- It’s Such a Beautiful Day
Hey, did you know the Academy Awards are tonight? Of course you did, because this year, the noxious noncontroversies generated by the annual awards show are particularly noxious and particularly noncontroversial, save for the Academy’s legitimately egregious and transparently racist dismissal of the biopic Selma—though I’m sure you’ve read one too many think pieces on that subject, so I’ll spare you the soapboxing. Meanwhile, the far less significant squabbling surrounding American Sniper‘s nebulous politics and The Lego Movie‘s supposed snub in the Best Animated Feature category cloud the fact that most of the films nominated tonight really aren’t very good. But then again, the Oscars aren’t about upholding a tradition as much as they’re about Hollywood self-aggrandizement, which is actually pretty fascinating, but it certainly isn’t the stuff of cinema.
- Waking Life (dir. Richard Linklater, 2001, USA) Champions of Richard Linklater’s Oscar-nominated coming-of-age drama Boyhood cite its radical, time-crunching structural invention, but Linklater has been making radical films for decades. An early masterwork of digital cinema, one that introduced new possibilities for cinematic imagery, this wondrously bizarre comedy is heavy with ideas—posthumanism, situationist politics, free will, metaphysics, social philosophy—but it never feels pedantic or obstinate. It’s as joyous and life-affirming as anything in Boyhood.
