I’m sorry, but I am going to have to hike up my crotchity old man pants and whip my suspenders; it’s time to do a little ranting about the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (AMPAS).

Recently, outgoing President Sid Ganis announced that next years Oscar ceremony will feature 10 Best Picture nominations instead of 5. This unprecedented (at least in 60 years) announcement was followed by a few lesser publicized changes. The rules for Best Original Song are now such that there may not even be an award every year and supplemental awards, such as the Thalberg or the Honorary Oscar, will be distributed at a separate event. It is great to see AMPAS blow the dust off of the arcane rule book they have been following for nearly a century, but other changes are needed. Like what, you may ask? Good thing you came to the candler blog.

Axe the Best Animated Feature Category, and Fast

Part of the thinking behind expanding the Best Pic pool is to give films that rarely make it into the running a fighting chance. Comedies, summer blockbusters and animated features are rarely nominated, but only one of those genres has been pushed out of the running completely. Instituted in 2001, with the first award going to Shrek, the Best Animated Feature award was meant to get gold into the hands of animated filmmakers whose work accounts for an incredible amount of box office grosses yet is rarely honored at the annual ceremony. Instead, it has pigeonholed all animated films into one giant lump that is out of the running of the Academy’s top honor.

Over the last decade, Hollywood and audiences have taken note of animation auteurs. So many people are required to make an animated film, the makers often get lost in the shuffle. However, Brad Bird has now become a marketable name, as have Andrew Stanton and John Lasseter. (These are all Pixar guys, I know, but hey, they’re the major studio) As films become more closely linked to specific names, they start to feel more like works of art rather than DVDs to keep the kids happy in the back seat. **With a bigger Best Pic pool, there is no longer a need to push animators into a corner with this useless, offensive award. **

Fix the Foreign Language Film

Over the years the essence of the Foreign Language film seems to have been lost. Given out officially since 1956, the award is meant to showcase films that do not open in the U.S. during their initial run, thus bringing greater attention to world cinema. The film must play in theaters overseas and be in a language other than English. Fair enough, but technology keeps making the world smaller, so we run into snags along the way.

Each nation must select an official film which AMPAS then whittles down to 5 nominees. There are obvious political issues that erupt in each country which the Academy can neither control nor anticipate, but there are rules that could be changed to allow more films into the fold.For films to be eligible they must be primarily in the language of the country of origin. In 2008, Beaufort was Israel’s official selection, though a controversy brewed over another favorite from that country, Bikur Ha-Tizmoret (The Band’s Visit), which is in English, Hebrew and Arabic. Rumors swirled that Beaufort’s producers brought to the selection committee’s attention the exact length of spoken English in The Band’s Visit, which happened to be too long for eligibility, thus securing a spot for the nod. The latter film, which was critically well-received the world over, should have been eligible regardless. Though the outdated rules AMPAS has set up forbid it, culturally speaking it is a film that should have every right to compete on behalf of its nation.

Also, for some unknown reason, a film can be nominated both for Best Foreign Language Film and Best Picture like Roberto Benigni’s La vita è bella (Life is Beautiful) was in 1998. This is particularly vexing considering the fact that if, say, a documentary film wants to try for the top award, the producers must pull it from the Best Documentary running. Why is it that this award can have it both ways yet other categories must make some tough choices? I think it’s pretty clear that the rules in general need to be revamped from the ground up.

Eliminate Redundant Nominees

It is an incredible honor for anyone to be nominated for an Oscar, so to be nominated twice in the same category would be an even greater honor, right? Well, if you ask Steven Soderbergh, who won Best Director for Traffic in 2001 while he was also nominated for Erin Brockovich, yes, it is pretty great. But ask Roger Deakins, a cinematographer who has racked up an incredible 8 nominations in his career, two for Best Cinematography in 2008 (No Country for Old Men, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford) and you might get a different answer. Mr. Deakins has never taken home gold, and in 2008 the theory is that he outdid himself. If voters who would support his work wanted to vote for him, they split their vote in two different places making it actually that much more difficult for him to win.

That same year, songwriters Alan Menken and Stephen Schwartz racked up 3 nominations for songs they wrote for Disney’s Enchanted. There was only one other film with a song in the running, (August Rush) Once, and it went home the victor. Again, the vote was probably split between all three of the artists’ songs.

Now, I realize that the actual quality of a given piece plays a huge part in the actual choice of an actual winner. Still, nominees should compete against each other, not themselves.

Ed Note: Fixes made based on Jonathan J’s comment below. Very sorry some facts were off for this article.

_As my twitter followers may know, I dragged my bones to the IMAX at 2 am last Wednesday to check out Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. It has taken me longer than usual to sit down and review the film mainly because the airwaves are clouded by so much of the same everywhere. In an effort to speed things along and get the candler blog back on track, I have decided to simply offer up my opinion on the film in short bullet points. Is this a cop out? Yes. Will you forgive me? I hope! _

Is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen a good film?

In short, no. However, it is not the worst film ever. I would say it beats out [X-Men Origins: Wolverine](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/05/08/review-x -men-origins-wolverine/) for overall watchability. The plot is almost non- existent and clunky at it’s most coherent points. Though the film may have generated an incredible amount of box office receipts, it does not stand out as a great action film to say the least. There are too many characters and the camera is always moving in a manner that makes it impossible to focus on anything. But don’t worry, there is a choice soundtrack to ground your auditory senses at least.

Are there any memorable performances in the film?

Shia LaBeouf proves once again why he deserves the spotlight in studio tentpoles. He is not a great action hero but he has an incredible ability to ease any scene. His comic timing timing is impeccable, and there is no off switch for the sincere laughs he brings. Hand him lemons and he manages to make lemonade time and time again. Megan Fox almost becomes more than a pretty face (read: tuchus), but the script doesn’t give her much chance. John Turturro is a little blander than he was the last go-around, but that can be said across the boards in this sequel.

Are the characters of Skids and Mudflap racist?

Absolutely, but that’s the wrong question to ask. The internet is abuzz with talk of these two “jive-talking” characters.  Why? Because it is easy to make a story out of this issue. The characters are absolutely stereotypes of urban street culture who never do much of anything in the film besides talk. Should you be offended? Hell yes. Is this new? Absolutely not, and I’m not saying this just hearkens back to D.W. Griffith days. Black characters are still maligned to a great extent in Hollywood films, look at, well look at pretty much anything. It seems that the easy target of a summer blockbuster and Michael Bay have simply boiled these emotions over. Great! But to all you writers out there who squawked about this last week, I hope you keep the convo up up in the future and don’t just drop race issues like any other meme.

Is it worth seeing this movie on the IMAX?

Yes. Just like last summer’s The Dark Knight, Revenge features scenes captured on actual IMAX 65mm film. The metallic bots rendered out at that size look gorgeous so it is definitely worth a peek. As with any 35mm to IMAX blowup, you are actually losing picture quality for more than 90% of the film, but at least it will sound amazing in that big ass theater! Also, of the two IMAX specific scenes in the film, neither of them are actually cut 100% IMAX. Believe it or not, while you’re watching these expansive scenes unfold, suddenly there will be 35mm film inter-cut at a different aspect ratio. This is most offensive when the shot that is cut in is fully animation and lasts all of 4 seconds at most. What the hell?! At $200+ million you couldn’t afford to keep the film in one aspect ratio at a time!? Which brings us to the final question…

Is Michael Bay the worst filmmaker/person ever?

Nah, we’ll keep him. His main issue is that he has no regard for cinema. Mr. Bay really just goes ahead and does pretty much whatever he wants. If he sat down and asked himself some very simple questions about whatever film he is making, I imagine his answers would look like this:

Is it a good film? Who cares, it’s entertaining. Am I maybe being a little racist? Nah, I’m not a racist, I have black friends. What will people say about my film in 10 years? It made a lot of money. Does my film have a message? Why would it need one?

You see, I honestly believe that he learned all he needed to a long time ago with The Rock, his best film to date. After that he has been convinced that he can show up and make a great film. I think if he retracted into a smaller action film, maybe a Bad Boys 3, he would find a way to make some sense of it. With all of this noise and hubbub surrounding the Transformers franchise, you get what you pay for: a lot of noise and hubbub.

Hip cultural aggreagate site Flavorpill is running a short film contest. So I said, hey, sometimes I’m a filmmaker too. So check out what I entered.

{% vimeo 5365440 %}

Hold onto your hats folks, it’s time for the first ever candler giveaway. Readers, you have been very good to me this month, so it’s time to give something back. After last month’s Starting Out In Film post gained some traction thanks to some linkage from the excellent blog [Self Reliant Film](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/17/full-deadcenter- coverage/), you came back for more in June. Many of you were intrigued by my [Google Wave for Filmmakers](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/05/google- wave-for-filmmakers-a-concept/) post, but there is no question that above all else you showed up for my coverage of the deadCENTER Film Festival. In fact, Oklahoma can now lay claim to the candler blog’s second highest readership in the U.S. Thanks!

Now to the contest. While I was in Oklahoma City, I popped into the Full Circle Book Store, an incredible local find, for a signing of a new collection of essays, [Sooner Cinema: Oklahoma Goes to the Movies](http://www.fortysixthstarpress.com/?page_id=265&category=1&product _id=5). I’ve only just started to read it and it is fascinating. The authors of this book take an interesting look at the cinematic history of the Sooner State. Trust me, this is the only book of its kind. If you are fascinated by local cinema, American history, or just a new take on American filmmaking, this will be a nice book for your collection.

I have one copy to give away and it is autographed by five of the authors. The rules are simple, leave a comment on this post with a legitimate e-mail address. That’s it! I don’t care if you use an alias and I will not be making a mailing list out of this data, I simply need your e-mail to contact you if you win. Please leave only one comment on any topic. Feel free to share your favorite film or director, suggestion for the candler, whatever you want to write. Keep it clean, dirty comments won’t get posted and are ineligible. You may enter up until 12:00am Thursday July 9th, as in midnight on Wednesday July 8th, two weeks from today. Best of luck to all!

As some of you may recall, the candler blog had a lot of fun when #filmfoodeating became a top trend on twitter about a month ago. Well, there’s another big one going on today called #filmdrinkshots. More to come on my contributions later, but for a good time check out the live search for it on twitter.

After 2004’s Melinda and Melinda, there were rumblings among the faithfuls that follow Woody Allen’s every move that the master had lost touch with the New York, that the film felt more like real estate porn, they decried, than an actual New York story. We want the old Woody back, they decried, we want to be enchanted by the greatest city in the world yet again! Following a four film love affair with Europe, Mr. Allen returns home to the big apple, but not to quell the masses. With _Whatever Works _he comes at us swinging with a very clear message: that we should shut the hell up and let him be.

The film opens with Boris Yellnikoff, a surly retired physicist played byLarry David, sitting with a group of friends, prattling off some choice Woody Allen favorites: the meaninglessness of life, the inherent evil within people, the realization that everyone on earth is an idiot, and so on and so on. To wow the die-hards even more, Boris stands up and directly addresses the audience, launching into a monologue that feels mimeographed right out of Annie Hall. Stylistically I have no problems with the way this fourth wall breakage happens, it’s actually quite funny. The trouble is with our lead actor. When Woody himself bares his soul in his 1977 Oscar-winner, there is an emotional purity in his words; when Larry David does it today, he is trying to become something he is not, an actor.

One stormy night, Boris finds a tight little coed, played with outdated southern panache by Evan Rachel Wood, on his doorstep. Taking pity on her, he lets her sleep on the couch, for a night, a week, a month, etc. Her name is Melodie St. Ann Celestine, about as goyishe a name as Yellnikoff is shtetl- born, and that’s the point. We have a caricature of the New York communist self-hating Jew scientist and the wide-eyed dumb as dirt southern belle hard- body thrown into the soup together. Hilarity would have to follow, yes?

Not exactly. As I touched on earlier, most of the trouble is with Mr. David. He is a writer and producer whose comdic worth is on par with Woody’s. He has made a name mainly by playing himself, a creative choice borne out of the realization that he is not an actor. In his HBO series, Curb Your Enthusiasm, this is all part of the joke. Here, it feels wholly out of place.

The problems may start with our star, but they don’t end there. Cinematographer Harris Savides and editor Alisa Lepselter , of course under the tutelage of their director, have dealt this film a one two punch by showing us a great deal of the frame and holding each shot longer than necessary. This is extremely common in Woody Allen films, especially ones as theatrical as Whatever Works, but it puts an incredible onus on our actors. Ms. Wood seems to have spent so much time toning her accent and her abs that she forgot about destination. She is lost in that massive frame. Thank goodness Patricia Clarkson comes along to play her mother, Marietta. Unlike her young counterpart, Ms. Clarkson slips into the N’Orleans mentality and lights up the screen; she is larger than life in this role. Also of note is the always hilarious Ed Begley Jr. who builds one of the most interesting characters in the film with very little screen time.

Whatever Works feels dated, slow and hackneyed. If there is a lesson to be learned, and I fully believe this is the film’s intention, it is that the New York City of yore (the 1970s and 1980s) is gone and has been replaced with something glitzier. Gotham is no longer a place where huddled masses of artisans, architects and other right-brain types can commingle on a pittance a day. These days you need capital, both monetarily and fashionably, to stay afloat in this town.

Woody Allen is breaking our reverie, this so-called love-affair with Manhattan that audiences are obsessed with. When you ask the wrong questions, he is telling us, you will get a lame answer. Why don’t you make films like you used to, Woody? Because they don’t work anymore, idiots. It may seem like intellectual apologism to say that Woody has a message in this malformed film, but I think the writing is as clear as day. He is a cinematic master who continues to grow with every film he makes (despite popular belief, he has never had a slow period), so just leave him be to make the films he wants, wherever they may be.

Tony Scott films tend to be violent, profane, and intellectually apropos. The limey director’s latest, The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, hits all of those points on target, though unfortunately, just so. The actioner doesn’t thrill quite as well as his Deja Vu, nor does it smack of a weekend-long peyote trip like his brilliant (yeah, I said brilliant) Domino. Still, for a New York action film, Pelham delivers the goods for most of its run time. To see an NYC action film that really stinks up a portrayal of Manahttan gunplay, check out Richard Donner’s 16 Blocks.

The only relation this remake has to Joseph Sargent’s 1974 thriller of the same name is a title, so let’s not bark up that tree of comparitive cinema. Mr. Scott is a big boy, we can judge his film without the prism of history. The story follows Walter Garber, an MTA muckity muck sentenced to working a dispatch mic after a scandal involving Japanese kickbacks. Played by Denzel Washington, Mr. Garber happens to be on the recieving end of a phone call from a terrorist who goes by the name of Ryder, played by John Travolta. Having hijacked a single car of a 6 train and cut off transit along that track, Ryder demands $10 million and the ability to stay on the line with Garber. So there you have it, the makings of a tight little thriller. Except, not really.

The biggest challenge for this film is to keep a bloodthristy audience interested during what is essentaially an extended phone call between bad guy and good guy. Mr. Scott, as you might expect, thinks the best way to keep these moribund scenes afloat is to whip and wind the camera around Travolta and Washington while they chat via CB radio. This gets old quite fast. Alone in the train tracks, there isn’t too much room for shoot ’em up action, so Tony Scott dips into his bag and pulls out his biggest trick: intellectual stimulation.

I could go on for paragraphs and paragraphs about how incredibly relevant this movie is. Ultimately, this film is about the stock market, but it is also about terrorism and being American. The hilarious intersection of the two occurs when one character points out that Ryder doesn’t look like a terrorist. I was the only one in the theater to laugh at this. It is not lost on Mr. Scott that we have all but forgotten the Timothy McVeighs of the world and settled on the Bin Ladens, whose physical appearances makes it that much easier to malign them. This kind of high-minded U.S. cultural dissection is the stuff that Mr. Scott has been pumping out his entire career. Pick up a copy of Days of Thunder if you don’t believe me.

Overall, 2009’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is good enough. Denzel fills out the boring city employee nicely, though without sacrificing his brooding good looks. Mr. Travolta, on the other hand, is still trying to reprise his brilliace in John Woo’s Face/Off. Falling short by a mile, he comes off as a Hollywood star pretending to be a hardened criminal by cursing profusely and having neck tattoos. The performances are just one of the departments in which this movie fails to please on the surface, but if you take the time to pick the film apart, there is a treasure trove of delectable discussion to be had.

The comedy short has a long and illustrious history in cinema. In modern times, the art is still alive but exhibition spaces are limited. As a result, film festivals have become the number one destination for these little films. deadCENTER has its share of shorts programs, but I was only able to check out the comedy section because I needed a laugh. Did I get one? Let’s take a look.

Ten For Grandpa - dir. Doug Karr

This slick little short follows a man wondering who his departed grandfather really was. The camera flows between scenes, across time, and across rooms to create the illusion of fluidity. This is extremely well executed, but I do wonder how much of this film actually qualifies as comedy. If anything is a joke, it seems to be the efforts the filmmakers went to to pull off these shots. Every time we enter a new space we are supposed to be wowed into a laugh; the form is so over the top for such a little film. The choice of the 2.35:1 aspect ratio seems like an arbitrary choice; the piece may be funnier with more vertical space. Of course, we would lose that slickness. T__en for Grandpa is tight, well executed, well_ acted, and fully realized. _Overall, it is a very strong piece and I want to see more from all involved.

The Last Page - dir. Kevin Acevedo

The best part of this short is the Dodge College opening logo. Its self-assuredness provided me the biggest laugh all day, but sadly, all logos must end. The film goes on to depict the terribly tired premise of a writer envisioning the final page of his novel. The writer goes for a walk ends in him getting into all kinds of “wacky trouble”. I realize this is a student film, but still, it is fraught with problems. Again we have an unjustified 2.35:1 aspect ratio. The biggest issue of all is the runtime. At 22 minutes, the piece is more than twice as long as there is story. Most offensively, the laughs are unexplained. Why, Mr. Acevedo, is it funny when a rotund woman grabs the writer’s crotch? If you are out there, defend your joke. And to the professors at Dodge College at Chapman University, please guide your students to kill their favorite babies and cut their pieces down to size.

The SPAM Job - dir. Padraic Culham

Stone faced after the last bit of drek, I was determined not to laugh once through this cheap-looking documentary, but it wore me down over time. I couldn’t help but chuckle by the end. Through interviews and photos, the story of one prankster’s stolen spam becomes clearer and clearer. It sounds dumb and that is the point. The joke here seems to be on us for making it through the whole damn story. This “cheap” feeling I mentioned only adds to the charm of the piece, you simply don’t expect how far they are willing to take this joke about a can of spam ending up in different locales across the globe. The piece is a little fat, could be cut down to size. I could see this as a sketch on a late-night comedy show, that is if Mr. Culham and friends have any other notes up their sleeves.

Cherchez la femme - dir. Idit Dvir

Comedy has a darker side that is briefly explored in this short. A man dressed like a taco wants to kill himself over a woman until he finds a friend in another suicidal man with far different love troubles. Slowly we learn that the man’s wife cheats on him while he is home, so the taco concocts a plot to kill her off. The film takes too long to get to very little payoff, though one of the purest laughs during the shorts program came out of the film. Once the murder is imminent, the murderer must continue having sex with his victim through tears. As an audience, we are left with no emotional output except laughter because our other options simply won’t do given the rest of the film. This one laugh is impressive, but it doesn’t make up for the slow pace of the rest of the film, not to mention the pre-required misogyny one needs to find humor throughout. Ms. Dvir assumes a lot about her audience’s beliefs: that walking tacos are funny, that promiscuous women are sluts, and that murder is a natural progression from anger. Focusing in on these muddled corners will help to make better work in the future.

Tom’s Day Off - dir. Justin Stanley

Sigh. I believe in film criticism as a tool to help filmmakers better their work over time, but when I am given nothing to work with I feel there is nothing I can offer. This is how I feel about Tom’s Day Off. It’s such a mess that I would rather the filmmaker, Justin Stanley, go make something else and bring it back so I can actually give some critique. Apparently, after being dumped a lanky bank employee chooses to rob his place of business. Then he ends up in the back seat of a student driver’s vehicle with no plan. There are no laughs, no plot, no aesthetic quality to speak of. Mr. Stanley probably thinks he’s a genius with his use of an inner monologue interspersed with diegetic dialogue. The bigger question is what place this film has in any film festival. The 10 minutes of space this took up could have been used so much better.

Miracle Investigators - dir. Jeremy Dehn

The program finished off with this crowd pleaser. Overall, this is a lame mashup of kung fu action and outdated church humor. Still, the laughs are there, and that is respectable for a student film thrown into this mix. The film follows two priests charged with meting out justice against perpetrators of false miracles. Unfortunately, this goofy premise never really comes to fruition. The film bumbles along from joke to joke with a plot that hardly makes any sense. It seems that it didn’t matter since the laughs were there. The makers of this film would do better to cut it down to about a 5 minute sketch and really focus in on each joke. Nonetheless, a valiant effort.

[](http://www.candlerblog.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/Andrew- Windy-Boy.jpg)If you were paying close attention even in the most progressive of U.S. public schools, odds are you were never made aware of the full extent to which Native Americans have been maligned by their Euro-Christian counterparts. Sure, you know it’s a bad history, a dark history, but that was centuries ago, right? A sobering wake-up call could be found in Steven R. Heape and Chip Richie’s Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding Schools.

The film is a straightforward educational documentary complete with interviews, photos, re-enactments and the readings of historical texts. It tells the tale of government and church financed boarding schools whose goal was to reform Native Americans, to make them more like their white neighbors. The facts are harrowing. In short, children were taken from their homes into the schools where their hair was cut, they were forced to speak english, and slowly the destruction of a culture set in for generations to come. If this is a topic that interests you you should absolutely check out the film. There isn’t the space here to get too deep into the facts.

Aesthetically, the film is nothing special, which is fine because the goal is to directly educate. The topic is so sweeping, so important, that it may be too difficult for the filmmakers to build an emotional narrative. I won’t excuse this as I believe this story would find a wider viewership if such a task were undertaken. The interview with Andrew Windy Boy, pictured above, is the strongest part of the piece. He spends much of his time on camera in tears, remembering the darkest pockets of his childhood. Mr. Windy Boy alone could fill a feature length documentary, but here he is only one piece of the puzzle. ( I do not want to minimize the stories of the other interviewees by any means, I am using Andrew as one example.)

Our Spirits Don’t Speak English is an important film that reveals a story that needs to be told before this generation of Native Americans can no longer tell it. However, it does not feel like the kind of documentary that runs in festivals. It reads like a book, not as much as a narrative docu. Perhaps I am too demanding, or perhaps the art of the educational film is lost on me. Regardless, I would recommend showing this film in schools across the country. We need to know the extent of our misdeeds as a nation, and Our Spirits Don’t Speak English exposes a great deal.

Now that the dust has settled, here’s the complete compendium of candler blog coverage from Oklahoma City’s deadCENTER Film Festival.

##Reviews

[Triangle of Death](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/12/deadcenter-review- triangle-of-death/)

Pearl

[Official Rejection](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/13/deadcenter-review- official-rejection/)

[Sweethearts of the Prison Rodeo](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/13 /deadcenter-review-sweethearts-of-the-prison-rodeo/)

[Weather Girl](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/13/deadcenter-review- weather-girl/)

[Our Spirits Don’t Speak English: Indian Boarding School](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/17/review-our-spirits-dont-speak- english-indian-boarding-school/)

[Comedy Shorts](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/17/deadcenter-review- comedy-shorts/)

##Liveblogs

June 11

June 12

[June 12, Evening](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/12/deadcenter-liveblog- june-12-evening/)

June 13

##Dispatches

[Day 1](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/11/deadcenter-dispatches-from-okc- day-1/)

[Day 2](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/12/deadcenter-dispatches-from-okc- day-2/)

[Day 3](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/13/deadcenter-dispatches-from-okc- day-3/)

[Day 4](http://www.candlerblog.com/2009/06/14/deadcenter-dispatches-from-okc- day-4/)

Day 5

##Photo Galleries

[nggallery id=1] [nggallery id=2] [nggallery id=3] [nggallery id=4] [nggallery id=5]