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 ✱.
2012 was a great year for movies about America's 16th president — Abraham Lincoln, in case you can't count that high ...
You may have heard of one of them, Steven Spielberg's Lincoln, the true story (warts and all) of how Honest Abe twisted enough arms to secure passage of the 13th Amendment banning slavery. Lincoln may have been an idealist but he was also a ruthless pragmatist who knew how to get the job done. It's a rare combination.
Daniel Day-Lewis went radically realistic in his portrayal of Lincoln and nailed it without ever giving off the sort of "actor-y" vibe Meryl Streep has a patent on, an absolutely balls-to-the-wall performance, maybe the best of his illustrious career.
And Spielberg immerses you in the legislative sausage-making behind the 13th Amendment without ever letting the proceedings turn dry — it's riveting stuff.
But did you also know The Great Emancipator killed vampires in his spare time? I didn't either until I saw Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. The man was busy!
This one isn't quite as successful — with a title like that, I was expecting an over-the-top romp like Army of Darkness — Bruce Campbell with a beard if you know what I mean.
Instead it's more horror than hoot and more history than horror, with vampires as a metaphor for the "peculiar institution." The plantation owners not only feast on the forced labor of the enslaved but on their blood as well.
Still, the Ol' Rail-Splitter swings a mighty mean axe, lopping off the heads of dozens of bloodsucking monsters. Pop some corn, put your feet up and get into a Svengoolie frame of mind. It's not half bad!
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. A historical winner who won in a different category is noted with a ✱.
Named for Katie-Bar-The-Door, the Katies are "alternate Oscars"—who should have been nominated, who should have won—but really they're just an excuse to write a history of the movies from the Silent Era to the present day.
To see a list of nominees and winners by decade, as well as links to my essays about them, click the highlighted links:
Remember: There are no wrong answers, only movies you haven't seen yet.
The Silent Oscars
And don't forget to check out the Silent Oscars—my year-by-year choices for best picture, director and all four acting categories for the pre-Oscar years, 1902-1927.
Look at me—Joe College, with a touch of arthritis. Are my eyes really brown? Uh, no, they're green. Would we have the nerve to dive into the icy water and save a person from drowning? That's a key question. I, of course, can't swim, so I never have to face it. Say, haven't you anything better to do than to keep popping in here early every morning and asking a lot of fool questions?
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