Academy Award Thoughts

Well, I am writing this Sunday afternoon. The Academy Awards are tonight, and, by the time anyone reads this, they will be over and done with.
I admit that I am interested in the Academy Awards, although I found out this year that I had lost touch a bit. I was rooting for Leonardo Dicaprio to win Best Actor for The Departed, but then I found out that he wasn't nominated for The Departed, but instead for Blood Diamond (haven't seen it; waiting for video). I also decided to rent a couple of the movies nominated for Best Picture, so I picked up Flags of Our Fathers, the Clint Eastwood movie about U.S. taking Iwo Jima during WWII. Turns out that this movie was not nominated for Best Picture. I had mistook it for Eastwoods other film, Letters from Iwo Jima.
This is not the first time that I have been out of touch. When the awards come up each year, I usually find that I have seen none of the movies that are nominated for major awards. Despite my blunder with Flags of Our Fathers (which, by the way, I loved), I did get to see two of the movies up for Best Picture: The Departed and Babel.
Okay, so both of these movies had a lot of "junk" in them. I know we all are willing to put up with different levels of "junk" if we believe the movie has something significant to say. I was willing to put up with the junk in The Departed, but not in Babel. I thought The Departed was amazing. It was intense, engrossing, amazingly acted, and powerful. If you are thinking of seeing it, know that it has A LOT of violence and language. It was, however, amazing.
Friday night I watched Babel, the favorite to win Best Pic tonight. I must say that I did not like it, and I highly recommend against seeing it. Some of the junk in it is reason enough to draw this conclusion, but I was more disappointed at the fact that I just thought it was not a very good movie. I found the story line impossible to believe on many fronts, and I also found that there was no real hope found in the film. There was pain, and at times it was powerfullly depicted. I just don't think that is enough.
Babel is done in a style that has become increasingly popular. It threaded several, seemingly unconnected, storylines together. The movie Traffic, which came out in 2000, was the first of this type, as far as I can see. It was an excellent movie about the war on drugs. Then there was Crash and Syriana. Overall, I didn't like either. Crash did have some powerful stuff, relating to racial stereotypes. Syriana brought up some interesting points. I thought they both failed, though, where Traffic succeeded. All three of these movies, along with Babel, deal with the reality that all human beings have issues, and they all tend to blur the lines between who is "good" and who is "bad." In Syriana, I really didn't like anyone. I thought that was sad. No, I take it back. I liked the guy that the U.S. assassinated. In Crash I just found the dialogue to be interesting, but nothing even slightly resembling real life conversation. Babel had a real life feel to some of it, but simply provided no real hope. No heroes.
I am all for the idea that we should avoid simple answers. I just also think that there really are people out there to look to and be inspired by. Speaking of which. . .
While The Departed had its fair share of bad guys, one of the characters take his place alongside Jack Bauer as one of my favorite fictional characters of all time. At the request of a couple of people who were scandalized by my high placement of Jack, I will give you ten honorable mentions of Favorite Fictional Character. Only a couple of clarifications to narrow the field:
A) All are from movies.
B) All are male, just because I guess I am more drawn to people I might want to be like, and these are, naturally, going to be predominantly men.
C) All are flawed people, not simple characters (this eliminates such fun characters as Indiana Jones). This said, some of them change dramatically throughout their film.
In no particular order, here they are:
1) Edward Bloom (Ewan McGreggor from Big Fish)
2) Lucky Jack Aubrey (Russell Crowe from Master and Commander)
3) Truman Burbank (Jim Carrey from The Truman Show)
4) Frank Slade (Al Pacino from Scent of a Woman)
5) Charlie Babbit (Tom Cruise from Rain Man)
6) William Costigan (Leonardo Dicraprio from The Departed)
7) Red Redding (Morgan Freeman from The Shawshank Redemption)
8) Lloyd Dobler (John Cusack from Say Anything)
9) Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburn from The Matrix)
10) Jack Ryan (Harrison Ford from Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger)