Kick Ass — with Science! — in these 5 Oscar Nominated Movies you Can Stream Right Now

The Oscar watchlists continue with Arrival and Hidden Figures, commemorating the valiant efforts of geeks, both fictional and historical.

I haven’t actually done the research on this, but I’m pretty sure that the most often written about profession in TV and cinema is the cop. After that are probably doctors and lawyers, and I’m willing to bet writer is not far behind — we writers are obsessed with ourselves. I’m also willing to bet that these rolls are popular because of their proximity to violence.

It’s sort of understandable that cinema has a fixation with violence. First of all people in general have a fixation with violence, and secondly, film is primarily visual, and it’s pretty easy to visualize, say, a fist, or a sword, traveling from one person’s hand to another’s face. It’s not that easy, however to visualize a thought, in one person’s mind traveling along, say, the surface area of a four-dimensional hyperqube.

But in a country ( the U.S) that undervalues STEM and consequently under-performs in that area, it isn’t absurd to suggest that perhaps we’re being held back by a lack of role models. Yes cops, lawyers, and doctors are important and it’s not easy to be any of them. Doctors are even scientists themselves — so maybe I’m sabotaging my own argument — but they are by far the sexiest and most violent of scientists. People die all the time, there’s blood everywhere. Add to that the sexual politics of a freshman dorm and you can keep a TV show going for 30 years. But where are the stories about the linguists? The engineers? The statisticians? As it turns out, they’re all at the Oscars.

1.Arrival — Amazon/GooglePlay/itunes/Vudu/etc

(Sadly at this time Hidden Figures is not available to stream, but we’ll tack the trailer on at the end.)

Arrival and Hidden Figures, while being very different movies, share a sentiment: The stories we tell ourselves create the way we see the world. Narrative is powerful and has far-reaching effects. It’s basically the foundation of critical theory which might be why critics love these movies so much. Arrival examines this on a more theoretical level. It’s an emotional story, yes, but it’s an emotional story about how language influences thought, and it takes that idea to the most sci-fi of extremes. What makes this movie special when compared to the rest of the invasion canon is that the heroes here are not trigger happy Will Smith types who welcome our visitors to earth with a right hook, but compassionate intellectuals whose great struggle is figuring how to earnestly communicate with one another. And it’s dope.

Hidden Figures explores the importance of narratives in a more immediately relevant way. It’s title is both a reference to redacted mathematics, and to the people who despite being influential and inspiring, have been ignored by history — specifically black people and women. This film offers itself as a response to the problem of underepresentation and begins the long arduous task of retelling american history to include the many heroes who were previously invisible.

2. Apollo 13 — Free on Crackle

There’s a reason four out of six of the movies mentioned here have something to do with space. If you have to sell a movie where people do math all the time, it’s easier to sell if they do that math in a deadly face-sucking vacuum miles away from the earth. Astronauts are the coolest geeks there are, but Apollo 13 (as well as the next and previous movie on this list) proves that the men and women on the ground can be just as heroic. Apollo 13 is basically two hours of geeks solving increasingly frustrating engineering problems in increasingly innovative ways and its goddamn thrilling. When you’re in space, you NEED to know your math.

3. The Martian —Cinemax

It’s basically Apollo 13 on mars. It’s bigger and crazier and super fun.

4. The Imitation Game — Netflix

It’s a sad fact that war has been the driving force of many a scientific innovation. The space-race, atomic power, and, in the story of the Imitation Game, the computer. It’s the story of Allen Turing who, in an astounding feat of patriotism and innovation, created the most complicated code-breaking machine ever and paved the way for a new branch of study: computer science. But sadly the same government that Turing helped save in WWII betrayed him to his ruin and eventual suicide. It’s a damn shame, but a good story.

5. Moneyball — GooglePlay/Amazon/itunes/Vudu/etc

It’s not really fair to make generalizations about the kinds of people who excel at sports and the kinds of people who excel at STEM. They can be the same people, but on the screen they are usually polar opposites, which is why this strange marriage of sport and science in Moneyball is an odd couple for the ages. It’s called Sabermetrics and today it’s almost impossible to run a baseball team without it, but in the early 2000’s it was just an idea in the mind of a geek who loved baseball, and the last chance for a manager running one of the least-funded teams in the sport.

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