Alternate Oscars: 2013

I started writing a rant the other day responding (eight years late) to Neil deGrasse Tyson's rant about the scientific inaccuracies in the 2013 movie Gravity and then decided before I was done that I didn't care anymore. That pretty much sums me up these days, fighting to finish a thought before my brain throws in the towel.

If you're not a regular viewer of the Science Channel, Tyson is the degrassehole who kicked Pluto out of the solar system. When Gravity first came out, he was as full of helpful nitpicks — e.g., "Nearly all satellites orbit Earth west to east yet all satellite debris portrayed orbited east to west" — as he is evidently full of himself.



I have no doubt everything he said was true (he is after all an acclaimed astrophysicist) but his criticisms were also beside the point. Going to the movies for scientific accuracy is like going to McDonald's for salad. I mean, sure, there might be one in the back of the fridge, but do you really want to eat it?

What's important is that a movie establishes its rules up front and then lives by them, come hell or high water. Warp drive in Star Trek? Vampires in Nosferatu? Letters of transit in Casablanca? Not even remotely realistic. But we accept them because the characters in the movie accept them and make their plans accordingly.

Gravity establishes the rules early on and lives with the consequences to the very end.

I think Tyson made the same mistake a lot of people make when watching a movie, confusing the plot's mechanics with the story's meaning.

If you haven't seen it, Gravity is the story of an astronaut (Sandra Bullock) who is marooned in space after a catastrophe destroys her ship and kills her crewmates. Armed with nothing but her wits, a spacesuit and the oxygen on her back, she makes one harrowing leap after another into the unknown, searching for a way home before she runs out of air or burns up in the atmosphere.

That's the plot.

What it's about, though, is a woman who's been marking time since the death of her daughter, drowning in a pool of grief she can't escape. Sure, she's still active — she's an astronaut, fer Chrissake! — but she's going through the motions. Now, however, thanks to circumstances beyond her control, she has to make a choice whether she's going to get on with her life or join her daughter in the great beyond.

If you did this same story starring a woman sitting in a silent room with a ticking clock, the critics would lap it up with a spoon, but nobody would watch it. Put her in a spacesuit and play out her therapy while she's gasping for oxygen? Now you've got something.

It's like that show from a couple of decades back about a middle-aged man with mother issues who pours out his soul to his psychiatrist every week. Pretty dull stuff, right? But make him a gangster, call him Tony Soprano? The rest is television history.

Love Gravity or hate it, to base your opinion on its fidelity to astrophysics is to confess you don't know what movies are for.

Oh, and for the record, Neil deGrasse Tyson loved Gravity. Me, too.

My choices are noted with a ★. A tie is indicated with a ✪. Historical Oscar winners are noted with a ✔. Best foreign-language picture winners are noted with an ƒ. Best animated feature winners are noted with an @. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.