The Writers Guild of America have released their nominations for the best original, adapted and documentary screenplays of the year. The good: recognition for Boogie Man, Burn After Reading and Vicky Cristina Barcelona. The bad: some of the least original, most cliche-ridden scripts of the year got noms, including Milk, Benjamin Button and Slumdog Millionaire. The will-be-judged-by-history-as-criminal: Synecdoche, NY and My Winnipeg were overlooked. Blerg, WGA. Blerg. 
To borrow a line from Lou Lumenick: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is this year’s Forrest Gump. This is not really arguable. In addition to sharing a screenwriter (Eric Roth), Robert Zemeckis’ 1994 Best Picture winner and David Fincher’s 2008 Best Picture front-runner (at least, as of this writing) both put groundbreaking special effects to the service of sprawling stories, spanning many decades and weaving a breadcrumb trail through modern American history, in which a man holds a torch for a woman who can’t reciprocate his love until her dreams of autonomy are spectacularly dashed. For me, the Gump comparison is a pejorative, a shorthand way to say, “This film will likely make a lot of money and win a lot of awards, and yet is so phony and cloying and gimmicky that its success will some day be seen by some as a tragedy.” But to others, the second coming of Gump would be a blessing. An Oscars-bait blockbuster? As Lumenick put it, before seeing the film, “Paramount would be thrilled, and possibly the Academy would be as well.”
Watching Benjamin Button, occasionally I actively loathed it, but mostly I just felt genuinely disappointed that it seemed so lacking in the genuine feeling that makes a bloated, over-serious, firing-on-all-cylinders Hollywood blow-out even temporarily satisfying. Ultimately, we buy into films like the film Benjamin Button wants to be because they offer our only chance at that unique catharsis: they let us cry, in public, surrounded by and united with strangers who are also crying, regardless of our individual age, class or station in life. But Benjamin Button cannot be effective as an audience-leveling tear-inducer, because it’s not a film about people. It’s a film about the feat of its own whiz-bang, Frankensteinian digital imagery, drunk on its own accomplishment to an extent that feels quasi-ethical.
