This has become an annual tradition the day before the Oscars. In order move away all the subjectivity and negativity that happens when figuring out what should win and what’s going to win, I get away from all of that stuff and celebrate the films that are nominated for Best Picture.
We take this day to look at them as masterworks of cinema and not as films competing for a trophy. All of that other stuff — the analysis, the opinions — that’s all done with. Today, we take a minute, we stop, and we appreciate the films themselves. I count down my five favorite moments (or elements) of each of them.
When you take away all the awards, all the competition, and all the arbitrary decisions about what film is better than the others, what we’re left with is great cinema. That’s what we’re celebrating.
Our next nominee is The Martian:
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5. Project Elrond
This scene was hilarious to me. The fact that Sean Bean was in those movies notwithstanding. It’s the fact that, in most movies, there’s one person who makes the Lord of the Rings reference and everyone else makes fun of them. In this movie, Kristen Wiig asks what Project Elrond means, and everyone else in the scene knows exactly what it means and are perfectly cool with it. “Yeah, it’s from Lord of the Rings.” “Council of Elrond.” “Secret meeting.” “What, you don’t know that?” And then you get Jeff Daniels dropping the ultra nerdy Glorfindel reference on top of it, and the one non-“nerd” is completely clueless and has no support.
This is a movie comprised of the nerds. They know this shit. And they know science. They’re the ones that are gonna save the day. It’s such a great twist on the usual exchange we see during these moments.
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4. The humor
I like the levity with which they treat everything. Because the situation is so extreme it has to be dealt with that way. You can’t have a guy stranded on Mars being dour the whole time. You lose an audience. It shows that scientists can be funny and goes with the John McClane tradition of — sometimes the situation is so crazy you have no other choice than to be funny. “Don’t dig up the big block of Plutonium, Mark.” It uses humor to hide some of the exposition, as well, which is good, since this movie has a lot of it.
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3. “I got him.”
There’s nothing that feels better than when a film builds up to one moment that everyone can understand and root for. A man in space and we want him to come home. And we watch everyone else in the movie put in the work and do everything they can to make that happen. There’s no one who isn’t invested in this outcome, as a moviegoer and as a human. So that moment when they finally succeed, and everything that was done has paid off, there’s this giant wave of relief and happiness that hits you as a viewer, and it’s hard to not tear up a little bit. I’m so happy when movies give you that moment where we all can feel that emotion. It doesn’t happen often. Sports movies are the others that come the closest. They put you in that place where we all universally can just feel excitement.
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2. Problem Solving
In a movie like this, the hero is going to have to solve problems to stay alive. And here, we watch him deal with all the problems, explain what the problem is and how he’s going to solve it, and then we watch him as he puts his plan into action. It’s riveting stuff. We see him figure out how to grow food, how to communicate with Earth, how to get himself to where he needs to go. And it makes you that much more invested in the outcome and that much more engaged with the film. Because you feel like you’re there, helping solve the problem. Even if you can’t even understand what hexadecimals are, you’re like, “Oh yeah, that’s gonna do it!”
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1. SCIENCE
This movie made me feel that joy of science and exploration that I had when I was a kid. It made me want to learn science. I know I don’t have a brain for science and wouldn’t be able to handle the technical stuff, but the idea is, it made me want to get back into learning all that stuff I was reading up on when I was a kid. And that means there are going to be kids who see this film and go, ”I want to do that. I can do that.” And that’s worth more than anything else this movie has to offer. We need more scientists and smart people in this world. Any movie that can make kids want to learn has done its job tenfold.
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