Richard Brody fasst die Oscar-Entscheidungen wie stets am klarsichtigsten zusammen:
[…] the overconfident simulacrum was the principal aesthetic mode of the movies that the Academy chose to smile on this year. The movies that were made seemed influenced by the 2012 electoral campaign, and the Oscar nominations seemed like a continuation of the campaign.
The Hollywood spotlight may not exactly be the place for shrinking violets, but this year’s batch of Best Picture nominees is marked by the swagger with which they depict, affirm, assert, represent. There’s no self-questioning; no hesitation about the aesthetic or ontological status of the filming of history or of violence; no doubt about the uninhibited access to film any subject at will; no suggestion that there’s any particular personal standpoint that defines the perspective and that is itself apt to be reflected in the film; no worry about whether something is too violent or too repellent or too intimate or simply too uncertain to film with the hard-edged stamp of unchallenged veracity. None of these nine films contains or implies the question of how or even why they’re filmed as they are. They all have tension-free representational positiveness, with all negative charges suppressed in advance.
Every one is a message film, every one comes packed with its op-ed moralizing or its didactic ambiguity neatly wrapped in its shadow-free cinematic prose or jingling and sentimental poetry.
[…]
So the movies offered patriotic lore and other sorts of issue-oriented advocacy, from the mental-health self-help support group of “Silver Linings Playbook” to the wan religious syncretism of “Life of Pi”—which is why the ceremony’s far-too-many overblown, overlong, overloud production numbers suddenly make sense.
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A Kiss in the Dreamhouse