Is ‘Birdman’ The First Best Picture Winner That So Clearly Hates Its Own Audience?

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Last night, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance) (which I shall refer to as simply Birdman, because I refuse to copy and paste that subtitle over and over again) picked up the 87th Academy Award for Best Picture, surprising all of us who assumed that a win for Richard Linklater’s Boyhood was a sure thing. Both of those pictures employ what could be described (possibly by a disgruntled American Sniper fan) as a filmmaking gimmick, with Boyhood being shot over a twelve-year period and Birdman edited in a way to suggest it was one, long take. That dazzling editing trick is just the tip of the artistically dishonest iceberg that is Alejandro González Iñárritu‘s showbiz satire.

The thing about Birdman is that it isn’t a complete garbage bag of a Best Picture winner, although it’s certainly a divisive one. To focus on its positives, one only has to look at one person: Michael Keaton. Keaton, whose portrayal of the washed-up actor Riggan Thomson, was incredible in the film, and not just because the role seemed so on-the-nose considering the blurry parallels between his own career and his character’s fictional one. They both came to fame playing superheroes, and they both fell from the limelight when their big-budget franchises ended. That’s where the comparisons end, we assume — unless Keaton is, in fact, haunted by the image of his version of Batman in between telekinetic exercises. (In my perfect world, Keaton is actually haunted by his clones from Multiplicity.)

Keaton’s fellow Oscar-nominated cast mates Emma Stone and Edward Norton, who play his daughter and a difficult actor, respectively, also shine in the film, with both of their characters serving as philosophical obstacles in Thomson’s artistic journey to bring Raymond Carver’s classic short story “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love” to the New York stage (and, in turn, revamp his career as a legitimate actor). Thomson is more dedicated to the work of reestablishing himself than he is the artistic pursuit, but the movie tries desperately hard to make his struggle to be worthy of merit — even though anyone can see he’s basically just rebranding himself, and failing to do so.

And that’s the thing: Riggan Thomson is not an artist — he’s a failed artist. He’s a Hollywood actor who swoops over to New York in order to find some validation in the applause from a Broadway audience, performing triple duty by starring in, writing, and directing his first Broadway play. Which would never happen in a million years, by the way, but that’s just me being pedantic. It is nearly impossible for me to avoid calling out the numerous errors about how New York theater works, and this is coming from someone who knows about it only from seeing many shows and following the bare minimum of theater news. It’s unfortunate that Iñárritu and his writing partners proved themselves so obviously to be tourists, who, like Thomson, are out of their element but are still rewarded for the bare-bones attempt at getting it right. By the time the film introduces the steely, cruel, and bitter New York Times theater critic (played, naturally, with perfection by Lindsay Duncan), I was bored and tired of the movie, and I felt like everything she said in her monologue about Thomson’s sad efforts to establish himself as a true artist on stage were very applicable to the film itself. And then Thomson calls her the failed artist, and that’s when I realized what this movie actually is: a sophomoric attempt to create a black-and-white look at those who make art and those who consume it. Guess which ones are better humans, and which ones are complete monsters?

I mean, that’s bullshit, to be quite clear, and I recognize that I’m falling into the trap that Birdman creates by defending the act of criticism as, in fact, an artistic pursuit. There’s a difference between leaving one-star Netflix reviews and film criticism, but in Birdman‘s (and Iñárritu’s) eyes, they’re one and the same. Which is too bad, really, because the overwrought and over-directed film could have been a pretty good backstage comedy if it weren’t so muddled with tone-deaf satirical elements about artistic integrity and the rapidly changing, ego-focused world we live in thanks to social media. (God forbid people express themselves through Twitter rather than, say, through multi-million dollar film projects.)

And that’s why, save for Emmanuel Lubezki’s win for his gorgeous cinematography, all of Birdman‘s Oscars seem undeserved. It wasn’t the great writing that elevated the already dated script; it was the actors who made the absolute very best of ridiculous commentary on social media, fame, and Ronald Barthes strewn about in a script written by four men. Iñárritu’s direction was hardly the best of the year, though it certainly was the most direction of the year. And Best Picture? Well, the Academy has a tendency to give that to perplexingly mediocre films, and at the end of the day it doesn’t matter. But the ultimate problem with Birdman isn’t that it’s a bad movie; it isn’t, at least not completely. But its sour, cynical view of its own audience doesn’t sit well with me, especially when its audience doesn’t seem to recognize how much this movie hates them — and how seriously it takes itself, as if it’s reinventing a form rather than copying bits and pieces of great films that came before it, ranging from All About Eve to All That Jazz to Opening Night. It has its moments, but something tells me that in ten years we’ll remember this as the movie that proved Batman could act and, honestly, little more.

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Photos: Everett Collection