Jeff Simon: The Oscar drama begins to build
Published: February 02, 2010, 12:30 am
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The film was unappealingly titled “K- 19: The Widowmaker.” It starred Harrison Ford, but even Ford fans could be forgiven for giving the film wide berth. There weren’t many reasons to see it, frankly.
One of them, though, was the reason I very much wanted to talk to its director, which took a lot of doing, to be entirely candid. The director was Kathryn Bigelow, one of the most fascinating, if previously obscure, figures in all of American film.
My desire to talk to her on the phone before the release of the film seemed to cause huge puzzlement all the way up and down the food chain of the movie promotion business that could help me do it.
When I finally did talk to her on the phone, I understood a little.
She is, by nature, an aloof woman, not much given to the product salesmanship that usually characterizes the film opening process. Nor does she think of herself in any of the conventional Hollywood terms which make phone chats possible. So if you ask her, for instance, about the longtime minority view that she is, by far, American movies’ greatest—and really only—dedicated female action film director (Mimi Leder doesn’t begin to equal her), she honestly doesn’t really know how to answer you.
It’s as if you’ve asked her about not being Kurdish. You’d have had better luck asking her about being legendarily tall and beautiful (which she also is).
Movie people—including directors— have, of course, every right to be whatever they jolly well want to be. When a group of them used to talk to Mel Gibson, the famous Three Stooges fan was so weirdly at cross-purposes to himself that he often seemed to have Curly, Larry and Moe all jabbering in his head at the same time. But that didn’t make “Braveheart” or, yes, “Apocalypto” any less stunning.
Bigelow wasn’t exactly a breezy interview but, for all her relative obscurity, she has always been phenomenally talented—right from the very beginning. No matter how peculiar some of her films, there are moments— many of them in some of her films—that are electrifyingly cinematic.
And now the remarkable news about Kathhryn Bigelow: after receiving some critics prizes, Bigelow won the Directors Guild Award on Saturday for directing “The Hurt Locker,” by my lights the most remarkable film by far of 2009, despite the unfortunate fact that the excitement of its midsummer opening was only known to those who regularly read film reviews (months after the fact, people e-mailed me wondering if it ever played here. Yes, it did, quite respectably).
Bigelow’s Saturday victory makes this morning’s Oscar nomination announcements awfully interesting.
Never mind the sudden Motion Picture Academy notion to go back to nominating 10 films for Best Picture—a great idea but only in a year more plentifully stacked with excellence—what Bigelow’s underdog victory this past weekend does is put three films in major Oscar contention in 2009— “Up in the Air,” “The Hurt Locker” and “Avatar,” the latter two directed by people on entirely different polarities in the film publicity world who were once, in fact, husband and wife, i. e. Kathryn Bigelow and James Cameron.
You’d have to be made of concrete not to find THAT a hell of an interesting story on the most primitive, unaesthetic level. Against everyone’s wishes, the 2009 Oscars are shaping up to be a morality play all over the place, with money and technology and vision and art swirling around in crazy chaotic conflict.
It’s complicated—all of it—and quite wonderfully so.
jsimon@buffnews.com
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