This Week in the Death of Cinema: Spielberging!

Sometimes it feels like there’s a new article every week decrying the death of cinema. I thought about that and decided, “why not make that feeling true?” So here it is, a weekly column chronicling the slow demise of the art form we love so much.

There are few more surefire ways to know cinema has died than to look over the list of Academy Award nominations. The banality of the Academy’s selections year in and year out is shameful. This? This is what the people who make our movies think the best movies are? Please, never ever forget that The Artist won Best Picture. I would claim cinema died that day, but then remember when Crash won? Or how about Chicago? Or hey, remember A Beautiful Mind? If cinema isn’t dead already, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and sciences certainly tries its damnedest to deal the final blow every year.

This year, though, the Oscar nominations were actually kind of good. And by good, I mean largely terrible, except for a few really interesting selections. Michael Haneke is a nominee for Best Director! Soak that in. Of course, despite restoring some faith in the continued life of the seventh art, this nomination likely has everything to do with the centenarian voting bloc identifying quite strongly with watching old people dying. Still, it’s a nomination I can get behind, and that’s without having actually seen Amour.

The big nominee this year is Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln. Spielberg, of cinema-killing Jaws fame, just keeps cranking out brilliant movies. Has nobody told him he’s allowed to stop? It’s not like we deserve it. He makes it hard not to love him, but then he goes and does something like produce a Jurassic Park 4 and set a release date 18 months away with no director or cast to speak of. This isn’t as bad as that time he produced a Michael Bay movie based on a line of toys, but it’s still another nail in the coffin.

Oh, and Jurassic Park 4 will be in 3D. Good grief. When will 3D die? I thought Spielberg would be immune to this kind of crap, but apparently the lure of $3 surcharges is just too great. Even his original Jurassic Park is getting the 3D re-release treatment this year. And if that didn’t make the demise of movies clear, just remember that Top Gun is also getting a 3D re-release this year. Just imagine the volleyball scene in 3D. Good. Keep imagining it. Now weep for all that is good and pure.

The Spielberg news doesn’t end with Jurassic Park 4, though. It turns out Drew Goddard’s script for Robopocalypse wasn’t quite good enough or cheap enough to produce. Let’s parse this information. Drew Goddard, the guy who worked with Whedon and co-wrote and directed the great indie horror movie, Cabin in the Woods. He’s written some of the best TV episodes I’ve ever seen. How could this guy not have a good enough script for a movie about a robot takeover of humanity? On top of this, how have we gotten to the point where a blockbuster movie about a robot apocalypse, directed by Steven Spielberg, can be too expensive to produce? What does this say about the state of the motion picture industry?

One other bit of news that got my attention this week was the announcement that Dan Trachtenberg has been selected as the director of the graphic novel adaptation, Y: The Last Man. The graphic novel is fascinating, and it could certainly lead to a great film. Trachtenberg might have talent, but I’m bothered by how he was discovered by Hollywood. Instead of making something truly unique, he made a slickly produce fan film based on the videogame, Portal. The short itself is fine, but that someone would spend so much energy on a fan film and then use that as a calling card for getting a feature film project? We’ve entered the darkest depths of fan culture, and I’m not sure I like where this is heading. What’s next, Hollywood churning out crappy films made only to appeal to geeks? Oh wait…

Getting back to the spirit-crushing Academy Awards. This year might be a pretty interesting one for nominations, and my boy Spielberg might be nominated for some well-deserved awards, but then I see The Hobbit nominated in some technical categories and all I want to do is suffocate Academy voters with a pillow. It’s not a stretch to say that The Hobbit is emblematic of all that is wrong with the movies today.

I would get into other films I don’t think deserve of nominations—ahem, Beasts of the Southern Wild, Zero Dark Thirty, Life of Pi—but I’d probably just be making enemies. The fact of the matter is the Oscars ruin cinema. Sure, they can be good for highlighting some good films, but for the most part the whole show is back patting and politics that does a serious disservice to filmmaking as an art. You want proof of the death of cinema? Look no further than Oscar night. I mean, Jesus, those asshats couldn’t even recognize Leonardo DiCaprio’s brilliance in Django Unchained. Shameful.

Anyway, there you have the week in the death of cinema. Come back next week for more rambling on everything wrong with the state of movies.