Oscar Race: Argo, Best Picture of the Year

Bibi is a very discerning movie goer.  Don't even, not even as a joke, ask her about movies like The Hangover, American Pie, A Lot Like Love (Ashton Kutcher movie with a Butch Walker song in it),

It's all about Butch's voice 

the Twilight movies.  If you did ask her, you would deserve the look of pity and scorn you would earn for your tiny little effort.  (Butch has a gesture for that, below.)

And if you pushed Bibi on it, you would deserve the resultant mocking, belittling, totally wipe the floor with your half-wit butt rant that would ensue.  Bibi doesn't mind using her v-a-s-t vocabulary on these little exercises, but they are ultimately unsatisfying.  She'd rather talk about movies she likes and wishes more people would go see. 

For some time, Bibi has been dispirited over what passes as movie entertainment for the masses (see above for a short, incomplete list and see below for dispirited Bibi). 

For all her attitude about good movies, Bibi believes movies are for the masses, not an elite group of snooty know it alls.  The Oscar race throws this argument into the spotlight annually.  Making the best movie category larger doesn't make it a better race, it just gives more less than outstanding movies a shot at muddling the odds for the other movies.  In any case, the faithful readers already know Bibi's favorite (which has no chance at all),  Beasts of the Southern Wild.  This favorite seems to run counter to Bibi's claim that movies are for the masses, but that's because of the way movies are marketed.  Apparently, each movie must fit into a category: 

a) Drama
b) American Pie kind of movie    
c) Action/Adventure
d) Chick flick
e) Art movie

If the movie is marketed so that the intended audience isn't reached, it won't be seen by a large number of ticket buyers.  Too bad for Beasts of the Southern Wild.  It's such a good, unusual, market niche averse film, depicting a hard scrabble community and lifestyle unfamiliar to 99% of the American population.  Great characters, fabulously authentic capture of slices of their lives, piercingly poignant rendering of a lovely, enfant sauvage, so young, so exposed to fear and loss and so strong.  That said, really do not see how some of the other movies got a nomination.  We won't go there for specific undeserving films, but Bibi will say that Argo definitely belongs in the nominated group and should win Best Picture of the Year.

It's a Hollywood movie.  In all the best ways.  My film prof always began class by writing on the board:  Why are movies made?  Then, through the examples of films he would show, we would see why those movies were made (to make money, so you could make another movie, to make more money so you could make another movie, on and on ...) and how and why they might or might not be successful movies.  Argo hits all the marks. (It's like Ben Affleck was in the same classes with Bibi!  Or, he's absorbed all the best ideas on how to make movies by watching lots of great movies.)   It tells a captivating story in a familiar, very successful, way--first, this happens, which leads to this, and in an unusual, but plausible way, this happens, etc.  It builds our knowledge of a character and the events he's involved in, giving us insight into different worlds:  the CIA, US/Iranian history, movie making, and although the time line is straightforwardly linear, we experience an increasing excitement and tension up through the thrilling success of the caper. 

Every bit of information, visual or spoken, is essential to the story and the eventual ending.  The casting is superb and the actors are channeling:  just be the part, totally.  Success all the way around on this.  Production values are way up there, all the better to see the contrast between it and the purported movie-in-the-making, Argo.  The time period and the mindset of the time is excellently evoked.  Like any real Hollywood movie, everyone is attractive.  The scope and reach of the movie is appropriate to what the movie accomplishes. If there were a weakness, it might be that Ben Affleck is too young and/or didn't look tired enough to be Tony Mendez.  Our interest is piqued and then maintained through the end of the movie such that we rejoice with the characters' enforced silent pride of having accomplished the unexpected outcome:  the rescue of civilians trapped in Iran using a far-fetched plan.  We really want an occasion to mock snarl: Argofuckyourself!

Which might be what Bibi says by the conclusion of the Oscar awards presentation.  Hope not!