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8) The Theory of Everything

If someone tried to invent a film that perfectly encapsulates the idea of “Oscar bait,” they’d be hard pressed to come up with something that fits the bill better than James Marsh’s The Theory of Everything. Though it features two undeniably great performances from Eddie Redmayne and Felicity Jones, the amount of time the film covers means that it quickly fizzles out after the first half an hour, which deals directly with Stephen Hawking’s initial work and his diagnosis with ALS and moves into the long slow process of depicting the Hawkings’ marriage. After that initial burst of energy, the film becomes little more than a series of scenes that happen to follow each other, with no cumulative effect worthy of the fine work being done by the people at its center.

7) The Imitation Game

There’s not much separating The Imitation Game from The Theory of Everything, either in terms of subject matter or quality. Both are pretty mediocre middlebrow fare, and neither are particularly challenging or all that dramatic. (If it wasn’t enough that both are biopics of influential British geniuses, Benedict Cumberbatch even played Hawking in a BBC TV movie in 2004, so he’s only an Isaac Newton cameo away from completing the set.) What gives The Imitation Game a slight edge is its clearer focus, in that it focuses on telling three stories from Alan Turing’s life instead of trying to encompass everything that happened to him. It also has a wry sense of humor, which at least makes it a more enjoyable watch than its fatally drab compatriot.

6) American Sniper

Part of the reason why American Sniper has been such a lightning rod for political discussions/hectoring, at least from my perspective, is that there is a conflict between the film’s themes and its style. Thematically, the film is the latest in a lineage of Clint Eastwood films about the impact of violence on the men who perpetrate it, and the parts with Chris Kyle at home dealing with PTSD hint at the idea that Eastwood is saying that the Iraq War had a lot of unintended consequences (something that you could extend to Kyle’s death, since it happened at the hands of another veteran). Under its surface, the film seems very uncertain about what the war means for Kyle personally or for America as a country. On its surface, though, the film is so slick and well-made that it can’t help but make the violence itself look cool, and in mimicking Kyle’s perspective as a sniper it dehumanizes the people in his sights to a degree which I found deeply unsettling. I enjoyed the film a fair bit, and I’m happy that Eastwood has turned around his recent run of critical and commercial duds, but the uneasiness I’ve felt about American Sniper since watching it prevents me from putting it up higher.

5) Birdman

In some ways, Birdman strikes me as this year’s Gravity. Not merely because they were both shot by Emmanuel Lubezki or that both utilize very long takes to force an intimacy with the actors, but because they’re both technically impressive films built around a compelling lead that are kind of let down by very obvious scripts. The characters in Birdman spend pretty much the entire film saying how they feel, yet none of them really feel like people that we could ever possible know, and the ambiguity about Keaton’s abilities/hallucinations kind of gets dull after a while. But everything apart from the script does make up for its deficits, as does the fact that Michael Keaton is surrounded by a great ensemble cast, many of whom play off their previous screen personas in much the same way that Keaton does. I’d even go so far as to say that Edward Norton does a better job than Keaton, especially since he’s so willing to make fun of his image as The Most Intense Actor Alive™. Of the eight nominees, I think that Birdman is the one that I had the most fun watching, but it’s also one that I’ve not really thought about much since, which is yet another way that it echoes Gravity.

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