worst best picture

Worst Best Picture: Is Everything Everywhere All at Once Better or Worse Than Crash?

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. Posts will be relatively spoiler free, but there may be some details revealed. Today’s installment is the 2023 winner Everything Everywhere All at Once. Is it better than Crash?

The discourse around the Oscars hasn’t changed all that much in my lifetime and it doesn’t look to change all that much. The problem, as I see it, is the Oscars only matter if they are relevant to the average viewer and they only stay relevant if they are both an indicator of greatness and a reward for it. That means you need to have some level of trust in their consensus but also you need to think their nominator process is a barometer in the first place.

The folks behind this whole thing showed their cards recently with a play at making a category for movies people actually watch, which is an old-school criticism tied in with the whole “Oscar bait” discussion. They walked that back because that’s a dumb idea and it makes them look dumb, but it does speak to a world where all ten of the top ten grossing films of 2022 in America were superhero movies, sequels, or both.

A24, the production company behind Everything Everywhere All at Once released exactly one movie, that one, in the top 50 grossing films of last year. That puts them one behind Crunchyroll, the anime streaming service. The world has changed. None of this matters. It still is part of the larger Oscar conversation, but it muddies the waters enough that the Oscars cannot seem to figure out what they want to be or for whom they want to put on a broadcast.

This year’s broadcast was, compared to the last decade or so, smoother, and, I think, better than it usually is. Almost everything you’d expect to happen more or less happened. The surprises were minimal and, in retrospect, make sense. All Quiet on the Western Front won a bunch of (deserved) technical or smaller awards. Brendan Fraser and the team behind his makeup won for The Whale. Other than that, Everything Everywhere All at Once essentially won everything majorly significant it could and people more or less seemed to both see that coming and accept it.

The point of this series was originally to drag Crash, which is a movie I have always found frustrating, but also to try to find a better understanding of what the Oscars do for us as a film audience. There are movies nominated every year that I would not otherwise see that I see only because of this process. I have that to thank for some surprising experiences this year, like the very weird Elvis biopic that I mostly liked and the atrocious, vile Blonde which I think was far and away the worst movie of the year and a low point for this entire endeavor.

I think this is the function of the Oscars in 2023. Your life probably looks pretty different than it did five years ago, when you might have gone to see more movies out in the world and taken some chances on different fare. Maybe I’m projecting, but that was true for me, and now I’m not as likely to turn on The Fablemans on a Tuesday. I appreciate the nomination process as a shortlisting of things to maybe try, if nothing else.

I think this year they got it right, too. My personal favorite movie nominated was The Banshees of Inisherin, but that’s not the kind of movie that wins this award. With the power of hindsight the last decade or so looks a little shaky, but there are also some all-time greats among Best Picture winners. How will we remember this one?

Everything Everywhere All at Once was such a sweep and so consistently a frontrunner that I don’t know how much I need to say here. Everyone said to see it cold and they were right, so I may take the lazy path here and tell you that’s the right recommendation. I think the odds of you reading this but not knowing more about it are slim, but if that’s you, just go watch it.

I’ll focus more on the place it occupies in film than the plot. Essentially everyone I know who saw it loved it and the critical consensus is near absolute. The New Yorker called it cynical, which in the context of their review makes sense but is akin to calling water dry. It’s a movie about optimism, or at least finding a way to cope with the inherent difficulties and failings around us. It’s a movie about a lot more things than I have space to talk about, which is part of why so many people loved it. It feels like it can be all things to all people, which gives it a sense that it’s talking to you no matter what you need to hear it say. That universality and that blank-slate quality of the main cast as they switch back and forth across multiple universes and different versions of themselves is what that single reviewer found alienating. In the larger world, it’s what people have grabbed onto and it’s how a really weird, specific movie feels like a slam dunk for a such a usually traditional award.

We’re only a few years removed from the fish monster love story movie winning, but it helps to remember that the Oscars have been very safe for most of their history. There are surprises, even going way back, but usually it’s a movie for everyone. Arguably, the real success of Everything Everywhere All at Once is that still being true and reflecting the world we actually live in even with visuals and experiences that are impossible and fantastical.

Will this seem weird ten years from now? I don’t know, but I don’t think so. The Oscars are at their best when they reflect the times accurately and it would be impossible to imagine anything else winning this year. I can’t even come up with what the contender would be, though I’m not saying this won by default. It deserves to be “the movie” of 2022, which is what the Oscars should be doing. Sometimes that’ll mean it’s a big deal to people who don’t care about the Oscars, but sometimes it doesn’t. Nomadland was the right choice two years ago, but did anyone ever mention it after that? I think we’re in for a different experience with this one.

The Best Part: The boldness of the whole thing is an easy choice here, as is the cast. This is the first movie in decades to win three of the four big acting awards in the same year. Everyone in it, down to the minor characters, is notably great. Couldn’t pick just one.

The Worst Part: I have not found that anyone shares my feelings on this, but some of the more extreme elements of slapstick fell flat for me. I think it says more about me than the movie, though, as that’s what a lot of people loved the most.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? It’s better, by a huge margin. I legitimately am not sure if Blonde is, and honestly it probably is worse, if I’m on the spot. Nothing nominated for the big award comes close this year, but it’s comforting, in a way, to see the Academy still does love to nominate something that flat out sucks every single year. Refreshing to see that even as they want to build a big tent, they stick with their roots.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is CODA Better or Worse Than Crash?

I assumed this would be about The Power of the Dog, so much so that it’s been what I’ve been thinking about for the last few weeks as I watched the final nominated films I hadn’t seen yet. Every year I try to watch everything nominated for the big awards just for the heck of it, but also to be sure that no matter how big a surprise the winner is I can be ready to compare it to Crash. As we do each year, once.

I’ve been updating this list yearly since 2014, when I watched all 86 existing Best Picture winners in the same year. CODA is not the biggest surprise, but I do want to note for posterity that The Power of the Dog really seemed like the choice. Before we talk about all that, let’s talk about the Oscars themselves.

Will Smith and Chris Rock will, rightfully, I guess, dominate the discussion of the ceremony, but it’s worth noting how weird and slow this year’s event was before the one moment everyone will remember. Only three movies won more than one award all night, and even those were under unique circumstances. Dune won six technical awards, The Eyes of Tammy Faye won for makeup in addition to Jessica Chastain, and CODA took home a screenplay award in addition to the supporting award for Troy Kotsur and the big prize. There wasn’t much of a theme to the evening, beyond the Academy’s desperate, awkward attempts to get people to like them with audience polls that allowed them to show clips from movies they have absolutely no interest in discussing otherwise. This does not bode well, but that’s a discussion for another time.

Of the ten movies nominated for Best Picture this year, only three made money in theaters: Belfast (on a relatively small budget and thanks to the subject matter), Drive My Car (thanks to the smallest budget of anything nominated), and Dune. There’s really no comparing everything else to Dune, which cost as much as the cheapest five of them but made twice as much as everything else combined. There’s also no real use for metrics like this in 2022, but I mention it because it’s one of the few comparison points we have left. Critical scores are equally challenging, for similar reasons. Audiences universally loved King Richard and West Side Story, but they were mostly seen on streaming services. Almost everything lost money this year, but that’s just the way of all things, now.

I mention all this because it brings us to the state of the Oscars in 2022. The criticism has always been that “Oscar movies” aren’t what people really go see and they aren’t really representative of film in general. The discussions of superhero movies and streaming replacing theaters got extra complicated in a world where people didn’t go outside for months, and now the Oscars are left with the same old criticisms, but even more complicated reasoning behind them. I don’t know what this whole thing looks like in ten years, but it certainly does not not look promising.

I think the best movie of the year was The Worst Person in the World, which was nominated for two awards and lost both. It’s depressing and difficult, but it stuck with me and it will be what I remember from this year. I liked The Power of the Dog and expected it to win and I thought Drive My Car and even Nightmare Alley were great. I thought all ten performances in the lead acting categories were great, even if I didn’t like the movies universally. But as I look over the list of eighteen movies that got nominations in the categories for screenplay, acting, directing, and the main one, I feel like the story of this year is a much lower ceiling, though a much higher floor, than most years.

The problems with Don’t Look Up are well documented elsewhere and outside of the lead performances, I didn’t really like The Lost Daughter, Spencer, King Richard, or, and maybe especially, Being the Ricardos. But even those films have charms or magic to them, in their way, and they deserve your time. There’s nothing truly, solely bad nominated this year, which sounds like a low bar, but is one the Academy does not always clear. But on the other hand, I think only a few films at the top of the list are really essential. West Side Story is fine. Most of these are fine.

That’s the year that CODA should win Best Picture. There’s nothing on the list that demands your vote, so you, as a voter, end up thinking about how everything made you feel. CODA is sweet, which helps, and it’s a story you probably haven’t heard before. It’s the story of a Child Of Deaf Adults, or CODA, named Ruby, whose parents and brother work full-time fishing and selling what they catch. Ruby loves her family but she wants to be more than their interpreter. She wants them to be independent, but also to live as a unit. She wants to fit in, but also to find something unique that’s hers. It’s a relatable story hidden within something totally new.

Troy Kotsur won an Oscar for playing Ruby’s father and Marlee Matlin, certainly the most famous deaf actor I can name, is great as Ruby’s mother. The couple drives more of the film than Ruby does, honestly, as we see them as full human portrayals of a married couple and a working couple, rather than just as characters to show us how the deaf community engages with the world. Ruby’s brother is also deaf, but the scenes where he goes to a bar and tries to fit in but also be himself feel more like what you expect to happen in a movie like this. CODA is most effective when it’s surprising, including a loud off-screen sex scene that embarrasses Ruby and becomes an even more ridiculous discussion in front of her friend from school.

Ruby wants to learn to sing. There’s really no way to say this without being a little mean, but this is really all done poorly. Her mother asks her if she only wants to sing because her family is deaf. Her choir director tells Ruby she needs to be dedicated and decide between her family and her art. She is too shy to sing but wants to do it, just to show the world her voice. Almost all of this is said, explicitly, and sometimes more than once. Several reviews of CODA make reference to the fact that there are two separate culminating concert moments. You constantly feel as a viewer that you’ve seen this story before, which gets away from what makes CODA an interesting choice and a unique story.

Audiences and critics largely loved CODA, but it’s hard to get away from the parts that feel like a TV movie. The sum of the parts is worth it and it’s not a bad choice, given how much there is to love about the performances and the view it grants to a world unfamiliar to a lot of us, but I feel like this one will not age well. There are so many moments that are in so many movies you’ve seen, down to the moment the teens realize they are ready for adult life as they jump off a rock into water, that it feels weird to give this the award they gave The Godfather. I think some risks would have made this a way better movie, but not one as many people would have liked. Overall I think it’s a net positive to hear this story and to elevate it, even though I think I’d like to see the same thing with a little bit fewer stock story beats. They probably did the right thing here, which reflects more about the direction the Academy is headed than any number of viewer polls ever could.

The Best Part: The performances here are excellent. Matlin and Kotsur will get all the attention and probably should, but no one is bad in this. The choir teacher has a really thankless part here, just exactly what this role would be in a Hallmark movie, but Eugenio Derbez does a great job with it.

The Worst Part: I really, really do not like how much this feels like a quickly turned-out holiday classic movie, like a Netflix original or a Hallmark film. That’s overstated and it’s not that bad, but something about the cheery, plucky vibe of the whole thing just really lives in that space for me.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? The family feels real. The performances feel genuine. This should feel even better to me than it does, but I have trouble getting there. I think this is a middle-of-the-pack film in the available choices this year and I think it’s probably in the bottom half of the full list of winners. That said, it’s miles better than Crash, as was everything nominated this year. Part of me was rooting for Don’t Look Up (only for this post), because at least that comparison is interesting, but I’m glad that CODA won. I think most people liked it more than me and it’s generally a fun watch. And above all else, there’s something really cool about seeing a story that’s genuinely, real-deal new, even if the beats of the hero’s journey there could use a little bit of polishing.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is Moonlight Better or Worse Than Crash?

image source: pitchfork

Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. Posts will be relatively spoiler free, but there may be some details revealed. Today’s installment is the 2016 winner Moonlight. Is it better than Crash?

In the days and weeks after this year’s Oscars, it seems like there’s only one thing to talk about: that final award. People will write tons of posts about the botched delivery of the Best Picture award as La La Land was mistakenly announced before Moonlight correctly won the award.

That will last for a little while. These two won’t be tied together forever, though it’s easy to forget that since we’re in the moment. When you look at the other 88 movies on the list, you realize that these movies will be remembered despite what they beat. We’ve decided that the Academy Award is our benchmark for greatness, or memory, or both.

If for no other reason, that’s why Moonlight had to win. We aren’t in agreement over if the Oscars point out our best or our most memorable or what, but we all seem to agree that they’re important. La La Land has been divisive for a number of reasons, but it’s a pretty good musical that a lot of us can’t see ourselves in. Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling play “down and out” characters that really aren’t and lament failures that many of us would see as successes. They’re beautiful, talented, and surrounded by support. In a future where we’re increasingly dealing as a people with groups being marginalized and the cruelty of humanity, it doesn’t ring true that a message of “maybe 100% of your dreams won’t come true but that’s the worst that could happen” should be the moral of our Best Picture.

I liked a lot of what this year had to offer. Arrival is a new, if flawed, take on something that’s been done too many times. Jackie is a shocking portrayal of a story we all know. Manchester by the Sea is crushing, Lion is inspiring, and 20th Century Women is heartwarming in ways I didn’t expect.

But it all comes down to the contrast between the two big ones: La La Land and Moonlight. I really liked La La Land, but I’m still thinking about Moonlight. It’s the three-part story of Chiron, a character locked inside himself. His mother is abusive and addicted, his friends are mostly absent, and his closest confidant is a drug dealer who may or may not really have a heart of gold. It’s the kind of story we don’t see very often because in a lot of ways it’s one we don’t want to think about. It’s a story about survival in the face of absolutely nothing going right.

I won’t break the entire film down because it’s really about watching the growth. Chiron is a boy, then a teenager, then a man, but he’s always quiet and worried. No matter who he talks to, you can see his character playing mental defense during every conversation. His mother offers no relief, his friends have their own challenges, and Juan (Mahershala Ali, who won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his performance) is supportive and personable, but represents risks in his own way. Chiron can never let his guard down and the movie feels tense even in small victories as a result.

I’d be remiss to not mention that Chiron struggles with his sexuality. It’s a film about race as much as it is about sex, and while it isn’t shy or concerned about either topic, it’s told through Chiron’s eyes. His character obscures much of our view of his world, which allows the whole thing to unfold for us just how it would for someone going through it. We see hate and anger just as we do solitude and a mixed sense of finding yourself. It’s a lot to unwrap.

You should see both of them and you probably will. La La Land is going to be talked about for years and it deserves it. It’s a catchy, flashy musical with good performances and a slightly more complex message than I’m letting on, but it’s tough to compare it to Moonlight. In 1964 My Fair Lady beat Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb and in 1951 An American in Paris beat A Streetcar Named Desire. All four of those movies are classics, but it highlights how strange it is to classify musicals in the same category as everything else. We just don’t often think of them like that, though the Oscars force us to do so.

The Best Part: The adult version of Chiron styles himself “Black” and drives a long distance to meet an old friend at a diner. The scene is longer than you’d expect and it plays with the idea of expectations. After so much time with both characters we think we know what’s going to happen, so the surprise of what does happen is all the sweeter. I remember pivoting over and over again in my head as I watched it and it surpassed everything I came up with.

The Worst Part: Naomie Harris said that she was worried about the portrayal of Paula, Chiron’s mom, as she’s introduced as just an abusive crack addict. Her performance definitely elevates the role and the arc is more interesting than previous iterations of this character type, but if I had to pick something it’s the initial version of Paula. It’s necessary for Chiron’s development as a character, but in a world full of people we’ve never seen before it can be odd to see a character type that’s been done so much.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Now that I’ve been caught up for a few years and am writing these yearly, it feels even more ridiculous to approach this question. The only nominee this year that had a real shot at dethroning the king Crash was Hacksaw Ridge, which made me mad in so many ways I can’t even begin to describe them all. Moonlight is a difficult, dark, sad movie that offers few moments of respite, but I still think it’s more realistic than Crash. They both tread the same waters and deal with the same fears, but Moonlight does so with respect.

Alex Russell lives in Chicago and is set in his ways. Disagree with him about anything at readingatrecess@gmail.com or on Twitter at @alexbad.

Worst Best Picture: Is The Apartment Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. All posts should be considered to have a blanket “spoiler alert” on them. Today’s installment is the 1960 winner The Apartment. Is it better than Crash?

Comedies don’t win Best Picture. Seriously, look at the list. Scroll through the last 30 or so. The Hurt Locker. Schindler’s List. No Country for Old Men. I mean, Gladiator definitely is funny at times, but I wouldn’t say the people behind it were making a comedy.

That’s what makes The Apartment so strange. It’s a Jack Lemmon movie and it is very clearly just a “vehicle” for his comedy. He plays sick and stuffs Kleenex in every pocket he has. He frantically flips a Rolodex and uses the 1960s version of a phone tree. He does everything but full-on pratfall to sell how funny he is in the first half hour and it works, it works, it works.

You first recognize that there’s something special about this movie through Jack Lemmon himself. He’s playing C.C. Baxter, the put-upon drone at Company X. Baxter wants to get promoted on his merits, but he’s figured out that middle management would rather screw secretaries in his isolated apartment than look at his figures. Thus, the game is on.

Baxter doesn’t condone anyone’s illicit activities — the movie has a couple of obvious, untouched asides where he openly condemns adultery — but he wants this job and it’s hard to say no. He’s only rewarded once their boss catches wind and decides to use the company retreat for himself. The trouble (well, rest of the trouble)? The head honcho’s girl is the one Baxter is in love with. The boss won’t leave his wife for her and she won’t love Baxter because she’s torn up over the boss. What’s a guy to do?

There have only been two black-and-white movies to win Best Picture since The Apartment. There are only two in those more than five decades: Schindler’s List and The Artist. As the last true black-and-white Best Picture from the days where it wasn’t an aesthetic choice, you’d expect the movie to be dated. The comedy suffers more than the universal theme.

The tricky part about comedy is always that it becomes dated. That’s just the reality of the genre. At one point a character says, angrily, “Live now, pay later! Diners Club!” It’s pretty clearly a slogan of the time, but it solidifies The Apartment in 1960. One of the main characters is an elevator operator, but what locks the movie in another era is that weird Diners Club line and a handful of others like it.

Does that matter? No, not as much as it could. It’s easy to see how that line works in context. It’s easy to guess at what a shrieking woman ordering a Rum Collins in a terrible bar is supposed to represent. It’s simple enough to forgive these little steps away from what we know to enjoy the line “That’s the way it crumbles, cookie-wise.”

It’s a comedy, but it’s weirdly dour. Baxter takes it hard when he realizes that the cost of getting the promotion means he can’t be taken seriously at work, but no one takes anything harder than the poor elevator operator. After just about an hour of mostly comedy and setup, she downs some sleeping pills and tries to kill herself in Baxter’s apartment. It has to happen to drive the plot and the movie eventually does a good job of supporting this as a choice her love-muddled mind makes, but it’s such a sharp tonal shift.

Later in the movie Baxter tells the story of when he tried to kill himself with a gun because he was torn up about love, but he says he shot himself in the knee. He’s nursing someone who recently attempted suicide back to some semblance of health and he doesn’t know what to say. It’s the kind of real, sad gesture that we all hope we would make to try to help in some way. It’s not perfect, but it’s human.

The movie slowly works backwards from the suicide attempt to explain what makes the character tick, but it never really gets there. It’s easy to blame the 1960 release date on why Shirley MacLaine’s character doesn’t get any agency or reason to live outside of the powerful married man she loves, but a movie willing to deal with the reality of suicide this directly should be able to sustain a more rational and powerful female lead. The role earned MacLaine a Best Actress nomination and she absolutely plays it well, but it is hard to watch the movie in 2014 and not want to pull her into the future, where women in movies are allowed to matter. This movie needs the Bechdel test badly.

There are modern complaints to lob at the 1960 winner for Best Picture, but it’s a phenomenal movie. Jack Lemmon gives what I’d normally call a once-in-a-lifetime performance, but most people don’t get to have Jack Lemmon’s lifetime.

I really tried to find a way to compare this to Crash, but I just don’t see anything they have in common. The 1960 Best Picture The Apartment is about as respectful of women as the 2005 Best Picture Crash, I suppose. It’s just that one of them is a sad reminder of a “simpler” time and the other is from the 1960s.

The Best Part: Sick Jack Lemmon, clearly. Through the first 20 minutes of the film Jack Lemmon’s character is sick, designed to show the physical toll that not having his own apartment is having on him. His sick antics are the same as watching an experienced actor play a convincing drunk — but sick is harder. You feel pity for him and it sets up the entire movie. Bonus: It clearly draws the line of good and evil. Only good guys get colds.

The Worst Part: Tone, tone, tone! Of course Shirley MacLaine has to take the sleeping pills because otherwise this is the story of how bad things all work out for bad people. That’s no story, so she’s gotta try to go into that good night. The suicide attempt isn’t the problem, it’s how wacky the movie treats it. Honorable mention to MacLaine’s brother-in-law’s character, who seems like he was a “Greedo-shot-first” level of afterthought. He may as well be screaming “Why I oughta!” instead of delivering lines.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? The Apartment is about if it is more important to care about work or about love, at the most basic level. The two are often difficult to balance (see: Mad Men, all culture forever, etc) but rarely are they so at odds. This is a movie about an age-old theme that manages to put an interesting spin on it. It’s relatable and unique. It feels real, even in the most slapsticky parts. Crash offers no one of any substance and is more needlessly morbid than a movie with a 45-minute suicide comedy arc. It would be tough, even if that were the assignment, to do that.

Worst Best Picture Archives: Crash | Terms of Endearment | Forrest Gump | All About Eve |

Image credit: IMDB

Worst Best Picture: Is Terms of Endearment Better or Worse Than Crash?

Alex Russell

In “Worst Best Picture” we search every single Best Picture Oscar winner of all time from 1927 to present to uncover the worst of them all. Conventional wisdom says that 2005’s winner Crash is the worst winner in history. We won’t stop until we’ve tested every last one. Read the the first, our review of Crash, here. All posts should be considered to have a blanket “spoiler alert” on them. Today’s installment is the 1983 winner Terms of Endearment. Is it better than Crash?

The Motion Picture Association of America debuted the PG-13 rating in the summer of 1984. In the decade before that, movies were all rated G, PG, R, or (very, very rarely) X. Whatever you think of the MPAA and the rating system, watching a movie prior to 1984 shows the need for PG-13. Terms of Endearment, a PG-rated movie, has two direct orgasm jokes in the first 15 minutes. It’s the first of what I can only call a lot of same. It’s a movie about personal interactions. Some interactions get blue.

Terms of Endearment won the Oscar for Best Picture in 1983. Of the four other nominees, history best remembers The Right Stuff and The Big Chill. After looking at everything that was nominated across the board, history’s list also needs to include WarGames, Flashdance, and Return of the Jedi. All-in-all it’s not a bad year for film, but it definitely feels absolutely and completely 1980s.

The tone is set early: Albert Brooks dies. The legendary comic plays (off screen) Emma’s (Debra Winger) father and Aurora’s (Shirley MacLaine) wife. His funeral scene is accompanied by the “opening theme” of absurd jaunty music. Tone is a big part of any movie and music is a big part of tone. It’s astounding how much this element doesn’t hold up. The movie was nominated for Best Original Score, but I can’t remember the last time music was this distracting — oh wait, it was Crash.

The music reinforces the “period piece” nature that every movie takes on after a few decades. The central narrative of Terms of Endearment is the story of Emma and Aurora. Aurora is the straight-laced mother who can’t let go of her daughter and Emma is the caged daughter who doesn’t really want to be free. She marries a man named Flap (Jeff Daniels, who looks young) right out of high school and carries out a marriage her mother Doesn’t Approve Of, moves to Iowa, and has three children.

There are a lot of places this plot could go from there. The average movie would force the mother to learn that she was too hard on the daughter and force the daughter to realize that running away from control only hurt her worse. Terms of Endearment, a movie from more than three decades ago, is ahead of even today as it subverts that hacky expectation.

Flap and Emma play house for a bit, but they can’t change the fact that they got married right out of high school. When people get married right out of high school it goes one way or the other: this one goes the other. This isn’t surprising, though the fact that no one ever questions that Jeff Daniels is playing a guy named Flap definitely is. Was Flap a name in 1983? We don’t have all the facts in, but we’re monitoring this story closely.

Shirley MacLaine beat out her fictional daughter Debra Winger for the Best Actress Oscar, but hot damn Debra Winger is perfect in this movie. Emma leaps into her mother’s arms after coming home for a weekend and she moves with a fluidity and liveliness that perfectly sells her character. When she’s playing a 20-something trying to act like a real adult, the movement tells it all. Emma is a kid, forever, and she’s always going to be Aurora’s kid.

The two stay on the phone through the whole movie, which is another 80s-shock device. In the time before cell phones, it is clearly supposed to be weird that Emma and Aurora are on the phone moments after sex or early in the morning. Aurora’s last words to Emma on her way to Iowa are about the phone bill. It helps sell the seriousness of the mother-daughter relationship. These little touches do more than any overwrought dialogue ever could.

The other side of mother-daughter is Aurora. She starts the film as someone who is visibly upset that people won’t let her say she’s 50 at her birthday party (she’s 52, her doctor reminds everyone). The hacky thing to do here is to transition her into a wild woman by the end of the movie. She begins an odd relationship with her ex-astronaut neighbor Garrett (Jack Nicholson at his absolute most Jack) that includes doing donuts in a convertible on the beach (reluctantly) and having sex for the first time in a decade (also reluctantly).

This is the very first non-Crash edition of this, so I’m still setting overall rules. All of these should be considered to have a spoiler warning on them. These are supposedly classics, all of them, and you should have either seen them or accepted that they may be spoiled for you when you read this.

The third act of Terms of Endearment is intense. Her doctor uncovers something troubling and suggests that Emma needs treatment immediately. She does well enough to go to New York City with her childhood friend at first, but then she rapidly goes down the proverbial tubes. Emma has cancer and Emma is dying.

This movie won Best Picture because it manages to be funny even though it’s the story of a woman whose mother never lets her go. It’s the story of a woman who dies after having an imperfect life that she never really has control over. She makes some final decisions (which has an odd feeling of “we should be so lucky in this world”) and then dies.

It’s a powerful movie before Emma ever gets cancer. It deals with individual loss of love. It deals with loneliness around others. It deals with the ways we all choose to just get the hell by when we end up somewhere (or someone) we just can’t get away from.

The cancer third act feels like another movie; it’s another episode of a show that you already like with people you already know. Acts one and two are funny and real in equal doses, but act three is a full-on reality haymaker that never gets maudlin. They deal with Emma’s dying and death with grace. It feels like a real person is dying, and the greatest trick of Terms of Endearment is that it stops being just a really great story at just the right moment.

The Best Part: While the obvious nod should go to Emma’s goodbyes to her friends and family in the hospital, I want to give this to a scene where she visits her mother during the depths of her despair about her marriage. She leaps into waiting arms and then discusses her extramarital activities with her mother in bed over coffee. The movie establishes the relationship between the characters so well that this scene feels sweet rather than weird, and that’s an accomplishment.

The Worst Part: The “theme” plays over and over in this movie and it is never appropriate. As Emma is just about to be hospitalized forever, some Super Nintendo-type funky jazz plays. It’s distracting at best.

Is It Better or Worse than Crash? Much, much, much better. This movie may as well have been the reason I started doing this. There’s no better thing to say about Terms of Endearment than that the distance between it and Crash is not measurable by the tools we have in today’s world. It is a theoretical distance, measurable only in the abstract.

Worst Best Picture Archives: Crash

Image credit: IMDB

Worst Best Picture: Is Crash the Worst Oscar Winner of All Time?

Alex Russell

On March 5th, 2006, America watched the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences award Crash the Academy Award for Best Picture. I didn’t personally watch the 78th Oscars, but I like a good movie as much as the next person. A few years later, I put Crash on my Netflix queue (back when people still had a Netflix queue for discs) and I waited.

Crash came. I watched Crash. I did not like Crash.

I still remember watching it on a tiny TV in a kitchen in Memphis. I remember wondering what I was missing and what everyone else had figured out. I watched the climax twice to try to pull out whatever beauty that other people saw in it. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

History has not remembered Crash fondly. It tops a number of lists of “worst” Oscar winners ever. Now that we’ve had plenty of time to crown other winners and compare them to Crash, we’ve got enough time before it and time after it to ask this question:

Is Crash the worst movie to ever win the Oscar for Best Picture?

With Argo last year, there are 84 other choices. We’re going to check them all.

In 2014, we’re going to watch every single movie that has ever been named best of the year. We’ll compare all of them to that most-hated-of-them-all Crash. Future editions of this feature will explore one of the other winners and then compare it to Crash, but we’ve gotta start somewhere.

We’ve gotta rewatch Crash itself.

I bought Crash with actual, real money. It turns out that it’s cheaper to buy the damn DVD than to get it any other way online. So now I have this shame capsule, forever. Some part of me wants to justify this purchase as “research materials” or “sources” or “self-inflicted punishment” The truth is that I had to know if it was as bad as I remembered it. I’ve actually only seen about 20 or 30 Best Picture winners, and for all of them I am going to revisit them completely. Crash can be no different.

The first thing you notice when you watch Crash is just how quickly it is… stupid. Calling a movie “stupid” is a simple criticism that should generally be reserved for much more base subject matter, but Crash starts off with an onslaught of some of the most asinine and insulting dialogue ever put to film. The first five minutes has dozens and dozens of slurs. You are struck, as a viewer, at how this not only isn’t the best movie of 2004, but how it barely feels like a movie at all. It feels more like a play written in a creative writing class full of teenagers. It is relentless with its message, and it assumes that you, as a viewer, will forget what it means to say if it ever stops saying it for one second.

For those of you who have not seen it, Crash is about racism. A handful of people in Los Angeles interact with the classic “other” stereotypes that they are most afraid of until they are all connected by a shoestring plot. Everything that happens in the movie serves to “challenge” the viewer. No one is “good” and no one is “bad,” everyone is just afraid of the “other.” Black people get pulled over and are mistreated by white people. A Chinese man gets run over by black people who essentially leave him to die. A white lady feels threatened by a Latino who is fixing her lock. There’s no reason to delve into the specifics of the plot. It is enough to know that Crash really, really wants you to think about what you think you know about racists. Surprise, everyone is racist at all times, to everyone.

It becomes a challenge to find any character with any redeeming qualities. People don’t act like people, they act like stand-ins for evil ideas. You know when you read an obvious allegory and someone’s name is like, Charity, or Hope or something and you roll your eyes because the author thought you were so stupid that you might not understand anything not spelled all the way out for you? Crash is worried you will miss the forest, the trees, and the ground. It’s shocking people aren’t wearing T-shirts that list the themes they represent on them.

In one of the opening scenes, Ludacris carjacks the Defense Attorney of Los Angeles. He does this after giving a long speech about how he felt discriminated against when he didn’t get enough coffee with his spaghetti at an Italian restaurant. You can accuse me of leaving out parts to make that sound absurd, but then you’d have to see Crash, wouldn’t you?

Is Crash all bad? No, not by a long shot. There are actually some decent scenes in the second act of the movie, but they are all shattered by these interjected lines. Every time some tension develops or a conflict goes somewhere, someone all but screams a slur at the camera. It robs the movie of any authenticity. This gets especially meta when one of the characters on a movie set hears from Tony Danza that a black character isn’t “authentic” enough. It’s clearly supposed to make the recipient of the message uncomfortable, but it is not something an authentic person would say. The movie is evil and calls this “normal.” If you want to make a movie about how no one is truly good or evil, you can’t make everyone evil all the time. There’s no baseline. It’s sci-fi without rules.

Some special attention needs to be given to the music. Nearly every “important” scene where two stories intersect has this weird Gladiator-style choral music over it. The effect is that even when a scene is in danger of getting to a good place, it takes you out of it. It happens every time the movie gets really, really proud of itself. It never happens deservedly.

If it was just some movie that came on TBS on a Saturday afternoon you would watch five minutes of it, snap back into yourself, and turn on some other horrible movie. The biggest sin of Crash is that the people who tell us what the good movies are say it was the best of them. It should just be a forgotten, weird piece of 2004. It’s not, though, and that’s why we embark on this journey.

The Best Part: There’s an OK scene with Terrence Howard. He does OK in one scene where he gets carjacked. That scene immediately becomes one of the worst of the movie when cops with shotguns stand down after they are asked real nice.

The Worst Part: At one point, a character shoots a kid. The kid doesn’t die (because the gun is filled with blanks) and then the family walks away and leaves the shooter standing in broad daylight. If you shoot at my kid, we’re at least going to have a conversation.

Honorable mention for worst goes to Sandra Bullock, who plays a completely useless character that does not drive any element of the plot. I’m not anti-Sandra Bullock, but whoa. To call her “misused” implies that they made an attempt. They did not.

Next time we’ll be back to compare Crash to another movie. We will not stop until we have done our due diligence. We’ll answer this, once and for all: what is the Worst Best Picture?

Image credit: IMDB

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A blog about things we do when we're supposed to be doing other things.

worst best picture

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