Oscar nominations for 2015 are out (not that it matters) and have met with deserved disapproval due to their waspish ethnocentrism (were that that were the Oscar's only shortcoming…). Birdman (Alejandro González Iñárritu) has been showered with nominations: 9, this year's record, including all major categories except Best Actress.
Birdman is Iñárritu 5th feature film, and like his previous output could be described as a melodrama in which emotional intensity (increasingly more intended than attained, IMHO) is sought through what looks like a cinematic attempt at Latin-American poetic realism.
Birdman tells the story of down-on- his-luck actor Riggan Thomson, famous for his past impersonation of film superhero Birdman (Michael Keaton, who in his salad day played Batman twice, so must have easily warmed up to the part) attempting a comeback on Broadway. It's sort of like The Sweet Smell of Success (Alexander Mackendrick, 1957) meets All That Jazz (Bob Fosse, 1979) meets Vanilla Sky(Cameron Crowe, 2001).
Hollywood and Broadway have always had a love/hate/cannibalize relationship. Historically, things have tended to move mostly westward (e.g. musicals, especially from the mid-40s on, and occasional plays) than eastward (mostly actors in search of prestige, or simply a check at the end of the month when Tinseltown wasn't providing). Because or in spite of this, Broadway theatre is, like baseball, one of the few celebrated American institutions which Hollywood has seldom celebrated properly, All About Eve (Joseph L Manckiewicz, 1950) and the aforementioned Sweet Smell being the only exceptions that come to mind. Birdman, justice be done, partly redresses this and some of its stage scenes are powerful, but otherwise diluted by frequent grandiloquent dialogue, histrionic attempts at pathos and episodes of (presumably symbolic) levitation and telekinesis.
All very much in Iñárritu style, but The MacMahonian is of the view that in the director's work flamboyance has progressed in inverse proportion to effectiveness, his 1st film (Amores Perros, 2001) remaining his best.