Who Will Win?

The Oscar race is ON and while thinking about movies is not perhaps as important as thinking about the economy, world peace, or global warming, thinking about who will win those gold statues does provide a nice respite from all these more serious problems.

Last Wednesday, I took a group of students to see "Milk," Gus Van Sant's movie about the gay rights activist Harvey Milk, the first openly gay elected official in the United States. He was elected to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco, in 1977. Shortly after being elected, Milk mounted a grassroots campaign against Proposition Six, which would have made it illegal for any gay or lesbian teacher to teach in California public schools. Milk, along with Mayor George Moscone, was shot and killed by Dan White, another city supervisor in 1978.

Most of us who went to the movie agreed that Sean Penn was brilliant as Harvey Milk: there was not a trace of the dour, tense, frequently angry actor in this portrayal. Milk is mostly happy, mostly optimistic, flirtatious, sexual, effusive - and a remarkably effective grassroots politician.

The movie may have glorified the impact of Milk's life - the last shot, of a long, candle-light procession through the streets of San Francisco makes it seem as if Milk were a saint - but the movie packs a wallop nevertheless, not in the least because it came out just as California was passing Prop 8, forbidding gay marriage. One student said that the movie made her wonder just how far we've come - given that in 1978 Milke and his supporters defeated Prop 6, but thirty years later the same cannot be said for Prop 8.

This afternoon, I went with another group of students to a movie about a very different kind of life: the life of Benjamin Button, in David Fincher's "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." This very long movie (almost three hours running time) charts the course of Benjamin, who is born as an old man and gets progressively younger through the course of his life.

Benjamin, played by Brad Pitt, starts out as a wizened, abandoned baby, who eventually turns into...well, Brad Pitt, in all his golden movie-star glory. (We wondered, in fact, if Benjamin's transformation would pack such a wallop if played by another actor - someone slightly more "ordinary.")

The special effects in the movie are quite amazing - in Benjamin's early days, he's a little old man on crutches, but with the face of a very old Brad Pitt; more remarkably, he becomes the young Brad Pitt of 12 years ago, in his first role in "Thelma and Louise," (one of the all-time great movies - if you haven't seen it, rent it now!) - we all know how "old" gets achieved in Hollywood, but the change to "young" (without Botox, etc, we assume) is stunning. A few people I know who saw the movie thought the special effects were distracting, but we didn't. This was the second time I'd seen the movie and I was surprised to find myself even more engrossed the second time around: I was immersed in the New Orleans world created by the movie and in the unfolding of Benjamin's life.

We talked about "BB" as perhaps being the anti-"Slumdog Millionaire," in that Benjamin isn't on a particular quest (although his love for the beautiful Daisy does fuel some of his adventures) and he isn't motivated by ambition or material gain. He simply lives his life according to what comes along - and while some may say that he's passive, it might also be that in Benjamin's attitude, Fincher implies a critique of the hustle-bustle-get-rich-quick sensibility that has governed so much of US culture in the last decade.

Several of the students who came with me to "BB" had seen "Slumdog" last week, and they decided that "BB" deserves to win the Best Picture Oscar - and maybe it will. In some ways, the story of Fincher's movie is more original than the "Slumdog" story, but it's possible that the lesiurely pace and lack of conflict in Fincher's movie will play against it. Benjamin, unlike Jamal in "Slumdog," never encounters any truly bad people - his conflict is primarily with his own body, which is seldom at the right physical age for what's happening to him.

After the movie, I asked the group if they could see anything that unifies the best picture nominees - The Reader, Slumdog Millionaire, Milk, Benjamin Button, and Frost/Nixon - and we couldn't come up with anything. But as I think about it, I wonder if there isn't some subtle link: all these movies are about reaching across boundaries, about the concept of individual human dignity, about accepting (or denying) differences: The Reader pivots on whether we can find ourselves in sympathy with someone who worked with the SS in Nazi Germany; in Slumdog, Jamal must triumph against an entire culture that sees "slumdogs" as less than human; in Milk, Harvey Milk teaches an entire city that gays and lesbians have human rights; in Benjamin Button, age (and race) cease to be reasons for alienation and distrust; in Frost/ Nixon...well, maybe the similarity ends there: or at least, that's the movie I haven't seen yet: are we asked to find sympathy with Nixon? Or only with the country whose principles he betrayed?

I'm not sure. But I think "Benjamin Button" has my vote for Best Picture. What about you?