We have a new winner.

Rating: Null/10 (24 March 2003)

"8 Mile" has recently won the most questionable Oscar of all time.
The worst that can be said of previous Oscar decisions is that they've been aesthetically misguided: "Hamlet" (1948) being awarded Best Picture despite being inferior to "The Red Shoes"; "Forrest Gump" winning the same award despite being no good at all; that type of thing. There have also been one or two doubtful procedural decisions. Denzel Washington won Best Lead Actor even though he wasn't, in fact, the lead actor of the film he won the award for - but whether or not he was the lead is itself an aesthetic judgment, of sorts, and anyway, it's ARGUABLE that he was the lead, at least to the extent it's arguable that the musical score of "Chariots of Fire" is superior to that of "Raiders of the Lost Ark".
But declaring "Lose Yourself" to be the best song is to make a simple mistake of classification. "Lose Yourself" is not a song. I'm not saying anything against it here. I'm sure it's a very fine piece of rap (and I'm not saying this in a patronising way - I really AM sure it's a fine piece of rap, and what's more, I find myself liking it), just as I'm sure that "Kubla Khan" is a fine poem. But anyone who calls either work a song has failed to grasp the meaning of the word. Songs are sung. Rap is rapped. To rap is not to sing.
If I loathed rap in an exaggerated way before seeing "8 Mile" it was probably because it had been sold to me as music, and while some (but not all) rap may in fact be music (in a borderline kind of way), its virtues are not musical virtues; and even the most musical rap comes nowhere near to being a form of song. "8 Mile" wisely leaves the music side entirely out of it. The impression we get of Detroit here is of a city alive with an artform unlike any other, one combining verbal and vocal dexterity, timing, rhythm, and the ability to cultivate a kind of false truculence. And Rabbit does it differently again. For most of the film he comes across as being inferior to many of those around him. His friends and enemies alike have smoother, more relaxed, in almost every way more impressive delivery; Rabbit comes off as being detatched and studied, so much so that he's almost embarrassingly awkward at first, although his style shows its strengths towards the end.
At least one reviewer claims that "8 Mile" shows Eminem not to be honestly expressive after all, and he's right. That's what's refreshing about it. The idea that art should be expressive of the artist, or that the best art is on average more expressive than the worst, or that more expressive art is on average better than less expressive art... well, some of these claims MAY be true, but we'd need to conduct a cunning statistical survey in order to find out. It was the claim that it was "expressive" that helped turned me off rap in he first place. I thought I was being told to like bad music on the grounds that (like an anguished scream) it expressed something. "8 Mile" shows me that some rap is not so much bad music as good something-else, but rap as a genre probably includes a lot of bad something-else, too, and that stuff is no doubt expressive, too. I like the fact that Eminem's closing song says "lose yourself", not "express yourself".
I still feel it's something of a waste of a film to give us this vision of Detroit, sketch out for us the virtues and nature of rap, and then mold the material into no particular form, not even that of a struggling artist eventually making it. The story progresses from the point at which Rabbit has stage fright to the point at which he no longer has stage fright. That's it. A lot of other story strands must go nowhere in order for so much good film-making to come to, compared to what's promised, so little.
Despite what you may have heard there's nothing wrong with Eminem's performance. It may be that this is the only role he can play at all, but so long as he plays it well, what business is this of ours?