Movies

In our house, the Academy Awards are like the Super Bowl. It’s one of the big events of the year. Typically, we have friends over for an “Oscar party.” For months before the actual how, I scour magazines and websites for information about who is likely to be nominated and who is supposed to win. Then I do my own prognosticating. True, the show itself is often a letdown (the same could be said of the Super Bowl). But I return each year and eagerly await the opening of the envelopes.

Beyond the major awards at the end of the show, one of my favorite categories has always been Best Original Song. Not any more. the decline of this category in recent years is a disgrace.

Less than five?

Where to begin? How about with the nominating process? This year there were only four nominated songs. Why is that? Almost every other category has five nominations. The only categories that have less than five are ones where there seems not to be enough qualified movies (such as Best Visual Effects).

This logic cannot apply to Best Original Song. Not this year anyway. How do I know this? Let’s look at this year’s nominees:

Coming Home (from Country Strong)
I See the Light (from Tangled)
If I Rise (from 127 Hours)
We Belong Together (from Toy Story 3)

The award went to frequent nominee Randy Newman for We Belong Together. Admittedly, this was not a spectacular collection of songs. My point, however, is that if these four songs qualified, surely there must be at least one more of this caliber that could have been included. Randy Newman said as much when he accepted his award: “They only nominate four songs? They nominate five for cinematography. They could find a fifth song somewhere.”

Yes. And, in this particular case, they wouldn’t have had to look very hard. Recently, I saw Burlesque. While not a great movie, it did have some very enjoyable music. Of particular note is You Haven’t Seen The Last Of Me, sung by Cher and written by Dianne Warren. It won the Golden Globe for Best Original Song. Surely, it is good enough to have been the fifth nominated song at the Oscars.

Why was this (or any other potential song) not given the fifth spot? I have never seen an official explanation. I haven’t even read any reasonable speculation. It appears to be a mystery. Whatever the reason, it must be a ridiculous one. There is no good reason for it.

[A sidenote: As its name implies, nominees in the Original Song category must be "original" — meaning that the song must have been written expressly for the movie. That's why, in Burlesque again, Christina Aguilera's driving performances of Something's Got a Hold on Me and Tough Lover could not be considered. These are old Etta James' standards. It's also why, years before, Whitney Houston's mega-hit cover of I Will Always Love You (from The Bodyguard) did not qualify.]

Less than good?

On the other hand…I can see one rationale for having less than five nominated songs as a general rule: the overall low quality of the music in recent years. No offense to Randy Newman (whom I greatly admire) but, compared to nominees from decades ago, there have been almost no songs in the past decade that qualify as memorable or future standards.

Need proof of this? As a comparison, check out nominees and winners for Best Original Song from years past.

First off, let’s look at songs from the period prior to 1961:

White Christmas
I’ve Got You Under My Skin
Pennies from Heaven
They Can’t Take That Away From Me
Zip-a-Dee-Doo-Dah
That Old Black Magic
The Man that Got Away
Three Coins in A Fountain
Love is a Many Splendored Thing
Unchained Melody
Que Sera Sera
All the Way
April Love
Gigi
High Hopes

See any ones you recognize? Of course you do. And the above list is by no means exhaustive.

Next, let’s move to the period from 1961 to 1990. Familiar nominees include:

Moon River
Town Without Pity
Days of Wine and Roses
Call Me Irresponsible
More
My Kind of Town
The Shadow of Your Smile
I Will Wait for You
Born Free
Alfie
Georgy Girl
The Look of Love
Windmills of Your Mind
Raindrops Keep Falling on My Head
Come Saturday Morning
Jean
What are you Doing The Rest of Your Life?
The Way We Were
Nobody Does It Better
Hopelessly Devoted to You
Fame
Up Where We Belong
I Just Called to Say I Love You
The Power of Love
Take My Breath Away
Somewhere Out There
I’ve Had The Time of My Life
Storybook Love

Whew! Impressed yet? I hope so. Yes, there were clunkers among the nominees (I haven’t listed those here). But, in any given year, there were almost always a few good ones. This is no longer the case.

Starting around 1991, things began to decline. Several songs from Disney and Pixar animated films were top-notch (such as You’ve Got a Friend in Me). Occasional other songs stand out, such as Because You Love Me and My Heart Will Go On (both from the 1990′s). After 2000, however, the pickings became really slim (Emimen’s Lose Yourself being one exception).

The year 2008 was a low point. Only three songs were nominated; two of them came from Slumdog Millionaire. In other words, out of the entire crop of films released that year, only two movies contained songs deemed worthy of a Best Song nomination. As with 2010, there were probably other songs that could have (and perhaps should have) been nominated. But my recollection is that this was indeed a bleak year.

What accounts for this decline? I believe there are two factors:

• Rock music. Starting in the 1950′s and 1960′s, popular music underwent a profound change. Popular music had been dominated by composers from Tin Pan Alley and Broadway. The rock and roll revolution changed all of that. From Sun Records to Motown to the Beatles and onward today’s diverse number of rock genres, it’s now a different world. Hollywood was slow to adapt to this. If you look at the above list of songs from 1961 to 1990, only a few (at the tail end of the list) could even remotely be considered rock music. By the 1990′s, movie songs had largely become irrelevant to the rest of popular music. The quality of songs were in decline because most top artists of the time weren’t writing for movies. The Academy made some effort to appear hip (such as when It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp won in 2005). But it was too little, too late.

• Money. There’s another reason top artists weren’t writing for movies: they weren’t asked to do so. Why? Because it had become too expensive. With the rising costs for making a film, and with original music seen as having little to do with a film’s financial success, producers were no longer interested in paying the escalating fees that musicians were demanding. An informative blog posting provides further insight on this point.

Sad. The end result is that what had once been a highlight of the Academy Awards show — great artists performing great music — is now just ho-hum at best, annoying at worst. I keep hoping that next year will be better. But I’m not optimistic.

I’m a die-hard James Bond movie fan. And Goldfinger ranks up there as perhaps my all-time favorites James Bond film.

At least it was until I watched it again recently. I’m now thinking of downgrading it a bit.

Yes, it still has all the iconic scenes that remain so indelibly imprinted in my mind. But watching it again, I was struck by how much of the movie makes absolutely no sense from any logical perspective. And I found it impossible to ignore this, even accepting the idea that the movie is basically an escapist fantasy.

I won’t bore you with a complete list of all the ridiculousness in the movie. Instead, I want to focus on just one sequence; a sequence that so defies logic that I believe it could well be the #1 all-time most logic-defying sequence in movie history. I’m talking about the scene that begins with the assembled hoodlums inside Goldfinger’s Kentucky ranch.

For starters, in the meeting room, Goldfinger unveils an elaborate hidden control panel that he uses to show the assembled group his big plan. However, the show consists only of a simple map and a 3-D mock-up of Fort Knox, also concealed until he presses the buttons to reveal them. Even granting that these items may have had some use beyond displaying them to his criminal associates, it’s hard to imagine why such an expensive and elaborate setup was needed to conceal and reveal these two items. Couldn’t he just keep them in a locked room? Okay, Goldfinger is super-rich and can afford it. But still.

Anyway, we’re just getting warmed up. Next, Goldfinger kills off the entire group by mechanically sealing off the room and spraying nerve gas into it. Are we to believe that he kills people off this way with such frequency that he decided to install a permanent setup just for doing so? Surely, there are many simpler less elaborate ways he could have taken care of this matter. Again, I can pretty much forgive this. James Bond movies, after all, are all about elaborate schemes.

But now, we enter into the realm of the unforgivable. If he always intended to kill everybody (as seemed to be the case), why even bother giving them the dog and pony show about how he was going to raid Fort Knox? Why not just kill them as soon as they were all in the room. Again, I understand that the movie needs to reveal the Fort Knox plot to the audience. But couldn’t the movie makers find a way to do it that doesn’t require that you be halfway in a coma in order for you not to notice how preposterous it all is?

Even if you are willing to suspend disbelief and accept all of the preceding, there remains the coup de grace of the entire sequence:

One of the criminals, appropriately named Solo, decides to opt out of the Fort Knox deal. He wants to take his promised money and leave. Goldfinger agrees and sends him on his way. Given that even he is going to be killed anyway (shot by Oddjob, as we soon find out), why let him leave? Why not just have him die in the room with the rest of the hoodlums? Goldfinger could have easily come up with an excuse to leave the room before letting Solo exit.

Okay, so Goldfinger passed on this opportunity. A lapse in judgement perhaps. But why not then shoot Solo before he ever leaves the property? Ah, that would still be too easy. Instead, Goldfinger puts Solo into a limo, ostensibly with instructions for Oddjob to drive him to the airport. And yes, there’s the payment of a million dollars in gold bullion in the trunk!

Solo never makes it to the airport — to no one’s surprise. Oddjob shoots him in the car along the way. Oddjob then dumps the body in some remote location, drives back to the ranch, and takes the gold out of the trunk, right? In your dreams. Why do anything that makes even the slightest sense when there is a much more complicated and totally idiotic way to accomplish the same goal?

What actually happens is that Oddjob drives to an auto junkyard that has machinery to crush and compress cars into nice compact cubes. And then, after compressing the limo (with the dead Solo still inside, of course), he places the resulting cube on the flatbed of a truck, somehow conveniently waiting for him, which he then drives back to the ranch. Of course! Why didn’t I think of that?

If you have not yet turned your brain off by this point, you may be wondering: Why take the compressed car back at all? Ah, you forgot about the gold. The million dollars in gold is still contained within the now heap of metal and human body parts — and needs to be extracted. Holy smokes, why didn’t Oddjob just remove the gold from the car before he compacted it? That would have saved Goldfinger from the ugly extraction task. In fact, it would have eliminated the need to take the compacted car back to the ranch at all. Ah, but then we wouldn’t have been able to have the witticism, spoken by Bond and Goldfinger in different scenes, of Solo’s “pressing engagement.” Oh yes, what does a total absence of any sense matter, when there’s a witty remark at stake?

Okay. I know James Bond movies aren’t meant to be taken seriously. And I will more than willing to accept some lack of logic in the name of fun. You’d be hard pressed to find an action movie that doesn’t have at least a few such minor lapses. But there comes a point when it all gets too much. For me, the Goldfinger movie surpasses that point several times over. I guess I was more forgiving when I watched it when I was younger. But I am not now.

Perhaps I am more harsh now because I see a bigger problem lurking. I believe the success of these early James Bond movies laid the groundwork for most of the hundreds of action movies that followed. The Bond franchise showed movie makers that you don’t need an intelligent script, or even one that makes any sense, for a movie to be successful. Throw in enough fight scenes, chase scenes, special effects, and explosions — and the audience will pay for a ticket and ignore the fact that there is no coherent plot to the movie.

That’s why I am almost always disappointed now in each new action movie that comes out. I hope the day may yet come when, in describing a movie, the words intelligent and action need not be mutually exclusive. I see some glimmer of hope here with movies such as 2005′s Batman Begins. But they are still more the exception than the rule. The vast majority of this summer’s movie blockbusters, sadly, appears to be sticking to the old formula.