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Here is Oscars Predictions – Why 1917 should win the Best Picture ?
Fledgling soldiers, front line. No one’s land. Dead horse, falling plane, accidental death, crying baby, painful sleep, cold river, incredible salvation.
The whole picture is easily described by a set of lyrical phrases.
Sam Mendes film “1917” goes to the main Oscar. In fact, his only competitor, the Korean painting “Parasites”, is slightly behind in the traditional award race.
At least because American academics need to read subtitles to watch it, and as you know, they are not very accustomed to reading, and this is harder than watching.
In turn, the military drama directed by Sam Mendes would not have lost anything if all the words had been removed from it: a couple of replicas necessary for understanding the plot are replaced without any problems with captions, as in a silent movie.
This laconic ism does not make the picture worse, on the contrary. “1917” is a simple film and that is precisely why it strikes the target.
Oscars Predictions Why 1917 should win the Best Picture
One shot
The tape is grand in scale. The costume extras in it are hundreds, if not thousands of people. In general, on the set of “1917”, as in a real army, there was no place and time for improvisations.
For the sake of the picture, they built grandiose scenery (hectares felt like hectares of square), filled it with sights, laid out the machinery in the corners, which jumps out or falls from heaven at the right moment, like a plane suddenly shot down in one of the most visually saturated scenes. Another such scene is the grand run of one of the heroes under the whistle of bombs, highlighting bizarre and frightening shadows around him – the achievement of camera skill.
Seventy-year-old British cameraman Roger Deakins received his first Oscar in 2018 after already 13 unsuccessful nominations in a row and now has every chance of another completely deserved statuette on the shelf.
The entire film is a reminder to professionals what a movie camera is capable of in the right hands. Given how complicated the scenes are here, it seems almost unbelievable that Deakins manages to shoot most of the tape in one shot.
War to end all wars
The plot is simple, as is the message of the whole picture. Two soldiers are ordered to travel several kilometers along the front line to convey to another regiment an important order to cancel the planned attack.
The thought is read instantly: like any decent war film, “1917” is also anti-war (paradox). To prevent a war, in this case, one of the attacks that, according to intelligence, is waiting for an ambush, and saving thousands of lives can only be done by sacrificing two innocent people.
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As you can see, unlike many other similar films, in “1917” the pacifist pathos is not booming, without extra squeezed tears. It is also important that the story is not about the Second World War, more familiar to us from domestic paintings, but about the First.
By the way, in Britain they came up with the aphorism “War to end all wars” about it. The longer the meaningless meat grinder lasted (as it turned out later, the next one), the sadder this idealistic characteristic sounded.
About the same thing, about the incorrectness of any war, even for the sake of the most good goals, “1917” speaks at every single moment, thanks to every artistic decision made. One of the heroes exchanged his medal for a bottle of wine from a random Frenchman – “I wanted to drink”: honorable trinkets do not change anything for a person whose only desire is to return home to his relatives. Etc.
Oscars Predictions Why 1917 should win the Best Picture
Gotta go and watch
Another question is that “1917”, as technically ideal film incarnation of the front-line weld, may seem somewhat insensitive to the domestic audience. For them, Mendes will be like a schoolboy who lingers on theory and does not go on to practice in time.
A comparison with the great film “Cranes are flying” begs, especially since there is also a brilliant camera work by Sergei Urusevsky and the comparison is not in favor of the British picture. “1917” does not hit receptors, such as “Go and See” by Elem Klimov or the worst Polish “Painted Bird” (it was recently shown in Moscow). All this has already been seen more than once.
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And yet it doesn’t matter. The journey of two young soldiers, hedgehogs in the front fog (they even meet a horse, albeit dead, but still it looks like a reference to the animated masterpiece of Yuri Norshtein), those who do not get into what is happening to the very core of their souls will also like it.
In the end, for the sake of this, a movie is needed – in order to once predictably impress with thoughtfulness, drag an unsuspecting person sitting in the comfort of the viewer through the carefully piled front-line mud, to knock the dead ground killed by the war from under him.
In 2020, this is a sufficient level for the Oscar, which is generally more commonly awarded films universally understood than out of the ordinary. This is neither good nor bad, it just is. And certainly “1917” is no reason to be upset: on the contrary, the picture still needs to be perceived as a miracle and a holiday of cinematography.
In the meantime, there is something to perceive so, while such works are published, which means that any feats committed in any war were not in vain.
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