12/11/2022 0 Comments Shakespeare in love best picture![]() I imagine it won because Hollywood likes to congratulate itself for doing edgy stuff (like Chris Cooper swapping spit with Kevin Spacey) no matter how pointless it becomes. I don’t think the movie won because it was all that great. And then there are movies like American Beauty that don’t so much tackle them as exploit them for shock value. Scott Gwin: There are forms of edgy cinema that tackle troubling and disturbing topics. Substituting a plastic bag flitting in the wind for a swirling cup of milky coffee is, if you'll excuse my French, fucking pathetic. To this end, American Beauty rips off a sequence from Jean Luc Godard's 2 or 3 Things I Know About Her – not a bad source for cinematic theft except that the American proxy is so poor. Rather, American Beauty is an insipid spook story about a second adolescence, dressed up with ham-handed, unoriginal critiques: Suburban banality is bad for you? Really? The film is wholly heartless full of old stereotypes and outrageous misogyny, presented with the puffed up pretensions of an art student. Though bestowed with the coveted Best Picture statuette, Sam Mendes' 1999 debut is not the withering analysis of curdled society in suburban wasteland that the film was lauded as being. Mariana McConnell: If there is any Oscar winning film deserving of all retroactive scorn possible, it is American Beauty. Don’t believe me? Watch it today, and tell me if it doesn’t feel as ancient as the topic that it’s handling. ![]() If not for a brilliant Joaquin Phoenix, who was rightly nominated, but wrongly snubbed, this film would be as bad and as hokey as Oliver Stone’s (another hackney director) Alexander. That said, while Braveheart had its moments of brilliance as Mel Gibson waxed philosophical about freedom in an almost poetic manner, Ridley Scott’s tribute to togas and sandals winds up feeling like one long, stiff monologue with sporadic intervals of way too fast combat that gets lost in terrible cinematography. Gladiator is the kind of pump your fist and yell film that Braveheart popularized and made violence a household name in the Oscar’s yearly selection. And I think the fact that he lost best director to Steven Soderbergh that year, who was on fa fa fa fire for both Erin Brockovich and Traffic is a testament to how much this proves my theory that he sucks. ![]() Rich Knight: Ridley Scott is the most overrated director in Hollywood.
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