Posts Tagged ‘Tree of Life’

It’s that time of year again – time to predict who will win the ultimate Hollywood prize at the grandest award show in the world. The 85th Academy Awards are going to be a place where young careers get made, long careers get rewarded, and viewers get incensed that their favorites didn’t win. We’ll get ready to hear, “I’ve never even heard of that movie,” “How could she win, she didn’t even deserve to be nominated,” and of course the old favorite, “Of course that would win. The Academy doesn’t know what people actually like.”

We must keep in mind two very important things: 1) “The Academy” is not some shadowy panel of a dozen or so anonymous judges, but hundreds of well-known industry participants. 2) The winners are not meant to represent what American culutre’s favorites are. If only box office favorites were ever nominated, we’d have The Avengers going up against The Dark Knight Rises and The Hunger Games – none of which objectively deserve to be called Best Picture.

Figuring out who will win for which category takes a special sense of reasoning. So special, in fact, that all three of our writers – Dan Supanik, Marisa Carpico, and Cliff Bugle – claim to be the only one to have that sense. And yet, they disagree about who will in the six most important categories. Read on to see what the chances are of your favorites winning, and which of them will be left sitting in their seats giving disappointed claps of congratulations.

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Short Take: Utterly ineffable, yet readily comprehensible. Unlike anything you’ve ever seen

Director: Terrence Malick

Screenwriter: Terrence Malick

Cast: Brad Pitt, Jessica Chastain, Hunter McCracken, Sean Penn

Length: 2h 18m

Synopsis: The era is 1950s America. Mr. O’Brien (Pitt) is an old-fashioned man who, like his father before him, adopted the kind of parenting skills that, looking back, leave a bit to be desired. He cares for his wife (Chastain) and three sons, but his disciplinary methods and anger issues prevent too strong of a connection from forming between them – at least not in the same sense that parents nowadays are expected to achieve. The eldest son, Jack (McCracken), goes through a sort of coming of age process that involves learning various exceptional and unexceptional life lessons, mostly by way of observing his father, mother, brothers, and friends. This family story is also at certain intervals juxtaposed with scenes showing the creation of the universe, extinction of the dinosaurs, and several biblical references. To be sure, it is very much an avant garde film; using montage at certain points not too unlike what Eisenstein might have enjoyed, as well as narrative temporality that likens back to the French New Wave. It belongs with the class of films that can be described as being like a Rorschach test: you will understand it best from your own perspective, and feel sensitivity in whichever ways correlate with that perspective. It is not necessarily whatever you want it to be, but it is dramatically more abstract than anything else Terrence Malick has done.

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