Hidden Figures

Okay, this one's a little better. No, not the movie - that too - but my Letterboxd review!

Safe and soft even for an Oscar-friendly biopic, but that's okay - a feel-good story about black women in the 1960s doesn't need to be out there taking risks and pushing envelopes. At worst it tries to cover too many bases; this is about the Civil Rights Movement, but also about women in the workplace, about teamwork making the dream work, but also about individual success stories. It's a workplace drama, a family drama, and a space race thriller all at once. It features math and explosions. Essentially it's three separate movies crammed into one movie's running time, but then, that's exactly the type of creative engineering solution these women would have come up with to make it happen at all.

See? Maybe? No?

Anyway, I always find myself in a tight spot between "when the Oscar nominees are announced" and "when the Oscars are awarded" because all of a sudden I'm no longer watching and rating and reviewing movies; I'm watching and rating and reviewing them with the tacit knowledge that these have been declared the best movies of the year. Like for instance, I liked La La Land just fine - call it an eight out of ten - but now that it's got fourteen nominations and is the favorite to win Best Picture of 2016 in a month, I'm all angry and spiteful and annoyed about its very existence. "This!?" I'm asking. "This!?"

But then something like Hidden Figures gets nominated, this family-friendly by-the-numbers PG-rated thing, and it's clear it has absolutely no shot at winning Best Picture, and it's flawed in several ways and safe in several others, and I'm just sitting here like, "Oh hey, awesome! Cool! Good for Hidden Figures!" Even though I very much thought La La Land was a better movie, I'll be cheering for Hidden Figures to beat it an an upset, against absolutely all the odds.

But then I look down the nomination list a bit and see Octavia Spencer nominated for best supporting actress, and I'm just flummoxed. Her? For this? For that very very ordinary performance I just saw? I know the award shows have their own intricate politics and all, but I just can't fathom any other actress not giving the exact performance Octavia Spencer gave here. Gah!

So maybe I'm starting to understand why so many people scoff at the idea of art as competition.