The 87th Academy Awards

The Oscars, saluting the best and the whitest, as host Neil Patrick Harris said at the beginning of the show, wasn't supposed to be this unpredictable. J.K. Simmons would be expected to follow Javier Bardem, Heath Ledger and Christoph Waltz in their villainous footsteps by easily winning Best Supporting Actor. Patricia Arquette, for her astonishing performance in "Boyhood," would follow with an easy win, as she has been a lock all awards season. Julianne Moore, long overdue for a win, would win without any serious competition for "Still Alice." That would leave three races -- Best Picture, Best Director and Best Actor -- to be the difficult ones to guess. Not so this year, for it was a year of surprises. The big winner was "Birdman," but I'm not entirely sure what the deal with this film is. All I know for certain is this: it's the most overrated Best Picture winner since "Driving Miss Daisy" from 1989, and it only won because "Boyhood," its main competitor, was released in the summer. That's it.

What makes this particularly frustrating is that it's not as if I was madly in love with "Boyhood." But the nominees for Best Picture this year were mediocre ("Selma," "Whiplash," "The Theory of Everything," "The Imitation Game") and the others, like the most culturally significant ("American Sniper") or the winner ("Birdman"), were terribly overrated, and so "Boyhood" was simply the best. I really don't see "Boyhood" going down in the records as the one that lost the battle but won the war in the hearts and minds of moviegoers; that is, it's not the next "Star Wars," "Raging Bull" or "Pulp Fiction," all of them Best Picture losers. But in terms of actual merit, it truly sounds impossible to argue that it deserved to lose to "Birdman." Beyond that, perhaps the biggest shocker of the night was Wes Anderson not being one of the many winners of "The Grand Budapest Hotel" when he lost to the writing team for "Birdman." Adding to my frustration is that the one Oscar "Birdman" actually deserved -- Michael Keaton for Best Actor -- it lost, and with all due respect to the terrific performance by Eddie Redmayne, his win over Keaton proved that if you really want to win an Oscar, your chances are significantly improved if you're a white guy playing a protagonist with a disability.

But I should at least be happy that I got to watch the awards. You see, in my present country, the awards had been broadcast for at least two years on Fox Movies, making it for easy viewing. (They even offered a re-airing later in the day.) The following year, it was available for viewing on channel Dubai One, making it a bit difficult to find at first, but I was successful nonetheless. This year, however, the Oscars aired on OSN, a private channel requiring its own super, special cable box. ABC, which has aired the Academy Awards in the U.S. since the 1970s, allowed for live streaming of the show on its website, but only for those who already had a cable subscription (which would sort of negate the need for viewing it online), and only for those who had a subscription and reside in one of the eight markets that have ABC-owned-and-operated stations. Those living in Detroit, Atlanta, Seattle and other major American cities would be out of luck. (One could, however, watch the red carpet interviews and backstage clips for free online; oh, joy.)

Why all the hassle? As Will Oremus at Slate points out, money. "If this sounds like cruel and arbitrary from the cord-cutter's perspective," he writes, "it is. But ABC has business reasons for limiting its live stream in this way. In short, networks don't make as much money from the ads sold of their telecasts. And, in general, media companies have little interest in catering to cord-cutters, whom they view as undermining a bulwark of their business models. Yes, ABC networks are free to watch over the air, but ABC is owned by Disney, and the company also owns a slew of cable channels." Because of this, I went to bed late Sunday night (my time) prepared to wake in a few hours on my birthday and not be able to view the Oscars. However, at the very last minute, I found the good folks at ustream, where there was a channel with a live stream (illegally) available. That being said, for the last four awards, the Big Rat found us and shut the channel down, leaving two drunk ladies watching the Oscars as the only available channel that was at least somewhat relevant to the Oscars (really) but would be the fastest way of learning who the winners were. These ladies appeared to be engaging in some kind of bizarre drinking act where every time the camera showed Benedict Cumberbatch they took a sip of wine, I think. (The camera focused on them and their drinking, not the screen.) Their howling in approval left me confused for several minutes as to who the actual winner was; how was I to know that they were such huge Eddie Redmayne fans?

Neil Patrick Harris turned out to be a surprisingly awkward (and boring) host, especially considering how much experience he has hosting the Tony and Emmy awards. Despite a fairly entertaining opening number about the magic of movies (or something) with Anna Kendrick and Jack Black, the remainder of his time, save for a fairly clever (and brave) spoof of Michael Keaton's underwear scene in "Birdman," was devoted to lame and certainly uncomfortable jokes. He should have anticipated what kind of a reaction he would get regarding his running gag involving Octavia Spencer guarding his ballot, which at best was this year's "who wants pizza?" and at worst was a message to Oscar-viewers everywhere that if you win an Oscar for playing a black maid in the 1960s, you will one day return to serving white folks at the Oscars.

It's moments like these -- the inability to open up the show for all viewers, its predominantly white male membership shutting out Ava DuVernay for a deserving nomination, the insult of refusing to let the winners actually talk, and the painful yawns throughout -- that make me wonder why I bother watching. But whereas the show was its usual bore, at least the speeches were awesome. Here's a few of them:

Arquette (Best Supporting Actress, "Boyhood"): "To every woman who gave birth to every taxpayer and citizen of this country we have fought for everyone else's rights. It's time to have our wage equality once and for all, and equal rights for women in the United States of America." Two women, in particular, really enjoyed her speech. (It's a bit depressing, though, that she had to say that in 2015, not 1980, the year "Nine to Five" was released.)

Simmons (Best Supporting Actor, "Whiplash"): "Call your mom, call your dad. If you're lucky to have a parent alive on this planet, call them. Don't text, don't email; call them on the phone and talk to them and listen to them as long as they want to talk to you."

Graham Moore (Best Adapted Screenplay, "The Imitation Game"): "Here's the thing: Alan Turing never got to stand on a stage like this and at look out at all these disconcertingly attractive faces. I do, and that's the most unfair thing I've ever heard. When I was 16 years old, I tried to kill myself because I felt weird and different and I felt like I did not belong. And now, I'm standing here. And so, I would like this moment to be for that kid out there who feels like she's weird or she's different and she doesn't fit in anywhere. Yes, you do. I promise you: you do. Stay weird and stay different."

John Legend (Best Original Song, "Selma," shared with Common): "We wrote this song for a film that was based on events that were fifty years ago, but we say that "Selma" is now, because the struggle for justice is right now. We know that the Voting Rights Act that they fought for fifty years ago is being compromised today." He also said that we live in the most incarcerated country in the world, and that there are more black men under correctional control today than there were in slavery in 1850, a claim that was validated by the fact-checking site Politifact.

And aside from the speeches, there was Lady Gaga's wonderful tribute to "The Sound of Music," as well as the Lonely Island teaming up with Tegan and Sara for "Everything Is Awesome," two of the few moments of life for the show. So in sum: memorable speeches, great singing, disappointing-as-usual host, unjustified (for the most part) winners. 364 more days till the next one.

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Gone Girl

An Irish prince leaves his perfect wife at their perfect home. How perfect is his life? So much that on the night he fell in love with his wife, there was a storm of sugar surrounding them. There aren't many cinematographers better than Jeff Bronenweth, and his camera makes that scene, in particular, hauntingly beautiful. His excellent cinematography lights a dark, dark world, as is often the case in the movies of David Fincher, the Prince of Darkness. When the man comes home, his wife is gone. His perfect world is turned upside down.

The man in our movie is Nick Dunne, played by Ben Affleck. He goes to a bar to drink with the bartender, who incidentally is his sister (Carrie Coon). Why is he drinking? Why not--it's his fifth year wedding anniversary. The bar is under the name of his wife, played by Rosamund Pike in her best performance. Pike's debut was as a Bond girl in "Die Another Day" a little more than a decade ago, but she hasn't really been given a chance to prove herself since. Here, however, she really shines, in a performance that will (or at least should) get her an Oscar nomination. Her character, Amy, is, in the first half of the movie a "complicated" woman, a "nagging shrew" whom no one particularly likes. But that would be too simple. In the second half, it's an entirely different story for her. I cannot elaborate, but I am permitted to say my opinion of the twist, which is this: While it did provide Pike with an opportunity to demonstrate her talent, it also produced some eyeball-rolling. In the history of dumb movie twists, this might be one of the dumbest.

But back to our couple. Nick is remarkably calm considering his wife has just disappeared. While it can only be natural to side with him as an audience member, the evidence is clearly piling up against him in the movie, and an objective detective (Kim Dickens) continually grills him. Our story bounces back and forth so that we see just how bad Nick and Amy were at marriage; it's as if it could have been titled "Scenes from a Marriage About to Turn Mysterious and Violent." The wife is increasingly frightened by her husband, and perhaps vice versa.

There are a lot of compelling moments here about cable media's obsession with scandal, dangerous "Fatal Attraction"-style marriages, and other human flaws. But one cannot help but feel that these would all be so much more interesting to think about while reading the novel. It seems almost inevitable to think unfavorably about a film adaption if one has seen the original material beforehand, but I haven't read "Gone Girl," and yet I know I would have had a better experience reading it than watching the movie. Yet probably the most interesting ideas (in the novel or the movie) are the gender issues. Despite the fact that improvements for women have been one of the most impressive gains in the rights revolutions we've seen over the past century, we still live in an unfortunate era where women are not only underrepresented but shockingly mistreated (to say the very least). Here, we have a story where women are not only capable of such disturbing violence, but they are also the most interesting characters. Well done, Fincher and company.

Fincher's directing is commendable as always, but his storytelling is a bit weak. Frankly, I often have this reaction when watching many of his films. Other than "Se7en," I can't think of an instance where I was totally amazed at his filmmaking. But he has, at least, gotten quality performances from his players, especially Pike and Affleck. Affleck, who won Oscars for writing "Good Will Hunting" and producing "Argo," has shown us arguably his best performance, and Pike, as mentioned, has never been better. The actors in smaller roles--Dickens, Tyler Perry as Affleck's attorney and Neil Patrick Harris as a rich man who has been obsessing over Amy for years--likewise are quite enjoyable to watch. But while the actors are sufficient and mostly have been given satisfying words from screenwriter Gillian Flynn (who also wrote the novel), this is ultimately a mediocre film. After an incredible climax, it goes on for another unwelcomed twenty minutes. It's certainly intriguing but, like most Fincher movies, forgettable.

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