A Fact. Use It However You Wish

I find it interesting that all five of this year's Oscar nominees for Best Picture are narratives told about the past.

• The Curious Case of Benjamin Button uses a journal kept by the main character as a way to examine his life through a series of flashbacks.
• Frost/Nixon is told from the perspective of various people involved in the historic interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon, as they recall the events that led up to and followed those minutes on camera.
• Milk begins with the main character, Harvey Milk, dictating a message into a tape recorder, a message that covers a significant portion of his life over the past decade.
• The Reader is all about the recollections of Michael Berg and the affair that he conducted as a 15-year-old with an older woman who is later charged with war crimes for her part in the concentration camps during the Holocaust.
• Slumdog Millionaire focuses upon the recollections of a young man on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? as he tries to explain how someone uneducated like himself could know all of the answers.

My dissertation for my doctorate was about the role that memory plays in the construction of narrative, but I'm not going to bore you with any analytical overview that tries to pull all of these films together into some neat package. It just seems that Hollywood, the film business, and the Academy Awards voters seem to be intrigued by the past and what it can tell us this year. I don't recall a time in recent years, at least, when all five of the films have had such a similar overarching structure.

Make of it what you will.