{"id":98878,"date":"2013-02-28T10:38:38","date_gmt":"2013-02-28T05:08:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/tehelka.com\/?p=98878"},"modified":"2013-02-28T10:38:38","modified_gmt":"2013-02-28T05:08:38","slug":"oscar-needs-silver-polish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/oscar-needs-silver-polish\/","title":{"rendered":"Oscar Needs Silver Polish"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Silver<\/a>
Silver Linings Playbook<\/strong><\/span>
Director:<\/strong> David O Russell
Starring:<\/strong> Bradley Cooper, Jennifer Lawrence, Robert DE Niro, Jacki Weaver, Anupam Kher<\/figcaption><\/figure>
\nThe Oscars come but once a year, and now that the farce that was 2013 (Argo? Really?) is over, the Internet is already full of lists of predictions for 2014. That\u2019s right, a year in advance, before almost any of the potential nominees have been released. A look at some of last year\u2019s predictions for this year\u2019s nominations shows that these lists aren\u2019t nearly as far off the mark as you might think. Indiewire writer Peter Knegt\u2019s 6 March 2012 prediction, for instance, correctly identified five of the nine nominees, while including two other nominees in his alternatives, identical to his record in 2011. It also included the eventual winners for Best Director, Best Actor and Best Screenplay, both Original and Adapted, among its predicted nominees for these categories. These, and the fact that he missed Best Supporting Actor\/Actress, which are essentially lotteries before one has seen all the films, suggest that his predictions were not simply inspired guesswork or clairvoyance. There exists an Oscar type, a film that you can tell simply by reading a synopsis and cast and crew details will conform to what the Academy will declare among the greatest films of the year. As if any more proof were needed that the Oscars are a bore. A reliable, predictable bore.
\nThe two films Knegt completely missed are instructive too. Amour followed Terence Malick\u2019s Tree of Life<\/em> as the Palme d\u2019Or winner picked by the Academy to give it street cred with the cineastes. No one gave Amour<\/em> a ghost of a chance of actually winning; if Life is Beautiful<\/em> could lose to Shakespeare in Love<\/em> in 1997, foreign films might as well not be nominated. The other, Silver Linings Playbook<\/em>, which released in India this week, has been the year\u2019s big surprise with eight nominations \u2014 the Bradford City, if you will, of the Oscars. The little film that could. Granted, it\u2019s a Weinstein film, which means it\u2019s not that little, but it is the antithesis of the Oscar type. And unlike Bradford at the League Cup final, it scored a goal on the big stage, a significant blow, with Jennifer Lawrence winning a much-deserved Best Actress award.
\n\u201cThere\u2019s a pleasure sure in being mad, one which none but madmen know,\u201d goes the epigram by Dryden. Playbook<\/em>, however, goes the opposite way, talking about the pain of mental illness, which is also understood only by those who have fought pitched battles with their minds. Pat Solizio Jr (Cooper) is trying to get his shit together after being paroled out of the loony bin, and get back with his wife, who has had a restraining order against him ever since he battered her lover to the verge of death. Meanwhile, Tiffany Maxwell (Lawrence) is a recently-widowed sex addict who is trying to get her shit together after being fired. They strike a co-dependent relationship, however turbulent, that helps bring a semblance of normalcy in their lives.
\nBut the film\u2019s triumph is in the fact that it embraces Dryden\u2019s maxim in its sensibility. This is no Virginia Woolf biopic; David O Russel infuses a refreshing eccentricity in even the \u2018sane\u2019 supporting cast, with the football-loving bookie Pat Sr (De Niro) and the nutty psychiatrist Dr Patel (Kher) my personal favourites. The simple story and the quirky, slightly off-balanced pacing and dialogue, which is Russel\u2019s element, make this film a silver lining in an otherwise bleak Academy Awards year.
\najachi@tehelka.com<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There exists an Oscar type, a film that you can tell simply by reading a synopsis and cast and crew details will conform to what the Academy will declare among the greatest films of the year<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":75,"featured_media":98899,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[21],"tags":[8270,7275,8271,7661,8272,8266],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98878"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/users\/75"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=98878"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/posts\/98878\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=98878"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=98878"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/tehelka.com\/rest-api\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=98878"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}