Well, of all the movies that have won Best Picture in the last decade, the one I can't stand the most is Birdman.
Ok, there are some that are just plain bad (The King's Speech), others that are pointless (The Artist), others irritating (Argo) and others incurably mediocre (Green Book) but, to speak in academic film theory terms, more Birdman breaks it. Inarritu's film managed to tick so many cinematic boxes that annoy me in subtle but real ways that I was actually struck by how micro-annoying I found it as I watched it.
I'm sick of this kind of self-righteous Hollywood self-referentiality that's just used as a meta surface gimmick without hinting at anything deeper or more meaningful. After all, everyone knows that festivals and awards and critics love movies-about-how-movies-are-made, even if the movies themselves have nothing to say about cinema except to regurgitate clichés and platitudes about the tortured artist, the clash of art with commerce, the comparison of the screen with the blackboard, the fading of fame and glory, success and failure, authenticity and hypocrisy, high and low culture and all that which Birdman deals with in a completely naive Manichean way through absolute and simplistic dipoles.
This is basically what bothers me about Birdman. That it's full of pretentious things that are there to give the impression of depth and meaning, masking the minimal effort the film makes to actually demonstrate the existence of that depth/meaning through its drama and imagery. If we remove the ironic play with Michael Keaton's biography and Emmanuel Lubezki's one-shot illusion (both the performance of one and the cinematography of the other are the best elements of Birdman) and various other tricks that are at heart extraneous and irrelevant to the dramatic/thematic core of the film, then what is left of the film?
The male characters are unbearably banal, the female characters are unacceptably poorly written, the themes the film tackles are treated in the most clichéd self-indulgent way, and in the end whatever messages it wants to get across have become such chewed fodder that they've ended up unsustainable. In the end, everything that Birdman pretends to present in a complex and ambiguous way ends up, if you strip away the meta/experimental cloak, over-simplified and trite. It simply replaces the classic Hollywood self-sucking with Hollywood self-contempt. The same thing in essence, since criticism is something different from simple reversal.
I generally don't like the category of "fraud" at all when it comes to art and I really dislike the category of "pseudoculture", but I feel that if there is any mainstream auteur filmmaker who is actually "guilty" (well within multiple quotes of course) of such things this is Inarritu. I already cringed at his over-ambitious dramas EVERYTHING CONNECTS MAN and VIOLENCE DEFINES OUR LIVES, but here when the ambition turned to the character of art itself and the artist's narcissistic self-torture it seemed clear to me that Inarritu wants to tackle big and complex ideas without having the proper cinematic (ie narrative, thematic and aesthetic) tools to do so. Or at least not in the original and groundbreaking way the movie pretends to do.
To close the post in a hot way, Birdman is a classic example of a movie that pretends to be smarter than it really is, in turn making the audience feel as smart as they want to feel when watching movies in general , even if their content doesn't actually warrant it.
