It is the distant promise

I've never watched an award show, nor have I really paid attention to who has won awards on these shows, but tonight I asked Google News how many Oscars Hugo just won. (It turns out the answer is five.) I did this because, back in December, I actually saw Hugo, and I was... a weird mix of underwhelmed and perplexed.

I won't say that I had a bad time watching Hugo, because I went with cislyn and the theater was completely empty after one other person walked out, so we had fun laughing at it. But it was not the "children's fantasy" it was billed as and that all its advertising and 3D (thankfully not at that showing) would imply. The robot was an old drawing automaton, not a prototype AI made by a mad scientist, and the chance to use Thomas Edison as the film's villain was completely wasted. Instead it was basically a history of film lecture wrapped in a laughably cheesy story about precocious children cheering up an old filmmaker.

Big deal, I know; so I saw a movie based on astonishingly inaccurate assumptions about its subject matter. Afterwards, though, I read some reviews, thinking I should have done a bit more research, but, no, not only was it universally beloved, every critic seemed to think it worth recommending to everyone. And then it was nominated for, what, eleven Oscars? I think this bit from the A.V. Club's best films of 2011 list captures what's going on there:

Once upon a time there was a lonely kid who discovered a sense of purpose and a makeshift family when he began to study the history and craft of cinema. That describes the hero of Hugo—an orphan who lives in a Paris train station in the ’30s—and it describes the film’s director, Martin Scorsese, who spent much of his youth in movie theaters or watching films on TV because he was too sickly to play outside.

Generalize that a bit further, whichever of you seven authors of this list wrote that sentence, because it describes basically everyone involved in the creation and serious criticism of film. This is a movie that is catering to a very small audience, but, because of which audience it is, it ended up with a very famous director, full of big actors, filmed in 3D, sold as a beloved children's classic in the making, and lauded by critics. Even the one negative review I encountered - while I enjoyed its takedown of the "highly contrived, maudlin story" - seems oblivious to the fact that feeling like "a heady compression of [your] History Of Film 101 class in college" does not imply universal appeal.

It isn't that I have a problem with creators of X making X specifically for each other and for other X nerds. I kind of have a history of awful analogies, but imagine a point-and-click adventure game starring an elderly Pac-Man who must reconcile with his family while dodging the ghosts of his past. That sounds potentially amazing, right? I know I'd give it a try, if I could. But I don't think anyone would give this game a multi-million dollar budget, make a PC version that pushes this year's highest-end graphics cards to their limits, and precede the game's release with a massive advertising campaign full of tie-ins with popular snacks. That would be silly. (But please do not read this as an endorsement of how the video game industry makes decisions.) In the case of Hugo and the movie industry, though, we have a bubble of opinion large enough that no one has to realize how silly and pandering they are being.

Maybe this all would not have surprised me if I'd been more familiar with those movies that are called "Oscar bait" - although I haven't heard that term applied in this case, nor do I recall other prestige films being made in 3D. In any case, though, the whole experience was oddly liberating. My knowledge of popular culture has always been extremely full of holes, especially when it comes to movies, and movies are also a topic on which many serious people have serious opinions. But, you know, if they can pretty much all be so blatantly wrong in this case, maybe they they can be wrong in other cases as well. Maybe I can feel a bit less uncultured for not being a film nerd.

Wow, what a ridiculous first post of the new year. And what a ridiculously long time it's taken me to get around to posting something. Hello, 2012!