing’s work so mere mortals could understand it, the movie makes what he did look super-easy and very boring. It’s a lot of beautiful British people staring at machines.
AMERICAN SNIPERIf you want to be pro: Movies aren’t documentaries; they capture an essential truth, not pesky facts! Accuse all party-goers who root for anything else of hating America.If you want to be con: PLASTIC BABY.
WHIPLASHIf you want to be pro: Look at these Rotten Tomatoes scores! Who are you to argue with the will of the critics and the people? The masses have spoken. They have spoken for Whiplash. There’s actual science to support the theory that people like to be aligned with popular opinion. Use this to your advantage to sway fellow Oscar-watchers to back your choice. If you want to be con: You can take the stance that Whiplash has the same uncomfortable kernel at its center that Zero Dark Thirty had: the thesis that torture produces desirable results. Does it take blood on the drums to be a truly great musician? Should it? Haven’t people gotten to greatness without that kind of violent torment? Sure, everyone knows about artists who were abused en route to excellence, but who wants to be in the business of saying you have to have Joe Jackson as a father to grow up as gifted as Michael?
THE THEORY OF EVERYTHINGIf you want to be pro: The Theory of Everything succeeds where The Imitation Game fails: Stephen Hawking’s magnificent thought process is both clear enough to follow and complex enough to appreciate as a phenomenal feat of intelligence. Everything is working together here to build a world that feels textured, vibrant and alive: the spot-on 1960s wardrobe and hair, the individual voices of every character, the score. Jane and Stephen fall in and out of love with each other in a way that doesn’t make either one into a victim or a monster. If you want to be con: Eddie Redmayne is fantastic, as is Jones, but great performances do not a great movie make. Say that this, like Boyhood, is a borderline-interminable flick that overstays its welcome by at least 25 minutes.
THE GRAND BUDAPEST HOTELIf you want to be pro: There are two main reasons the Golden Globes are (usually) are more fun, delightful affair than the Academy Awards. One: everyone is drunk. Two: The Golden Globes mix the self-serious world of cinema with the self-deprecating world of television. Take away the TV, and you’re left with a night of movie people who won’t stop talking about the “importance” of movies. It’s all very stiff-upper-lip, art-changes-the-world, these-are-films-not-movies, etc. Why not inject some Wes Anderson whimsy into the proceedings? If nothing else, it would be an upset in a night not likely to yield many surprises. If you want to be con: Declare that the movie is nothing more than a triumph of style over substance, a bunch of cutesy, quirky oddities for the sake of oddity that doesn’t tell a story worth telling. You’ll be kind of a downer, but that’s a sacrifice you’ll have to make if you want to stand against one of the most fun nominees in the pack.