Racking Focus

'Wings' may have won the "Best Picture" Academy Award in 1929 but it wasn't the only film to do so.

The general consensus for this year’s Academy Awards is that the “Best Picture” category boils down to two films – Avatar and The Hurt Locker. Among that consensus there’s a great many people who feel The Hurt Locker will win; but if you’re curious to know how the Academy will vote look no further than the 1929 and 1930 Academy Awards ceremonies.

That first ceremony saw two Best Picture awards handed out – one to William Wellman’s Wings for “Best Picture, Production” and one for F.W. Murnau’s Sunrise for “Best Picture, Unique and Artistic Production.” The Academy’s original goal was to honor the mainstream, popular films that did well at the box office and the smaller, more experimental films that received less coverage but played just as important a role in the development of the medium. The practice of handing out two Best Picture awards was quickly done away with and by the following year the voters chose to acknowledge just one film as “Best Picture” – MGM’s The Broadway Melody.

One could point to the fact that Wellman was “one of Hollywood’s” while Murnau was a foreigner in the Academy’s subsequent decision in 1930, choosing to recognize their own as opposed to outsiders, but the results of future awards ceremonies would point towards a favoring of middlebrow films with wide popularity over more refined films with more of a niche audience.

Ironic that this year marks the first time the Academy has expanded their Best Picture category to ten nominees in what was purported to be an act of shining a light on films that may have slipped past the public’s view. While that may have been the intention it certainly wasn’t the outcome. Of the five “extra” nominees (Warner Brothers’ The Blind Side, Tristar’s District 9, Disney’s Up, Focus Features’ A Serious Man, Sony Pictures Classics’ An Education)*, three of them finished in the top 27 at the box office in 2009, with two of them finishing in the top 8. Even with the opportunity to acknowledge more innovative, limited-appeal films the Academy, once again, erred on the side of commerce and popularity.

So for those of you believing The Hurt Locker will walk away with this year’s “Best Picture” Oscar, don’t be surprised to see James Cameron up on the stage when the night wraps up. All one needs to do is look to the origins of the “Best Picture” category to see the proof.

*Determining the five “extra” nominees was done by matching up the five “Best Director” nominees with the five “Best Picture” nominees. The remaining five films are the five “extra” nominees for Best Picture. The trend for “Best Director” nominees to come from “Best Picture” nominees has been in place for decades.

There seems to be some confusion out there about what exactly is going on with the current season of LOST and the new “sideways world” that’s taking place off the island. I have no inside info but I’ll attempt to explain it from my limited understanding. Perhaps I’m right, perhaps I’m wrong. But, at least in my mind, it makes sense. Here goes ….

One of the many things that was wrong with season 5 of LOST was the opportunity the writing staff had to take their own stab at causality (with Sayid shooting young Ben Lynus) and them dodging the proverbial bullet by having him survive. Seeing their take on causality and how it would affect the world of LOST was something I had been looking forward to for quite some time. That dodging of that topic almost got me to stop watching. Almost.

Conventional thought on causality has mostly been somewhat linear (even for something as anachronistically strucutred as time travel) — something happens that changes a prior event and the permutations affect everything occurring after that event. What’s interesting about the story in LOST is that it deals so much with destiny –  a predetermined set of events that have been in motion long before they actually occur. We’ve been told (or it has been suggested) that the Oceanic 815 survivors were actually destined to be on the island. If that’s the case, there had to have been many events prior to them getting to the island that would put them in a position to be there. We’ve been seeing a large portion of these events throughout the first 5 seasons of the show, almost always told in flashback.

The extent of these events is actually somewhat mind boggling when you think about it. It’s not just the direct and immediate events that placed them on that plane in Sydney, it’s also the people that were in their lives, the people that helped those other people be in their lives, and an almost infinite list of events that would eventually cause them to be boarding that flight. If one were to get be literal about the science involved we’re actually talking about each individual person’s entire life. Every aspect of it eventually led to them crashing on the island. It’s a rather daunting concept to wrap one’s mind around but everything about quantum physics and time travel is a rather daunting concept to wrap one’s mind around.

Still with me? Good.

Now that we’ve conceded this point, let’s reexamine what we’re talking about. A hydrogen bomb was detonated at the core of the island’s immense energy, causing the island to be destroyed at a point in time long before some of the Losties were even born. Therefore, the island is no longer there for them to crash on. Their destiny (crashing on the island) now ceases to exist (the island no longer exists) and everything and everyone in their lives that was there (the flashbacks we saw in seasons 1-5) — no matter how small or insignificant those events’ and peoples’ roles may seem — are no longer needed or provided, depending on how you look at it. Therefore, an entirely new life filled with entirely new people and events have been put in motion and we’re picking those lives up at the point of the fateful crash (that now doesn’t happen).

Typically, in previous time traveling stories, the act of traveling back in time or in any way “correcting” or “altering” a chain of events has then affected everything that follows the time traveled back to or the event that has been “corrected” or “altered.” While this still holds true in the current framework of LOST, because the event that was changed was a predetermined one of destiny it has also affected things that occurred prior to the “corrected” event — in this case, the island ceases to exist. This is the reason why the lives of the Losties back in the real world seem to have different pasts than the ones that crashed on the island.

Note, this doesn’t mean that every aspect of their lives is different; Kate is still wanted for murder, Jack is still dealing with the death of his father, etc. But it explains why there is a different past that led them to each of those points. It’s actually a rather inventive and original take on the conventional time travel story.