The Oscar Project #70: Titanic (1997)

by Chris Marshall:

I realized a couple of things while watching Titanic today. One, it was the first (of only four total[1]) Best Picture winners that I saw in a theater. Two, it came out 15 years ago. Holy schlamoly I’m old. It pains me to remember things so clearly when they happened a decade and a half ago.

It’s also a perfect showcase for the best and the worst of James Cameron. From a technical standpoint, it is incredibly well made. The cinematography, set design, and special effects all hold extremely well all these years later. But the actual screenplay, despite having a number of memorable, canonical lines, falls flat most of the time. Especially when Old Rose is speaking near the end, it sounds more like she’s reading a poem than actually speaking.

Of course, she was pretty old, and I guess she’d had plenty of time to think about it. Still, it seems like Cameron’s characters rarely talk like actual human beings. I think that’s why the Terminator films work so well. Arnold can get away with talking like a machine because he is a machine. When Edward Furlong says those horrible lines, not so much.

The Oscar Project #6: Cavalcade (1933)

by Chris Marshall:

Why couldn’t King Kong have won? It was released the same year, and it’s an all-time classic. Instead I had to watch Cavalcade, adapted from the Noel Coward play, and it was a chore. It was more like a series of vignettes set during various important moments in British history between 1900 and 1929 than a single narrative. The net result was a disjointed mishmash of events that couldn’t hold my interest, no matter how hard I tried.

In general, I object to describing a movie as “boring,” particularly if it’s used as a pejorative. When people say a film is boring, they generally mean that it is unexciting, which is a major difference. Ingmar Bergman’s Winter Light, one of the greatest of all films, is extremely slow and methodical. It could quite accurately be called boring. But that’s exactly what it means to be. The characters’ lives were, for the most part, dull and uninteresting, so it only made sense for the movie to reflect that.

Here lies the problem with Cavalcade. This is presumably a very exciting—if tragic—period in British history. Yet, despite everything that happens, from the Second Boer War to the sinking of the Titanic to the outbreak of World War I, I never cared about anything that happens. It was slow, unexciting, and, yes, boring, but it made no sense within the context of the movie. I kept praying for it to be over already, but it seemed like the end would never come.