Best Picture of 2008

The Winner: Slumdog Millionaire.

The Other Nominees: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon, Milk, and The Reader.

My Choice: I have to agree very strongly with the Academy on this one. As much as I loved and admired both Milk and The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire is just too great a movie. It has a story that allows viewers to maintain a sense of hope despite all of the dark paths that the narrative takes its lead character, Jamal, down. Despite its fairy tale romance, it manages to comment seriously on poverty and its varied effects on children. It was, from my perspective, the most technologically skillful film made last year, most notably in the areas of cinematography and editing. I loved the music, particularly the two songs that were nominated. And I thought all of the performances, especially given the tender ages of much of the main cast, were astonishingly good. When a film has all of that going for it, it deserves to be named Best Picture.

Gigi (1958)

Gigi, winner of the Oscar for Best Picture of 1958, is an almost perfect example of the skill with which MGM made musicals. Producer Arthur Freed had, by this time, perfected the art of bringing together some of the most talented individuals to work on movie musicals. A long-time member of the so-called Freed Unit, Vincente Minnelli was the director for Gigi, adding to his list of triumphs such as An American in Paris, The Band Wagon, and Brigadoon. And, perhaps most important of all, the great Cecil Beaton oversaw the entire "look" of the production, from sets to costumes and everything in between. It's all rather sumptuous, even when we're supposed to believe that the title character's family lives in poverty. (All of the impoverished should live so well.) They knew how to make movies look good in those days.

However, despite all of the technical skill involved in its creation, Gigi is a rather slight confection. The story is a rather simple one: a young girl is groomed by her grandmother and aunt for life as a courtesan since she would have very low prospects for marrying well. Of course, this being 1958 and MGM, no such word as "courtesan" ever gets uttered on screen. You have to figure it out for yourself, but it's not that difficult. Gigi, played by Leslie Caron, is supposed to be a relatively naive French schoolgirl. She enjoys spending time with family friend Gaston, played by Louis Jourdan. He's a rich playboy who goes from one woman to another as casually as he travels from Paris to Monte Carlo. Everything is boring to him, except for the moments that he spends with Gigi, of course.

You can perhaps sense where the story is headed already. Yes, Gaston falls in love with Gigi after taking her and her grandmother to the sea for the weekend. Upon their return, Gigi's Aunt Alicia (Isabel Jeans) sets her sights on Gaston as Gigi's future benefactor, and all of the pieces begin to fall into place. All of them except, of course, for Gigi's consent. She doesn't want to be a courtesan, not really. She wants to fall in love and marry the man she loves. She just doesn't realize it's Gaston, at first. Gaston, being a man of the world, initially agrees to "keep" Gigi as his lover, but eventually he too begins to re-evaluate his feelings for her. If you've seen enough MGM musicals from this era, you already know how it ends, so I'm not going to tell you.

Jeans gets some of the best lines in the film. As she tries to teach Caron's Gigi to be ladylike, she passes on the wisdom she has accumulated throughout her many liaisons with the wealthy men of Europe. Her reaction when Gigi guesses that one of her jewels is a topaz, for example, is priceless, as is her withering dismissal of another woman's pearls as "dipped." My favorite remark of hers, though, is when she tries to teach Gigi how to "insinuate" herself into a chair. The look on Jeans' face sums up just how poorly Gigi lives up to this standard.

I've also mentioned Caron and Jourdan already, both of whom are very charming here. But the real heart of the movie is the performances by the older cast members. Maurice Chevalier, as Gaston's uncle, Honoree, is a delight. Honoree is sort of a mentor for Gaston in the ways of being a playboy. The movie begins with his famous rendition of "Thank Heaven for Little Girls," and it's a charming way to start the narrative. It certainly gives you all of the insight you need into his character. (A short reprise of the song also ends the film.) The other great performance is by Hermione Gingold as Madame Alvarez, Gigi's grandmother. She's so much fun to watch whenever she's on screen, and her duet with Chevalier, "I Remember It Well," is such a lovely ode to lost love. I would have preferred to watch a film version of their adventures instead, but youth must be the focus, I suppose. None of the cast members were nominated for their performances, oddly enough, a rarity among movies that win Best Picture.

A good musical must be judged by its songs, and you don't get much better at choosing songwriters than Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe, who are no doubt more famous for their musical My Fair Lady. They made some fine music for Gigi as well, including "The Night They Invented Champagne" and the two songs I've already mentioned. My personal favorite is "I'm Glad I'm Not Young Anymore," sung by Chevalier. It's a somewhat bittersweet song, but Chevalier brings to it a wealth of history. If there are any songs that don't seem to measure up, the one that stands out the most is the title track, which won the Oscar that year for Best Song. "Gigi" sounds to me like an obvious retread of "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face" from My Fair Lady. Even the pacing of the song is very similar, not to mention the overall rhythm and content. Still, one weak song in the bunch is a pretty good average.

Gigi won nine Oscars in 1958, a record number at that time, and a lot of them were in the technical categories such as art direction and music and costume design. In fact, it won every Oscar for which it was nominated. It had some pretty interesting competition for Best Picture of 1958, a comedy (Auntie Mame) and three dramas (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, The Defiant Ones, and Separate Tables). I think it's really a testament to the Freed Unit that Gigi was the winner. It is all beautifully made, even if there is little substance to the story. There's no social message involved, no deep meaning, perhaps, just a bit of light entertainment set to a lovely score.

Best Live Action Short Film of 2008

Auf Der Strecke (On the Line), a German film, tells the story of a department store security employee who spends much of his free time (and quite a bit of work time) pining away for a pretty young woman who works in the book department of the store. He never speaks to her, of course, but watches her on the surveillance camera and even rides the same subway that she does so that he can continue to look at her. You begin to think that this is going to be a creepy film about a stalker, but then she boards the train with a handsome young man one night, and she and the young man begin to fight. After she abruptly leaves the train, the young man is attacked by three young thugs, who beat him to death. The security guard watches much of this, but he does nothing, perhaps jealous of the woman's affections for the young man. When the guard discovers that the young man is her brother, he tries—haltingly—to make amends. (Those German filmmakers and their sense of guilt...where would they be without it?) This film has an interesting story and some technical prowess, but I don't know that it would stand out to me in a field of hundreds of other short films of similar skill at storytelling and camera work and editing. This is the longest of the five films at 30 minutes, and it has the most fully developed plot.

New Boy, a film from Ireland, tells the story of a young boy from Africa who arrives at a grammar school in Ireland, only to be picked on by one of the Irish boys. Through a series of flashbacks, we discover that the young African boy has left his home country due to the military's arrest and probably murder of his father, a schoolteacher. The kids in his new class are an intriguing lot overall, most of them fitting pretty clear "types." The resolution of the story is charming, coming as it does on the heels of the most dramatic of the young boy's flashbacks to Africa. Again, this film is competently made, and it was fun to hear the Irish accents, but I'm not sure that it would stand out in a field of short films so distinctly either. It's the shortest of the five, clocking in at a brisk 11 minutes.

Toyland (Spielzeugland), is also from Germany, and it mines more familiar territory: the Holocaust. A young German boy is friends with the Jewish family downstairs; in fact, he and the son of the Jewish family play the piano together. When he learns that the Jewish family will be leaving soon, he wants to know why he can't go. When his mother tries to tell him that they are going to Toyland, that just makes him all the more excited to join them. What she can't tell him, of course, but what we all know is that they are on the way to the concentration camps; foolishly, she makes up a destination that only entices her son rather than discourages him. On the morning that the Nazis arrive to take the family downstairs into custody, the young German boy packs his suitcase and tries to join them. Much of the film is the story of his mother trying to locate him, even going to the train station and having the officers open the railcar that contains her neighbors. The payoff for this film is strong, but I won't spoil it for you on the chance that you might get to enjoy seeing it on your own some day. Like New Boy, Toyland uses a series of flashbacks to tell its story, but the German film is more emotionally engrossing, perhaps because of the more detailed knowledge we have of the cultural context.

Grisen (The Pig) is a Danish film about an older man who enters a hospital to have surgery; he has an abscess in his rectum, a fact which he shares with almost everyone he meets. At first, he is in a hospital room by himself. In his solitude, he notices a painting on the wall of a pig leaping into a body of water. He becomes intrigued by the picture and starts to feel like it is a good luck charm for him. He even likens the expression on the pig's face to the smile on the Mona Lisa. (Well, it is a rather enigmatic look. The pig's look, I mean.) He awakens after one of his procedures to see that the painting has been removed and that another patient has joined him in the room. It turns out that the other patient is Muslim, and his family has asked for the painting to be removed because it offends them. A series of misadventures follows, including the hanging of a picture of a moose as an alternative. Frustrated, the elderly man calls in his daughter, the lawyer, and asks her to become involved. It's all rather comic, yet each "side" still makes an intriguing case regarding the limits of tolerance. The way the plot is resolved is the most ironic of all five films, but it too should really be experienced firsthand.

Manon Sur Le Bitume (Manon on the Asphalt), a French film, is perhaps the most challenging in terms of its structure. It begins with a series of images of various people going about their day. Then the central character of Manon hops on her bike and rides to meet someone. She is struck by a car and, while she fades in and out of consciousness, begins to think about the various people in her life and what she last said to them and key memories of their times together and how they might react to her death. All of these people are, of course, the ones we saw in the opening sequence. The film ends with a series of images involving the same people, but I'm not certain that the narrative has been fully or satisfactorily resolved when that sequence begins. As intriguing as this film sounds, I'm not sure that it is executed as skillfully as it could have been.

Oscar Winner: Toyland. Perhaps it was the darker theme of the German short film that made it stand out more. It is the most resonant of the films in terms of its emotional impact.

My Choice: The Pig. It's sense of humor is charming, yet it manages to make some intriguing social commentary about tolerance and justice.

Best Animated Short Film of 2008

La Maison en Petits Cubes, despite the French title, was made in Japan. It's an intriguing story of a man whose home starts to flood, causing him to build another home on top of the existing one. Apparently, everyone does this, making the entire town a series of towers barely poking out of the water. When he drops his pipe into the water, he begins a journey back into his past as he stops at each level and reminisces about the time he spent there. It's a charming story, and (I suspect) it's also a parable about what we might be losing in the climate change the world is facing, what we leave behind when the world we knew starts to disappear. My only complaint is that this is the least visually appealing of the five nominees. The animation is a bit, well, ugly, frankly, but the story is a winner, the most fully realized of the five nominees. By the way, the title has been translated into Pieces of Love, Vol. 1, which I believe is a gross distortion of what the title actually means in French (something more like "the house of little boxes").

Lavatory—Lovestory is an unusual tale of a woman who oversees a public lavatory—she takes the "fee" you must pay to enter—and how she begins to realize that she has a secret admirer. A series of vibrant bouquets appear when she is not looking (which is often, especially when reading her magazine filled with fantasies for women), and she begins to wonder which of the men who come in and out of the lavatory might be attracted to her. This film is the simplest in terms of its animation, really little more than line drawings, and the only colors are the ones used for the different bouquets. Most of the production crew is Russian, apparently, but all of the words that appear on screen (such as the title of the magazine the woman reads) are rendered in English. This is a charming story, delightfully romantic, but a bit of a trifle perhaps.

Oktapodi is the shortest of these films at only two minutes, but it's a very rich two minutes. In this French film, two octopi (octopuses?) in love are separated when one is taken to be the special on the menu that night at a restaurant. The remaining octopus escapes from the tank at the pet store and begins a wild journey trying to retrieve his lover from the hands of the boy who has stashed her in a cooler to remain fresh until dinner time. The colors of this one are luminous and not a second of the short time is wasted. A real gem of a movie, and one that gives you the feeling that you'd like to watch even more of these two interesting characters.

Presto is the tale of a magician's rabbit who just wants a carrot. He keeps getting thwarted in his attempts to eat his lunch, a luxury that the magician has already enjoyed. If you saw WALL-E in the theatres, then you've seen this animated short. It's clever, as you would expect from the folks at Pixar, and very slickly produced. The film manages to find as many ways as possible to allow the rabbit to punish the magician for failing to feed him properly, and all with the use of a wizard's hat much like the one Mickey dons in Fantasia. (Yes, of course, I know there's an homage at work here.) While watching this one again, I was reminded of that old Bugs Bunny cartoon where he and the magician keep getting zapped by a magic wand. I suppose there are far worse comparisons that could be made, given the high standard that those Warner Bros. cartoons had.

This Way Up, an entry from the United Kingdom, tells the story of the most unlucky of undertakers on the most unlucky of days. After picking up the remains of an elderly woman, the two men (apparently, father and son) experience a series of mishaps, all triggered by a chain reaction the younger man starts in the woman's home. The Rube Goldbergian start to the film sets the tone for much of the slapstick that follows. The most intriguing of those mishaps involves the two men seemingly on a journey toward hell with the "ghost" of the old woman riding her coffin as if it were one of the boats at Disneyland's It's a Small World ride. Funny, if a bit macabre at times. I kept expecting even worse things than what did happen, but this one seemed to generate the most laughs from the audience of which I was a part.

Oscar Winner and My Choice: La Maison en Petits Cubes, It’s both the most ambitious and successful of the nominated films. As an aside, I also thought the speech by the director was entertaining, especially his shout-out to the band Styx.