What makes a great movie?  I suppose everyone has their opinion, and I’ll take the occasion of tonight’s Academy Awards to give mine.

Firstly, it must have a good story to tell, a story with people and trials that we care about.   And if the story is new – not a remake, or an identifiable retelling of, say, The Odyssey or Romeo and Juliet, it gets extra points. 

Secondly, it must tell its story well.  But what does that mean?  A well-told cinematic story has these qualities:

1. It lets the camera tell as much of the story as possible.  There is to be a minimum of expository dialogue (“You can’t keep treating me like this, Todd!  This is the 1960’s!  The times are changing!”).  What speech there is, is there for what it tells us about the character who speaks it, not to explain the story.

2. Actors are chosen strictly on the basis of their suitability for their role, and not for their general acting skill, their beauty, or their box-office draw.  Lord Jim is a great novel, and Peter O’Toole was a great actor, but casting him in the lead role ruined what might have been a fine movie.  (The novel’s Jim is a handsome, jolly English dimwit, not the melancholy existential anti-hero as played by O’Toole.   In adapting a novel, a director can indeed decide to change a character in order to make the best possible film, but this was simply a case of miscasting.)

3. Music is to be used judiciously.  The audience will not be constantly insulted and irritated by pounding Asian drums that tell us that danger is nigh or pizzicato violins to let us know that the action in a scene is mischievous but unthreatening.

4. The camerawork (point of view, editing, color schemes, etc.) must be purposeful and thoughtful.  The film may be visually beautiful or ugly; the scenes may feel long or short; faces shown close-up or not, etc.  But there is a sensibility and craftsmanship behind the camera that is thinking about how to best convey the story.

5. The movie must give us a coherent sense of time and place.  It may be real, surreal, fantastic or somewhere in-between, but it must be something.

Easy to say, very hard to accomplish!  But last year’s Roma by Alfonso Cuarón hits on all of these aesthetic cylinders, and tonight will win not just the award for best foreign film, but best picture as well, if there is any justice or judgement in Hollywood. 

The story, about an indigenous Mexican peasant girl working for a well-to-do Mexico City family, is original and one that we come to care about. Its casting (of a non-professional actor in the lead role) is courageous and, in the event, perfectly successful. The cinematography is startling and impressive, in a crisp, silvery black and white that gives a kind of poetic beauty even to a cramped garage littered with dog shit.  Its music is sparing and effective.  And although I never visited Mexico City in the early 70’s, now I know what it looked, sounded and felt like to be there, then.

It’s not a perfect film.  It gets a little too programmatic towards the very end.  Cuarón yields to the temptation of veering out of the hard reality lane into the group-hug (as literally exemplified by the beach scene) lane.  But the sense of moral uplift at the end is at least well earned by the hard truths that preceded it.

Roma is a movie that deserves to be seen and re-seen.  It will be talked about for years to come and its reputation will only be enhanced by the imitations that will follow.  And if it doesn’t win the award for best picture tonight, I’m returning in my Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences membership card.  Well, I would, if I had one.