Braveheart the Worst Film for Best Picture - 3877 Words

Thesis Mel Gibson’s Braveheart is routinely named in polls of film critics as the worst movie ever to have won the Academy Award for best picture, and it is easy to see why. The acting in the film ranges from the blandly unmemorable to the mortifying. Negligible as Scottish history, but it is undeniably a political film. Gibson clearly did not intend to venture into a political debate—the film is structurally and visually standard Hollywood fare, a costume drama of the sort normally considered a â€Å"prestige picture† or â€Å"Oscar bait,† and the Academy swallowed it whole and awarded Braveheart the 1995 Academy Award for Best Picture. Coincidently the 1995 release date would coincide with the political push towards Scottish â€Å"devolution†Ã¢â‚¬ ¦show more content†¦Firelight or torches are used; in the long and ludicrous sex scene between Wallace and his bride (before she is raped and killed by the English) Gibson contrives to film everything by moonlight. The color is largely lush and saturated, although dream sequences or certain sequences seen through the eyes of the young William Wallace are given an icy blue desaturated tint which matches the color of Wallace’s eyes. The camera is usually at a middle distance and a straightforward angle; in conversations between two characters Gibson tends to hold both in frame so that we can see them interact, rather than cut back and forth with two separate shots over the actors’ shoulders. If the camera moves at all, it is slowly and on a dolly: there is nothing unsteady or hand-held about anything, certainly not the battle scenes, which are fi lmed with a steady solid focus on Gibson himself striding with face-paint through the smoke and carnage. Framing usually includes two characters in dialogue. The camera is mostly objective—even subjective effects such as young William seeing his dead father’s corpse speak platitudes are noted with a change in color saturation to signpost the shift. There are no special effects in Braveheart. The dialogue in Braveheart is corny and stilted in English: I