Oscarblogging, Year the Second, Part the Fourth: Maaahhhchismo

I know, I know, I KNOW Hollywood's always been a boy's club. This year, for whatever reason, it's bugging me disproportionately.

The Departed is an excellent film. It really is. I'm by no means a Scorsese expert, but based on my viewing of this film alone I do hope he wins the Best Director Oscar, 'cause that's some bloody *masterful* work, keeping that level of depth, pace, development, visual engagement in a two-and-a-half-hour film. Matt Damon carried the whole thing off with concision and grace, I didn't quite realize Mark Wahlberg was Mark Wahlberg until the end of the film (that's a compliment), and I was quite impressed with Leonardo DiCaprio, a phrase that hasn't even entered my mind since What's Eating Gilbert Grape. (Nicholson was perfectly fine, but only in The Sopranos does the mob boss have anything really interesting or challenging to do.) I responded to the violence, which is to say, it was not nor was it intended to be desensitizing, which in a crime thriller is no small feat. Every killing mattered, had an impact on viewers (I speak as one of the most desensitized to film violence among the people I know) and characters, had both a moment of shock and a sense of inevitability to it. It's a tight script and mind-blowing editing. I like it, and I'm frustrated by how much I like it.

The only female character, using the word "character" to mean "someone in the film who actually does something in the film," is Vera Farmiga's Madolyn. Through her performance the character becomes a little bit more than the cherchez-la-femme figure, she can only push it so far. Matt Damon's character keeps his entire life from her, his social worker girlfriend-turned-wife; Leonardo DiCaprio's needs her as a nurturing, comforting resource, and that's all she's got. There are three other peripheral women—the mob boss's sexy lover, the sexy state police secretary in tight jeans, and the heavy working-class Irish aunt—but, as should be obvious from those descriptions, there's not much to them. It's a boy's club movie, a shining example of Margaret Atwood's frustrating statement, "You can have a men's novel with no women in it except possibly the landlady or the horse," a statement that one would hope had dated in the twenty years since its publication. Okay, yes, the crime and cop syndicates are men's worlds, and Scorsese is probably portraying them honestly—though in a contemporary context, might there not be a few more female players?—and I can't even pull out the truth-and-insight distinction here, as it's quite an insightful film, winding tightly and beautifully around itself and around us, its audience. But I can't shake the feeling that, no matter how much I like it, it's just another dick film. I don't like that thought any more than I like liking the movie.

The trouble, really, is of the four Best Picture nominees I've seen thus far, The Departed seems to me the most deserving of the award. As someone who admires artistry first, I want it to win; I don't want the false social consciousness that honored Crash to reward Babel, Little Miss Sunshine doesn't have the resonance it seems to think it does, and The Queen is more Mirren's virtuoso performance than anything else. (And Iwo Jima might give me even more trouble in the boys' club category.) But I don't want it to win, because I don't want to encourage the cheap imitations of it that are sure to follow (or, for that matter, that have preceded it); in the hands of a lesser director and lesser actors, it really would have just been a bunch of guys sitting around throwing testosterone at each other. Having considered this writing project a project of social criticism, this boys' club thought is certainly one I have to pursue, but I don't know if making a judgment based upon it is okay.