Every couple of years, Will Smith looks at an empty place on
his mantle and decides that he wants to fill that space with an Oscar. With
that in mind, he goes into full-blown Oscar bait mode and stars in a vehicle
meant to give him that acclaim. Unfortunately, up until this point, it hasn’t
worked out for him yet. He’s gotten a couple of nominations for Best Actor,
most recently in 2006 with The Pursuit Of Happiness, but he has yet to win one.
Given the whole media furore over Leonardo DiCaprio’s similar position until
his inevitable win for The Revenant, I don’t hold much stock in this need for
this particular brand of validation, but nevertheless, he ends up bringing this
side of himself to the screen every so often… with very little success, even
ignoring the obvious intent behind it all.
I personally have a liking for some of his works in this style, like Seven Pounds and even last year’s Concussion, but there’s a very deliberate and manipulative air to most of them that ultimately make them fall short of their lofty ambitions. Then again, this is something that befalls an awful lot of Oscar hopefuls: They spend so much time trying to tap into some form of emotional complexity that the Academy loves so much, but they don’t spend enough taking a step back and realizing how those emotions are being presented to us and how insensitive it can get. And oh boy, nothing in recent memory embodies the term “insensitive” quite like today’s film.
I personally have a liking for some of his works in this style, like Seven Pounds and even last year’s Concussion, but there’s a very deliberate and manipulative air to most of them that ultimately make them fall short of their lofty ambitions. Then again, this is something that befalls an awful lot of Oscar hopefuls: They spend so much time trying to tap into some form of emotional complexity that the Academy loves so much, but they don’t spend enough taking a step back and realizing how those emotions are being presented to us and how insensitive it can get. And oh boy, nothing in recent memory embodies the term “insensitive” quite like today’s film.
