What is the theme of this year's Oscar nominees?

In the New York Times article announcing 2014’s lineup of Academy Award nominees, Brooks Barnes and Michael Cieply described the current award’s season as “puzzling,” stating that while 2012 was largely defined by political films, the top Oscar nominees of 2013 lacked a thematic pattern.

It is true that the years most lauded films were all over the map (and, in the case of ten-times-nominated Gravity, way off of it) in terms of setting, time period, mood and plot. But in the more general, between-the-lines sense, a number of the top contenders did have something in common. That thing is evoked in the title of one of the Academy’s noted “snubs”: All is Lost.

All is Lost pits the human will to survive against the apparent certainty of failure. The interplay of those two forces – external oblivion , internal perseverance - worked its way into most of this year’s best films. Life is full of obstacles, and every awards season is full of movies about people overcoming adversity. But this year didn’t just give us your garden-variety setbacks. This year gave us insane hope in the face of total despair. And more often than not, hope won. Here are some more examples:

An astronaut, cut loose from her spacecraft, hurtles through the bottomless void.
A captain is taken prisoner after his ship is boarded by armed Somali pirates.
A rodeo hero is diagnosed with a deadly new virus that has no known cure.  
A young Catholic mother has her young son taken away from her and sent to a foreign country. 
A musician is abducted and sold as a slave to sadistic plantation owners. 
Two con artists are busted by the FBI and forced to work under the thumb of the law.
An elderly alcoholic travels across an American wasteland in pursuit of an empty promise.

All of the characters described above pass through the “abandon all hope” gateway, convinced that they can maneuver their way out of hell. All of their stories are nominated for Best Picture.

2012, with frontrunners like Argo, Zero Dark Thirty, and Lincoln, was a big year for political movies. It was also a big year for politics, with Obama’s reelection roughly coinciding with the time most studios release their Oscar hopefuls. Pretty straightforward.

So, what happened this year that made Americans want to watch movies about overcoming hopelessness? Headline-wise, 2013 was an ego bruiser for America. We found that our own security agency was spying on us. We waffled about our involvement with crises in Syria and Egypt. We saw horrendous violence in Iraq following a deadly and expensive occupation that was supposed to promote stability. We slipped further in global education rankings. The implementation of our president’s signature health care law was a disaster. And let’s not forget the week in October when we didn’t have a functioning government.

When America is threatened by an outside foe, we unite and shine. We imagine ourselves standing tall, chins in the air and fists on our hips. This year we were our own worst enemy, which left us shuffling our feet, heads down, avoiding eye contact. This year was embarrassing.

America was founded on the belief that anyone can succeed if they try hard enough. So it is fitting that the nation’s onscreen avatar is an everyman with secret powers. An Average Joe who becomes extraordinary when faced with extraordinary circumstances. Be it a comic book vigilante, a small-town hero, or just a dude who’s been pushed too far, this guy’s job is to remind us that being down-and-out is nothing but a prelude to greatness. The more powerless he becomes, the more inspiring and morale-boosting it is to see him gain that power back. In this humbling year, we needed Joe to work overtime.

 

What makes an American movie?

American Hustle is an impish tribute to all things false. A forged Renoir. An affected British accent. A Mexican FBI agent masquerading as an Arab Sheik. And above all: hair. Director David O. Russell has lots of fun exposing the back end of his main characters’ deceptive hair maintenance procedures. It’s a fitting motif, considering that the movie is all about faking one’s identity for personal gain. Beginning with the cheeky disclaimer “Some of this actually happened” it never bothers to draw a clear line between what is and is not real. Fact and fiction in Hustle are like two identical kittens, playfully tussling with one another to the point where it’s near-impossible for us to tell them apart.

The word “Hustle” fits nicely into this theme. But what about the other word in the title?  In his review of American Hustle, the Guardian’s Peter Bradshaw wrote “The adjective ‘American’ appended to a word in a movie title always implies something with instant design-classic status, gorgeously laced with irony and modernity.” Such movies tend to carry a wink of self-awareness, but what does being “American” really mean to them?

Let’s consider the other movies to receive this designation: American Beauty, American Psycho, American History X, American Gangster, American Gigolo, American Graffiti, American Pie. Sifting through these titles we find some recurring themes: crime, violence, lust, deceit, redemption, etc. But if there is one thing that unites them (and other similarly qualified films) it is that all are presided over by some permutation of the American Dream.

Maybe the characters are underdogs, crushed beneath it. Maybe they are starry-eyed social climbers, striving to achieve it. Maybe they are outlaws who have changed the rules to make it work for them. Maybe they are winners humbled by the discovery that it wasn’t really what they wanted. The spectre of the American Dream lingers regardless.  

Some “American” movies build a 3D model of the Dream in order to dismantle them. “American Beauty” casts an unflattering light on the world of affluent white suburbanites. With their stately colonial home, their SUVs, and their actual white picket fence, the Burnham family exemplifies the lifestyle for which all the huddled masses presumably yearn. Of course, these trappings of success conceal the mess of neurorses and frustrations within. And much of the movie is dedicated to exposing the unseemly reality of the Burnham’s, and by extension the American Dream they represent. The simmering dsyfunction of the Burnham family erupts as their circumstances unravel. But the movie doesn’t just put its characters through the ringer, it eventually spits them out as better people. The violent death of Lester Burnham becomes a quiet moment of reflection because before he died, he abandoned his consumer-driven misery and found his joy.

If the Burnham family represent superficial success as a family, then Patrick Bateman represents superficial success as an individual. His immaculate appearance (embodied by a different species of Christian Bale than we see in Hustle), his Manhatten apartment, his enviable possessions, represent the aspirations of all who seek to get rich in America. His obsession with status symbols is directly linked to his activities as a sadistic killer, which is what makes Bateman an American pyscho and not any other kind of psycho. The spirit of American Pyscho is dark as pitch, but the story is not amoral. It is a statement against a misinterpretation of American values, and a parable (albeit a cartoonishly extreme one) about the dangers of unchecked greed. The self-destruction of Patrick Bateman communicates the same message as the reinvention of Lester Burnham. We are reminded, in both cases, that self-aggrandizement through material goods will get you nowhere in the end. The movies are “laced with modernity” but their morals are downright Old Testament. And not for nothing. Despite evidence to the contrary, it is a comfort to be assured that America has not entirely abandoned its core values in pursuit of its golden calf.

Sentimentality often joins morality in eclipsing the cynicism of “American” movies. American Graffiti is a 1970s movie about the 1950s. It depicts a hormonally-charged group of teenagers who are both clinging to and running away from their innocence. The implication seems to be that the America of the 1950s was struggling with similar adolescent paradox. Self-aware and satirical at times, it is still a deeply nostalgic piece. The 1990s exchanged nostalgia for raunch in their own “American” franchise about the teenage loss of innocence, beginning with “American Pie.” American Pie eschewed the rosy glow of Graffiti in favor of masturbation jokes. But beneath the all the juvenile hijinks, it is still a story about the sweet, awkward vulnerability of youth. The boys in American Pie are obsessed with losing their virginity, but they’re also figuring out how to grow up into decent men. The longing for classic American goodness remains intact.

Again and again, we see a triple-layered treatment of the American Dream: what is fantasy, what is fact, and what is real. We first encounter the object of desire which – while alluring – is a little too shiny to be believed. The exterior dissolves under scrutiny and we are left with the unassuming truth. But then there’s something else: something that is maybe not as glamorous as the hollow promises of the outermost layer, but ultimately better. Like the happiness that Dorothy feels when she wakes from the dream of oz to find herself back in Kansas. America is nothing like what we dreamt it would be, but it is home. And there’s no place like home. As moviegoers, we like a glitzy garnish. But the story isn’t over until the characters, with sustaining satisfaction, discover what truly matters.

Beneath all the post-modern mischeif, there is a longing for something pure. Once movies push through the gilded exterior, they keep pushing in search of a true national character that is authentic, vibrant, and entirely unironic. Modern entertainment likes to parody and pigeonhole, and the rest of us like to be in on the joke. But at the end of the day we all want to feel the fabric of James Dean’s red jacket against our skin. We are all in the audience together, wanting something real.

American Hustle follows this format. For all the fun it has building its false exterior, it also retains its good and honest heart. The principal characters feel remorse for the bad things they’ve done, and their love of the con is ultimately overtaken by a desire to redeem themselves and settle down. It is well titled because it hits all three marks of a great “American” movie: that which is fake, that which is fact, and that which is really real. And what do you know, it has a happy ending.