Seeking refuge in festival season

There’s been much prophesying of doom among film journalists lately, with everyone from Roger Ebert to Jeff Wells harping on about an imminent cinematic dark age, brought on by mainstream audiences who prefer “G.I. Joe” to “The Hurt Locker.”

If I don’t quite share their alarm, it’s because it’s a cry that is repeated at least every other year, as we near the end of another summer stuffed with celluloid shit — that this year’s better blockbusters didn’t quite catch on to the degree of a “Dark Knight,” or (in pop-culture impact, at least) a “WALL-E,” to me suggests a return to the status quo rather than a significant dip.

Eugene Hernandez at indieWIRE shares in the general dissatisfaction with this summer’s crop — bemoaning in particular the dearth of originally-scripted hits — but hits a more upbeat note than his colleagues by painting the upcoming fall festival season as a kind of beacon of hope for serious film lovers.

This is hardly a revelatory observation: everyone and his mother knows that Venice, Telluride and Toronto unlock the gates to the Oscar-chasing prestige product that the studios carefully withhold until the leaves start yellowing. But what is a little sad, and I’m sure Hernandez knows it, is that summer ennui compels us to attach more stature to Oscar-bait than we probably should:

This weekend I finally started reading Mark Harris’ “Pictures At a Revolution.” It considers the five best picture nominees from 1967 (“Bonnie and Clyde”, “Doctor Dolittle”,  “The Graduate”, “Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner,” “In The Heat of the Night”) and how those films signaled the birth of a new Hollywood. Mainstream moviemaking rebounded bigtime. The ‘70s was a great decade for American film.

It was just two years ago that we thought we might be on the cusp of another such moment. The best picture nominations of “There Will Be Blood,” “No Country for Old Men,” “Michael Clayton,” “Atonement” and even “Juno,” seemed to signal something new. When the dust settled, however, it became clear that the economics of marketing arty movies to the mainstream was a risky proposition. Studios retreated.

2007 was a superior Best Picture vintage, I agree, but that’s not to say that all those films (or even the majority of them) marked any significant ‘moment’ in the artform. However, the collective respectability of the five films — all final-quarter releases in generally high-quality season that also delivered the festival-christened likes of “I’m Not There,” “Lust, Caution” and “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford” — came as such a relief after another indifferent summer (“The Bourne Ultimatum” and “Ratatouille” were the great redeemers that year, remember) that the list probably seemed more meaningful at the time than it really was.

As we head towards the likelihood of another Best Picture list dominated by fall and winter releases (even with ten slots to fill), I’m guessing the forthcoming prestige titles will have similar critical hopes sailing on them. That’s no reason not to look forward to the festivals — hell, I’m getting itchy with excitement about my Venice trip already — but we must be careful not to burden their selections with too much responsibility. Good films first, saviors can wait.

Read the rest of Hernandez’s thoughts here.