re: The OFFICIAL 85th Annual Academy Award In-Game Thread *ARGO WINS BEST PICTURE!*

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Pop culture and politics have finally, completely merged into a glowing pile of bullshite.

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Complete bullshite

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BEST PICTURE

Amour, Argo, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Django Unchained, Life of Pi, Lincoln, Les Misérables, Silver Linings Playbook, Zero Dark Thirty

This is the best collection of movies since the field expanded four years ago. The gamut they run is wide, but their quality is high, too. The two best of the nine are Django Unchained and Amour. One is a historical epic that was made by someone who doesn't care for the retrospective neatness of history, but it's shocking how Quentin Tarantino mastered schlock that doesn't tip into abject tastelessness. It's easy to assume that Amour is here because so much of the voting membership is older than 60. But this is the most unflinching movie ever made about accepting the return on several decades of marital investment.2

Six weeks ago most people were talking about Lincoln and Zero Dark Thirty as the front-runners and merely whispering about how the enthusiasm for Argo, in which Ben Affleck leads the charge, with Hollywood's help, to free Americans in 1979-1980 Iran, had kind of peaked and stalled. But then the nominations came out, and Affleck wasn't on the Best Director list, which shocked Hollywood. Neither was Kathryn Bigelow, who made Zero Dark Thirty. At the time, that was actually the bigger shock. The matter of what the movie was arguing or not arguing about torture seemed to overwhelm the movie itself, and what seemed like a snub began to seem like something more flagrant: It's as though Bigelow were being chastened. Now the movie, which is a hit, feels like something no one wants to touch, despite how well made it is. It went from the heroic tale of how the U.S. got bin Laden to a declassified memo that distorted the truth of how bin Laden came to be gotten. The movie doesn't have political-party politics, but the liberal voters among the Academy's 6,000 or so members might prefer something that makes them feel less queasy.

That apprehension would seem to lay the groundwork for a Lincoln cakewalk, but there are a number of things working against it. For one thing, this is not a great Steven Spielberg movie (it's very good, very conscientious). The star of the film, aside from the performances, is Tony Kushner's script and its delirious linguistic musicality and intelligent distillation of an array of conflicts down to two or three concentrated dramas. The movie is called Lincoln, but really it's about the law. And it isn't that Spielberg didn't do anything (those great House of Representatives scenes didn't direct themselves; nor did the tussles between Mrs. and Mr. Lincoln). It's that there's nothing thrillingly Spielbergian about them.

There's also the matter of accuracy. And it's not about the allegedly passive depiction of the Lincolns' black servants, Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben) and William Slade (Stephen Henderson), whom the movie handles more slyly than it has been given credit for. Both were activist-organizers. The movie doesn't argue that they weren't. With Keckley, you always feel that she's sneaking off to do something important the way Clark Kent was often backing out of the Daily Planet newsroom. The matter of alleged inaccuracy involves something else. The movie features two of Connecticut's congressmen voting against the passing of the 13th Amendment.

On February 5, one of Connecticut's current congressmen, Joe Courtney, wrote Spielberg a letter pointing out that this isn't true, that all four of the state's delegates voted to pass the amendment, and asking that Spielberg find a way to correct the film in time for its DVD release. Two days later, Kushner wrote a response that appeared on The Wall Street Journal's Speakeasy blog, acknowledging that all four delegates voted yes, which he totally knew, and that having two of the members vote no gave the movie some dramatic tension, which is why he didn't use the actual names of the two congressmen. That's not all Kushner said. He wrote the sort of letter that makes you sorry you said anything in the first place. (Courtney's response to Kushner conceded a tad, but he still wants a correction on the DVD.)

What this has to do with Lincoln's Oscar chances is unclear. If this is at all a controversy, it's not sexy enough and way too academic to be a total deal-breaker. Now, torture? Torture's a deal-breaker. But this is all to say that no one has anything challenging to say about Argo, not anything that has stuck. Take the airport climax. It's a shameless fiction (as is the movie's depiction of the Americans' downtime at the Canadian embassy), but there you are biting your nails as you roll your eyes.

The movie was already popular, but it's become a class cause célèbre. Yes, Lincoln is a movie about injustice, but it's a little too tidy. Not only are the slaves made equal, we are now living during the second term of a black president. There will be some voters who feel their work was done on November 6. But for a month and a half, the evil and travesty done to this young, rich, and famous white dude who once had a career, then didn't, yet now does again continues to haunt Los Angeles, and Sunday night someone's calling the exorcist.

Then there's Silver Linings Playbook, which seems to make a believer of everyone who sees it. It's got the ideal blend of tartness and heart, mania and clarity, Rocky and Little Miss Sunshine, Harvey and Weinstein. If any of the nine films comes from almost nowhere to shock the world, it's going to be the movie about the mentally ill strangers who enter a Philadelphia dance contest together. People feel great about humanity with Silver Linings Playbook. But in so many ways, Argo makes Hollywood feel great about itself.

Your Winner: Argo

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What the hell is the point of Michelle Obama announcing the Best Picture winner

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