Subjective Best Picture Nominees

The Artist: Severe sound problems, but a sound story nonetheless. Considered a lock because it's a silent, black-and-white French film.

The Descendants: Trouble in paradise. George Clooney plays a native Hawaiian of a more marketable complexion, and finally a role sans his signature disarming charm and good looks. It’s a nuanced movie about family and heartbreak, my favorite of the nominees but not of the year.

Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close:  The only one I missed. But with a dismal 47 percent rating on rottentomatoes.com, what did I miss?

The Help: The softer side of Mississippi bigotry, systemic racism with a woman’s touch.

Hugo:  A movie that finally answers the question - What if Martin Scorsese grew up not a sickly asthmatic in Little Italy but an orphan inside of a train station clock in Paris?

Midnight in Paris: Woody Allen comically exposes the Golden Age of art and culture as a fraudulent lie. Then again, what fun is time traveling without a DeLorean?

Moneyball: Adapted for screen by Aaron Sorkin, so it’s good. Understandably though, baseball fans might not relish seeing the magic of America’s pastime turned into a frigid algorithm.

The Tree of Life: The best documentary the Discovery Channel never made. Gorgeous and cerebral and I wouldn’t recommend it to anybody.

War Horse: Steven Spielberg makes a World War movie not about II. Battle scenes were dirty and gritty, the most climactic of them reminiscent of Saving Private Ryan’s Omaha Beach opener, though better fit for the family. Good enough to make me want to see the play.

And to finish out Black History month, here's Glory

Freed slaves fight to free slaves.

Based on the true, truly noble story of the 54^th Massachusetts Regiment, “Glory” is the Oscar-winning 1989 film by Edward Zwick honoring one of the first official black units of the American Civil War. It’s the soldiers’ battles off the field that measures their valor.

Equally precise, “Glory” is based on actual wartime letters of the comparatively naïve Colonel Robert Gould Shaw (Matthew Broderick,) the son of an aristocratic New England family and accidental commanding officer of the 54^th. Following the 1863 Emancipation Proclamation the 23-year-old officer was ushered into the position, a rich boy abolitionist out of his element, leading a nascent regiment of untrained but unafraid freedmen.

So then it is fortuitously appropriate that Broderick, trying to shake off the goodhearted mischief-maker type, often appears uncomfortable and unsure in a role so mature. It isn’t often a film benefits from an underlying sense of insecurity in its lead actor, “Glory” is an exception.

When fatherly soldier John Rawlins (Morgan Freeman) is promoted to rank Sergeant Major, he privately lets Shaw know of his secret uncertainty about accepting the honor. “I know exactly what you mean,” replies Broderick/Shaw.

The levelheaded Rawlins is one of four principle soldiers in the 54^th, and each of these characters is notably unique in temperament, personality and background. The differentiation is refreshing, these men fought for the same cause and had the same color skin, but screenwriter Kevin Jarre took lengths to ensure they’re not one single-minded person.

Jupiter Sharts (Jihmi Kennedy) is a bumbler, a stutterer, a kind soul, grossly uneducated but handy with the rifle. That juxtaposition against Thomas Searles (Andre Braugher) is starkly wide. Searles is an intellectual raised free, a childhood friend of Shaw, but a dainty soldier who some fear could be a liability.

Then there is the defiant Trip (Denzel Washington, who for this earned the Academy’s Best Supporting Actor prize,) who is angry at everything, distrustful of white people and perhaps with good reason. When by the end of a whip he was wrongly punished for supposedly deserting, his shirt was torn off to reveal a scarred lifetime of brutal punishment.

As he took his lashing he stared unblinkingly at Shaw, never arguing, never grimacing. But his anguish and feeling of betrayal is clear behind his haunting stare and single tear. A white soldier would’ve received a trial, what is he really to the Union?

He was a member of an exploited unit, one being withheld uniforms and good boots (Trip didn’t desert, he was looking for protective footwear,) being used solely for manual labor, one being paid $3 fewer each month. But when the soldiers refuse to take any pay but full pay, Shaw joins them in solidarity.

“Glory” is a loose adaptation of the real events, but the basic facts hold true. Shaw had to fight his own commanders just to get his men out of ditch-digging duty and on to the battlefield. It turned out most advantageous of the North, before the end of the Civil War 180,000 black men fought for the Union.  

An early effort for Zwick, the film succeeds in showing that an epic war movie, and “Glory” is one of the best about this most pivotal American theater, can be accomplished on a relatively modest budget. The few fight scenes were explosive and gritty, but never terribly graphic. Though never vulgar it doesn’t shy away from the real parlance of the times, whitewashed of the you-know-what word like some unfortunately edited copy of “Huckleberry Finn.”

In that sense the film makes a good learning tool for students, and is age-appropriate even for the young teen.

War is ugly. Racism is ugly. “Glory” is beautiful.

In honor of Black History and Oscars month, here's "The Help."

There’s inherent danger should a white homeowner permit their colored maid, or any of the help, to use the indoor facilities. It’s not only a breach of etiquette it promotes unsanitary conditions, colored people carry unfamiliar diseases, think of the children.

This was Mississippi 50 years ago, in reality the nicer side. Decidedly racist white Jacksonians pretending Southern hospitality is a virtue as they send the help to the outdoor facilities, even in the most unforgiving elements.

That bathroom issue, it was a recurring conflict in Tate Taylor’s 2011 “The Help,” the quick adaptation of a 2009 Kathryn Stockett novel. The film, which examines the friendship built between one young white woman and two working black maids just as the Civil Rights Movement was gaining traction, is up for a slew of Oscars this year, including Best Picture, Best Actress for Viola Davis and two Best Supporting Actresses for Octavia Spencer and Jessica Chastain.  

As evident in the bathroom dilemma, which is a spot trivial when in 1960s Mississippi civil rights activists were being executed on shadowy dirt roads by local police, the film takes a noticeably non-violent approach to the tumultuous crossroads. Not even a mention of the Ku Klux Klan, the use of the notorious N-word was all but scrubbed away.

Aspiring young writer Eugenia “Skeeter” Phelan (a nearly unrecognizable Emma Stone) returns home from the University of Mississippi with the radical notion she may forego a husband for a career in writing. This being a time when people could get jobs at newspapers, she soon lands a local column on housekeeping but defers to her family maid, Aibileen Clark (Davis, in her second Oscar-nominated performance) for guidance.

An unlikely, seemingly unheard of, relationship is forged. Stories of keeping house turn to stories of a black person keeping a white house and raising white kids for a family of ingrates, indignity is in the job description. Soon sass-mouthed Minny Jackson (Spencer, Supporting Actress nominee,) recently fired by villain Hilly Holbrook (a rather unintimidating Bryce Dallas Howard,) offers a host of terrible tales to accompany.

More stories from more maids surface, enough to publish a book, yet it’s curious just how taken aback Jackson-raised Skeeter is by these omnipresent injustices. We’re only left to assume that college opened her eyes in ways she couldn’t before thought possible, suddenly the world she grew up in was never one she knew.

Aibileen is a woman of constant sorrow, her friend Minny is the brash type, the kind that can steal the show and trick prissy Hilly into eating some of the most disgusting pie (think of the bathroom issue.) For Davis and Spencer, their performances are bold enough for respective Oscar nods. The other Best Supporting Actress nomination for Jessica Chastain playing Celia Foote, a bubblehead mistress and unwitting outcast in the white social order, is a happy but unmerited gesture.  

Otherwise performances were gripping, the core three characters anchored a movie fragmentally gentle with the atrocities of institutional racism. It’s also a shame Sissy Spacek’s little discussed performance as Mrs. Walters, the senile (maybe) mother of Hilly, went overlooked by the Academy.

With the help of Taylor her timing is impeccable, a woman falling into dementia is at times comically inappropriate, but it’s easy to laugh with Mrs. Walters when even she takes pleasure in seeing her nasty daughter get her just desserts.