This is the fourth and final part of a series about films that had Oscar buzz during their years, and why they deserved such attention.
The 2013-2014 Awards Season is widely remembered for the very successful Oscar nominations morning American Hustle had (10 nominations received...) and the awful Oscar night it had (…but it went 0 for 10, ouch!). It’s also one of the first seasons where people became very conscious of Hollywood’s problem with women behind the camera and the roles they received. The lack of opportunities and recognition given to non-white filmmakers and performers was a big subject that season too. The race for Best Picture was a three-headed race between fun heist film American Hustle, the technical marvel Gravity, and the socially significant 12 Years a Slave, our eventual big prize winner.
Nebraska, Philomena, Dallas Buyers Club, Captain Phillips, The Wolf of Wall Street, and Her were the other six films nominated for Best Picture that year and were present in almost every big award ceremony, too. Critics and guilds also recognized them. I remember the acting races were done pretty early since Matthew McConaughey, Jared Leto, Cate Blanchett, and Lupita Nyong’o won almost all the major precursors such as the Golden Globes, SAG Awards, Critics' Choice, and BAFTA. Screenplays were also a done deal at some point, when Her and 12 Years a Slave kept up winning the award until Oscar night. As for the technical aspects, Gravity was the favorite by a wide margin, including the Best Director race, won easily by Mexican filmmaker, Alfonso Cuarón.
Nevertheless, there were other movies besides these nine that also got some buzz before the season began and while the season was running. Prisoners, August: Osage County, and Saving Mr. Banks quickly come to mind. Others, like Inside Llewyn Davis, take a little while to remember how close it was for them to be in the race. The thing with Inside Llewyn Davis is that, unlike many of the “Oscar bait” films released that year, this film was very anti-Oscar, although its quality was superior to many of the films nominated.
Directed and written by Ethan and Joel Coen, better known as the Coen Bros., Inside Llewyn Davis deals with the horrendous bad week our title character (played by Oscar Isaac) suffers during the Greenwich Village folk scene of the early 1960s. Based on true events, this film basically told us six years ago that you can deal with bad luck without the need of going on a killing spree before going to an interview on a late-night show and killing its host in the process. It also got to show us how a character that we somehow cheer on, is also an asshole and it makes our feelings conflict because of that. All of this is possible because the Coen Bros. know how to write a great movie, but above all, direct it. The great cast, from Isaac to Carey Mulligan, John Goodman, Justin Timberlake, and a green but great Adam Driver, are all excellent and it's their commitment that also helps elevate this film.
The Coens are accustomed to awards season love and that year was no exception, at least in the beginning. It played at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival, the New York Film Festival, and AFI Film Festival, to great acclaim. It got a Top 10 Films mention from the National Board of Review, won Movie of the Year from the AFI, won Best Film for the National Society of Film Critics, mentions and wins for Bruno Delbonnel’s camera work from LAFCA, NYFCC, NYFCO, and many other critics associations (including the BFCA Critics Choice), and also got a lot of love from Hollywood’s various guilds (ASC, ACE, CAS, MPSE, among others). It managed to get three Golden Globes nominations, including Best Actor in a Comedy or Musical and Best Motion Picture Comedy or Musical, and three BAFTA nominations, including Best Sound. Come Oscar nominations though, it only gathered two nods, one for Best Achievement in Cinematography and the other for Best Achievement in Sound Mixing.
Those two nominations were well-deserved, but this film deserved way more love. Oscar, for instance, should have won himself that year (if not him, then Leo DiCaprio for The Wolf of Wall Street). I think this film was not viewed as an awards pony because it was too complicated for some of the single-minded members of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Science. It also didn’t scream for attention because it was a movie made to tell a story (like most movies should) whether it’s awarded or not; the Coens didn’t really care. I'm glad they didn’t because Inside Llewyn Davis is one of my favorite films thanks to that natural and real feeling that makes the film so enjoyable. It also has a nice rewatch value that many of the films nominated that year don’t have and that, for me, surpasses any film that has a golden man in its trophy case. Fortunately, Inside Llewyn Davis got its deserved love in the years afterward, where people still talk about it to this day and it marked the Oscar Isaac performance that put him on the map. That’s a win.
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