We got home last night at 9:30, just in time to see my three favorite parts of the Academy Awards: Best Live Action Short, In Memoriam, and Best Foreign Film.
This meant that my surprise and outrage at an undeserving winner came before most people’s. I Am Not a Robot was, in my opinion, the weakest of this year’s shorts, a slight story that starts out with promise – a woman unsuccessfully clicking the “I am not a robot” box on her computer screen – and then fizzles into pointless absurdity.
I have not yet seen any of the foreign films that were nominated, though, because I love Iranian cinema, and know that The Seed of the Sacred Fig was filmed in secret in Tehran, with great risk to the cast and crew (many of whom now live abroad), I was pulling for it. But I was happy for the Brazilians.
I love seeing the dead remembered – CBS Sunday Morning now pays homage to the recently departed every week – and there’s something about seeing actors, pictured in their celebrated roles, that’s beautifully uplifting: the realization that, through their movies, they will live on. It is the evening's greatest demonstration of the magic of cinema.
