A BIGelow Mistake

Imagine a blank screen with no images, no title, nothing to establish a sense of location or context.  Instead, you only hear voices.  At first, you think the movie is malfunctioning, but it is not.  There are muddled voices that you soon realize are phone conversations that were recorded during the events of September 11^th.  It is with this that the film Zero Dark Thirty begins.  Throughout the course of the film, the audience follows Maya (Jessica Chastain) in her journey down the rabbit hole to find Osama bin Laden.  It is a story of the unsung heroes: the individuals whose efforts we may never realize.  Whose names we may never know. 

To try and explain the entire plot of Zero Dark Thirty would negate its complexities, so I challenge the reader to see the film.  In this blogger’s opinion, it was one of the best of 2012.  Period.  To this end, I wish to pose a question to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.  It is a question that has been constantly asked since the Oscar nominations were announced:

            What the hell were you thinking when you did not nominate Kathryn Bigelow for Best   Director???? (And yes, this warrants four question marks)

Now, some may blame the omission on the torture controversy surrounding the film.  I sincerely hope that is not the case.  I would think that a group of people associated with the film industry could tell the difference between a film that promotes torture and one that depicts an occurrence to maintain the truth of the story.  Would it really have been possible to have a movie on this particular subject without portraying such scenes of violence?  Bigelow wrote an open letter discussing her reasoning for including torture in the film.  What people often forget is that to include a subject into a form of media, whether it be film, television, or books, does not mean the creator of said media personally agrees with its morality.  On the contrary, artists often include things into their creations with which they personally disagree.  But if such inclusion helps to maintain the integrity of the work, it then becomes a necessity.

Furthermore, with Bigelow’s omission from the Best Director category, Zero Dark Thirty stands little chance of winning the big prize.  To borrow a phrasing from Jane Austen, it is a truth universally acknowledged that for a film to win Best Picture, its director must also win his or her category (with extremely rare exceptions).  When the Academy expanded the field for Best Picture, they really only doubled the number of films that can add “Academy Award Nominated Best Picture” to their the titles. The real competition exists between the films with both Best Picture and Best Director nominations.

There are certainly other films worthy of the award, particularly Spielberg’s Lincoln.  Nevertheless, it is a huge disappointment that Zero Dark Thirty stands little chance of winning.

- Southern Belle