Cormac McCarthy, The Pulitzer Prize For Fiction

Speaking of books, it is worth noting that the Pulitzer committee last week announced it awards. For fiction, the best book of the year was Cormac McCarthy's, "The Road". For what it is worth, I agree. It is the finest novel I read last year.

The Times's summary of the novel says it well: "The famously reclusive Mr. McCarthy, 73, won for his devastating chronicle of a father and son walking alone across a post-apocalyptic America, cold, dark and strewn with corpses and ash. In her review in The New York Times,, Janet Maslin wrote, “ ‘The Road’ would be pure misery if not for its stunning, savage beauty.” It is Mr. McCarthy’s 10th novel." It is a dark, but very moving meditation on a possible future we should do everything in our power to avoid and the universal bonds of fathers and sons.

McCarthy's prior novel, "No Country For Old Men", has been made into a film by Joel and Ethan Coen. The story, reminiscent of their first movie, "Blood Simple", is about a chase across the southwest by a older sheriff, a drug mob enforcer, and a psychopathic bounty hunter, looking for a poor shnook who came upon a pile of money and drugs in the desert. The movie is set to open late this year and is one I am very much looking forward to.

(Photo by Derek Shapton)

Tom Cruise Leads United Artists, But Where?

After Sumner Redstone, owner of Paramount, said he fired Tom Cruise last year and Cruise's people claimed the parting was mutual, some too soon predicted the beginning of the end for Cruise's career. As the very wealthy and famous are know to do however, Cruise has ended on his feet and now holds control, along with his business partner, Paula Wagner, of the historic studio called United Artists.

United Artists was famously founded by D.W. Griffith, Charlie Chaplin, Mary Pickford and Douglas Fairbanks in 1920. A more famous set of stockholders has never existed, before or since.

The future test for Cruise will be the skill with which he exercises his new found power. Will United Artists produce films to be proud of, or will Cruise's devotion to Scientology lead him to generate a set of horrid efforts to reproduce the vast fiction and non-fiction drivel of Scientology's founding Commodore, the dreaded L. Ron Hubbard (photo)? As anyone who has paid to see John Travolta's version of Hubbard's sci-fi nonsense, "Battlefield Earth" can testify, the results can be awful.

Oscar Picks

For the record, at 7:07 PM EST, here are my personal choices for the top five categories and my predictions of the likely winners.

Supporting Actor - I would like to see Jackie Earl Haley win. His comeback story is great and the role, playing a child sexual predator, required some bravery. The likely winner, Eddie Murphy. In truth, I have not seen Dreamgirls, but I can't imagine that anything Eddie could do would surpass his competition.

Supporting Actress - It seems to be unavoidable that Jennifer Hudson will take home the trophy, but for me, Rinko Kikuchi in Babel was just brilliant and totally believable.

Leading Actor - I actually think that Leonardo DiCaprio should have been nominated for The Departed, not Blood Diamond, but he was great in both. The Academy will probably give it to Forest Whitaker. He seems to be on a run.

Leading Actress - My choice and my predicted winner is Helen Mirren. She made this mysterious, secret person come truly alive.

Best Picture - The most enjoyable and satisfying film of the year was The Departed. Unfortunately, it will suffer in the voting because so many Academy members see all the films on DVD at home. This was the only movie I've have seen in years with so much applause and cheering by an audience. It was totally involving for all, and this was is a largely white neighborhood where silence during movies is the norm.

One last prediction: An Inconvenient Truth will absolutely take home the Oscar for Documentary Feature. It is a unavoidable opportunity for the Hollywood community to symbolically vote one more time for Al Gore and to teach the unwashed millions another lesson about the truth of world and national affairs and global science. Then they can all pile into their 8 miles to the gallon limos to be driven to their private jets so they can go back to work at their movie locations or the equally important ski jaunt at Sun Valley.

How Do Past Oscar Winners Stand Up?

If you have ever been certain that the best film of a given year was not selected by the Oscar voters, here is your chance to see that judgment quantified. The folks at Rotten Tomatoes have applied their numerical rating scheme to the 79 films that have won the Best Picture Academy Award over the years. The resultant ranking can be accessed, sadly, only one film at a time.

Suffice it to say that the list includes such dreck as Cimarron and The Greatest Show On Earth at the bottom of the list. To save you some time and to make the point I want to convey, the top ten ranked Oscar winners are:
10. Casablanca
9. The Godfather, Part II
8. Lawrence of Arabia
7. The Best Years of Our Lives
6. Marty
5. Rebecca
4. Sunrise (1927 silent film directed by F.W Murnau)
3. All About Eve
2. On the Waterfront
1. The Godfather

All very fine films, with the possible exception of Sunrise, which I have never seen. What the list highlights is the frequency with which the Academy misses the better films released in a given year. Stories that tug at the heart or are uplifting seem to be favored. (The Godfather films being the exceptions that prove the rule.) Nowhere on the list are such gems as The Maltese Falcon, Ragging Bull, Citizen Kane, and dozens of other great films.

So it may very well be the case again this Sunday night. If uplifting is what is sought, then Miss Sunshine will prevail. If The Academy wants to make a political point of some kind in this very political year, then Babel will win. But what about our view of these films years hence?

If The Queen is selected, will future audiences see it as too bound up in issues of our time, with no broader human lessons to tell? If it is Little Miss Sunshine, will that film come to be seen as essentially a small, quirky, overrated movie, admired only for its very smallness in the face of the vast Hollywood studio machines? Would Letters From Iwo Jima come to be seen as a minor film that rose to prominence only when accompanied by its sister production, Flags of Our Fathers? The Departed, just another crime drama? Babel as episodic, with a long disconnected jaunt into the Mexican desert?

The point is that is possible to imagine such views of five films currently all considered important to the art form, and impossible to know for sure how our view of these films will evolve. My own pick for the most complete and satisfying film of the lot is The Departed, but I'm not going to lose any sleep over the outcome of Sunday's display of wretched excess. Neither should you.

2006 Movie Top Ten Lists 1.0

'Tis the season for the publication of 10 Best Lists for just about every form of commercial art. As a film junkie, I confess to a peculiar fascination with the End-of-movie-season rituals. As it does each year, the ritual begins with the announcement of the Golden Globe Awards nominations by the Hollywood Foreign Press Association.

The second rite in the annual sacramental honoring of the humble efforts of the movie industry begins to appear about this time each year. It is the naming of Top Ten lists, and occasionally Worst Ten lists. Nicole Belle at Crooks and Liars has a handy set of links to those released so far.

As for my opinion, because of the industry's annual insistence on holding back the best movies until December, I have not yet had the opportunity to see many of the likely candidates, such as Flags Of Our Fathers, Letters From Iwo Jima, Dreamgirls, etc. So for now I'll hold off and stick in my two cents worth in a few weeks when I've seen all the candidates.