Rants - Little Miss Sunshine - Best Picture???

Little Miss Sunshine is a fun, harmless movie that provides some good laughs, and in the end is a perfectly satisfying comedy. It’s well acted (especially by Alan Arkin), and ends on a genuine high note making sure its funniest scene is the climax, so that the audience feels energized leaving the theatre.

I liked it, and if I was reviewing it I would probably give it *** out of 4 stars. I wasn’t onboard with all the wackiness (a few quirks are cool, but a mute son, suicidal Proust scholar uncle, and drug addicted grandpa felt odd for the sake of being odd), and we’ve seen this story numerous times before, but it’s sweet and I laughed aloud quite a few times. It’s the kind of first time feature that makes you excited for the directors’ next film.

But now suddenly it’s one of the frontrunners for Best Picture at the Oscars (despite the directors not being nominated) after winning the Producer’s Guild Award for best picture and Screen Actors Guild Award for best ensemble. And frankly, I’m baffled. Sure, the Oscars have always been a popularity contest, but they have a fascinating way of revealing the artistic trends of North American society….so what is the Little Miss Sunshine hype saying?

Personally, I think it says a lot about our society’s desire for honest character driven comedy; the kind of comedy where laughs and tears can exist in the same moment. Basically, the kind of comedy that represents the struggles we all go through on a daily basis. We laugh hardest, or at least more genuinely, when we can see our struggles on the screen. I would argue that human comedy is the most difficult genre to do well, and because of that, Hollywood seems to have given up, focusing on loud in-your-face slapstick or gross-out comedies instead.

Yet people desire those heartfelt laughs (these are the films that tend to be word-of-mouth phenomenon), and when a movie like Little Miss Sunshine comes along it fills a void that is desperately missing in Hollywood.

It’s the equivalent of feeding a starving person a McDonald’s hamburger. You’re starving, so as long as it doesn’t taste horrible, and I think McDonalds is tasty, you’re going to think that hamburger is filet mignon on a bun.

But who can blame anyone? Where have the artists of human comedy gone?

Is there a Billy Wilder, Charlie Chaplin, Preston Sturges, Frank Capra, Ernst Lubitsch, George Cukor, Howard Hawks, or even an Alfred Hitchcock (who was just as adept at comedy as he was at thrills) around?

Kind of….

Woody Allen’s in a slump, James L. Brooks makes one film every five years and they aren’t all As Good As it Gets, Cameron Crowe has been hit or miss lately after the wonderful Almost Famous, Rob Reiner got left behind by the eighties. Maybe… Alexander Payne?

So, coming full circle to the movie in question; Little Miss Sunshine, the Big Mac of human comedies. It’s good, but let’s not get ahead of ourselves. It's just fast food. It’s too bad that the Academy Awards get carried away by the huge hype machines that sweep Hollywood. Today, Little Miss Sunshine is touted as a “brilliant” examination of a family coming together, but once the hype dies down I bet you it’ll be one of those movies lost in time, loved by some, liked by many, forgotten by most.