The Theory Of Everything – Memphis Flyer

It’s time for the annual ritual of complaining about the Oscar nominations, and I’m here to help. Or at least, throw fuel on the fire.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

2014 was a great year for movies. The two frontrunners, Birdman and Boyhood, both of which have nine nominations, are great movies, but to my mind, the Best Picture category is wide open. The Grand Budapest Hotel and Selma are both equal to the two frontrunners, and since Clint Eastwood has been an increasingly inexplicable perineal Oscar favorite in the twenty-first century, American Sniper could be a surprise winner. If you held a gun to my head, I would probably go with The Grand Budapest Hotel as best picture from the choices given, but I would be happy with any of the top four.

[jump]

Boyhood

To me, the Best Director category is clear: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an unprecedented directorial achievement. Movies can be derailed by tiny choices early in the production, and since Linklater’s Boyhood shoot stretched over 12 years, he had plenty of opportunity to mess up, but turned instead a perfect movie. The biggest omission from the Best Director category is Ava DuVernay for Selma, which is just inexcusable, especially when Bennett Miller is nominated for the mediocre morass that is Foxcatcher.

Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything

The Best Actor category also has two inexcusable snubs: First is John Lithgow’s career high performance in Ira Sach’s Love Is Strange. I think Love Is Strange should have been in the running for all of the top-line awards, but Lithgow, Alfred Molina, and Marissa Tormei’s performances in the film were simply unequalled this year. The second, and perhaps more glaring, snub is David Oyelowo, who is exceptional in a really difficult role as Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Steve Carrel’s name recognition got him a nomination, but his performance in Foxcatcher is a one-note disappointment. Among the nominees, I’ll take Eddie Remayne’s perfectly calibrated, physically demanding turn as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything.

Reese Witherspoon in Wild

Without Tormei in the Leading Actress category, it’s going to come down to between Reese Witherspoon in Wild and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl. Both are fine performances, but I’ll have to go with the empathetic naturalism of Witherspoon.

Michael Keaton and Ed Norton in Birdman

My knee-jerk pick in the Actor in a Supporting Role is Ethan Hawke in Boyhood, but all of the nominees seem strong. Mark Ruffalo was the best thing about Foxcatcher, and if you watched the trailers for Whiplash, J.K. Simmons seemed like the lead actor, so he’s got a good shot. And don’t count out Ed Norton if a Birdman wave builds.

Patricia Arquette in Boyhood

Suporting Actress, however, should be a runaway for Patricia Arquette, who lays it all out there in Boyhood. Emma Stone greatly exceeded my expectations for her in Birdman, but this is Arquette’s trophy.

Inherent Vice

The screenplay categories are also pretty clear for me. Original Screenplay should go to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is as tight and original piece of screenwriting as Wes Anderson has ever done. My Adapted Screenplay pick is Inherent Vice for pulling off the seemingly impossible task of adapting Thomas Pynchon’s prose. But it probably won’t win, because it has divided audiences so much, so this category is wide open. I wouldn’t be surprised if American Sniper got it, because the book it was based on has been extremely popular. I was surprised that Gone Girl didn’t get nominated, but the category is admittedly pretty stacked.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

I was stunned to see The Lego Movie snubbed in the Animated Feature category, but directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller should console themselves by rolling around in their giant piles of money. In the Editing category, Boyhood is the clear winner for the effortlessly clear and inventive way it strung together 12 years of one boy’s life. The visual effects category, however, is wide open. My pick is the photorealistic Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, but Guardians of the Galaxy and Interstellar are both very strong contenders, and Magneto lifting RFK Stadium with his mind in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is among the year’s indelible images.

In sum, the Oscars have given us lots of stuff to argue about this year—which is pretty much their function, right?

Even in a century of scientist heroes that includes Einstein, Salk, and Bohr, Stephen Hawking stands out. He was the first to try to reconcile the very large world of relativity with the very small world of quantum mechanics. He helped prove that black holes exist, then proved that even they don’t last forever. He became a popularizer of science, writing a bestselling book that introduced many to the science of time. And, of course, he did it all while fighting Lou Gehrig’s Disease, doing his most profound work as a public figure confined to an electric wheelchair and communicating with the world through a computer voice.

The Theory of Everything is based on a memoir by Hawking’s first wife, Jane Wilde, that attempts to look behind the myth and reveal the real man living behind the voice synth. It opens with a bike ride through Cambridge in 1963, where Hawking (Eddie Redmayne) is a promising, if somewhat scatterbrained, doctoral candidate in astrophysics and cosmology, which he defines as “a kind of religion for intelligent atheists.” When he’s not turning in impossibly elegant mathematical solutions written on the back of train schedules, he does what all of the other young scholars do: awkwardly chase girls. He meets Jane (Felicity Jones) at a house party and is immediately enchanted; but in a bit of foreshadowing of their eventual relationship, she has to give him her number, because she knows he would have asked if he had thought about it.

Felicity Jones and Eddie Redmayne

Just as Hawking is formulating his first big ideas that would earn him his doctorate, he is diagnosed with motor neuron disease and given two years to live. Jane insists they marry anyway, and she puts her own studies on hold to minister to him while he works on his world-changing science.

Directed by James Marsh, who won an Oscar for his 2009 documentary Man on Wire, The Theory of Everything resembles Walk the Line, in that it tries to illuminate the character of a “great man” through the lens of his great love. Hawking’s accomplishments are complex equations written on blackboard, and thus not as cinematic as Johnny Cash playing Folsom Prison. But like Walk the Line‘s Joaquin Phoenix and Reese Witherspoon, this movie soars on a pair of strong lead performances. Jones is self-possessed and compassionate as Jane, who bears the burden of caring for her husband and their three children until the cracks begin to show. Redmayne’s physically demanding performance as Hawking brings to mind Daniel Day-Lewis’ Oscar winning turn in My Left Foot. The film is at its best in the early going, as the lovers move through sun dappled English campuses with Hawking’s disease creeping up behind them, but it bogs down in the middle with some plodding characterization and the difficulties of explaining the complex science that is its subject’s life’s work. But The Theory of Everything ultimately wants to live in the heart and not the mind, and in that, it succeeds admirably.