Why the Oscars are primed to go Mach 10 with ‘Top Gun: Maverick’
The Top Gun: Maverick trailer finally gives us the first close-up — and, perhaps, the first glimpse — of Maverick’s undersea world.
The Top Gun: Maverick trailer finally gives us the first close-up — and, perhaps, the first glimpse — of Maverick’s undersea world.
Oscar’s Best Picture categories have always been a good barometer of what the Academy Awards want to be about. The best picture category, as a barometer of what the Academy actually wants to award, has always been its biggest weakness, at least since Cecil B. DeMille’s The Ten Commandments almost a century ago.
In the past, it has been about just about everything — love, hate, tragedy, comedy, melodrama, war and heroism. And every one of these things is reflected in the current crop of nominees.
Top Gun is about a good guy gone bad — and in the case of the Academy, the good guy is a man who, as his movie trailer reveals, is a man who looks like me.
Top Gun was a movie about a Marine jet pilot who, at the end of the Vietnam war, was assigned to escort downed North Korean pilots and protect them from the communist soldiers who were hunting them. He did so, and was awarded the Medal of Honor.
His squadron commander, Lieutenant Colonel Richard “Sully” Sully, was a bit flaky. He was also a womanizer, and the pilot was assigned to a wife of a man who was also an alcoholic, and who had already been convicted of abusing both his wife and his daughter before the war began.
The film won 10 Oscars, with one shared by best director Richard Attenborough (who, in the spirit of the times, called it “Top Speed”) and best photography.
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