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"FacebookPinterest\n\n During Oscar season people talk about art instead of trash. Art's perennial battles are contained in each Oscar ceremony: novelty (The Artist) vs. popularity (The Help). Insiders in the Hollywood ecosystem either embrace or reject the established order of things (War Horse). Tested competence (Hugo) is pitted against youthful genius (Young Adult). The debate is always lively and sorely missed throughout most of the year when we are forced to subsist on Jack and Jill-level dreck.\n\n Yet, so often during this splendid time of year, the conversation trumps the conversation piece and it becomes impossible to see Oscar contenders objectively during their time. Take 1999, a momentous year for movies that lead to some of the most contemptible wins in Oscar history. Indie turks like Alexander Payne, Paul Thomas Anderson, and David O. Russell\u2014who made a name for themselves laboring on shoestring budgets during the early '90s\u2014were given studio backing, bona-fide stars, and just enough license to ensure their scripts wouldn't be nitpicked to the point of banality. This was the year Fight Club, The Matrix, Three Kings, Office Space, Being John Malkovich, Election, Magnolia, and South Park: Bigger, Longer and Uncut were released. A new aesthetic and intellectual order was gelling, one that would later come to define '90s cinema: a mini-golden age, when today's best working directors and writers were actively demolishing the old guard by bucking middlebrow, feel-good formulas in favor of dark, irony-laden, sometimes mind-bending, and sinister narratives that pulsated with equal parts exuberance and disenchantment.\n\n With the exception of The Matrix sweeping the special effects trophies, these films were nearly invisible at the Oscars. The five contenders for best picture were The Green Mile (total gasbag), The Insider (admirable), The Sixth Sense (no), The Cider House Rules (never), and American Beauty. The most prestigious prizes\u2014Best Director, Best Actor, Best Screenplay, Best Picture\u2014all went to American Beauty. It's not a tremendous shock, of course, that the Academy would pick a mediocre movie as the Best Picture of the year\u2014this happens all the time. What is downright bewildering is how often American Beauty was identified as instant canon, an unflinching satire of American dysfunction in Clintonian times, and the piercing cultural coda for an angst-filled decade.\n\n I can think of few other films that struck such awe, and now inspire such vitriol. Unlike other contrived winners, like, say, Crash, whose repugnant qualities are immediately apparent, American Beauty's badness, its slickness, its insistence on its own profundity, was enough to bamboozle many of us as teenagers. I believe it's one of the earliest firsthand experiences my generation had with changing our minds about a movie we loved.\n\n At first blush, American Beauty seemed grand, dark, and subversive (especially to the angst-riddled mind of a high school sophomore not old enough to buy tickets for R-rated movies). The raciness of the opening scene\u2014a found-footage camcorder clip of Jane (a pallid Thora Birch), reclining on a bed in post-sex flush, telling the camera that she wished her dad wasn't a \"horny geek boy\" and \"doesn't deserve to live\"\u2014was enough to hook right into a swirling teenage psyche. The movie's themes pander directly to the narcissism of the young\u2014libidinous individualism, the triumph of youth over cynicism, the beauty of ordinary things (i.e. dead birds, plastic bags) over empty materialism. We responded naively and passionately\u2014the desired effect. But we were just kids! What is so confounding now about American Beauty is how adults endorsed such juvenilia.\n\n The New York Post called it \"a flat-out masterpiece\" and \"an all-time classic.\" According to Andrew Sarris at the New York Observer, American Beauty was \"brilliantly acted, written, and directed.\" Variety's Todd McCarthy predicted that the movie would do \"exceedingly well to sophisticated audiences attuned to the film's caustic wit and mischievous sensibility.\" McCarthy also praised the film as \"independent minded\" and as \"a real American original.\" The Los Angeles Times's Kenneth Turan considered American Beauty's exploration of the hollow space behind the American dream as \"unsettling, unnerving, undefinable,\" adding it was, \"one hell of a movie.\" Writing for the New York Times, Janet Maslin applauded director Sam Mendes for \"beautifully\" crafting a movie whose \"gravity\" matched its \"evil zest.\" Maslin also says: \"As these characters struggle viciously\u2014and hilariously\u2014to escape the middle-class doldrums, the film also evinces a real and ever more stirring compassion.\" Shortly after the film's release, the Boston Globe dubbed American Beauty a \"millennial classic.\"\n\n In 1999, Disney sank $141,000 into Oscar advertising for The Sixth Sense and a $198,000 on The Insider (which, according to rumors around town, was perfunctory because ecs at Disney didn't like The Insider very much). Warner Brothers pumped $313,000 into The Green Mile and, as always, the big spender and shameless campaigner, Harvey Weinstein's Miramax put $350,000 into The Cider House Rules. DreamWorks, by contrast, put in a whopping $744,000 in Oscar ads, including six full-page ads in Variety at $29,000 a pop. It's said that the American Beauty campaign was payback for the previous year's defeat at the hands of Miramax\u2014when Shakespeare in Love upset DreamWorks' shoo-in prestige picture, Saving Private Ryan. In terms of momentum, American Beauty dominated at the Screen Actors Guild Awards, Writer's Guild Awards, and Critic's Choice Awards. The WGA prize is particularly unsettling\u2014it beat out Three Kings, Being John Malkovich, and Magnolia\u2014because while Mendes's direction is striking, alive with lush, wide-angle shots and his playful use of theater techniques (spotlight, terrifying visual symmetry) and his ensemble cast is undoubtedly gold-plated, the writing is stomach-churningly bad.\n\n Here's where dark-lipsticked Jane confronts her dad about ogling her best friend:\n\n JANE: I've been too embarrassed to bring her over. Because of you, and the way that you behave.\n\n LESTER: What are you talking about? I've barely even spoken to her.\n\n JANE: Dad! You stare at her all the time, like you're drunk! It's disgusting!\n\n LESTER: You better watch yourself, Janie, or you're going to turn into a real bitch, just like your mother.\n\n Why the appeal of Lester and Janie's suburban gothic? Answer: William Wallace, Oskar Schindler, whatever Kate and Leo's names were in Titanic. American Beauty was the first non-epic/historical movie to win a Best Picture Oscar in nine years (all costumes since 1991's Silence of the Lambs win). Its focus is on a modern dysfunctional family, rather than gorgeous people peacocking in period garb\u2014though looking back, it is a bit of a schlock costume drama for the late '90s, no? There's Annette Bening as the castrating bitch in a proto-Kate Gosselin severe cropcut, outfitted in a career-friendly Ann Taylor skirt and gray blazer. And Chris Cooper, as the homophobe marine/secret queen in his earnest crewcut and high-waisted pants. Between them, it seemed the most artful incarnation of a year dominated by an empire's discontents. In Fight Club, Office Space, and American Beauty the main characters tell their bosses to fuck off, but they remain on the payroll. Lester, played by Kevin Spacey, has a much broader appeal than Tyler Durden or Peter Gibbons. Nevertheless, even those of us who were enchanted by the slacker ethos and anti-hero narrative then, know better now. Dare I say, popular consensus, among '80s babies, is that American Beauty is a bad movie. This is why:\n\n It's a pitifully pre-9/11 movie: We were prosperous! There's no war! We have a good economy! Yet we are still sad! Being unable to love someone more than yourself is the central theme of the film, but given the glibness with which it's handled, it seems petty. The angst that drives American Beauty is three decades too late. Peter Rainer, one of the only dissenting voices amidst the Oscar lovefest, wrote in New York Magazine, \"Moviemakers who feel betrayed by the cheery sitcoms of their adolescence can now take it out on all the rest of us and, as a bonus, get points for profundity too.\" He goes on:\n\n \"There's something else afoot in American Beauty. Lester is not only the anti-Ozzie Nelson, he's also a counterculture washout who smoked dope and partied in the '60s and now has nothing to show for it. Why should we care about him? What ideals did he leave behind? We're never really told. The filmmakers apparently don't feel the need to fill out Lester's character; it's as if he were fated to become a drone by the country's straitjacket culture.\"\n\n Today we have the anxiety of existing in the twilight of an empire, where the longstanding edifices of authority are disintegrating and there's a potent fear that we will be the transitional (or sacrificial) generation that gets lost in the din. It may all prove to be better for those who came before us and those who will be here after, but those of us who were born between Apocalypse Now and Wall Street seem to be in a bit of a bind. There is no sense of that coming dread in American Beauty\u2014it's static; a silent groan about the excesses of comfort. Whereas Fight Club, Three Kings, eXistenZ, and others embodied a looming paranoia and diminution that feels steady today. (I mean, did you see The Dark Knight Rises trailer for chrissake?). It feels impossible to go to American Beauty, now, as an adult, and find anything but a nasty, patronizing movie that tries to spin baby boomer disillusionment into universal themes.\n\n Sam Mendes proved himself a hack willing to offset the weakness of a script with overwrought style. He also refuses, or perhaps encourages, the worst excesses in his actors. A performance in a Mendes movie is a needlessly high-decibel affair that might give you the sensation of satire\u2014its actually just hammy bluster. Spacey, with his dry line readings\u2014who always gives the sense that he is indeed smarter than the character he's playing\u2014trotted out the same tricks in a string of garbage Oscar bait after his Best Actor win. Writer Alan Ball landed where he belongs\u2014writing a campy, hypersed TV show about vampires.\n\n We can be thankful to American Beauty for one thing, though: sharpening our senses. After all, one of the best parts of growing up is developing a bullshit detector; learning that our own sensibilities as moviegoers evolve. People will repeatedly return to the formative movies of their youth with the ability to see the flaws and anachronisms, but still find the experience invigorating. There are some movies that quaintly don't hold up, but retain their endearing qualities. Like, say, Beetlejuice. Then there are movies that betray, manipulate, and cheat you.\n\n At the end of American Beauty, after his maniac neighbor has murdered Lester, the camera soars above the nameless suburb, as Lester serenely narrates:\n\n ...I can't feel anything\n\n but gratitude for every\n\n single moment of my\n\n stupid little life...\n\n You have no idea what I'm\n\n talking about, I'm sure.\n\n But don't worry...\n\n FADE TO BLACK.\n\n You will someday.\n\n It's one thing when a movie is fun trash. It's quite another when trash totters around calling itself art and insists that you agree. The older I get, the more I find myself asking, \"What do they take me for?\" Now I yell at my TV when movies like American Beauty take top prize, because good heavens, that plastic bag speech. How could we have been so blind! We were young\u2014what was everyone else's excuse?"^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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