Somewhat annoyingly often, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences gets it wrong.
There have been a lot of Oscar snubs over the years. This isn’t surprising, considering the Academy Awards has existed for almost a century. Some of the Academy’s choices have been odd, but understandable. Take a year like 1994, for example. Widely regarded as one of the best movie years ever, the Best Picture nominees included Pulp Fiction, The Shawshank Redemption, and Forrest Gump (which ultimately won). If it were only Pulp or Shawshank in the category, they each very likely would have won. But 1994 was ridiculous from a quality standpoint, and only one film could win Best Picture. Did Gump deserve it? It’s very debatable (I’d say Pulp is the best of the three), but it’s not hard to understand why Academy voters went with the now-beloved Gump.
Other whiffs by the Academy, however, are totally baffling and borderline unforgivable. Did you know Al Pacino didn’t win an Oscar for either of the first two Godfather movies? Is that not the most insane thing you’ve ever heard?! Denzel Washington was shut out for his performance in Malcolm X. I mean…what? How? The list goes on: Alfred Hitchcock and Stanley Kubrick never took home a major Academy Award. Goodfellas, Brokeback Mountain, Citizen Kane, E.T. The Extra Terrestrial, Do the Right Thing, The Social Network…some of the greatest, most important films ever made, and none of them won Best Picture. Hindsight is 20/20, of course, and I think given the chance, the Academy would choose to recognize some of the films it didn’t before. But man, some of its misses are really rough.
Look, winning awards almost certainly isn’t (or at least probably shouldn’t be) a filmmaker’s primary focus. But their achievements deserve recognition, and although cinema is subjective, some films are very obviously excellent, and it’s frustrating to see them not get their flowers.
I have no idea how Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 dystopian action thriller Children of Men didn’t take home a single Academy Award. It was nominated for a criminally low three awards at the 2007 Oscars, getting nods for cinematography (which we will talk about shortly), adapted screenplay, and film editing. The movie I wrote about in a recent column, The Departed, took home Best Picture (somehow Martin Scorsese’s first and only Oscar, another perplexing bit of Oscars lore), but Children of Men not making the cut in the category is bonkers. Now, it’s worth noting that the Oscars allowed only five Best Picture nominees back then; with 10 films now nominated each year, Children of Men would almost certainly be a lock for a nomination. Yet, it remains ludicrous that Cuarón and company went home empty-handed.
Furthermore, the movie doesn’t seem to have that large of a cultural footprint, which is a massive collective “L” on our part as the general movie-going public. Children of Men is a masterpiece, and it absolutely deserves a place among the most revered post-2000 films.
Children of Men is based on P. D. James’ 1992 novel of the same name and takes place in the United Kingdom in 2027. At the start of the film, women have been infertile for 20 years, and society has all but collapsed. With humans facing the grim reality of their impending extinction, wars have broken out, and a global depression has set in. London is essentially a police state; refugees flee to the city, only to be detained, deported, and even executed in government-run concentration camps.
Theo Faron (Clive Owen) was an activist at the outset of the chaos, but he’s given that up for a bureaucratic job. One day, he’s kidnapped by a militant resistance group called The Fishes. His estranged ex-wife, Julian (the great Julianne Moore) is the leader of the group, and she offers Theo money to obtain transit papers for a young woman named Kee, which would allow her to travel to the coast. Theo ultimately pulls this off by asking for a favor from his cousin, an influential government worker. Theo can only get his hands on papers that would require an escort, and he agrees to do the job, for a bigger payday. Soon, Theo learns that Kee is no ordinary refugee – in fact, she just might be the key to humanity’s survival. Kee is the first pregnant woman the world has seen in two decades, and Theo is tasked with bringing her to The Human Project, an organization that could solve the infertility issue and rescue the human race from the brink – that is, if the organization exists at all.
From a filmmaking perspective, Children of Men is a miracle. On the cinematography: This is one most visually stunning films ever made. Cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki bugged out on this one, folks; the camera work is completely dazzling. Mind-blowing extended takes follow Theo and Kee as they traverse the expertly-crafted apocalyptic landscape. The still, quiet moments are equally as pummeling as the action sequences, which are executed with such virtuosity that their realism rivals all-timers like Steven Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan. One single-take sequence happens entirely in a car occupied by several people, and for years, I had absolutely no idea how in the world Cuarón and Lubezki pulled it off. A behind-the-scenes clip later lifted the veil for me, but knowing how it was done made the achievement that much more impressive. Simply put, Children of Men is one of the most spellbinding visual masterworks this side of 2001: A Space Odyssey.
Although some exposition through dialogue is necessary, Cuarón doesn’t hold your hand; instead, through brilliantly-conceived and placed graffiti and signs, you learn pretty much everything you need to know about the state of society. Advertisements for plastic surgery for “if you’re feeling old” and medications offering “happiness in a pill” and government notices calling on citizens to “report suspicious activity” can be seen plastered throughout the film, driving home the deeply desolate state of affairs. While these things might seem like simple production design choices, they convey such a sad, terrifying reality within the world of the film: People will, within a lifetime, cease to exist. It’s one thing to have the possibility of our collective fade-to-black occasionally rattle around in the darker parts of your mind, but can you imagine knowing for a fact that it’s going to be here, sooner rather than later? Many of the people who remain are desperate to grasp onto any semblance of normalcy and peace in a world that is anything but normal and peaceful, while others strive for a sense of order through oppression and violence – state-sanctioned and otherwise.
What would the world be like without children? What would happen to society if the possibility of having children disappeared? How would people react to the knowledge that they might see the end of the human race as they know it? These ideas, coupled with grey dreariness rarely brightened by anything other than intrusive fluorescent lights, make the apocalyptic world of Children of Men one of the bleakest, but most realistic and impactful, in film history.
There are aspects of this movie that are shockingly pertinent. Viewing the film through the lens of the state of the world today, and considering it takes place in 2027, makes this one of the most effective, enduring, and admittedly disturbing films of the century. Feelings of suffocating desolation and insurmountable dread brought about by the unforgiving brutality and inhumanity of government forces and surviving civilians alike are juxtaposed with the slightest glimmer of hope for the future – in this case, Kee’s pregnancy. The harsh, unyielding fight between fleeting righteous optimism and pessimistic reckless abandon being rendered with such cinematic mastery makes Children of Men as intense an emotional experience as any film ever made.
Is everything just a cosmic battle between faith and chance, as Michael Caine’s character Jasper declares in the film? Maybe. But I do believe our choices and actions can tip the scales in the favor of decency. We have agency over our lives, over the world. We can right our past wrongs, change things, make them better. But first, we have the have faith in the notion that we can, and we have to be willing to give hope a chance.
Jalen’s columns, “Movies You Gotta See” and “The Free Play,” can be found online at www.medium.com/@jalenmaki.
Follow Jalen on Letterboxd at www.letterboxd.com/jalenmaki182/ to see what he’s been watching.
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