Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Actor 2011

The Contenders:

Jean Dujardin: The Artist (winner)
Demian Bichir: A Better Life
George Clooney: The Descendants
Brad Pitt: Moneyball
Gary Oldman: Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy

Immigration Reform

Films: A Better Life
Format: DVD from NetFlix on laptop.

I think making a drama about a current, real social issue is potentially fraught with peril. It has to be easy to slide into melodrama or to be so polemic that the plot of the film becomes something immediately accepted by one side and immediately dismissed by the other. A Better Life, which in its own way looks at immigration in the United States, certainly had the opportunity to walk over that line. It manages not to cross that line in most cases for one simple fact: it tells a believable, good story of which the idea of illegal immigration is a driving part, but which is not the real focus.

Carlos Galindo (Demian Bechir) is an undocumented alien in California working as the assistant to a landscaper named Blasco (Joaquin Cosio). Blasco has made his money and is ready to go home to Mexico and is hot to sell off his truck, tools, and all of his contracts to Carlos. Carlos, lucky to have a regular job and knowing that he’ll lose that job if Blasco leaves, isn’t really sure he wants to buy the truck and the contracts. Eventually, he contacts his sister Anita (Dolores Heredia) to borrow $12,000 in the hopes of building the business up and moving to a better neighborhood.