Dear Hollywood: You're Boring

Yeah, I knew Inception didn't have a snowball's chance in hell. I'd figured that out even before I'd heard that Nolan didn't get a Best Director nomination. The reason is simple.

Hollywood hates science-fiction.

No, really, it does.

Hey, pop quiz, what film won the 1977 award for Best Picture? Annie Hall. Ever heard of it? I haven't. Can you name one line from it? Anything about that movie that has permeated into popular culture? No?

Know what film from 1977 everyone's heard of? Star Wars. If you haven't heard of it, you are officially dead. No, really, report yourself to whoever keeps track of the Wonders of the World because, as someone who can read a blog while dead, you certainly qualify.

Now, I'm not in any way defending a film like Transformers. Hell no. Transformers is all Stuff Blowing Up. You can sell that to an overseas market without investing in a decent translation, because Stuff Blowing Up is a universal language.

I'm certainly not defending the Star Wars prequels either, because really, really dumb. Also unoriginal. Now you might be thinking that Star Wars itself was unoriginal, because it synthesizes a bunch of myth tropes together. But it's not. It was groundbreaking on practically every level.

1999. I don't care what part of the planet you're on, you're going to know that bullet time comes from The Matrix before you remember that that one chick naked in a bathtub full of flowers is from American Beauty.

Then there was the Avatar versus Hurt Locker thing. I don't like Avatar myself, but it's not the butt of nearly as many jokes as, say Transformers or The Phantom Menace. If ever there was a time for the Academy to overcome its sci-fi-phobia, that was it. And of course it didn't.

Now, in 10 years, what do you think there's going to be more of: spinning hallway fights, or characters with speech impediments? My money's on the former.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that Hollywood doesn't reward creativity. All it really wants is formulaic drivel that can appeal to a foreign market. Or baring that, historical drama.

And that is sad.

Because there were two films this year that were so amazingly on top of their game. One showed us just how you could mix what essentially amounted to a mystery story into a not-quite-cyberpunk heist film; the other made us bawl our eyes out. Toy Story 3 picked up an award that was practically tailor-made for it, while Inception got several of the awards it so richly deserved (as well as Sound Mixing, whatever that means), while missing out on a few. And not nominating Nolan for Best Director was simply criminal. No, really: not giving him the Best Director nomination automatically means that he's not going to win Best Picture, because the two are almost always picked up by the same film. And then it went on to win Best Cinametography, when it wasn't even nominated for Best Director. Somebody was tripping balls when they came up with these nominations.

And I'd be making this argument even if Inception had been up against, say, The Godfather. Not because I think that Inception's a better film than The Godfather; it's practically an apples and oranges situation (yes, that is me dodging the question*). It's not necessarily that I think The King's Speech is bad; I think it's a glorified documentary, and if you want to honor a glorified documentary over something shockingly creative, go right ahead and do that. Just don't expect any sympathy from me.

(*Okay, here's a slightly more thought-out dodge. My biggest complaint about The Godfather is how very slow it is. It's also my biggest complaint about The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and indeed about any film I like before, well, Star Wars. And even Star Wars deliberately spends 20 minutes following two comic relief characters around. You cannot get away with that sort of thing today. Inception has a tighter story; scenes are generally shorter and the plot unfolds more concisely (sort of). The two films are products of two different times and two different genres. It'd be like comparing Pulp Fiction to Star Wars. You could do it, and you could even make the argument that one was better than the other, but it wouldn't be very satisfying.)

Here's a humble suggestion. Next time around, pare away all the adaptations, regardless of whether they're adapting a novel, short story, comic book, candy wrapper, other film, historical event, what have you. Give them a separate category. You already do that for screenplays, sort of. Do it across the board. Costume design? If you're setting it in the past, your job's easy. Look at some newspaper clippings. If newspapers didn't exist yet, just look at the most famous film already set in that time. Yeah, the costuming will be dead wrong, but it's what everyone expects. If you're setting it in the future, you've actually got a challenge; you've got to find something that's not going to look stupid dated even 5 years down the line.

Would that suddenly bias the non-adaption segment towards science fiction? Absolutely. And about time, too, given that it's pretty much the last creative genre out there.

I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you want to make awesome and even trend-setting science-fiction, Hollywood could care less. But they've already turned their back on original, intelligent storytelling; don't hesitate to turn your back on them.