Yesterday, Deadline ran a piece considering the impact of politics on the 2013 Oscar race, assessing factors from Congressional scrutiny of Zero Dark Thirty to various historical quibbles over Lincoln. Argo, the piece suggests, has one of the strongest campaigns linking the film to real-world events, and to real-world endorsers (though it’s sparked some quibbles by Canadians):

For Argo’s end credits former President Jimmy Carter turns up in an audio interview basically confirming the facts of the CIA mission he approved to get six American hostages out of the Canadian Embassy in Iran by creating a fake movie production. It was a very effective way of validating the events of the film set in 1979 and giving it added gravitas. It also didn’t hurt the film’s awards chances to have Tony Mendez, the real life CIA operative who hatched the scheme (and played by director Ben Affleck) appearing everywhere in praise of the film.

Even more than this roster of praise, the consensus seems to be that Argo, a relatively slight but definitely entertaining picture, racked up a string of awards season victories and became the leading contender for Best Picture at the Academy Awards because it’s the kind of movie that makes Hollywood feel good about itself. The ability to create fantasies compelling enough to make an audience suspend disbelief isn’t just a source of joy, the movie argues. It can be a service to the Republic!

But I think Argo has emerged as the consensus contender for Best Picture for even stronger reasons than that. In a pool of strongly politically themed-movies, Argo is at the intersection of two important trend lines. It has a gloss of relevance, but the movie exists at a safe distance from actual events, and from shameful, damaging policies, that remain the subject of heated political debate. For all that we talk about Hollywood liberalism, the Academy appears to be converging around a movie that allows us to feel as good as possible about the way the United States handles the blowback of our foreign policy.

The contrast between Argo and Zero Dark Thirty is the most obvious point of comparison between Argo and its other competitors, but it’s important. Where Tony Mendez, the CIA analyst who is the main character in Argo is safely a historical figure, an inventive hero by consensus before he became a Hollywood story, the CIA analyst who is the basis for Maya’s (Jessica Chastain) still works at the agency. More to the point, though, is that the tactics Mendez employed—convincing the Iranian government that he was shooting a wacky science fiction picture and smuggling out escapees from the U.S. Embassy in Tehran under the cover of that project—is amusing and anodyne, tradecraft that is only impeachable if you think that it’s wrong to lie to people in the name of espionage, which would be an awfully confusing position. The tactics Maya uses, on the other hand, include torture. It’s not fun to watch her watch a man be waterboarded, sexually humiliated, and beaten in the same way it’s fun to watch Tony jauntily fake a table read for his Trojan Horse of a movie. It requires a great deal more work to dig out what Kathryn Bigelow and Mark Boal want you to think about those horrendously uncomfortable scenes than it does to sit back, relax, and enjoy Affleck, Alan Arkin, and John Goodman engage in wacky, ethically clear hijinks. And where Argo gives us permission to revel in its finale, in which a commercial airliner races jeeps full of Iranian intelligence officers off a Tehran tarmac, Zero Dark Thirty withholds permission to enjoy an event that gave a lot of people a lot of pride in real life, the killing of Osama bin Laden, by turning that sequence into a tense, workmanlike effort that traumatizes a great many children.
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The breaking news in the Hollywood Reporter’s profile of Lucasfilm chief Kathleen Kennedy is how she talked J.J. Abrams, who was reluctant to take on the work, into directing Star Wars Episode VII. But to me, the really fascinating part of Kim Masters’ reporting is the portrait it paints of the ways Kennedy’s balanced her work and her family—and the work Kennedy’s done over the years to make sure Steven Spielberg has everything he’s needed to make his movies. As much as there are structural barriers to women getting opportunities in Hollywood, I also think a major challenge is that it’s not easy for a lot of women to pick up and leave their families for three months at a time:

In her new position, she will split her time between the Lucasfilm offices at Disney and the company’s headquarters in the Presidio of San Francisco. Usually Kennedy flies to the Bay Area on a Tuesday and returns to Los Angeles on a Thursday evening — a schedule she says allows her to spend more time with her family than she could during long film shoots. On the heels of War Horse, which had her living in England for three months, Kennedy spent another three months away from home in Richmond, Va., for Lincoln.

It’s easier to make sacrifices when you have people accommodating your needs and making you feel comfortable and supported, something Kennedy’s done for other people for a long time. When she went to work for Apocalypse Now writer John Milius:

Kennedy’s first task was cataloging Milius’ gun collection. “I consequently know the difference between a Colt .45 and a Colt .45 Gold Cup,” she says. “I know what a Winchester Over Under is. Things that I have no desire to know, I know because of John Milius.” Milius is one of Hollywood’s larger-than-life characters, and Kennedy acknowledges, “There was a fair amount of insane things going on. I tried to ignore the things that I didn’t find particularly appropriate and carried on,” she says. “I did have thoughts every now and then of, ‘Is this really what I want to do?’ But I knew I wanted to make movies, and I knew it was somewhat of a means to an end.”

And it’s clear that, in a more respectful, less exploitative way, Spielberg’s leaned heavily on Kennedy over the years, too:

Given that, it’s hardly surprising that Spielberg seems to feel some sense of grievance that his old friend Lucas has taken Kennedy away. Lucas called to raise the issue during a dubbing session on Lincoln. “He actually asked for her hand in business,” says Spielberg. “I wasn’t going to stand in her way.”…She and Spielberg say their parting is not permanent. One project that could reunite them would be a fifth Indiana Jones, but Spielberg is clear: “I will not make another Indiana Jones film unless it’s based on George’s story.” Lucas intends for that to happen, says Spielberg, though the timetable is unclear — the gap between the previous two movies was 19 years. “Kathy and I will figure out some way to work together again,” he says, before adding, as if counting the days, “She has a five-year contract.”

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with visionaries—or even folks who aren’t visionaries, but mostly really solid, middlebrow directors—needing help. You don’t transform ideas on the page into convincing flesh-and-blood realities without producers. That’s a role some people are suited to spend their whole careers fulfilling. But that doesn’t mean that women who have bigger plans should get stuck supporting other people’s careers, rather than pursuing their own, just because they’re good at that. It means that we need to think about not just what it takes to get women in Hollywood the opportunities to chase those dreams, but the conditions they need to chase them, given that the choices they face about work and family may be influenced by difference forces than those choices are for men. I have my doubts about Star Wars Episode VII. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not rooting for Kennedy to succeed to the utmost.

There’s a lot to chew over in Django Unchained, Quentin Tarantino’s bloody slavery epic, and the second in a planned trilogy of revenge movies, the third of which will be about black World War II fighter pilots. There’s the movie’s worship of cool masculinity, even as, like Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln it marginalizes the role black women played in the fight for their own liberation. There’s the reaction to a black man, first killing white people for money, and then to eradicate the forces that have consistently brutalized his family and denied him his humanity, something that’s been rightly demolished by other critics. But as I’ve thought about the movie in the weeks since I’ve seen it—and I needed that time to really consider Django Unchained—it strikes me that it’s as interesting a movie about whiteness, solidarity, and how best to achieve social progress, as it is on any of these other questions.

And it’s impossible to consider that element of the movie without thinking about it in context of Lincoln. Like long-term abolitionist Thaddeus Stevens’ decision, on the floor of the House, to moderate his stated views on the equality of black Americans to win support for the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in Spielberg’s film, a crucial moment in Django Unchained comes when German bounty hunter Dr. King Schultz (Christoph Waltz), a newer advocate of equality, is offered an opportunity to avoid violence and advance the cause of equality with social moderation—except that in this case, he chooses purity, radicalism, violence, and ultimately his own death.

Where Stevens is a long-standing participant in the struggle for black liberation, Schultz is a newcomer to radical action against slavery, and a rather accidental one at that. Though he initially approaches Django, when the other man is imprisoned as a member of a slave-trading caravan, in a tone that makes the white men transporting uncomfortable enough to tell Schultz to “stop talking to him like that,” by which he means as if Django is a man possessed of agency and opinions, he treats Django as an equal only as in so far as he treats him like someone who can be of use to Schultz. Schultz clearly thinks slavery is wrong—he tells the other member of Django’s caravan that they should “Make your way to a more Enlightened area of the country. Oh, and if there are any astronomy aficionados among you, the North Star is that way.” But at least at the beginning of the film, he appears to view the institution as a particular American backwardness rather than a moral abomination that requires urgent opposition, and Schultz is willing to hold Django’s freedom over him until he gets what he needs from the other man. “On the one hand, I despise slavery,” he explains to Django. “On the other hand, I need your help…In the mean time, I’m going to make this slavery malarkey work for me.”

Schultz’s radicalism comes from his increasing ability to place Django, the first slave he’s ever known personally, into the tropes that for him seem to define humanity. “Do most slaves believe in marriage?” he asks Django when he finds out his traveling companion is married. “Me and my wife do,” Django tells him. And when he discovers that Django’s wife (Kerry Washington) is named Broomhilda, Schultz is able to fit Django into a cultural framework that he understands, seeing him as the legendary hero Siegfried. “I’ve never given anyone his freedom before,” Schultz explains to Django when he decides to stick around and assist in Django’s quest to rescue his wife. “And now that I have, I feel vaguely responsible for you. And for a German to meet a real-life Siegfried, that’s a big deal.”

Where Schultz feels vaguely responsible to a specific slave, of course, Stevens feels very specifically responsible to black Americans both particular and general. As Stevens and Lincoln discuss in the kitchen during Mrs. Lincoln’s party, Stevens has a vision for the reintegration of the seceded states back into the Union that will reorder the nation’s economy to give the people who once were property in it a foothold they can lever into independence. At the end of Lincoln, the movie suggests that there’s a specific woman of color who motivates Stevens’ vision, the housekeeper he can’t bring to the White House, Lydia Smith (S. Epatha Merkerson). But in both cases, Stevens wants to reshape the world so he can live in it in a fashion more to his liking, with the woman he loves in particular, and in what he believes to be the true state of nature beyond his domestic affairs.

Schultz has the fire of a recent convert, but not the experience of America’s past and the things to gain from its reformed future that animate Stevens. And so when, after securing the freedom of Django and Broomhilda during a tense dinner with Broomhilda’s brutal owner, Calvin Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), Schultz has a chance to end the interaction in the kind of tense show of comity Stevens engages in for the greater good, Schultz takes the purer, but more dramatic path. After pointing out that Alexandre Dumas, an author Candie admires enough to collect, and to use as inspiration for naming one of his fighting slaves, D’Artagnan, after the hero of The Three Musketeers, was black, Schultz refuses to shake Candie’s hand. And then he shoots the other white man, explaining to Django, “I’m sorry. I couldn’t resist.” That act of self-indulgent purity sets off an orgy of violence that endangers Django and Broomhilda’s ability to escape: it’s the act of a crusader who is more concerned with his own ability to get and stay right than with whether or not he achieves the freedom of the people he initially intended to help. I’m not sure whether Tarantino intended to make that point, or if Schultz’s indulgence is merely a way to set off a spasm of cool that gives Django the opportunity to free himself and to claim the mantle of a badass rather than having Schultz do that work and get that credit for him.

There’s no question that Hollywood could do more to let people of color be the heroes of their own stories, but I don’t think any of us would deny that it would be better if they didn’t end up in peril because white people made self-regarding decisions that placed them in great danger and difficulty. Stevens’ willingness to compromise may mean he gets credit that is not available to black characters in Lincoln. But he also doesn’t endanger the people he claims to represent and care about for the sake of his own pride.

In Tarantino’s world, it’s possible to have both, the shootout and the triumphant escape, to put Broomhilda through the tortures of slavery, while also preserving her radiant beauty as an inspiration to Django, to portray a weirdly sanitized vision of plantations full of well-clothed slaves working in immaculate fields, while still condemning the institution as an affront to human decency. But while Lincoln eschews Django Unchained‘s fondness for gouged eyes and gouts of blood in favor of a single, muddy battle scene and wars of words, it’s Spielberg who ultimately has the tougher vision of what it takes to achieve substantive social progress. Revenge may be more fun than reform. But it’s ultimately more self-indulgent.

“How the people love my husband. They flock to see him by the thousands,” Mary Todd Lincoln (Sally Field) tells Rep. Thaddeus Stevens (Tommy Lee Jones) midway through Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln after Stevens, who investigated her spending on the White House as Chairman of the House Ways and Means Committee, arrives there for a reception. “They will never love you as they love my husband. How hard for you to know that. But how important to remember it.” Her opinion of the relative position of the two men guides the film, a tremendous depiction of what it takes to pass epochal legislation marred by lapses into sentiment and Spielbergian self-indulgence.

Lincoln is at its most clear-eyed, and its most-effective, when the movie tackles the question of how to muster votes, and bipartisan votes at that, for the end of slavery, a section of the film dominated by Stevens and Secretary of State William Seward (David Straitharn). The two men begin the movie in very different positions, Stevens as a life-long advocate for the end of slavery and racial equality, Seward unconvinced of the Amendment’s viability or necessity. “Since when has our party unanimously supported anything?” he asks his president, particularly given the prospect of the South suing for peace. “Why tarnish that luster with a battle in the House?” But Lincoln makes himself clear: he will have the Amendment in January of 1865, even if it means buying off lame duck Democrats who need employment when they leave their offices in March. “If procuring votes with jobs is what you intend, I’ll procure from Albany the skulking men who are suited to this shady work,” Seward tells Lincoln, resigned to his task.

Those skulking men are W.N. Bilbo (James Spader) and Robert Latham (John Hawkes), and with their arrival on screen, both Seward and Lincoln are invigorated. After assessing their prospects, Bilbo explains that he and Latham will ignore Democrats of the “Kind that hates Niggers, hates God for making Niggers. We’ve abandoned these 39 to the Devil who possesses them,” and focus instead on rather more craven men like Clay Hutchins (Walton Goggins, capping off a tremendous year). Seward takes it on himself to figure out what each man is worth. “A first-term Congressman who couldn’t earn reelection,” he says of one rather greedy Democrat. “I deemed it unseemly and bargained him down to Postmaster.” Hutchins, standing in for that persuadable Democratic minority, explains the dilemma he faces: the 13th Amendment is being presented as the only way to end the Civil War by weakening the Confederacy, but Lincoln’s case for it is being weakened by rumors of a peace delegation from the South, seeking an accord–but only if they can preserve slavery. “If my neighbors hear I voted yes to Nigger freedom and no to peace, they’ll kill me,” Hutchins says. His view is shared by more sophisticated men like Preston Brooks (Hal Holbrook), who is desperate to avert the arrival of another fighting season. “I went to Richmond to talk to traitors,” he tells Lincoln after his meeting with the Confederates. “To smile at and talk to traitors. Because in two months, it will be spring.”

While Lincoln delays the commissioners and the actual offer of a peace deal to keep the necessity of the 13th Amendment alive in Washington, aided at the last minute on the day of the vote by Bilbo and Latham transversing Washington at a dead sprint, in the House it is up to Stevens to strike the delicate balance to hold his fragile party together. A man of firey temperment–Stevens at one point addresses Democratic leader Fernando Wood as “you perfectly named obstructive object”–Stevens is forced to make a moral compromise, telling the House that, contrary to his lifelong advocacy, “I don’t hold with equality in all things, just equality before the law, nothing more.” It’s a painful moment, that rhetorical scaling back, and a recognition of the rhetorical compromise needed to move legal equality forward, leaving the work of cultural change separate. “Who would have guessed that old nightmare could show such control?” Mrs. Lincoln, watching with her maid Elizabeth Keckley (Gloria Reuben) from the House Gallery. “He might make a politician some day.” After Stevens speech, one of his Radical Republican allies tells Stevens that he betrayed their cause. “You’ve lead the battle for race equality for 30 years…You refused to say that all humans are human.” “I want the Amendment to pass so the Constitution’s first and only mention of slavery is its abolition,” Stevens responds to them. “So no, it seems there’s nothing I won’t say.”
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The thing that strikes me most about the trailer for Steven Spielberg’s Lincoln is how quiet the President is for much of it. There’s a kindness, almost, to the delivery of the Gettysburg Address, a tentativeness to the question, “Shall we stop this blood?”

In a way, watching this reminded me of Michael Lewis’s profile of President Obama in Vanity Fair, which emphasizes both the essential aloneness of the presidency even as the person who occupies it faces constant emotional demands. Obama told Lewis:

“You have to exercise,” he said, for instance. “Or at some point you’ll just break down.” You also need to remove from your life the day-to-day problems that absorb most people for meaningful parts of their day. “You’ll see I wear only gray or blue suits,” he said. “I’m trying to pare down decisions. I don’t want to make decisions about what I’m eating or wearing. Because I have too many other decisions to make.” He mentioned research that shows the simple act of making decisions degrades one’s ability to make further decisions. It’s why shopping is so exhausting. “You need to focus your decision-making energy. You need to routinize yourself. You can’t be going through the day distracted by trivia.” The self-discipline he believes is required to do the job well comes at a high price. “You can’t wander around,” he said. “It’s much harder to be surprised. You don’t have those moments of serendipity. You don’t bump into a friend in a restaurant you haven’t seen in years. The loss of anonymity and the loss of surprise is an unnatural state. You adapt to it, but you don’t get used to it—at least I don’t.”

In the profile, as in the trailer, the president is surrounded by competing voices, but ultimately required to decide alone. The wars are different. The job—and the federal government—have gotten bigger, in part because of what the war Lincoln oversaw taught the country about what it needed, particularly in a time of conflict. But the essential nature of the role remains very much the same.

Obviously, Megan Fox is not exactly a pure feminist ideal, and it’s pretty stupid to say of a director you’re working with on a lucrative franchise (if you want to continue working on that franchise), “He’s like Napoleon and he wants to create this insane, infamous mad-man reputation. He wants to be like Hitler on his sets, and he is.” Still, I’m less than charmed to learn that Steven Spielberg urged Bay to fire Fox over the incident, rather than having her in for a talk, or whatever. This is the same Steven Spielberg, of course, who has made precisely one movie with a female main character who doesn’t share lead duties with a dude. And, you know, not everyone has to make their life’s work making movies with female leads or nurturing young actresses or breaking down Hollywood’s gender barriers. But maybe when you’re one of the most powerful men in Hollywood, you don’t have to use that clout to land all over young actresses, either.

At the end of the day, Megan Fox may not have been a pro on the Transformers set, and she may have been a jerk in the press. But Alex Pettyfer can behave like a spoiled brat on multiple pictures and in negotiations, and there can be allegations that he’s a slightly scary control freak, and he’s fine to the extent that he’s the star of Steven Soderbergh’s next movie. Fox is not the ideal spokeswoman for feminism in Hollywood, she’s the kind of unideal victim Gloria Allred specializes in. But crying a lack of professionalism is a pretty good way to defang critics who are saying things that cut to the heart of your flaws. Or to distract folks from the likely awfulness of the movie you’re about to foist on American audiences.

Either way, maybe Steven Spielberg should consider using his powers for a greater good than saving Michael Bay from having people say mean things about him in the press.