AFTER-PARTY.

The Oscars should be about the simple joys of life -- gambling and vanity -- and not about politics, but I see Charlie Pierce has people expecting me to talk about those poor nuts who hate-watched Libtard Hollyweird from their survivalist treehouses. Most of the best ravings have been well picked over, but there are a few morsels left to enjoy. First, Matthew Clark, "Associate Counsel for Government Affairs and Media Advocacy with the [wingnut front group] ACLJ" and author of the dystopian epic "Hollywood’s Self-Indulgent Delusional Demagoguery." Sample:

For anyone who has an ounce of critical thinking ability (critical thinking, not PC dogmatic zombism), [the Oscars are] almost unbearable to watch (it’s like watching sausage being made, with rotten meat, and then watching someone eat it, on prime-time TV).

This guy has a future in slasher films. Oh, also:

What if an actress said this award wouldn’t have been possible if my mother chose to abort me? 

Sarah Silverman hasn't done this bit yet? Get on it, Hollywood!  Next we have Young Cons and their wonderful headline:

Sean Penn Makes “Racist” Remark At The Oscars, Everyone Forgets His Party Affiliation

Similarly, when Jane Fonda does something stupid, the media just sits back and lets everybody think she's a Republican. My favorite, though, is the line from IJReview's "5 Hollywood Actors for Conservatives To Root For At This Year’s Oscars," introducing their #3, Michael Keaton:

Michael Keaton may not be a conservative, but his speech at the Golden Globes this year espoused strong conservative principles, even if he didn’t realize it...

Also, #2 Reese Witherspoon: "While she may not be a conservative, she espouses some refreshing ideas regarding modesty..." If this kind of thinking spreads, I could wind up on this year's Best-Dressed List. Thank you, good night!

OSCAR PICKS FOR ENTERTAINMENT PURPOSES ONLY.

I should add a review of The Imitation Game to my other on to Oscar posts, but it's almost magic time, dammit, so, quickly: We have a cryptographer-hero who's so ahead of his time he may as well be bringing penicillin to neanderthals, and who's also a gay martyr forced into chemical castration and suicide, plus he's possibly on the autistic spectrum, plus he sticks up for women's rights (well, one woman's) -- all this, as they say, and World War II! A Beautiful Mind meets Casablanca! It’s such perfect Oscar bait that I had to admire it, despite hearing each gear-tooth in the machine clicking — click, the platonic love of the smartgirl makes him try to be sociable and he’s humorously inept, click, but they’re going for it, and they stand up to The Man, click, etc.  Keira Knightley as always seems like a little girl playing at grown-ups and once again Charles Dance is made to be the Wicked Witch of the West. But Cumberbund or whatever his name is -- I thought he was supposed to be a pretty-boy and a joke, but in this he's not only believable and affecting in his swallowed anguish, he's absolutely magnetic, a real screen-filling star. Maybe the kids know something after all.

OK, on to this annual death march. I've been good and I've been awful, so make sure you can spare the money:

× Best Picture: The Imitation Game. People are talking Boyhood and talking Birdman. But those movies are probably too weird to win -- look at the past winners -- and will I believe knock each other off. As I just said, The Imitation Game is big-time Oscar bait, and has all the right nominations including Actor, Director, Screenplay, even Editing. (I half-expect -- maybe one-quarter-expect -- a late miracle surge for The Grand Budapest Hotel, so remember that if chaos ensues.)

× Best Actor: Michael Keaton, Birdman. I really was thinking Eddie Redmayne, but Glenn Kenny got me thinking about it -- Redmayne's performance has some nice shadings but nothing like the wells of anger and sorrow that, say, Daniel Day-Lewis gave Christy Brown in My Left Foot. And despite the gags about going full retard, disability is good for getting Oscar nominations, but not so much for winning the prize. In Birdman Keaton was acting his ass off, in both the good and bad ways, and the Academy gives points for effort (if you are or ever have been a star).

× Best Actress: Reese Witherspoon, Wild. I didn't see any of these movies except The Theory of Everything, so here's my half-assed but not necessarily wrong reasoning: The surge of enthusiasm for Julianne Moore in Still Alice reminds me of the alleged sure thing that was Julie Christie in her Alzheimer's drama Away From Her. Also, I hear great things about Witherspoon's performance, and people love her.

✓ Best Supporting Actor: J.K. Simmons, Whiplash. The odds are too steep for anyone else, plus I'm making too many wild picks and must cut my losses somehow.

✓ Best Supporting Actress: Patricia Arquette, Boyhood. Ditto.

× Best Director: Richard Linklater, Boyhood. If it's not the picture of the year, it's the stunt of the year (or past 13 years) anyway. This is exactly the kind of thing that wins directors Oscars in year when their films don't win.

× Best Original Screenplay: Wes Anderson and Hugo Guinness, The Grand Budapest Hotel. I think the Academy likes Wes Anderson but has been waiting for him to dispel their suspicion that all his movies were written to be performed by children, and that Anderson was having a laugh by using big Hollywood stars instead.

✓ Best Adapted Screenplay: Graham Moore, The Imitation Game. Now, one or two craft awards and we've got a believable Best Picture card.

✓ Best Cinematography: Emmanuel Lubezki, Birdman.

✓ Best Production Design: Adam Stockhausen, Anna Pinnock, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

✓ Best Costume Design: Milena Canonero, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

✓ Best Makeup and Hairstyling: Frances Hannon and Mark Coulie, The Grand Budapest Hotel.

I think Birdman's camera trick carries so much of the movie's feeling that the voters will go for it. Also, now that Budapest has caught their attention, they can lavish rewards on his stunning visuals. (I am violating my own rule on costumes this year -- that the earliest period gets the award, particularly if there are ruffs and crinoline -- so Mr. Turner may make a fool of me. But I am prepared.)

✓ Best Film Editing: Tom Cross, Whiplash, because it's got drumming, and I bet there's a lot of rhythmic stuff going on (almost as good as a car chase!).

× Best Score: Alexandre Desplat, The Imitation Game. And there's your Best Picture winner craft award! I still like Jóhann Jóhannsson's The Theory of Everything music very much, but Desplat has been a bridesmaid too often.

✓ Sound Mixing: Whiplash. Drums!
✓ Sound Editing: American Sniper. Guns!

✓ Visual Effects: Interstellar. Ugh, what do I know. Speaking of which, I didn't have time to meditate and my Ouija board is broken,  so I'll refrain from predicting the other awards, though I will say I wouldn't be surprised if they didn't throw one to Glen Campbell just to fuck with us.

UPDATE. I cleaned up on the minor awards and wiped out on the major ones. Until they got to Best Score I was flawless, baby, solid gold, and even there I got the right composer. (Not predicting shorts, docs, and cartoons really helped my percentage, though, I had no idea what the fuck was going on there.)

But Desplat getting it for GBH rather than The Imitation Game was a tipoff that my big bet wouldn't clear. Guess the WWII-winning loner who's also gay, autistic, and bullied was a bit too on the nose; maybe it would have won if they'd just extended their rewrites of history and  given Turing the happy ending he deserved, perhaps ascending into heaven with Christopher like at the end of Gladiator. (And why not? I'm with Graham Moore, fact-checking the water lilies is stupid.)

I have to admit, if you'd tipped me that The Imitation Game wouldn't win and that Keaton wouldn't win, I still would not have guessed Birdman would win. It may be the most avant-garde (in relative terms) winner since All Quiet on the Western Front. Even other arty winners like American Beauty and No Country for Old Men give viewers some old-fashioned hey-that-star-is-a-guy-like-me thrills, or at least entertaining chase scenes, before it all goes existential; Birdman is the kind of headscratcher people used to associate with Europe and make fun of. Well, forty years of future studio execs going to film school have paid off. 

My Birdman review here.

FRIDAY ROUND-THE-HORN.

At first I thought, "O God no Joanna Newsom is trying to sneak back get the spray-bottle" but this song is kind of sticking with me.
•   Jonah Goldberg's column today could have been titled, "I'm not lazy and stupid, you're lazy and stupid!" He says Obama is dumb because he won't admit Islam itself is responsible for the nuts who kill in its name. The President's anodyne ecumenical statement is, in Goldberg's view, the same thing as saying "Michael Jordan didn’t play basketball" or  "We didn’t win World War II" in that, durr, that's stoopid too, right? The analogy invites deeper analysis, so step well back as Goldberg executes his logic-fart:

“No religion is responsible for terrorism,” the president proclaimed, “people are responsible for violence and terrorism.”

Now obviously, there’s some truth to this. We judge people more by their actions than by their beliefs. But reasonable people also recognize that our actions often have a causal relationship with our beliefs. This is hardly a controversial — or even debatable — insight. Orthodox Jews don’t avoid bacon because it tastes bad; they do so because they’re keeping kosher. One cannot intelligently discuss why Mother Teresa helped the poor without referring to her faith. And one cannot discuss why the Islamic State burns, rapes, and enslaves people without taking their religious beliefs into account.

See -- Jews have wacky eating habits, Christians are nice, and Muslims are savage rapist-murders; Q.E.Doritos Cool Ranch! While I attribute the lack of retribution I've suffered for my anti-Mohammed cartoons to global respect for my artistry, I think Goldberg is safe because most non-conservatives can't make out what he's trying to say.

•   Speaking of legacy pledges and the next GOP President, Bill Kristol worries that Hillary Clinton is getting better numbers in the reps-the-future-not-the-past category in a CNN/ORC poll than any Republican Presidential candidate. (Scott Walker's numbers are least bad, perhaps because voters relate his social-net-shredding record to the dystopian future of The Handmaid's Tale or Idiocracy.) Kristol thinks he sees a way out:

Perhaps some new set of concerns in 2016 will overwhelm all the past/future talk. Given the state of the world, that’s quite possible. We could easily have a foreign policy election in 2016. And then people might not mind a steady hand, even if one from the past (think Richard Nixon in 1968).

One thing Americans  seem to have learned from the last clusterfuck in which Bill Kristol had a hand is, let's not do that again. In fact Kristol himself was complaining about "American war-weariness" only last year. Yet now he thinks beating the drum for Gulf War III might get one of his ringers elected. I suppose that's because he has more than average faith in the power of yellow journalism and jingo. After all, he is the editor of the Weekly Standard, which is very influential among people who never read anything they can't get for free on the New York-DC shuttle; that's got to count for something.

•   Whether or not I get to see any of the other big films (see my "On to Oscar" posts), at some point this weekend I'm going to stick my fool neck out, as I have in years past, and predict Sunday's winners. So watch this space! (And the easy way to do this is to get on my Twitter feed, where I announce posts sometime and dish out apothegms.)

•   Yeah it's late and who cares, but there are a few wonderful things about this Noah Rothman Hot Air column defending noted asshole Rudolph Giuliani and the asshole thing he said this week. I mean, it's mostly terrible on the level of Twitchy (look at the sickburn takedown of the media by "Florida-based political operative Rick Wilson"!), but in his flailing Rothman does bang into an interesting defense:

What are we to make of this frenzied attack on Giuliani, in which the whole of the political press reacted as though a man who left office 14 years ago had insulted their mothers?... 

Oh, but he was a leading presidential candidate in 2007, don’t you know? And he delivered the keynote address at the GOP’s nominating convention in 2008. And he’s a frequent guest on cable news, so he must be influential (a claim that could only be made by someone who rarely appears on cable news). But observing Giuliani’s diminished stature today when compared to the last decade renders the media’s reaction even less explicable.

I hope someone in Rudy's retinue told him, "It's okay, chief -- Noah Rothman says it doesn't matter 'cause you're a has-been!" Oh but the very, very, very best is the correction at the end:

An earlier version of this post incorrectly identified the chairman of the RNC as Ron Fournier

May your weekend be as serendipitous.

ON TO OSCAR, 5.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, Boyhood, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

The Theory of Everything. As I've said before, the biopic is a minor form that usually tells us why some famous person was famous and doesn't spare much time for the demands of art. The Theory of Everything stretches the formula a little -- it's not just about Stephen Hawking, it's about him and his wife Jane -- but it's still an inspirational famous-person story, with both Hawking and his doting wife rising through suffering to redemption. In some ways it's just the sort of gush you'd expect: for example, Jane doesn't seem to think about cheating on her increasingly enfeebled husband (with her saintly choir director, no less) until well past the halfway point -- and at that moment, hundreds of miles away, Hawking starts spitting up blood. And every so often someone gets the opportunity to tell the world what a genius Stephen is (most melodramatically, a big-time Russian scientist who carries the crowd with him at a crucial turn). The inspira-biopic formula is faithfully followed.

And yet... the Hawkings' relationship is genuinely interesting. Their meet-cute is pro-forma -- he's gawky but obviously impassioned and fun, she's sincere and sweet and too real for those other boys, and their life at Cambridge is sunny and full of promise. But when Hawking begins to have medical problems, their relationship is stepped up -- though Stephen wants to give her an out, Jane insists she's in for the long haul and that she has the steel for it.

The haul is indeed long, far longer than the two years Stephen is originally given to live, and both parties work hard at sustaining it, and at Stephen's career. Jane's other interests are subordinated, and over time it wears on her, as Felicity Jones, who plays Jane, brilliantly shows: She doesn't become shrewish or embittered -- it turns out she does indeed have the steel -- but she does stiffen; she sees that she may break, and begins to look for ways to sustain herself.

Stephen meanwhile is both increasingly driven and dependent, and like Jane is smart enough to find out how to keep from collapsing. His academic success everyone knows about, but his way of dealing with his physical dilemma is more interesting. Eddie Redmayne is great at conveying the effects of Hawking's ALS, and at showing how Hawking uses his wit and charm, even when deprived of most conventional means of expressing them, to avoid despair in both his own life and his marriage. Still, eventually he, too, has to look outside the relationship to sustain himself. (Though putting across delicate and painful emotions while physically challenged is an Oscar-season punchline, I can tell you that in Redmayne's case, when Stephen has to have the marriage-ending discussion with Jane, it absolutely works.)

So this inspirational story is about what from some perspective might be called a failed marriage. The most obvious argument for its success is Hawking's glorious career. As for Jane's success, that's a little trickier; the film suggests that when Hawking finally acknowledges the possibility of God, which for Jane has always been a certainty, it's because she has made God real to him by her devotion. It seems a small enough victory, though you could say that any good relationship between educated people is to some extent an extended conversation, and that Hawking's admission is not so much about Jane winning a point as it is a sign that they have all along been talking the same language.

All the craft elements are very fine, but I especially liked the lushly romantic score by Jóhann Jóhannsson, which in the grand Hollywood tradition not only underlines but exalts the characters' feelings; it's up for an Oscar and I wouldn't be shocked if it won.

UPDATE. Here's an interesting Music Times column handicapping the Best Score race; it's always nice to hear from someone who knows what he or she is talking about, though the author's view that Alexandre Desplat's double nomination won't work against him is contradicted by history.

ON TO OSCAR, 4.

(See previous reviews of American Sniper, Birdman, and The Grand Budapest Hotel.)

Boyhood. A boy grows up in suburban Texas. And that’s pretty much the movie.

There are crises — the boy’s mother marries a crazy, mean drunk; the boy gets picked on a bit at school; the boy’s first real girlfriend breaks up with him, etc. But what most other filmmakers would naturally parlay into drama, Richard Linklater just makes into scenes. Linklater’s not into drama, or even plot: In his own words, “our lives don’t have plot so much as they have character and a time structure.”

This is the sort of thing we expect from Frenchmen and normally I’m wary of it, but the movie held my interest. When an artist has something on his mind, character and time structure may be enough.

So what does Linklater have on his mind? He seems to want us to identify with some experience that means a lot to him, like the stoned 70s high-school valedictory of Dazed and Confused. In the case of Boyhood this is not a hard ask, because the milieu covers a broad American ground: the family is suburban but not financially secure, and their status wobbles between comfort and struggle; their habits and habitats (high school, malls, cars, parks) are familiar; the setting has some flavor of Texas but could be anywhere in the Big Middle. It’s no more than a short reach up or down for most of us who would wind up seeing the movie.

If that sounds a little bland and characterless and pitched-down-the-middle, you’re not wrong. For a slice-of-life, Boyhood doesn’t have a lot of the details that, in the best examples of the genre, would stick like burrs — no Scorsese espresso cups nor Ozu teacups, no rituals that gain resonance over time. There’s some feeling for cluttered children’s bedrooms and Austin tyro crash pads, but not a lot; the movie moves quickly through its 12-year span and doesn’t let us steep in anything very long.

This is, I think, by design; the movie is more about change than about permanence. But there can be something about change that sticks to the soul, too. And here’s where Childhood’s famous stunt — having one kid, Ellar Coltrane, play the lead, Mason, from age six to 16, and pausing the film to age along with him — is actually a bigger stroke of genius that it at first looks.

Note that with all the praise the movie is getting, no one is saying much about Coltrane’s performance. The fact is, he’s not that much of an actor. He could be one — he’s perfectly natural, even attractive. But he doesn’t have the same ego-push you find in child actors (and indeed in adult actors), because he hasn't learned or been trained to assert himself. As Mason, he’s rather passive, in just the way that you might expect a kid with the upbringing posited in the film to be, even in scenes where he’s at the center of the action. And that suits the picture's purposes fine: He’s just a boy, not yet grown — and not one of those miraculous boys of legend who rise to meet challenges, with daddy's rifle or Horatio Alger gumption, but a real boy of the modern American system — insulated from challenge and looking for the next thing.

One of my very favorite scenes in the movie involves teenage Mason coming home later than he promised from a date and confronting his mother’s live-in, Jim, who’s been drinking and doesn’t appreciate the kid’s disrespect toward his mother. This could be a “dramatic” scene, and we’ve seen versions of it a million times in movies. Only in this case, the kid isn’t going for it. He knows the man doesn’t have any authority over him — and if he tried to act as if he did (and he doesn’t — Jim also knows that much), that would be something to ride out rather than engage. Just like the drama with the mean-drunk husband, and the bad kids at school; whatever anguish it might mean for others, for the boy it’s just another growing pain. The choice he makes -- to blow the guy off and walk into the house -- is absolutely right, and probably not what any Hollywood screenwriter would have cooked up for him.

Other scenes have this same dynamic. The kid’s girlfriend betrays him, and he’s pissy with her about it — and he looks like an ineffectual jerk, as of course he would. When Mason is packing for college and disdains to take one particular nostalgic tchotchke, his mother (Patricia Arquette, ascending to a whole new level of magnificence) breaks down, and the kid isn’t particularly good about it — not mean, not weird, just self-involved and unable to engage his mother except on an adolescent level that has nothing to do with her grown-up pain.

I think this is why I stuck with the movie even without a plot to be pulled by, and even without liking the kid very much (how could I? He’s too much like I was at his age). I can’t even imagine our great poets of adolescence — Wedekind, Rimbaud, Paul Westerberg, the guy who wrote River’s Edge — catching this aspect of boyhood without gilding the lily. For all Boyhood's faults, Linklater's trick caught lightning in a bottle.

(I will add that it occurred to me at the end, when the kid is sitting at the park with his new college friends, that the whole movie might be a vision produced by the drugs he took -- and that the psilocybin candy he ate is Linklater's equivalent of Proust's madeleine.)

ON TO OSCAR, 3.

American Sniper. As I suspected, the political obsessives were watching, through their Zhdanovite lenses, a very different movie than the one I saw, which is both more interesting and weirder than what they describe.

Chris Kyle is a good Christian Texan whose father taught him to shoot and that the world is made up of sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs (basically a more Christian version of the dicks-pussies-and-assholes analogy from Team America: World Police). Kyle internalizes the lesson, including the contempt for both sheep and wolves contained in it; when U.S. embassies are blown up in 1998, he quits his fun but purposeless cowboy life to sign up with the Navy Seals (yeah, it does seem weird; Eastwood rushes through it); Nineeleven finally sends Kyle into combat in Iraq, where in the ruins of the cities he more or less gives up on sheep entirely and just tries to kill Iraqis who are trying to kill his fellow sheepdogs. Oh, in between '98 and '01, he meets a lady who likes him, marries her, and gets her pregnant (don't worry, I'm not eliding many grace notes there).

This all happens very quickly, bookended by a flashback from Kyle's first kills: First a child, then a woman try, surreptitiously at first, to blow up his comrades. Kyle takes them out from a rooftop. Another SEAL tells him as he prepares to fire that if he's wrong he'll get his ass thrown in Leavenworth; but he's not wrong, he saves his men and his illustrious career as a sniper and (this word gets thrown around enough to become loaded) "legend" is launched.

This first part of the movie teaches us everything we're going to learn about Kyle -- that he's capable of intense focus, charming when he wants to be, believes in what he's doing and isn't afraid to say so. In other words, he's like a Clint Eastwood hero, except for one thing: No sense of humor. He does have some mildly funny lines, but nothing on the order of "make my day" or "there are two kinds of people -- those with loaded guns and those who dig." There's no irony to him, nor the reflectiveness than gives a man irony. He does what he does, and never questions himself for a minute.

And that's why, throughout the remainder of the film, Kyle doesn't see a lot of things that Eastwood makes very obvious and that even other servicemen, even his own brother, are able to see: That they're only defending each other, and Kyle is only killing so many people in defense of them, because they insist on coming back, over and over again, to a place where no one seems to want them. He also can't tell that he's suffering from massive PTSD attacks (and by the way, I don't think anyone's shown transient mental illness better than Eastwood does here). I'm not even sure that, when he begins his mercy missions among wounded warriors near the end, Kyle knows what happened to him. And he gives no indication that he's expecting what's going to happen to him at the end.

Once that first section is over with, the movie gets really weird. A seminarian turned SEAL reveals to Kyle that he's lost faith in his God and this war; later, when he's killed in an ambush, his mother reads his anguished letter about the war aloud at his funeral -- it's barely coherent, as his mother is breaking down with emotion; later, Kyle, apparently in the midst of another stress attack (and therefore pretty much devoid of emotion) says it was actually the letter that killed his comrade.  Then there's the scene where Kyle calls his wife on the phone from the middle of a firefight -- a firefight he caused because, against orders, he had to take a magic mile-long shot to kill his nemesis, which alerts all the local jihadis to the squad's presence -- and tells her tearfully that he's ready to come home. When he does get home he sits in a bar watching a basketball game; his wife calls and he tells her, "I just need a minute."

And there's the scene where Kyle's goading a severely disabled vet, in the easy, friendly way he goaded his own comrades back in the field, to get his shots to hit a target. The goading works; "I feel like I got my balls back," says the vet. He keeps making shots, and gives Kyle a look that doesn't seem entirely friendly. "Who's the legend now?" the vet tells him.

But the legend is Kyle, of course; as the credits begin we see archival footage of the real Kyle's coffin borne along the Texas highway, lined with people saluting and waving flags. They see things the way Kyle did. Sheep, wolves, and sheepdogs; do what you have to do and don't cry about it. Eastwood knows his Ford, and what Ford said about what to do when the legend becomes fact. I'm not shocked the movie's such a hit.

ON TO OSCAR, 2.

Birdman. At first I wondered why Iñárritu was sticking all that magic realism into a perfectly good New York backstage drama. It made me suspicious; maybe, I thought, he just didn’t want it to be All About Eve all over again, and that’s why he gave the central character, Riggan, washed-up former star of an old superhero franchise, the superhero himself as an alter-ego who spurs him to narcissistic fantasies and then (spoiler) destruction — you know, the way Jimmy Cagney told Raoul Walsh, when they were trying to figure a way to make Cody the gangster in White Heat more interesting, “Why not make him nuts?”

Still, White Heat’s a pretty great movie.

There is something old-fashioned and melodramatic about the Birdman Broadway plot: Riggan has put himself in hock to finance his stage adaptation of Raymond Carver stories (hello Room Service!) and it’s a mess (hello The Bandwagon!); he loses an actor during tech week, but rejoices when a young phenom steps in (hello 42nd Street!), only to find that the phenom is a total snake-in-the-grass asshole (hello Eve Harrington!).

Of course Iñárritu’s mise en scène is a little more, um, ambitious than Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s, and the main thing about Emmanuel Lubezki’s holy-wow camerawork isn’t the single-take illusion (though that helps with the paranoid-schizo vibe) but how grubby he makes everything look, from the backstage tunnels to the canyons of Manhattan — I don’t think there’s a clean surface in the movie until we get to the hospital. And the story itself has some very contemporary modifications beyond the Birdman bit, like Riggan’s tough relationship with his daughter who’s just out of rehab. Still, there’s enough razzle-dazzle in the dialogue that even the scene that (spoiler I guess) ends in a Sapphic embrace plays like something from Out of The Frying Pan (“Why don’t I have any self-respect?” “You’re an actress, honey”).

So why the weird stuff? Well, I think it’s like this: Riggan isn’t happy. But it’s not because he’s about to lose his shirt. No, it’s because he’s doing what actors do — but unsuccessfully, aimlessly, because he doesn’t really believe in it. (The play looks awful, and his why-Carver explanation is just ridiculous.) When the phenom starts throwing around actorly shit about “truth,” it drives Riggan crazy — particularly when it works on his daughter — because he knows he’s not coming up to scratch on that score and he thinks he should be. But the truth the phenom's talking about is limited, it’s grubby and narrow and circles in on itself. And the costumed superhero is coming around because Riggan is realizing he prefers something else — and, despite what we might have assumed if the movie didn’t show us different, it isn’t his old tattered stardom. It’s magic. Even when no one else sees it, even when it’s insane, he has it. And with that he can fly. We see him fly.

We don’t see him fall. Does he fall? But with that question the movie, and all its tunnels and circles, is over.

Bonus spoiler: I don’t know if it means anything but I have this in my notes: He shoots off his nose to spite his fate.

ON TO OSCAR.

The nominations are out, and spurred by some vestigial urge from my showbiz days I'm working on seeing the big ones and reporting back here whenever I get a chance.

The Grand Budapest Hotel. Wes Anderson heroes don’t usually have life-or-death crises; they suffer from misunderstandings. Some of these misunderstandings are large and threaten their happiness, but they’re nothing that can’t be straightened out, for in the Anderson universe good will and reasonableness are always popping out from around a corner, ready to set things right. Even criminals don’t give Anderson heroes much trouble. (The pirates in The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou were less of a threat than the Pirates of Penzance.) His movies have been like children’s-edition versions of Dickens, which is a large part of their pleasure, and also their limitation — they have a great range of amusing characters and incidents, but the viewer is always aware that this is not quite the world.

The Mitteleuropan fantasyland of Zubrowka, in which The Grand Budapest Hotel takes place, is not quite the world either — the visuals are rich as frosting; you can see how much pleasure Anderson gets from the very idea of an early-20th-Century alpine funicular. There is also the very Andersonian mentor-pupil relationship of Monsieur Gustave, the Hotel’s brilliant concierge whose aplomb, we come to realize, is not only inventive and industrious but magnificent and brave, and Zero the Lobby Boy, who climbs but is not a mere climber, which Gustave recognizes by instinct and seeks to encourage. And around many corners come many helpful people to lend Gustave and Zero support — most memorably the secret order of concierges known as the Society of the Crossed Keys.

But these helpers can’t do everything. There is a probate matter that has the appearance of a misunderstanding, and Deputy Kovacs attempts to deal with it as such; he is (spoiler) murdered for this misapprehension. His assassins, and Gustave’s and Zero’s main nemeses, are Dmitri and his enforcer Jopling, two genuinely savage creatures beyond the reach of all sentiment or reason, whose evil industry seems a match at least for the energy and good faith of our heroes. Also, from near the beginning of the film a great war threatens, and in the end it does more than that.

The Grand Budapest Hotel has all the pleasures we’ve come to expect from Anderson. The amplified grandeur of the Lubitsch-y, cinema buffa settings make it even easier than usual to expect them. But Lubitsch for all his kitsch was pretty wised-up, and I think Anderson is getting to be, too. Much has been made of the film’s inspiration by Stefan Zweig, not least by Anderson himself. I take him at his word: The melancholy for a vanished world — a world, as Zero, seen in his old age in the framing device, tells “the Author” was probably vanished even before the story began, but embodied and upheld by Monsieur Gustave — feels genuine, and informed by the sadder lessons of history and life. It’s not that kindness and its effects have left the world; just that their value has to be treasured and transmitted, maybe in movies like this.

That framing device makes the point beautifully. We see the message passed by elderly Zero to the Author, and the Author passing it on, through literature (and through difficulties which are only suggested but which to anyone who lived in the 20th Century will be perfectly clear) to his people. The evil in this world, this seems to say, does not refute the rosy Anderson idea of life; rather, vice-versa. Our problems, that is, may not all be misunderstandings, but when we insist on understanding we can yet triumph.