Black Bike and Mother of Pearl, or How I keep my obsessive compulsive Oscarquest going

Some people may wonder why it is that back in the winter of 2001 I decided to set about my extremely anal project of seeing all the award nominated films I could, and what might continue to drive this eccentricity after five years. My original intent was to reduce the number of outright bad films I saw (often multiple times) by having a checklist to guilt-trip me into seeing something other than the Curly Whip of Zorro or whatever was playing close by, and I could annoy people on Oscar night by explaining why their favorite actor lost. I still see ridiculously bad movies (Ghost Rider, 300, The Da Vinci Code, 16 Blocks, and I could go on and on) so that didn't work, and let me tell you, there are some serious dogs that get to go to the Oscars as well (Poseidon, The Black Dahlia, Babel, and many more), and nobody would invite me to an Oscar viewing party to hear me explain why their favorite film's anachronistic, jejune mish-mash of Carmina Burana and Mozart's Requiem doesn't qualify for an award for best original score. (Or at least they've never invited me back.) So sometimes even I wonder why I've taken the last remaining tranquil repose in my life and made such work out of it, tracking down every excruciatingly tragic Chinese wuxia, English comedy about limping coughing towards death, desperate American musical revival, dreary Hollywood biopic centered entirely on the subject's drug use, or all-singing, all-dancing falafel drenched Israeli homage to the aforementioned American musicals, all drenched in our Western culture's horrid fascination with its own decline as we each stare into the darkening eyes and torn stomach of our own Dying Gaul... at least Spider-Man 3 would be a known quantity.

But this week Carice van Houten and Orla Fitzgerald gave me an answer: sexy girls on bikes. Once I saw those two chicks wheeling it through WWII Den Haag and 1920's Cork, I knew I was, like... I was home, man. Amidst all the prestige pictures and arthouse dreck that failed to catch the wind in their sails, there are those moments when all the threads of a good film come twisting together into this tense knot that will snap in all directions in the next gust of wind, that violent, cathartic burst of the heart and surge of blood through veins and the mind, that all those Greek playwrights were sounding out through their giant wooden masks and pounding across the echoing stone a thousand years before Rome, London, and New York, until across a thousand flickering screens Aeschylus, Yeats, Bertolucci, O'Toole and Williams and Mirren cry "I am!" Okay, I just threw in that last part to be pretentious, but there is such beauty in some of these films as to shake you to tears and put you back together, if you can find it. But really, I just like that occasionally you get some cuties on bicycles. The Wind that Shakes the Barley (Palme d'Or at Cannes is how it got my attention) is a moving story about the combined power of and the tension between idealism, optimism, pragmatism, faith, hope, love, and resolve, about two brothers who join the Irish Republican Brotherhood in 1920 Cork with a heartbreaking performance by a captivating Irish girl on a bicycle (above, right), and Black Book (Best Film not in the English Language nominee at the BAFTAs, just missed an Oscar nod) is a fantastic thriller in which a devastatingly sexy Jewish woman tries to survive the Holocaust, the Nazi occupation of Den Haag, and the Dutch resistance, with the aid of a black bike. I really had Oscar fatigue after the last of the awards were given out, but two cuties on bicycles in one week... somehow that's got the wind at my back again.

(By the way, I never actually got disinvited from an Oscar party for being a pedantic annoyance, I don't even know what jejune means, and I only refer to the cinema as "tranquil repose" to get a laugh out of anybody who's seen the Doctor Who episode "Revelation of the Daleks", where Davros is running a cryogenic freezing facility for the terminally ill next to a meat-packing plant and nobody finds this suspicious.)