brian hefele's untidy space

First off, I have a lengthy, exciting essay/article in the works, but since it is more essay than article, it has taken a lot of research, and I have a higher priority project at the moment. Second, and more to the point of this article, I'd like to say that I think the Academy Awards are a big joke, laced with politics and petty rivalries. Still, as much disdain as I may have for them, it's hard not to get caught up in it at times, particularly when something wins purely based on a visual gimmick.

I fully expected the visual gimmick win to be Avatar. I have not seen the film, but I repeatedly heard things like 'see it for the visuals, not the story.' Not quite compliment of the year. However, Avatar did not win anything that was not directly related to its visuals. But there was one win which was pure gimmick - Logorama for Best Animated Short Film.

Logorama is just an ordinary story, set in a world where everything is made of logos. Wikipedia can fill you in on the overall plot, which also tells a lot about the film's failings (in that so much space is spent listing logos, ensuring the reader is in on the joke). I just can't see the film as anything but gimmick. Here's why:

• Do the logos have anything to do with the story? No.
• (By extension) would the story make sense without the logos? Yes.
• Would the story, sans logos, have won an Academy Award? I'd hope not. Nothing original about the story.

The creators have some story about the film showing how inundated we are with logos. It's the sort of thing you might say to your 101 film class to convince the other students that you're this deep creative genius. But there's no tie-in. If that's what they were really going for, they should have actually used the film to say something. There's an argument to be made that by just showing everyday life in this manner, the film is saying something. But it's not everyday life, it's some sort of surreal, Tarantino-esque, glorified action hero life. There is no cohesion to the film, in the sense of story vs. style vs. message. It truly feels like they just wanted to do this for aesthetic purposes, and quickly tossed together a story which would allow them to use as many logos as possible, and then finally slapped on some BS consumerist message - and I just can't buy it. I'm not going to lie, the aesthetics are striking. It's a thing to look at, but not for 17 minutes, quite possibly the 17 longest minutes of film I've watched in a long time. It's neat, it's interesting, but it's not great film.

Finally, I find it a little entertaining that H5 is so protective of their intellectual property, whose only selling point is that it's made of ~2500 appropriated pieces of IP. I fully believe in fair use. I fully believe that sampling, appropriation, détournement, whatever you want to call it, results in a new work which a person can claim as their own. But I also get a good chuckle out of people who are so aggressive about protecting their détournement. There's no way they don't see the hypocrisy there. If you have 17 minutes to kill, you should be able to find it around with some creative Googling, though it keeps getting pulled (the upload I watched has since been pulled).