The Best Picture That Won’t Win the Oscar for Best Picture: Drive

The Academy Awards are tonight, but I am unable to take them seriously this year. Typically, I respect the choices that are made for Oscar winners and nominees. The Academy Awards tend to actually give out awards to nominees who deserve recognition. Other award ceremonies, like the Grammys for instance, tend to focus more on the popular than the profound and moving, with good music being ignored in favor of performances by shitty pop artists (see, for example, Chris Brown’s nominations and performances at the most recent Grammys). If the Academy Awards were to mimic this, Transformers: Dark of the Moon and the Twilight movies would be generating all the attention and the awards. Thankfully, the Oscars tend to go to movies that are legitimately compelling.

However, this year I am disappointed by the glaring absence of one particular Oscar-worthy movie: Drive. Even with the Best Picture being expanded from five to ten nominations in recent years, Drive still did not make the cut in a year that didn’t see its share of particularly good movies. Drive’s absence is conspicuous and jarring. Of the movies I’ve seen that were nominated, Drive is the far superior movie. It has the artistic visuals and symbolism of Tree of Life, but unlike Tree of Life tells an engaging story that does not make you want to kill yourself out of boredom. It is as heartfelt as The Help, given its heart-rending depiction of a budding romance torn apart by violence, but perhaps lacks The Help’s ability to make white people condescendingly feel better about racism by depicting white people doing their darndest to help those black people escape racism. And while Moneyball certainly tells an engaging and entertaining story, it is too conventional to be great, and in any other year would have been seen as a good movie but hardly worthy of any sort of laudatory recognition from an award ceremony. As for the other nominees, which I have not seen, I have a hard time believing they surpass Drive’s full suite of achievements, which encompass amazing visuals, great use of sound, interesting music selections, and solid performances all around, even from the unlikely, seemingly out-of-place casting of Ryan Gosling as a violent action movie star (but whose very out-of-placeness is what makes the character work so well).

Drive is a movie that deserves to be rewatched to be appreciated. It is easy to overlook its beautiful and intriguing cinematography, as well as its symbolism of hidden, unchangeable natures permeating almost all aspects of the film. The movie can be enjoyed simply as an action thriller if you are the type of person that does not want to think too deeply about a film. But reflecting on the movie’s choices rewards the patient, yielding a treasure trove of compelling themes. To name just a few, consider the use of reflections and masks in the film (the Driver is constantly seen in mirrors and reflections, and in one memorable scene donning a mask, hiding his inner nature), the interplay of this element of a hidden nature with the movie’s own hidden nature (it is an art-house movie masquerading as a big-budget, 80s style action movie), the ideas of unchangeable natures and self-destruction (the parable of the scorpion and the frog, the shark being a bad guy “because he’s a shark”), symbols of cleanliness versus dirtiness (the increasingly dirtied jacket, the dirty hands), and so on. There is a rich vein of symbolism running throughout this movie. And what little dialogue there is courses with meaning, something that is more appreciated on a second viewing (e.g., the theme of crime permeating and infecting all aspects of life, even family life, when Standard says “Wow, so it was illegal?” when his wife reveals she was 17 when they met). The visuals are beautiful and stunning, from the ending’s first-person view out the car’s windshield, Driver’s eyes seen in the rear-view mirror in flashes, his hand shining dark red with blood in the intermittent flashes of light, to the way the lights dim as Driver kisses Irene on the elevator in a long slow-motion effect, only to have time speed up to real-time as he fights the hitman on the elevator with him and stomps on his head (an odd reversal of the use of slow-motion that focused on the kissing rather than the fighting). And who can forget the sounds from this film: the brooding electronic music in Drive’s opening scene, the amazing 80s-style credit music, the sound of Driver’s leather driving gloves crunching as he makes a fist, the soft squish of a caved-in skull being stomped.

But enough about Drive. If you didn’t enjoy Drive, or liked it but don’t understand why it was great, then you should probably read my review. Or just take my word that it is a great film. I don’t mind so much that Drive’s greatness could be overlooked. What bothers me, however, is that the movies that are nominated in its place are simply not that good, at least in comparison with Drive. Had better movies taken their place, the Academy could be forgiven, but with this crop of so-so movies in a year that didn’t generate many great films, the fact that Drive is not nominated almost makes me angry enough to smash Oscar’s bald golden head with powerful stomps in a vicious rage while on a descending elevator.

Tree of Life, for example, is beautiful like an abstract crystalline figure—it is something you can admire from a distance but too fragile to handle, something that seems so precarious that it could break simply by looking at it askance, that could be marveled at for a few moments but anything extending beyond a few minutes, let alone 139 minutes, would strain its capacities to induce enjoyment. I admit to taking nothing from this movie aside from a vague memory of children walking near wheat fields while someone hoarsely whispered barely audible non-sequiturs. The movie simply wasn’t enjoyable. No doubt it has a lot to say and also contains a wealth of symbolism, but the movie lacks any reason to try to pursue understanding that symbolism. It does not seem to tell an interesting story, and if it does, its interestingness is very well hidden. On the spectrum of artfulness, it is definitely on the extremes of artfulness, but it makes the mistake of seeing artistic integrity as totally removed from and incompatible with plot development or any sort of enjoyment. It is a movie that is too beautiful to be enjoyed, for fear that you will drop it and shatter it.

On the other hand, Moneyball, while a good, engaging film, simply lacks anything that makes it stand out from other good movies. It lacks greatness. Brad Pitt, and especially the surprising Jonah Hill, turn in good performances, but there is nothing particularly challenging about these roles. Simply put, there doesn’t seem to be anything unique here, or anything that could generate an interesting conversation about film (though it certainly allows for plenty of interesting conversation about baseball and economic undervaluation). Drive, on the other hand, is the sort of movie that produces all sorts of conversation-starters (Why is he so quiet? Why does he wear the mask? Why is he driving off at the end and not going to a hospital? What’s with the 80s aesthetic in a movie set in the present?), and as I’ve already indicated it has many markers of greatness. The Help suffers from the same problem as Moneyball. It is a good film, but there is nothing unique or great in it.

Of the movies I haven’t seen, The Artist appears to be the most interesting. A silent film released in 2011 is certainly an odd choice. But if we’re going to award a film for being silent, then Drive deserved at least a cursory nomination as well, as its introverted protagonist is every bit as silent as The Artist.