As an ardent fan of the movie "Drive", I'm completely fine with one of the most original movies of 2011 not garnering a single Oscar nomination. Sure, the precursory of it all led me to believe Albert Brooks was going to get recognition, but wrists-slit "it's done, it's over, there's no pain."
"Drive" is too gritty, too brooding for the Oscar ceremony. It's not the glitzy Hollywood where endings are happy or lead characters have names, and this point can be sufficiently summed up in the opening scene with a very attentive detail: the Clippers.
The Driver, in this establishing scene, loses the cops by parking in the Staples Center parking garage while the crowd is leaving a Clippers game. Not a Showtime Lakers game, but a Clippers victory over the equally maligned Toronto Raptors. That's not a hot ticket. At all. The people who would attend games between these 2 teams are die-hard basketball fans who can't afford Lakers tickets, Immigrant Mexican families who bought a package deal for a fun night out, or Ad-Executives that like to get drunk in public who were comped these tickets as a perk.
The Clippers are a historically bad franchise. Having the Clippers help open up "Drive" sets the tone of a different approach to Los Angeles. The more mundane, day-to-day, "yeah LA is great town full of the elite (Lakers), but we also have DMVs and discount family dentists (Clippers)." The Driver likely does jobs during Laker games like he does during Kings' hockey games too, but only a hapless team like the Clippers would give the impression that this is run-of-the-mill, business as usual job for the Driver.
A serendipitous effect of the use of the Clippers is the team's recent success. Matching up the time frames from when "Drive" would've been set to when that particular game would've been played, we can assume it was the beginning of the 2010-2011 season, aka Blake Griffin's rookie year. The team finished under .500, but were the up-coming darlings of the NBA. "Drive" had its own stud in Ryan Gosling drawing fans in, and Blake Griffin's dunks parallel well with movie's violent outbursts. And much again like the Clippers, "Drive" will turn into a success story with a growing rabid fanbase. (More metaphors I could make: the simple pastiche of the Clippers color scheme and logo seeming appropriately anachronistic much like the movie's soundtrack; DeAndre Jordan's space clearing interior presence as the white scorpion jacket)
The Clippers of "Drive" represented a seedier side of Los Angeles. One that most of America knew of, but didn't really pay any attention to. Interests were occasionally peaked by the good, (NWA, the good work put in by LaMond Murray) and the bad (Rodney King riots, Darius Miles/antenna celebration), but the other L.A. didn't steal attention from the more glamourous side until we got 'a real hero.' That's not a Chris Paul metaphor. It's not a Nicolas Winding-Refn one either. Rather the 'real human being' we really got: ammunition to hate-on the Lakers.
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