The Race: of Dreamers and Performers

With the Golden Globes behind us and the Guilds all but finished with their announcements, we focus our race now on the Oscar nominations. Due out on Tuesday, the Academy's choices will invariably reflect the direction we've sensed the race has been headed for some weeks now, while almost certainly introducing an unknown component, some kind of variable to shake our perceptions of what this thing means.

It does seem interesting to me that the films that will potentially be about dreams, ideas and performers -- some of the very things cinema itself is about. In my review of Inception back in July, I said (in so many words) that it was a critical appraisal of the cinema as much as it was a grand summer blockbuster, deeply embedded in the sense that to watch a movie, to experience a movie, is to dream, to lower one's consciousness in a dark space and allow images and events to enter your mind.

But that's not the only place where I see this year's race as being about "Big Ideas" or "Dreamers."

The Social Network definitely falls into this category. Mark Zuckerberg, as the film tells him, is a dreamer. He yearns to change the world, to set himself apart; he has a vision for what "the social experience of college" looks like, and replicates that vision online. But he is also a dreamer in that he's not a part of the reality he experiences; the film's narrative comes from the point of view of depositions, not truth, where a vast percentage is exaggeration. Mark does not seem to experience reality as "we" do; he observes things, he does things, but he is a detached soul, a tabula rasa for the other characters to graft their aspirations. As he remarks when Erica breaks up with him, "Is this real?"

Black Swan is about performing, about assuming a role, but like Inception, it is explicitly about dreaming. It imagines dreams as intruding on reality, it makes our reality look like a dream (and vice versa), and Nina's entire psyche is based on the idea that her dreams are uncontrollable representations of her inner desires, and through interacting with her dreams she can actually become and embody these desires.

The Fighter is more about dreaming in the abstract sense, about yearning to be more than one is, about searching for a goal, performing the "role" of boxer almost reluctantly. True Grit is about how mythic figures get conjured and performed, how retribution looks and the idea of justice. And The King's Speech is about performance as well; Bertie must perform as the King, his aspiration to speak, his ability to conjure a public view of himself.

See? It's not much of a stretch to say that this year, we're all about dreaming. Last year, it was "what war does to our identity" - The Hurt Locker, Avatar, Inglourious Basterds, District 9, heck, even Up in the Air is about personal battles shaping identity.

This year, it's "how do our dreams shape our cultural identities?"

This is the logic behind my thinking it's now The Social Network vs. The Fighter. One is about what our dreams can do to the world in a very ambivalent way, the other is about how personal dreams lead to personal satisfaction.

On Saturday, we'll have the Producers Guild of America awards. If anything but The Social Network wins, it'll be a massive upset. On Tuesday, we'll have the Oscar nominations. I'll have my nomination predictions finalized by Monday night, I'll be up blogging as the nominations are announced at 8:30 a.m. EST, and then we'll have a whole new way to think about the race.

Now, it's not about getting in. It's about winning.