Oscar Got It Wrong!: Best Original Screenplay 1990

The Contenders:

Alice
Avalon
Ghost (winner)
Green Card
Metropolitan

Blood is Thinner than Water

Films: Avalon
Format: Movies! Channel on rockin’ flatscreen.

I find slice of life movies difficult to review. They’re difficult because in many cases, they don’t really go anywhere. We get a chunk of somebody’s life, or several somebodies’ lives. And then it ends. I realize that this is certainly a lot closer to the way the real world works. We don’t all have storylines with a beginning, middle, and end. But movies do. That’s one of the things that’s great about them. So, when I get a movie that just takes a chunk out of a life and puts it on the screen, I feel like I don’t get a complete story. This is exactly the case with Avalon.

Like a handful of other Barry Levinson films, Avalon is at least semi-autobiographical. In this case, it’s more about Levinson’s family and less about his own personal experience. It appears to be more or less the story of his grandfather and his life in Baltimore starting in around 1914. Using his grandfather’s experience and the experience of his family, Levinson is more or less recounting the story of the Polish Jewish immigrant experience in the United States from around the start of World War I.