2013 Alternate Oscars

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 while 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.

All the great ones — Chaplin, Ford, Hawks, Wilder, Hitchcock, Spielberg, Tarantino, Gerwig — knew how to wrap a tasty doggie treat around the bitter pill of truth they were feeding you.

The late great Stanley Kubrick — who was absolutely never accused by anyone of being a corporate shill — once had this to say about the practical need to put the "popular" in "popular entertainment":

"However serious your intentions may be, and however important you think are the ideas of the story, the enormous cost of a movie makes it necessary to reach the largest potential audience for that story, in order to give your backers their best chance to get their money back and hopefully make a profit. No one will disagree that a good story is an essential starting point for accomplishing this. But another thing, too, the stronger the story, the more chances you can take with everything else."

Remember that the next time you're tempted to dismiss something as "merely" entertaining. Entertaining is what puts butts in the seats and make everything else possible.

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 ✱.