8) It defines the current cultural zeitgeist
At the top of the Academy Awards, in one of the night’s only moments that everyone seemed to enjoy, a whimsical, nostalgic Neil Patrick Harris and Anna Kendrick tried to fend off an embittered Jack Black. (For the record, Kendrick managed to do so despite throwing her Cinderella slipper sloppily.) The gist of their argument was that Harris and Kendrick were arguing in support of celebrating the majesty of the movies. Black, meanwhile, was like a snarky soothsayer, warning about how the movie business is treading downhill, emphasizing the zeroes at the end of the opening weekend grosses instead of five-star reviews. It rings true, coming from a year where only one Best Picture nominee surpassed the $100 million mark, while nearly every major box office hit from 2014 will either inspire a sequel or was a sequel.
In essence, Birdman is a film that embraces both the host and the heckler’s sides. The recent year in cinema was both one that prized visionary talents, as indicated by several of the nominees and winners Sunday night, but it also catapulted the “Go Big or Go Home” credo alluded to by studios that continuously reboot and rekindle fan favorite properties for mass consumption.
In Birdman, the main character is at a crossroads between, as I wrote earlier in this feature, popularity and prestige. Is he searching for artistic validation or an ascent into the arms of fame that he has not seen in a long time? Riggan spends a lot of his time trying to figure out where his ego (and his alter ego) inevitably lies. As it turns out, it is somewhere right in the middle.