The 2023 Oscar ceremonies bear down on us all like a vacant, runaway bus on an oil-slicked interstate. And yet, people still can’t stop nattering about what happened at the 2022 ceremonies, when somebody’s husband got so mad at somebody else’s bad joke at her expense that he bitch-slapped that somebody else while ABC did its gosh-darndest to keep us from seeing it happen. Now the Motion Picture Academy of Arts & Sciences have assembled a “crisis team” to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Too bad. They could use the ratings. And they know it.
For yet another year, the Academy Awards stagger into view beneath a fog of uncertainty as to whether they should continue to exist at all. In a recent interview, erstwhile Paramount Pictures honcho Barry Diller declared awards season “an antiquity”, along with the movie industry that kept them propped up for more than a century. The business model, Diller says, of a movie “going to a theater, building up some word of mouth if it was successful, having that word of mouth carry itself over” has been overpowered by streams, clouds, and movie theaters closing in America and abroad as a reverberating byproduct of the COVID-19 lockdown. The very definition of a “movie,” he adds, “is in such transition that it doesn’t mean anything anymore.”
He’s right, of course. And yet, here we are again, rewiring this tired old circuitry to get audiences in the mood for another night of triumph, tears, suspense, and whatever else Oscar hype used to promise. What’s kind of ironic, if not all that significant, is that this year, there may be real suspense in a few of the major categories given the mixed results along the way in the awards leading up to March 12. As of this writing, all the trade publications and prognosticators are certain Everything Everywhere All at Once will win everything, everywhere, etc. As you’ll note below, I’m not as convinced, at least not for Best Picture.
I’m also not convinced that this will be the last Academy Awards broadcast, nor, for that matter, the next one, or the one after that. Because, as wobbly as things are with the Oscars, and as more people, even movie lovers, wish they would go away already, no one seems to have any ideas as to what, if anything, would fill the void they would leave behind. As with newspapers, all-star games, and other institutions struggling for new identities in the still-new century, the very nature of what a “movie” is and what the criteria is for assessing its value, artistically or commercially is, unavoidably, under review in several quarters. Whatever the case, the movie business as we once knew it may be dying, but movies are not; any more than opera, live theater, even the damn novel, all of which persist, despite no longer occupying the center of the zeitgeist.
In fact, what is a zeitgeist these days anyhow? If the Oscars are little more than a lame excuse to avoid dealing with that question, then, they’re good for something after all.
As always, projected winners are listed in bold with FWIW (For Whatever Its Worth) notes added whenever I feel like it.
Best Picture
All Quiet on the Western Front Avatar: The Way of Water The Banshees of Inesherin Elvis Everything Everywhere All at Once The Fabelmans Tár Top Gun: Maverick Triangle of Sadness Women Talking
Let’s get this party started by clambering out on a limb. As I’m writing this, the Screen Actors Guild, the Producers Guild of America, and the Directors Guild of America have all given their top honors to Everything Everywhere All at Once with BAFTA dissenting by making All Quiet on the Western Front its choice for Best Picture. That digression, though hardly major, should be a hint that this season’s predictions shouldn’t be, if not set in stone, certainly written in ink. As the New York Times’s Kyle Buchannan tweeted, not since Apollo 13 swept the PGA, DGA, and SAG’s top prizes 28 years ago has a movie winning those awards fell short of winning the Best Picture Oscar. On the one hand, that’s a formidable precedent; on the other, if it happened at least once before…
At the risk of repeating myself (at least to those of you who’ve been paying attention to my annual dithering on these things), the Oscars, even in their present emaciated state, are trade awards, first, foremost, and for however long they go on. In the medium’s customary tug-of-war between Art and Commerce, the latter tends to have the upper hand in the Academy’s consideration. Neither the media nor the moviegoing public are factors in the voting except for those parts of the latter group with craft union cards within the moviemaking industry. Thus, most of the Academy’s final decisions have less to do with the quality of a motion picture and more to do with assessing its overall impact on their industry’s future. Hence, I put it to you: which of these eight movies has done more to bolster whatever’s left of the movie business’s sagging confidence?
Before you answer, I need to remind you that at this year’s annual Oscars luncheon, TG:M’s co-producer and star Tom Cruise made the biggest splash among its record-breaking 182 attendees; he was the Big Man On Campus, its Belle of the Ball, with none of the baggage he’s had to lug over the past 20 years. In a year with as many wide-open categories as this, the top prize may be the widest and most open of the competitions, excepting the feature documentaries. Draw your own conclusions, but at this moment, I can easily see Captain Maverick and his squadron booming and zooming to the winner’s circle. And because the movie was better than anybody had the right to expect, it wouldn’t be the most embarrassing Best Picture award in Oscar history. Too many others compete for that dubious honor.
FWIW: I doubt Prey or Nope, two of my own favorite movies from last year, would have made this list; nor would the tightly wound and ferociously topical Emily the Criminal and the sumptuously Hitchcockian detective story from Korea Decision to Leave. What all these had in common, as far as I was concerned, was a sense of each movie going about its business, doing what needed to be done in their allotted time, and keeping their audiences alert for surprise and possibility within tight corners. In short, they were the kind of movies I sought out in theaters or drive-ins in an earlier, different life.
Best Director
Martin McDonagh, The Banshees of Inesherin Daniel Kwan, Daniel Scheinert, Everything Everywhere All at Once Steven Spielberg, The Fabelmans Todd Field, Tár Ruben Öslund, Triangle of Sadness
Fablemans is a Steven Spielberg movie about Steven Spielberg. Some people have a problem with this, and I don’t know why. It’s not getting skunked the same way that his remake of West Side Story did a couple years ago. But you’d think a love letter to movies and moviemaking would be a slam dunk with voters. Instead, Team Daniel has been riding in triumph throughout awards season and there’s not so much as a pebble to trip them up to the winner’s circle.
Best Actor
Austin Butler, Elvis Colin Farrell, The Banshees of Inisherin Brendan Fraser, The Whale Paul Mescal, Aftersun Bill Nighy, Living
At the start, this category appeared to belong to Farrell or Fraser, whose SAG win may have put him back in play. But maybe it’s kind of a retroactive referendum on what people admired more about Robert De Niro’s Oscar-winning portrayal of Jake La Motta in 1980’s Raging Bull. Was it the all-out depiction in La Motta’s volatile personality or was it the fact that De Niro invested so deeply into the role that he made himself gain weight? Guess we’ll see.
Best Actress
Cate Blanchett, Tár Ana de Armas, Blonde Andrea Riseborough, To Leslie Michelle Williams, The Fabelmans Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Everybody I know, including me, is rooting for Yeoh, though Blanchett’s been mounting a doughty and, it would appear, successful campaign to dispel the negative vibes her movie stirred up in the classical music community. Cate’s BAFTA win teases us into thinking this will be a photo finish, but somehow, I doubt it’ll be that close
FWIW: Every year, the Oscars always seem to single out a “little” movie with a broken, put-upon protagonist struggling with some malady that s/he cannot control until they find redemption at the end. This year, that movie is To Leslie and its principal beneficiary is Andrea Riseborough, whose controversial nomination came through an eleventh-hour campaign with big names (Kate Winslet, Amy Adams, and Gwyneth Paltrow among them) pushing her over. This in turn led to cries of foul, especially among the #OscarSoWhite veterans believing Risborough’s candidacy came at the expense of such Oscar-worthy lead performances as those of Danielle Deadwyler (Till) and Viola Davis (The Woman King), both of whom were nominated for SAG Awards, but lost to Yeoh. Till’s director Chinonye Chukwu accused Hollywood of “unabashed misogyny towards Black women.” She’s not altogether wrong. But it doesn’t mean Riseborough’s nomination is a manifestation of this prejudice. It’s legit. You come away from To Leslie with Riseborough’s all-out investment in her serial-fuck-up character resonating in your head. Do I think she’s better than Blanchett or Yeoh? Apples and oranges. Do I think Deadwyler was better in her movie than Riseborough was in hers? I’d say it’s a draw. Do I think Davis was better in Woman King? You bet I do because, as I’ve stated before on this platform, Viola Davis is God! Then again, I also would have wanted Aubrey Plaza represented here for Emily the Criminal. But who cares what I want? Not Hollywood. That, as we were once fond of saying, is show biz and biz-ness of any kind rarely plays fair. So, I say kudos to the coalition behind Riseborough for making their push. Someday soon, Black and Brown people will make their own Riseborough uprising because of the precedent it set. To repeat: that’s show biz.
Best Supporting Actor
Brendan Gleeson, The Banshees of Inisherin Brian Tyree Henry, Causeway Judd Hirsch, The Fabelmans Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin Ke Huy Quan, Everything Everywhere All at Once
By now, a foregone conclusion. And, as with last year’s winner in this category, it’s also a great story: the little boy émigré from Vietnam who played Short Round in 1984’s Indiana Jones and the Temple of Down hitting the jackpot forty years later. Fun fact: Jeff Cohen, who played Chunk to his Data in 1985’s The Goonies, is now his lawyer.
FWIW: Keoghan was a surprise BAFTA winner in this category, and it may be because his poignant presence shined through the outsized personalities of Banshees’ two stars. He’ll get some attention, but, in many ways, he’s already won. As for Paper Boi (Henry), his day’s coming. Count on it.
Best Supporting Actress
Angela Bassett, Black Panther: Wakanda Forever Hong Chau, The Whale Kerry Condon, The Banshees of Ineisherin Jamie Lee Curtis, Everything Everywhere All at Once Stephanie Hsu, Everything Everywhere All at Once
Curtis’s SAG award shouldn’t have come as a surprise. For starters, she’s totally unrecognizable in the movie, at least at first. And Oscar loves it when the glamorous go all out to distort themselves on camera, especially when, in Curtis’s case, they’re Hollywood royalty. I’m now feeling it’s hers to lose. Bassett’s infusion of power and vulnerability helps ground what could have been an unwieldy popcorn blockbuster and made her an early favorite. But the MCU can’t withstand the accumulated might of ancestral movie legacy. Not this time, anyway.
Best Adapted Screenplay
All Quiet on the Western Front Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery Living Top Gun: Maverick Women Talking
On the one hand, giving an Oscar to a Nobel Prize winner like Kazuo Ishiguro (Living) would show elevated thinking on Hollywood’s part. On the other, Sarah Polley has quietly, diligently proven herself to be one of the world’s best writer-directors and I can’t see her walking away empty-handed from another one of these ceremonies.
Best Original Screenplay
The Banshees of Inisherin Everything, Everywhere All at Once The Fabelmans Tár Triangle of Sadness
Anything with Martin McDonagh’s name on it is all but automatically placed in this category’s pole position. This one’s an odd chamber piece, an astringent, overextended Laurel and Hardy sketch in which you actually feel the bumps on the noggin and see all the bruises, physical and otherwise. However thin the gruel, I can easily see it winning, though there’s always a chance that the momentum of EEAAO (“…with a moo-moo here and a moo-moo there…”) could sweep this one up.
Best International Feature
All Quiet on the Western Front Argentina 1985 Close EO The Quiet Girl
Given a Best Picture BAFTA and eight other nominations, Edward Berger’s graphic, devastating take on Erich Maria Remarque’s novel is the surest bet on the table.
Best Animated Feature
Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio Marcel the Shell with Shoes On Puss in Boots: The Last Wish The Sea Beast Turning Red
I feel relatively alone in asserting that this spikier, darker take on The Puppet Who Wanted to Be a Real Boy may have been a more imaginative and adventurous movie than any of the Best Picture nominees if only in the way it risked pissing people off who cling to their memories of the Disney version, which, for the record, I love, too. Most of the experts think it’s a lock, but I’m sensing a groundswell of support for M. Shell.
Best Cinematography
All Quiet on the Western Front Bardo: False Chronicle of a Handful of Truths Elvis Empire of Light Tár
Another close race, this one primarily between James Friend’s work on All Quiet on the Western Front and Mandy Walker’s on Elvis. If Walker wins, she will be the first woman to do so. But Friend’s movie also is nominated for visual effects and production design, which experts say gives him the edge. Screw it. I’m going to put my chips on progress.
Best Documentary Feature
All That Breathes Fire of Love All the Beauty and the Bloodshed A House Made of Splinters Navalny
By far, the widest-open race this year. If precedent alone was a factor, Sara Dosa’s DGA prizewinner, Fire of Love, with its dual themes of nature and everlasting love (married scientists who perish in a volcanic explosion), would have the edge. Then again, voters’ hearts would be just as vulnerable to House Made of Splinters which is set in a home for neglected children awaiting adoption. But the timeliest of these nominees is Daniel Roher’s tense profile of the Russian opposition leader who survived poisoning by Vladimir Putin’s goons, recovered in Germany, and returned home to a hero’s welcome – and imprisonment. The winner may, as in previous cases, depend on whether voters want to assault the turmoil of what’s been happening in Russia and the Ukraine, or run from it towards more hopeful, or at least more heartening stories. I’ll guess I’ll just what-the-hell my chips on Roher’s film.
Best Score
All Quiet on the Western Front Babylon The Banshees of Inisherin Everything Everywhere All at Once The Fabelmans
Once more, with feeling, to 91-year-old John Williams, though Carter Burwell still hasn’t won one of these yet. Here as elsewhere, I’m not convinced Banshees is strong enough to pull him over the hump.
Best Original Song
“Applause” from Tell It Like a Woman “Hold My Hand” from Top Gun: Maverick “Lift Me Up” from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever “Naatu Naatu” from RRR “This is a Life” from Everything Everywhere All at Once
With Rhianna (“Lift Me Up”), Lady Gaga (“Hold My Hand”), and one third of David Byrne (“This is a Life”) in play, how is it possible that the showstopper in this bunch belongs to a Tollywood epic that somehow stormed the global marketplace? Everybody seems to have already taken its win for granted, but everybody, including me, has been wrong many times before on this category.
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There’s so much stuff to keep track of these days that it’s easy to lose track of stuff that seemed so great to watch, read, or even glean. So, this took a longer time to assemble than previous lists because it took that long a time to process the maelstrom that was 2022. I’m not going to tell you what I think is missing here because you’ll all have your own lists, some of which will likely include, say, the January 6th hearings or Everything Everywhere All at Once. The Multiverse itself likely deserves a slot all its own, except how do I know I don’t have a whole other list somewhere that’s all different. But there’s no time left to figure all that out. This is what I’m going with, and, except for the very last item, I feel altogether good about it. As always, these are not in any particular order – except, again, for the last one.
Reservation Dogs – Two things, I’ve recently decided, make life worth living: a sense of purpose and an active connection with each other’s souls, no matter how remote or hostile. Such were the animating forces of Sterlin Harjo and Taika Waititi’s poignant blend of teen anomie, vacant-lot naturalism, and stoner surrealism. As with its predecessor, Season Two found its indigenous American kids adrift in their ramshackle Oklahoma hood, still grieving the suicide of their friend Daniel and still getting haphazard and not altogether lucid counsel from varied elders, living and dead. My personal favorites among the latter demographic include, among the dead, William “Spirit” Knifeman (Dallas Goldtooth), a Lakota ancestor to confused-and-abandoned Bear (D’Pharoah Woon-A-Tai), whose half-baked advice to his teen descendant include lyrics from “Carry On Now Wayward Son” (yes, that one); among the living, it’s a three-way tie between Officer Big (Zahn McClarnon), a tribal policeman who stumbles his way towards a wholly innate sense of law, order, and even (such as it is) justice; woozy, weed-mongering Uncle Brownie (Gary Farmer), and the oracular-if-shabby Bucky (the great Wes Studi), with his hard-won cosmic wisdom. Still, it’s the kids who occupy the series’ fitful center; not just Bear, but also Cheese (Lane Factor), Willie Jack (Paulina Alexis), and Elora (Devery Jacobs), whose single-minded path towards California anchored the second-season narrative, and now appears ready to affect her friends’ destinies. Whatever happens and wherever all the rest of the grownups and kids end up, I hope I see more of those rapping, bike-riding bros LilMike and FunnyBone. Even if I don’t, I’ll happily settle for more Bucky and Brownie.
The Philosophy of Modern Song — Don’t call it “Bob Dylan’s Pop-Rock Criticism” or apply any socio-political ideology to its 60-plus selections. More than anything else, this is the authentic follow-up to Dylan’s 2004 memoir, Chronicles, Volume One and should be acknowledged as the autobiography of a personal aesthetic. Its illustrations and its text are as illuminating, evocative, cryptic, funny, and exploratory as “Bob Dylan’s 115th Dream,” “From a Buick 6,” “Positively 4th Street,” or any other Dylan song, even those with no numerals in them. Also as with a Dylan song, whatever its intentions or origins, much of the raw content of these mini-essays, addenda, outbursts, and eruptions may arouse your subconscious to something it never considered before but recognizes as familiar. And no, I’m not going to explain what I mean by that.
Star Trek: Lower Decks – I’ll always place Matt Groening’s ribald space opera Futurama first above equals among animated science fiction TV series, even above the underappreciated, trailblazing, and scarily prescient Jetsons, which marked its 60th anniversary this year. Nevertheless, after three seasons, this doughty, wily offshoot of the ever-expanding-like-the-universe-itself Trek franchise has not only leaped towards the front of this personal pantheon, but it also threatens to become my favorite among the Trek shows that streamed into being over the last five years. As its title implies, the show moves its focus away from the Alpha Dogs of Star Fleet like Kirk, Spock, Sulu, Picard, Riker, La Forge, and other Heroes on the Enterprise Bridge and more towards the scrubs, swabs, and junior grade drudges several floors down from whose ranks would routinely come cannon fodder with imperiled landing parties in previous Trek incarnations. The series’ core clique waiting and serving on the USS Cerritos (itself a relative second-stringer among Star Fleet ships) is made up of science nerd D’Vana Tendi (Noêl Wells), super-striving Brad Boimler (Jack Quaid), sweet-tempered cyborg Sam Rutherford (Eugene Cordero), and last-and-certainly-not-least Beckett Mariner (Tawny Newsome), thorny, determinedly underachieving daughter of the ship’s captain Carol Freeman (Dawnn Lewis), whose own insecurities and thwarted ambitions are of such comparable dimension that you come away from this ingenious, often touching series affirmed that even in deep space, nobody ever gets out of high school, dead or alive.
Percival Everett – Suppose Chester Himes was an actual cowboy who spent as much time working out ontological riddles as riding ranges and fishing in mountain lakes. At age 65, Everett, who claims Himes as an influence, along with Herman Melville, has published more than twenty works of fiction of startling range, deadpan humor, and formidable intelligence. This year, for instance, he published Dr. No, where he borrows both a title and a plotline from Ian Fleming’s James Bond’s novels to fashion a blackout-adventure spoof judiciously seasoned with red herrings and philosophical conundrums. If I told you it’s about Nothing, you’d still read it, right? You’d have to read it. But if I were you, I wouldn’t start with the new one, but the one just before that was short-listed for the Booker Prize: The Trees, a very different, but no less provocative and inspired comedy thriller in which cool, dry Black agents from, the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation (MBI) investigate the serial murders of white racists whose bodies are somehow accompanied by the corpses of long-dead lynching victims, including Emmett Till. It made you almost wish Hollywood had made this into a movie instead of Till. But Hollywood was barely ready for that straight-ahead story to be told on-screen. And I doubt it’ll ever be ready for Percival Everett. But you might be. (Other recommended titles: Glyph, Erasure, I Am Not Sidney Poitier, For Her Dark Skin, Damned If I Do.)
Nope – Though I honor the memory of Rod Serling and what he did for me as a child in the warm bath of his Twilight Zone, the grownup I am now is less drawn to those Serling-esque episodes making broad and direct sociopolitical points and more towards those Zone stories written by Richard Matheson and Charles Beaumont that were more interested in pure jolts and unsettling visions for their own sake. Maybe that’s why I think this third feature by Jordan Peele is his best thus far for the same reasons much of the word-of-mouth I’d heard when it came out was so antagonistic: it was all over the map, in both theme and tone; it didn’t sustain a straight storyline or deliver a hard, sharp point. And it left me with more to unravel and think/dream about than either Get Out or Us. Yes, there’s a racial subtext (what Hollywood did for, and mostly to its Black workers, on- and off-camera), but it’s only one of several layers in this aliens-from-outer-space movie that manages to evoke the dry-mouth aura of a 1950s drive-in chiller while being up to date with its eccentric supporting cast, especially the marvelous Keke Palmer as steely, feisty sister to Daniel Kaluuya’s dispirited horse trainer. For the record, Michael Abels’s score reaches new heights here, too. Almost as high, maybe higher, than the big black disc in the sky that causes all the trouble.
Abbott Elementary – As I’ve previously testified in public, I was so much in love at first sight with Quinta Brunson’s tender and whimsical workplace comedy series about an economically challenged South Philly public school that I took its premature cancellation as an inevitability. Now it’s a firmly established hit which may well be single-handedly rescuing the analog network sitcom from oblivion. Somewhere, Mister Peepers is grinning – and idly wondering how he’d cope with a principal like Ava Coleman.
Matthew Goode in The Offer — For most of Goode’s career, I thought I had him nailed down as a pleasant, perfectly comported prototype of the British smoothie capable of an eccentric tic (in the manner of British smoothies) or even a swerve into hysteria because of, say, combat fatigue from whatever beastly war harshed his erstwhile empire’s mellow. Watching him bring Robert Evans back to life in The Offer was a massive revelation. Those who know or have seen the 2002 documentary The Kid Stays in the Picture don’t need to be told that Evans was something of a Hollywood superhero in the mid-1970s when the movie business was generally lost at sea while the art form was at its peak. Evans’ one major misfire of that decade was The Great Gatsby and what you see in Goode’s evocation discloses where he went wrong: to do Gatsby right, what Evans really needed to do was to let cameras follow him around for a year and have somebody edit all the raw footage into a feature. That hypothetical verité could have been just as innovative and grand an achievement as both Godfathers and Chinatown. As it was, Goode’s rendering of a Gatsby-esque Hollywood legend, a “Last Tycoon,” if you will, elevated an otherwise middling docudrama to near-classic tragedy.
Prey – This was the prequel to the Predator franchise than no one, not even those who don’t care about hunter-gatherers from outer space, knew they wanted until it materialized in front of them. Set in a primeval American Great Plains more than three centuries before Arnold Schwarzenegger was a gleam in his mother’s eye, the film stars the magnetic Amber Midthunder as Nuru, an indigenous young warrior itching to show her brother and the other young tribesmen that she’s as great at stalking and hunting as they are. But the first in a series of hairy, insect-faced extraterrestrial hunters begins to pick off the incredulous young braves, eventually leaving her to figure out how to protect the rest of her village from being harvested. The special effects are, in their elemental way, just as spectacular as the hi-tech pyrotechnics of previous installments. (You will believe a bear can fly.) But Midthunder is, on many levels, the most dazzling of the movie’s assets, her character’s intensity and self-possession announcing both a young woman’s coming-of-age and a screen star’s arrival.
Atlanta: The Final Season(s) – Where to begin? The crew’s WTAF adventures during Paper Boi’s (Bryan Tyree Henry) European tour, including strange encounters with, among others, a friendly-but-oddly-abusive Liam Neeson, some well-heeled gourmet cannibals, a Blackface Dutch Christmas icon, along with streams of misread signals, overpriced fashion goods, exotic and dangerous drugs, and a missing phone. Or what about the seemingly “free-standing” stories, including the one about the wealthy white Manhattanites who discover their little boy is emotionally and psychically closer to their recently deceased Caribbean caregiver? Things got even weirder when Earn (creator-producer Donald Glover) and his posse returned to Atlanta where things are as dislocated as ever; how Van (Zazie Beets) somehow ends up searching for her daughter within a sinister cult-like entertainment complex run by the exploitative, enigmatic Mister Chocolate (Glover), all of it finishing off somehow with harrowing adventures in sensory deprivation with perpetually stoned Darius (Lakeith Stanfield). And that just scrapes the surface of this layers-within-layers, worlds-within-worlds cultural excursion that resembled exactly nothing else anywhere on any screen. They say it’s over. Not in my head, it isn’t.
Top Gun: Maverick – This is on the list primarily for its significance as a cultural phenomenon and not so much because it’s a great, or even very good movie. Not that I didn’t like it. In fact, I liked it a whole lot more than its 1986 predecessor, when its star’s grin was devouring everything in its path, symbolizing both the era’s avarice and obliviousness. TG:M provided such a massive, exhilarating surge to theaters struggling to shake loose from the COVID-19’s siege that some audiences used the word “great” without qualification or irony. There were great things in it, most of them having to do with aerial ballet. But as all-American paeans to duty go, I much prefer John Ford’s calvary trilogy (Fort Apache, She Wore a Yellow Ribbon, Rio Grande) and even with Ed Harris around for the first act, I’d still rather watch The Right Stuff than either Top Gun movie.
In that first act (and if I’m really spoiling things for you here, then, dammit, go watch it on a streaming channel), Tom Cruise’s Maverick flies a state-of-the-art craft based on the now-decommissioned SR-71 “Black Bird” modified to reach Mach 10. Harris’s crusty admiral is about to shut down the manned flight experiment in place of drones, which kinda sorta makes sense. But “Mav” being “Mav”, he takes the plane up into the stratosphere and not only reaches the optimum speed but decides to stretch that old envelope a tad past Mach 10, which causes the plane to break up in flight. The next thing you see is Maverick, woozily lugging his parachute into a small-town diner, chugging ice water and asking where he is to which a small boy replies, “Earth.”
Now I don’t claim to be an aeronautical engineer. But I’ve absorbed enough histories of test flight and space travel to know that any corporeal being who even tries to eject from a flying object traveling past Mach 5 (a.k.a. hypersonic speed) will at the very least break every single bone and rend almost every tissue in its body, even in the highly unlikely event that a parachute opens. I’ve heard explanations (a.k.a. excuses) that the plane was likely equipped with some manner of “escape pod” that broke away and carried its pilot safely to the ground.
It’s only a movie, right? And a movie that works so conscientiously to please its audience as Top Gun: Maverick needs to sacrifice credulity to roll the turnstiles and leave everybody happy.
But suppose, just suppose, that what we see when that plane breaks up high in the sky is the death of Captain Pete Mitchell, USN? And what if everything we see afterwards, including – and especially – Maverick’s reunions with his ailing wingman and the embittered son of the Lost Goose, make up an extended posthumous dream sequence, a Sixth Sense with G suits and F-35s? You’d have a less satisfying popcorn epic. You might also have a resonant masterwork of American storytelling. As it stands now, it’s likely the loudest, most ornately apportioned shout of “olly-olly-oxen-free” ever issued to the moviegoing public. Thus, it’s a masterstroke of some kind. But not quite the one we, or the movies, really needed.
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Reposting this essay I wrote twelve years ago about Vincente Minnelli’s 1943 classic all-Black musical because a.) people besides me like it a whole lot and b.) because of its more-timely-than-ever admonitions against too-easy dismissals of what is believed to be Anachronistic and (thus) Patronizing. Also if you’ve never seen it before and it happens to come your way again, jump on it. You won’t be sorry.
At the hinge of the 1960s and 1970s, Cabin in the Sky embodied everything we young, gifted, and solemn black college students thought we were fighting against. All we blinkered baby cultural-nationalists could see back then in those idyllic depictions of small-town African American folk life were unhealthy levels of honeysuckle and hambone. Eighty-six those rolling dice and eyeballs, all that cornball piety and undignified shucking! Is that really what we wanted our collective profile to look like after King and Malcolm and countless others had died for our advancement?
It’s a measure of how much time has passed that I can’t even LOOK at that previous sentence, much less write it, without wincing; the same kind of wincing we aforementioned Children of the Movement were doing whenever Cabin poked out from TV’s wee-hour wilds or was screened at collegiate film societies. Exaggerated nose-turning-in-a-vertical-direction is at least as embarrassing as pronounced eye-rolling – and not nearly as funny. Given the choice between retroactive scoldings from what some new-jack pundits have come to label the “soul patrol” and the to-be-or-not-to-be anxieties displayed by Eddie “Rochester” Anderson, I know whose party I’d rather go to.
The distinction no longer needs raising. A few days ago, I’d hosted a screening of Cabin for a Wednesday-night Lenten supper at our predominantly black Episcopal church in lower Manhattan. It was a small audience, mostly older and just about all of its members had seen the movie before and loved it without predisposition or qualifiers (even though the DVD released three years ago opens with Warner Home Video’s contemporary disclaimer apologizing about “stereotypes” that were “wrong then and wrong now.”) The tiny audience appeared to appreciate the concern, though it didn’t need to be told what was or wasn’t appropriate. They just wanted a warm black-and-white memory bath. Even the sole 20-something in the room, recruited to help with projection, was caught up in a movie old enough to be his (grand) mother.
Each time I see the movie, I’m more galvanized by the sheer magnetism of its performers. Even in the reproachful seventies, it was hard not to be waylaid by the glory that was Lena Horne in her twenties. What she was then and what she remained throughout the sixties and beyond was so legitimate & enduring to young black fogies like us that we gave her quick dispensation for Cabin; the kind of pass that that didn’t easily go to, say, Ethel Waters (about whom, more later),“Rochester” Anderson or John “Bubbles” Sublett, whose song-and-dance recital of “Shine” is at once the movie’s most glaring anachronism and its most flamboyant affirmation of poise and skill.
Which in no way slights everyone else in the movie, though you wish Louis Armstrong got to do even a little bit more than set off a few elegant licks while wearing those ridiculous devil’s horns. You also wish you could see more of Duke Ellington’s orchestra at work beyond flashes of its suave, imperturbable leader. (That IS Johnny Hodges in the front with the alto, right?) But first-time director Vincente Minnelli was too caught up in the dancing and singing – and rightfully so. His own eye is so greedy and avid for movement and energy that you can almost feel him sitting next to you as you’re looking for the next big moment.
Almost all of which moments are owned by Waters. Donald Bogle has elsewhere noted how often contemporary audiences are drawn to screenings of Cabin by the promise of seeing the young, cat-like Horne, yet leave those screenings dazzled by Waters’ charisma. If younger moviegoers had easy access to Waters’ recordings from the 1920s and 1930s, they’d be better prepared for her vocal agility. (Critics and historians, not that anyone pays them any mind, argue with conviction that Waters’ chops as a singer were the equal of Armstrong’s – and that her influence on jazz singing was just as emphatic & far-reaching.)
But hardly anyone at any age is prepared for the moment when Waters’ Petunia, backsliding into “sin” to “save” Anderson’s Joe from the Devil’s clutches, sashays into a startlingly graceful jitterbug with Sublett’s Domino. One has read in books about both women of tension between Horne and Waters throughout Cabin’s shooting. (In her own memoir, His Eye is On the Sparrow, Waters doesn’t go into detail about the friction except to say that she “won every battle” and that her scrapes kept her away from the movies for another six years.) Whether Waters ended up dominating Cabin by fair or foul means, her triumph endures just as Dilsey, the character she played in her last film, 1959’s The Sound and the Fury, endured.
After the church screening was over, I asked the audience if there were still aspects of the movie that offended or seemed out-of-date. No one could think of any – and I honestly couldn’t come up with any that mattered. I do wish, in retrospect, that I’d asked them if it seemed as though the folks who were either in hell or engaging in “sinful” partying had a better time – and heard better music – than those who stayed close to Petunia’s righteous path. I decided against bringing that dilemma up in a Lenten discussion, though it now strikes me that there were folks willing to talk it over.
I did, however, bring up the closest present-day corollary to Cabin in the Sky’s blend of low comedy and Manichean melodrama: the films of Tyler Perry, especially those featuring Madea, Perry’s pious, pistol-packing alter-ego. Since I knew that all those assembled had seen more than one Perry movie more than once, I asked if there was any real difference between the depictions of black life in Cabin and those in, say, the recently released Madea Goes to Jail. They said there were none; a surprise to me since I expected them to mention the relative rawness of Perry’s depictions of single motherhood, class animus and teen pregnancy. Cabin’s dichotomy between Petunia’s milk-and-honey world view and the temptations of the flesh embodied by Horne’s duplicitous Georgia Brown seem like old school Disney by comparison. But in both cases, a simplistic (as opposed to simple) solution to mortal weakness and moral sloth is submitted to audiences for whom broad laughs and big emotions are the only justifications for entertainment.
Perry continues to astound the mainstream (white) world with the bushels of money he reaps for his movies. And his entrepreneurial moxie serves as a reminder that, unlike the 1940s (or the two decades subsequent to or preceding them), it’s possible for African American artists to have some control over how they’re depicted on screen, for better or worse. I still wonder whether future generations of black people will someday accuse his work of, at best, being too over-the-top or (so to speak) too black-and-white in their moralistic aims. I doubt it somehow. But of one thing I have no doubt: Madea, whatever her own martial skills or swaggering mojo, is no Ethel Waters.
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I’ve never believed there was a useful distinction to be made between “popcorn movies” and whatever’s meant by “prestige films.” Good movies are good movies and whatever’s left to talk about is marketing, nothing more.
And so, for that matter, is all this year’s pre-Oscar chatter about the decline in TV ratings for the awards ceremonies and the relative apathy among the public for movies considered “Oscar bait.” Do pundits and other assorted “observers” really think nominating Spider-Man: No Way Home for Best Picture is going to revive the Academy Awards’ profile among the masses? I don’t think so – and I happen to believe movies like Spider-Man should be nominated – as long as they’re good; just as I was pulling for Deadpool’s nomination (and for that matter, Leslie Uggams’) a few years back and wouldn’t have at all minded if Black Panther had won Best Picture over Green Book three years ago. It was, after all, the better movie in addition to being the bigger success.
Neither factor has ever really mattered when it comes to the Academy Awards. As I keep putting my blood pressure at risk to tell people who refuse to believe otherwise, the Oscars are trade awards voted and decided upon solely by those who work in the film industry. That means whatever gets nominated and rewarded depends on whatever mood prevails each year among a crowd of Hollywood working stiffs. And these mood swings are somehow immortalized (for at least three months or so) as the Best Movies of their particular year by cable news channels, slick magazines, and whatever’s left of the newspaper industry.
The social and economic upheavals of the last three years, especially the pandemic’s ongoing reverberations, are causing even legacy media institutions to wonder if this venerable charade is, at last, over and out. The celebration of the 50th anniversary of The Godfather’s release is a melancholy reminder of theatrical cinema’s once prominent place in American life and of how the old apparatus of making and hyping movies at all levels of society hasn’t existed since at least the second Clinton administration. Once again, I find myself asking, if we’re no longer sure what a movie is, then what the hell is an Oscar? And more to the point, what’s any of it worth?
I still don’t have an answer and I bet none of you do either. It’s one of those many 21st-century dilemmas for which an answer will surface on its own rather than materialize as a lightbulb over the head of an Instagram follower. For now, The Show in whatever form and however it’s packaged will go on as will the usual griping and grousing from those who don’t care and never have about Academy Awards. I’m no longer sure I care much either. But I’m here. Again. And many of you are or will be. I can hear you growling and snapping.
Once again, projected winners are in bold and, whenever applicable or appropriate, an FWIW(For Whatever It’s Worth) note will be added to each category.
Best Picture
Belfast CODA Don’t Look Back Drive My Car Dune King Richard Licorice Pizza Nightmare Alley The Power of the Dog West Side Story
Even before cowpoke’s cowpoke Sam Elliot blurted his indelicate critique against Power of the Dog (and these days, Oscar Season just isn’t Oscar Season without some occasion for public outrage and virtue-signaling to keep the yahoos distracted), Jane Campion’s western was showing a slight drop from the front-runner status it seemed to nail down upon its premiere last fall. The first wave of acclaim, along with the initial flurry of critics’ awards and field-leading 12 Oscar nominations, was followed by an unusually quick and acerbic blowback. I’d expected Belfast to be the principal beneficiary of this shift in Power/Dog’s fortunes – and it still might be. But lately it’s CODA that’s been gathering a head of steam since it won a best-movie-ensemble award from the Screen Awards Guild (SAG).
Not that SAG’s record as a Best Picture harbinger can be counted on to float without sinking. Less than half of the last 26 winners of that award carried their luck over to Oscar’s big prize. And besides (trying not to spoil things here), CODA’s story of a working-class teenager choosing between fulfilling her destiny as a singer and helping her financially strapped deaf family fits snugly into how SAG’s members see their own careers and aspirations. You wonder if that story arc is likely to patch into other Oscar voting blocs. Heck, yeah, it is, especially if it makes everybody cry as they’re watching. At the time I’m writing this, it’s still Power of the Dog’s race to lose, and as one of my correspondents suggests, Sam Elliot’s “POS” tirade could end up gaining added sympathy for Campion and her movie. But recent history has me regretting every time I’ve underestimated the power of “feel good” movies.
FWIW: Here’s where I usually talk about what I liked best last year, Oscar-nominated or not. Mostly I am, and plan to remain, confounded and aggrieved over Passing, its two stars Tessa Thompson and Ruth Negga, and its first-time director Rebecca Hall getting skunked out of any nominations whatsoever. In the long run, it may be all for the best; movies that are bold and enigmatic in their own time often find greater acceptance in another time – and I still believe in time. Speaking of boldness, I keep insisting that Nightmare Alley wasn’t a “remake” of a 1947 noir classic so much as a total reimagining as though 1945’s Detour (a far bleaker and grittier exemplar of “noir” movie than the original Nightmare) had a head-on collision with a Stephen King movie adaptation from the mid-to-late-1980s. It got a few Oscar bids in technical categories, but you’ll never see it win anything on live TV because of how they’re planning to telecast this year’s ceremonies. The Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner revival of West Side Story deserved much better upon its theatrical release than it got from the public and from industry wise guys too quick or, maybe, too eager to stamp it as a disaster. These days, I’d say, the word “disaster” weighs too much to casually fling at a movie whose biggest mistake was having the bad luck to pile into movie houses during a pandemic. To me, there’s no greater portent for the inevitable fall of the multiplex than the turnaround in overall reaction to West Side Story 2.0 in the weeks since it dove into the streams, as it were. I also have a qualified recommendation for The French Dispatch that reflects the latent generosity, or greater tolerance from my older, more indulgent self towards Wes Anderson’s intricate jewelry boxes. Or maybe it’s that I’ve lately found his knee-jerk critics more insufferable as time passes for their all-too predictable carping and jeering.
Best Director
Kenneth Branagh, Belfast Ryûsuke Hamaguchi, Drive My Car Paul Thomas Anderson, Licorice Pizza Jane Campion, The Power of the Dog Steven Spielberg, West Side Story
Even if Power/Dog doesn’t get the Big One, it won’t keep its director from Getting Hers, as it were. It used to be an anomaly for Best Film and Best Director winners to diverge. It’s now happened often enough in recent years to be taken for granted. Campion still has lots of support for this one whatever Sam Elliot says. And, as I said earlier, he may even have unintentionally helped her stay in front of this pack.
FWIW: If I had a vote on this one, Spielberg would get it; if nothing else, just for withstanding all the catcalls he was getting, even as he was still trying to finish it against stiff odds. (e.g., “Why are you bothering? The first one was just fine!” Or: “Why are you bothering? This old warhorse is too creaky, an anachronism, etc.”) Branagh could also pick Campion’s pocket, but only if Belfast wins Best Picture.
Best Actor
Javier Bardem, Being the Ricardos Benedict Cumberbatch, The Power of the Dog Andrew Garfield, tick..tick…Boom! Will Smith, King Richard Denzel Washington, The Tragedy of Macbeth
As good as I am at intuiting such things, I still can’t tell for sure how much Hollywood still loves Will Smith, despite the hugs, kisses, and backslaps he got for winning the SAG prize a few weeks back for this same role. And yet I can’t imagine anybody else from this list taking the Oscar from him except possibly …Denzel, whom I’m sure Hollywood loves for still being able to open a movie on name recognition alone while always delivering nothing less than an A-level performance. His Macbeth isn’t his very best, but it’s good enough. Smith’s rendering of the Williams sisters’ volatile, complicated daddy, on the other hand, IS his very best. Not a slam dunk, maybe; Cumberbatch also lurks in the weeds. But taking everything into account, it’s close to a no-brainer.
Best Actress
Jessica Chastain, The Eyes of Tammy Faye Olivia Coleman, The Lost Daughter Penelope Cruz, Parallel Mothers Nicole Kidman, Being the Ricardos Kristen Stewart, Spencer
Chastain’s SAG award vaulted her to the foreground of a not-terribly-strong-but-highly-competitive field. It’s a big, bravura performance, exactly the type that actors love to reward. And however effective, say, Kidman and Stewart (especially) were at embedding themselves in their real-life personas, it’s now Chastain’s to lose.
Best Supporting Actor
Ciarán Hinds, Belfast Troy Kotsur, CODA Jesse Plemons, The Power of the Dog J.K. Simmons, Being the Ricardos Kodi Smit-McPhee, The Power of the Dog
Another case where the SAG vote seems to have locked this one up. McPhee had the early lead, but with Plemons’ nomination for the same move came that hoary old saw about “splitting the vote,” which I never thought mattered much and won’t this time either. The veteran Hinds enjoys much affection and esteem among his peers and his turn as the grandfather in Belfast is lovely and touching. But Kotsur’s movie now has greater momentum and his is the far more compelling backstory.
FWIW: There was a moment early on when I thought Simmons had a fair shot of getting his second one of these and it had mostly to do with how even those who disliked Being the Ricardos were always happy to see his William Frawley appear on-screen.
Best Supporting Actress
Jessie Buckley, The Lost Daughter Ariana DuBose, West Side Story Judi Dench, Belfast Kirsten Dunst, The Power of the Dog Aunjanue Ellis, King Richard
Rita Moreno made me tear up when she soloed on “Somewhere” in West Side Story. I was sure that alone would have made inevitable another nomination, even another win 60 years after she copped this same award for playing Anita. Still, DuBose is getting unadulterated props – and prizes — for her fiery, effervescent, and deeply touching turn in the same role. She should have little-to-no trouble adding another trophy to the pile…
FWIW: …but if it were up to me, I’d ship this puppy posthaste to Aunjanue Ellis for all but stealing her movie out from under the Fresh Prince’s fabled jawline. Her character’s confrontation with a meddling neighbor was an aria of last-nerve enervation with Other People’s Bullshit. Love her, even if hardly any other forecaster seems to notice, or care.
Best Original Screenplay
Belfast Don’t Look Up King Richard Licorice Pizza The Worst Person in the World
Paul Thomas Anderson may be the most original and audacious living American filmmaker – which won’t necessarily help him win this one. You need to be in the mood for Licorice Pizza’s first-this-happens-then-this-happens-and-then-this-happens storytelling, which would be far more welcome to moviegoers in the 1970s when this story takes place. I was down with it because that decade was my most formative as a cineaste and it is probable there’s a majority of voters in this category who are likewise disposed. But I sense this one’s heading to Northern Ireland.
Best Adapted Screenplay
CODA Drive My Car Dune The Lost Daughter The Power of the Dog
This one’s wider open than it seems with all except, maybe, Dune carrying strong, if not overpowering cases on their behalf, and none as innovative as Kushner’s delicate, detailed upgrade of West Side Story‘s book, which was totally ignored. Even with CODA‘s late surge to the finish line, I’m thinking Power/Dog may have the edge. But not by a lot.
Best International Feature
Drive My Car Flee The Hand of God Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom The Worst Person in the World
Drive My Car’s triumphant ride through last year’s festival circuit made this elegiac dissection of grief an early favorite in this category. But this is an especially strong field, with both the groundbreaking Flee and Worst Person in the World drawing homestretch buzz. The Ukraine invasion could be a rogue factor favoring Flee if not in this category, then in one of the other two where it’s contending. Even past winner Sorrentino’s Hand of God has a puncher’s chance. Keeping my finger here for now but prepared to move it at any time.
Best Documentary Feature
Ascension Attica Flee Summer of Soul Writing With Fire
I’ve had dismal luck forecasting this category in recent years and I’m not quite sure about this pick either. As in past years, the outcome of this contest depends on whether Hollywood votes its hopes or its fears. Both impulses are very much in play in the present tenseness. As much as I was transported as everybody else by Summer of Soul’s found objects, I’m going to presume that both innovation and urgency count for a lot with this crowd and believe this is where Flee collects its Oscar.
FWIW: Once again, the grizzled ex-newspaperman in me is rooting for the nominee that shines a light on journalism overcoming formidable odds in foreign lands. Last year it was Romania’s Collective; this year it’s India’s Writing With Fire. Next year, it’ll be some doughty, put-upon independent weekly near the Urals – or, more likely, Central Florida.
Best Animated Feature
Encanto Flee Luca The Mitchells vs. The Machines Raya and the Last Dragon
Sony Animation’s rowdy, whip-smart sugar rush of a techno-satire is, in every sense, the wild card of this bunch. That it’s already won 25 awards from critics’ associations and other groups may come as a surprise to those who’ve watched only its first ten minutes or so on Netflix (where, BTW, you can still find it, even if it’s not always highlighted on the home page). It seems at the outset like such a typical example of formulaic dysfunctional-family slapstick that you’re almost shocked by how meta it gets without losing its edge, its warmth, or its run-amuck tempo. It’s by no means a sure thing, especially with not one, but two Disney entries and the aforementioned Flee as competition. But brains-and-heart, along with the much-beloved Olivia Coleman providing the voice of a megalomaniacal smart phone, seem to me a formidable combination of factors for victory.
FWIW: Unless I’m wrong and either Encanto or Luca end up in the winner’s circle after all.
Best Cinematography
Dune (Grieg Fraser) Nightmare Alley (Dan Lautsen) The Power of the Dog (Ari Wegner) The Tragedy of Macbeth (Bruno Delbonnel) West Side Story (Janusz Kaminski)
Once again, a good, strong field, all of them deserving. Because of that, I choose to go with my personal preference. Fraser may win it anyway. But this movie’s images keep crawling back into my head the way Dune’s do not.
Best Original Score
Don’t Look Up (Nicholas Ball) Dune (Hans Zimmer) Encanto (Germaine Franco) Parallel Mothers (Alberto Iglesias) The Power of the Dog (Jonny Greenwood)
Greenwood deserved this award in 2017 for Phantom Thread and he’d probably get his first win this year for his appropriately itchy and eccentric arrangements for Power/Dog if Zimmer, who’s only got one Oscar (The Lion King, 1994) to show for his 12 nominations, hadn’t done some of his finest work ever in laying down tracks, as it were, on Planet Arrakis.
FWIW: I’m going to assume, however, that the Encanto soundtrack’s prolonged stretch run on the pop charts isn’t lost on voters, many of whom likely have kids in the house who’ve played it to death on whatever platform or machine they have. Not that such factors have always tipped the scales; voters in this category like to think they’re above such matters. But nobody should be surprised if Encanto’s name is called. On any of these.
Best Song
“Be Alive” from King Richard “Dos Oruguitas” from Encanto “Down to Joy” from Belfast “No Time to Die” from No Time to Die “Somehow You Do” from Four Good Days
Does Billie Eilish beat Beyoncé? Do either of them expect to beat Disney? Or Van Morrison? (Well, yeah, because we’re all supposed to be ticked off at Van Morrison, right?) And what about Reba McEntire? Nobody knows from her movie anyhow. Maybe that’s why she’ll win. But I’m going with who’s hot right now and that would be…would be….could be…um…
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Going to live performances for most of the past year was pretty much out of the question for me (with one notable exception cited down below). And there were so many reasons for this that relatively few of them had to do with the pandemic. (Here, for example, was a big one.) As for the brave not-so-new-anymore world of streams and clouds, one wasn’t always sure where one wanted to dump several hours of one’s life into binge-watching. Most evenings found me staring at the available options, all but completely immobilized by the sheer mass of “content” to the point where I frequently found myself saying, “The hell with all this noise!” and go to sports or Turner Classic Movies – or both. Or neither.
So given the myriad, metric tons of possibilities for my favorite things. of 2021, it’s possible that there may be things I’ve neglected, passed by, haven’t caught up with or entirely forgotten about. It may say something about the sheer glut of “content” that my top pick was a 2020 release, but it took me most of this year’s first half to absorb its content, and even longer to assess its impact. It’s still Up On Top, so to speak, because it’s too important to ignore – even if much of the culture, popular or otherwise, pretty much has:
Turn Me Loose, White Man– Now that “critical race theory” has affected state and local elections, driven school boards up a wall and perplexed a mass media that doesn’t quite grasp the concept (or know exactly what it means), it may be time to consider the possibility that we’re all going about this “racial dialogue” thing the wrong way. Mostly we need to stop worrying about making Black and White people “feel better” about being what they are. “Feelings,” after all, are what got us all into this mess in the first place. Somebody needs to break the news, however gently, that none of us is as “Black” or as “White” as we think we are, thanks in large part to an ongoing cultural transaction that began centuries ago with music created by African slaves, propagated by their descendants, absorbed and, yes, appropriated by Whites only to be reinvigorated and even reinvented into new forms by pink and brown alike. Fellow Americans and worthy constituents, it’s in all our DNA, whether we like it or not. We’re all different, and always the same. Few people this side of Ralph Ellison’s ghost care to even consider such concepts, booby-trapped as they are with anachronisms, racial slurs, ribald and sacred outbursts swarming and popping on scratchy old 78-RPM records, archaeologic souvenirs of an earlier, exceedingly weirder America. But Allen Lowe, saxophonist, composer, historian, educator, and cultural gadfly, has long believed that if you gathered as much aural arcana as can be assembled, you could approach something resembling a unified field theory about what makes up the American soul in all its contradictory restlessness and conflicting exuberance.
It takes 30 compact discs with almost 900 songs and two volumes of hypertext for Lowe to fashion Turn Me Loose, White Man, a survey of the national sound in all its permutations, blues, bluegrass, gospel, jazz, burlesque, C&W, R&B, rock and rockabilly in so many mutant and mongrelized strains that “genre” loses all meaning. As, Lowe implies, it probably should. Lowe’s archival efforts have been compared in range to those of such intrepid pioneers as Alan Lomax, Paul Oliver, and Harry Smith. But there are far more idiosyncratic and illuminating patterns Lowe draws from and, in some cases, imposes upon his discoveries. You’ll probably need to follow along, as much as possible, with Lowe’s written text (pure pleasure on its own) to gauge how and why on the first volume he chose to follow, say, the great Black vaudeville comedian Bert Williams’ 1906 recording of his deathless “Nobody” with the more obscure May Irwin’s whimsical 1907 sliver of minstrelsy, “If You Aint Got No Money, You Needn’t Come Around.” Note the use of dialect in the title’s first clause and the grammatical precision of the second. Such tensions are played out in big and small ways throughout this cosmic juke box whose selections cover the 20th century’s first sixty years. From the shuck-&-jive of Irwin’s “coon song” (defined by Lowe as “that odd phenomenon of progressive melody and harmony, advanced white singing, significant black co-optation and racist bait”) through the 1920s emergence of Black blues queens Bessie Smith and Ethel Waters and a panoply of artists from the widely celebrated (Louis Armstrong, Jimmie Rodgers, Al Jolson, Leadbelly, Count Basie, Bill Monroe, Bing Crosby, Kitty Wells, Charlie Parker, Roy Rogers, Little Richard) to just-below-the-radar legends (Geeshie Wiley, Babs Gonzales, Blue Ridge Quartet, Helen Merrill, Jimmy Yancey, Riley Puckett) and many more obscure or little-remembered artists whose contributions glow like searchlights struggling to be seen through twilight mists.
The zillions of epiphanies and discoveries along the way are too numerous to adequately summarize. The best I can do for now is to mention the shock of hearing the original bust-out 1911 recording of Sophie Tucker’s “Some of These Days,” composed by Black songwriter Shelton Brooks and thus an early example of appropriation; but one whose impact was galvanic enough to give safe passage to Tucker’s stardom well past the 1960s. Another shock: the spare, haunting 1941 recording of “Why Don’t You Do Right?” by the ill-fated blues singer Lil Green that Peggy Lee credited with influencing her own hit version the following year. And on and on…
Whether things should have turned out this way (and artists like Lee are the ones least deserving of blame) shouldn’t be a matter of concern to contemporary listeners anxious to throw as many red “racism” flags at the past as can be flung. (You’re better off blaming the Southern segregationist bloc in Congress for ruining what could have been a nice party for all.) The main point, as Lowe continually asserts, is that such push-pull dynamics, this braiding of cultures on record, as it were, didn’t validate or encourage racial separation. It was very much the opposite, even when the lyrics were far from conciliatory or respectful to Black people earlier in the century.
Lowe’s magnificent treatise comes to us as a gift we’ve needed for a long time, though this era being whatever it is, I don’t know whether the skittish, hopelessly judgmental masses who now dominate social media are prepared to deal with its sheer weight or its propensity for nuance, irony, wit, and surprise. For the moment, I choose to be optimistic enough to speculate that when these masses are ready for Turn Me Loose, White Man, it’ll still be around somewhere to both explain and evoke a world where the Light Crust Doughboys are as “ivey-divey” as the Sun Ra Arkestra.
The rest, as usual, are in no particular order:
Rita Moreno – You know how you have those people in your life or in your personal pantheon of whom you always say, “If you don’t like —-, then I don’t want to know you”? Well, Rita Moreno has for most of my life been at or near the top of that list for me and it was as much for what she did when she was Being Herself on talk shows and interviews as for when she exploded on-screen in the original 1961 film adaptation of West Side Story and collected her supporting-actress Oscar the following year. As most of the known universe knows by now, she’s also in the Steven Spielberg-Tony Kushner version and not a few people believe she can win the same Oscar sixty years after she got her last one. It may not matter much either way as she’s practically a charter member of the EGOT sisterhood. What does matter is that this year, at a supernaturally energetic 90 years old, Moreno has been given her proper due and then some; not just with the new West Side Story (of which she is also a producer), but this past year’s release of Just a Girl Who Decided to Go for It, a PBS documentary about Moreno that gained viewership when it streamed on Netflix. She made being Rita Moreno look easier and much more fun than it likely was, especially when struggling through her dispiriting and (especially) demeaning early years as a studio ingenue. From those experiences, she developed superior emotional intelligence and fervent empathy towards all who struggled as she did. At about the five-minute mark of this interview clip, she talks about how when working as a series regular, she would go out of her way to make guest actors feel more welcome in unfamiliar, and in some cases, less hospitable surroundings. It’s not in the documentary, but it’s yet another reason, as if any more were needed, to cherish her forever.
The Beatles: Get Back – As Samuel Johnson didn’t say, but would have, whosoever gets bored from watching four active imaginations pooling their resources to make music in a studio is bored with life. Eight hours of footage didn’t seem an exceptionally long time to get embedded in a handful of hard day’s nights in the studio. Much as they may have wanted to get back, so to speak, to live concerts, their basic instincts turned out right: they were better together in a studio than they would have been on stage in their latter days as a group. (The guess here is that if they’d stayed on the road any longer than they did, one or more of them would have gotten physically, seriously hurt as the decade they helped create began curdling like cream left open too long on the patio.) Even with all the tiffs, tantrums, and tensions sharing the room with them, the guys were in their safe space, as capable of mutually assured generosity (still loving the sequence where George is helping Ringo erect a bridge for the latter’s “Octopus’s Garden.”) as of sticking tiny needles into each other’s self-esteem. All of which happens when you’re just “hanging out” and this may well be for all time the sine qua non of cinematic “hangs.” The sainted Cassavetes couldn’t have pulled it off if he’d staged everything in advance: he could never have drawn up those two “what’s-all-this-then?” constables trying in vain to get the lads to shut down their rooftop concert. Questions for further study: Can we be sure Phil Spector didn’t put the old lady up to calling the cops? And where, in all this footage, was Phil Spector anyway?
Passing – With episodic television now firmly in the center of popular storytelling, it’s perhaps inevitable that some of the year’s most critically-lauded feature films tended to leave more of their narrative details to the imagination, much as producers, directors and writers tried to do in the mid-20th century as commercial television squeezed movie houses into tight corners. Jane Campion’s award-winning western noir The Power of the Dog was a revelation to many for its calculated ambiguity. I preferred Rebecca Hall’s directorial debut if only for the daring aesthetic and personal choices she made in adapting a Harlem Renaissance classic and thus proving (a.) that Nella Larson has earned serious reconsideration as a major American novelist and (b.) judging from some of the reactions to the movie, there remain some things about skin color we feel uneasy about.
Samantha Fish – So let me tell you how this happened: I was wandering around YouTube this past summer in search of vintage fifties black-and-white videos of the great country-rockabilly pioneer Wanda Jackson to show a friend of mine what she’d been missing. In the process, whatever algorithm mediates such things kicked up more recent live performances from a guitarist/vocalist I’d never heard before. Among the many things that led me from the Telluride thing was this solo recital above for New Orleans’ fabled WWOZ from a year ago when things were too locked down for live audiences.
Damn! I said to myself. Where’d she come from? I then asked myself.
Born 33 years ago this coming January in Kansas City, Fish’s been performing kickass blues, soul, and country rock for more than a decade and has recorded seven albums under her name, the latest of which, Faster, came out this past September on the Rounder label. She plays several different types of guitar at several different speeds and may well be the master of the amplified cigar-box. With composure and conviction, she can belt, purr, growl, and shout like a grizzled juke-joint veteran, a swampland Marilyn Monroe with a surfeit of sang-froid. She’s always on the move from one medium-cool venue to another, her smitten fans following her trail and hanging on her every well-wrought lick and riff. By autumn, I was so enamored that when I found out her tour would land at Philadelphia’s Union Transfer on my birthday night, I gave her concert as a present from me to me as the first live music show I’d attended since lockdown. I keep wondering why this woman isn’t ruling the world. One answer, the best I can come up with for now, is that the world as it is now constituted would need to be at once older and newer to deserve her reign. As things stand now, she already travels the world, finds love wherever she goes, and, as The Fugs would say, is doing all right.
Tear Across the Dotted Line – In a time like ours where narcissism and its toffee-nosed sibling solipsism rule the populace regardless of ideology, anything that chips away at what legendary basketball coach Pat Riley famously labeled “the Disease of Me” is worth your time. I’m certainly glad for the time I spent absorbing this six-episode animated series by the Italo-Franco cartoonist Zerocalcare, who also voices (in the Italian-language version) his cartoon alter-ego Zero, a snarky, self-absorbed, and self-sabotaging professional illustrator whose personality is best expressed by the giant orange armadillo who hangs around as his sardonic Jiminy Cricket: “You’re a black belt at dodging life.” Exhibit A for the armadillo’s diagnosis is Zero’s fraught, constricted relationship with Alice, a shy, enigmatic young woman with whose feelings Zero plays an exasperating game of keep-away, until tragedy forces him to confront his own mangier inhibitions. On this description alone, you may be inclined to take a hard pass. But there is genuine charm, wit, and ingenuity in execution, and it wins your heart, fairly and honestly, at the end, even if you’re left feeling that Zero would still be more annoying without the armadillo tagging along.
The Love Song of W.E.B. DuBois – “We are the earth, the land. The tongue that speaks and trips on the names of the dead as it dares to tell the story of a woman’s line. Her people and her dirt. Her trees and her water.” If you’re going to try writing a “great American novel,” you better come at it with a killer lead, especially if what follows is almost 800 pages long. Award-winning poet Honorée Fanonne Jeffers fulfills this first obligation in her first novel, an audacious, dense-star potpourri of bildungsroman, multi-generational history, socio-political inquiry and, as the title implies, love story. The coming-of-age story belongs to Ailey Pearl Garfield, habitually impertinent, intensely probing, and passionately engaged in the pursuit of her family background with all its upheavals, hardships, duplicities, and hard-won victories. For those who wonder if going so long and deep is worth the trouble, I yield the floor to culture critic Davin Seay who in 1982’s The Catalog of Cool posed the rhetorical question, “Ask yourself…you looking for something to do while the coffee cools or do you want to read a book?”
Lashana Lynch, Ana De Armas & Lea Seydoux – No Time to Die took its sweet time getting its business done, making Daniel Craig’s long goodbye to the James Bond franchise seem even longer than necessary. Still, the movie’s generosity of spirit towards its cast and its audience compensated for any number of longueurs and Craig’s comfort level with the 007 persona was never more evident, or more disarming, than it was on his way out. What also helped was a dazzling trio of what would have once been branded “Bond girls” for convenience’s sake, though somehow, they each seem emblematic of Things to Come rather than What Once Was. We’ll start with Lynch as Agent Nomi of MI-6, who in the wake of Bond’s resignation from the secret service, was granted “license to kill” status and made the most of it with a skill set formidable enough to get her out of any jam the franchise could conceive. Seydoux, reprising her role from SPECTRE as Bond’s enigmatic love interest Madeleine Swann, got to show additional bad-assery in an unexpected place beyond Bond: as the truculent prison guard who doubles as an artist’s nude model in Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch. Last, and by no means least is Armas, who made perhaps the biggest splash with critics and audiences as Paloma, the callow, but poised CIA agent, whose one action set piece with Craig’s Bond showed she could take command of the screen on her own. When Armas’s Paloma split for Parts Unknown, you felt she’d taken much of the movie’s vitality with her. It’s been whispered that Paloma will be given her own movie as will Lynch’s Nomi. It’d be OK with me and I suspect millions of others if they paired up somehow, if the world could withstand so much magnetism from the same place.
Succession – For those who haven’t watched the third season, or for that matter, its two predecessors (and what are you all waiting for anyway?), I’ll try hard not to spoil anything for you by being of no real help whatsoever. Moving stuff around without changing anything about their miserable selves: that’s what being a member of the Roy family is all about, beginning with Mister “Fuck Off “himself, his satanic majesty Logan Roy (Brian Cox). Part of the reason Season 3 reached a new peak in dialogue was its many cogent deployments of the f-word as verb, adjective, noun, and adverb. beginning with what retains pole position as Snap of the Decade: not-as-smart-as-she-thinks sister Shiv (Sarah Snook) telling her not-as-hep-to-the-jive-as-he-thinks-younger bro Roman (Kieran Culkin): “Oh, you love showing your pee-pee to everybody, but sooner or later, you’re actually going to have to fuck something!” Then there’s Shiv’s not-as-pliant-as-he-seems husband Tom (Matthew Macfayden) telling nowhere-near-as-cool-as he-thinks renegade son Kendall (Jeremy Strong) why he can’t join the latter’s uprising against Big Daddy: “I don’t mean to be insulting, but having been around a bit, my hunch is you’re going to get fucked. Because I’ve seen you get fucked a lot. And I’ve never seen Logan get fucked once.” In the end, there’s Logan (and, as Tom says, this shouldn’t be a spoiler to those of us who’ve “been around” these jackals since 2018) proclaiming “I! Fucking! Win!” closely followed by Shiv’s doleful last words till next season, “Mom fucked us.” That’s more than enough fucking “fucks” for you to begin piecing together where things go from here. And you can count on so much more — and potentially worse — fuckery to come.
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If blame is necessary, then it goes to my good friend, humane observer and fellow professional spectator Tim Page, who was inspired by this year’s recently completed Academy Awards to come up with his own entirely subjective Best Picture list for every year he’s been alive. He posted this list on Facebook and the heroism of his effort so inspired me that I was compelled to come up with one of my own.
I had fun with it while I was picking and choosing. But as soon as I was finished, I was all but overcome by a profound sadness. Because as I surveyed this list, it came across more like a melancholy relic of an era of moviegoing that is all but swept away by the streams and clouds of the digital age, along with the countervailing bombast of spectaculars and star-packages contrived to keep whatever’s left of the multiplexes alive and upright, post-pandemic.
Whatever you want to say about my choices, which are presented with little more than random illustrations and no explanations (or, at this point, equivocations), they each came from discoveries I made either at the time they were released or, mostly, long afterwards. They are not commodities to be assessed like IPAs or yoga mats, which seems pretty much how most “consumers” assess filmed “product” these days; these films were means of stretching my senses, deepening memories, sharpening the landscape around me. They are all places to which I am always happy and eager to return so I can re-encounter the arcane joys they gave me and, maybe, find something new to like about them as an older, if not always wiser viewer.
“Viewer.” I like that word so much better than “consumer.” Don’t you?
A couple things before we begin: 1.) It’s entirely possible that some of the things on this list could change over time. They did in at least a few places as I prepared to post this version. 2.) These are in no way intended to be a definitive, all-time-great, etc. or whatever other euphemism you wish to use. They are parts of myself that I and I alone declare as a personal best for each year. You will have your own. I shall be as forbearing towards those as I hope you can manage to be for mine own.
So…
1952:Singin’ in the Rain 1953: Tokyo Story
1954: Rear Window 1955: The Night of the Hunter 1956: Invasion of the Body Snatchers
1957: Sweet Smell of Success 1958: Vertigo 1959: Rio Bravo 1960: Shoot the Piano Player
1961: Yojimbo 1962: The Manchurian Candidate
1963: Charade 1964: A Hard Day’s Night 1965: The Spy Who Came in From the Cold 1966: Persona
1967: Bonnie & Clyde 1968: 2001: A Space Odyssey 1969: The Wild Bunch 1970: The Landlord
1971: McCabe & Mrs. Miller 1972: The Godfather 1973: Ganja & Hess 1974: The Godfather II
1975: Jaws 1976: All the President’s Men 1977: Annie Hall 1978: Blue Collar
1979: Being There 1980: Raging Bull 1981: Diva/My Dinner With Andre
1982: Blade Runner 1983: The Right Stuff 1984: Repo Man 1985: Lost in America
1986: Blue Velvet 1987: The Princess Bride
1988: Bull Durham 1989: Do the Right Thing 1990: GoodFellas 1991: Daughters of the Dust
1992: One False Move 1993: Groundhog Day
1994: Pulp Fiction 1995: Toy Story 1996: Jerry Maguire
1997: L.A. Confidential 1998: Babe: Pig in the City
1999: All About My Mother 2000: Yi-Yi
2001: In the Mood for Love 2002: The 25th Hour/Talk To Her
2003: Lost in Translation 2004: Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind
2005: A History of Violence 2006: Children of Men
2007: Zodiac 2008: WALL-E
2009: A Serious Man
2010: The Social Network 2011: Margin Call 2012: Moonrise Kingdom
Just so we’re clear, movies aren’t dead, though multiplexes are likely dying. And that process was well underway before COVID-19 locked down the world.
We keep hearing that there’s light at the end of this tunnel we’ve been trudging through for a year. But keep in mind, whether immunized or not, that we’re still in a tunnel, even as I’m writing this. And whenever we all can safely stagger into this light-at-the-end, it’s going to take a while for us to get our cloistered senses re-adjusted. Things will at the very least look a lot different at the outset from how they did a year ago, the movie business being among the familiar institutions most conspicuously affected by a year of closures and strictly enforced re-openings here and there.
Of course, I too have missed going to movie theaters, even the ugliest, most utilitarian of them. No matter how big an HDTV screen you’re able to squeeze into your kitchen or bathroom, the experience of watching any moving picture, whether as intimate as Personaor as populated as Rear Window is nowhere near as immersive as sitting with strangers in even the narrowest darkened room. As with any other self-respecting cinephile, I regret what seems an irreversible decline in a kind of romantic, near-heroic age of moviegoing commemorated by Martin Scorsese during the past year. Streams and clouds are no longer alternatives to theater-going. They are now, pretty much, The Ball Game. Given the choice between figuring out logistics for going out to see a blockbuster or watch that blockbuster at your own convenience as soon as it “drops,” how many would rather pony up the baby-sitting money, root around for gas and parking expenses and line up single file for whatever dubiously packaged snack will adequately meet their needs and those of the kids tagging along?
But we’ll still have movie houses; better yet, all those repertory houses that were devoured by the multiplex could come back to life and restore the romance and adventure celebrated by Scorsese. If whatever’s left of the multiplexes still think they can make a go of it by including all kinds of other distractions – arcade games, dining, aerial acts, whatever – they’ll carry on and some may even thrive in such reinvention.
And the really good news, at least as far as I’m concerned, is that the Age of Clouds and Streams will better enable greater diversity of both product and producers. Studios will no longer have to wonder about whether certain scripts and stories are too “niche-ey” to reap theatrical profits worldwide. In other words, Black and other minority filmmakers will have more and better outlets to tell their stories and, through such exposure, may eventually be empowered enough to carry those stories into wider marketplaces.
But that’s all for later. For now, the movies are still trying to pick their way through a bewildering, anxious and altogether strange year that may someday be regarded as a transformative one. Whether the transformations are for better or worse won’t be settled or even suggested by this year’s Oscars that, whatever else you want to say about them, don’t look a whole lot like the Oscars of a decade or even a half-decade before
As always, projected winners are in bold face and, whenever necessary, a FWIW (For Whatever It’s Worth) disclaimer/appendix will follow.
Oh…and one more thing: if you’ve been annually wagering on my picks, please don’t do that this year because this year, as opposed to its predecessors, I expect to be wrong about most, if not all of these.
Best Picture
Judas and the Black Messiah Mank Minari Nomadland Promising Young Woman Sound of Metal The Father The Trial of the Chicago 7
After all those serial film festival triumphs, rapturous reviews and probing inquiries into its up-to-the-minute-neo-Grapes-of-Wrath relevance (or lack thereof), Nomadland has become this season’s catch-all for smarty-pants revisionism. Critics and civilians alike seem to be groping for reasons to dislike or dismiss it, many of them insisting on greater detail or added socio-political content that the movie’s structure was never built to contain in the first place. Why? Who’s that helping? And aren’t we supposed to be smart enough to tease out such inferences on our own? What happened to the idea of making the audiences work even a little bit instead of the story doing all the work for them?
I still believe in Nomadland, even if I’m no longer certain the Academy does. But what kind of Academy vote will matter here? If it’s the same Academy that punched Green Book’s ticket two years ago, then Mank, The Father or Chicago 7, the closest things to “traditional” Oscar bait, will get this one. If it’s the Academy that gave Parasite its unprecedented near-sweep of a year ago, then Minari, Judas and, yes, Nomadland lead the pack. This leaves Sound of Metal and Promising Young Woman, both very dark in very different ways. If you think the Best Picture vote is the best reflection of an overall industry mood, then I’m going to presume here that the overall industry is both anxious and angry over what’s happened over the last twelve months, or four years, or whatever index you choose to use. The mordant humor of Promising Young Woman is, from this vantage point, best suited to ride that wave. If on the other hand events since January 20th are making Hollywood feel more hopeful than not, then any of the others could take this one home. As with just about every category on the board this year, nothing’s set in granite.
UPDATE (4/8/21): Is it plausible to imagine a world in which the in-your-face storytelling of The Trial of the Chicago 7 vanquishes the sublimities of Nomadland or even Minari (which would be my personal choice)? Doesn’t take much imagining, because that world has been with us for as far back as the 1940s when issue-oriented melodramas such as Gentlemen’s Agreement could prevail over David Lean’s Great Expectations. (A greater, if not necessarily bigger movie than either Lean’s Bridge Over the River Kwai or Lawrence of Arabia. ) It’s still anybody’s ballgame as far as I’m concerned. But somehow Aaron Sorkin’s look-back-in-anger over what happened to Fred Hampton in 1969 seems more of an industry crowd-pleaser (and prototypical Oscar-winning Best Picture) than, say, Shaka King’s angrier one.
Best Director
Chloe Zhao, Nomadland David Fincher, Mank Emerald Fennel, Promising Young Woman Lee Issac Chung, Minari Thomas Vinterberg, Another Round
Zhao’s ascension is as compelling and inspiring a story as her movie’s. Besides which, it’s past time for a woman-of-color to win one of these
Best Actor
Anthony Hopkins, The Father Chadwick Boseman, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Gary Oldman, Mank Riz Ahmed, Sound of Metal Steven Yeun, Minari
There’s been some chatter, as the NSA likes to put it, over how Hopkins’ portrayal of an Alzheimer’s victim is so consummately good that voters may decide he deserves another one of these after all. But Old and New Hollywood, in whatever post-Millennium forms they assume, were deeply shaken by Boseman’s passing last August and his widow’s acceptance speech at the Globes was so startlingly beautiful and moving that voters would love a reprise.
FWIW: Since we’re here, would it be OK if we take a brief tour of Boseman’s (brief) life’s work to determine which of his roles would or should have gotten this award beforehand? We can eliminate Black Panther ‘s title role, even though he evinced a lot of star power in all the MCU movies where his character appeared. Of the historical figures Boseman brought to life, his portrayal of James Brown in 2014’s Get On Up is the one that was at once the most electrifying and credible, though the Jackie Robinson he played in 2013’s 42 was more complex and cogent than was generally acknowledged at the time. A few words, but no more than a few, should be submitted on behalf of his impressive star turn in the 2019 NYPD thriller, 21 Bridges. But what in many ways represented Boseman at his most magnetic was his scene-stealing performance in Spike Lee’s Da 5 Bloods as the charismatic, doomed patrol leader for which he richly deserved a Supporting Actor nomination – and, for that matter, the Oscar. Have I mentioned yet that this particular nomination is only his first? How could I have forgotten to mention that? Oh, and about 5 Bloods? Delroy Lindo was screwed.
Best Actress
Andra Day, The United States vs. Billie Holiday Carey Mulligan, Promising Young Woman Frances McDormand, Nomadland Viola Davis, Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom Vanessa Kirby, Pieces of a Woman
In any other year, this might have been the occasion for yet another win for Academy fave McDormand. But this a formidable quintet competing in what is almost, but not quite, as wide open a contest as this year’s Supporting Actress race (see below). Early on, Day’s Golden Globe victory took so many by surprise that it compelled several hundred eyes to gaze upon her intuitively intelligent rendering of Billie Holiday. The rest of her movie, however, can’t keep up with her and, in some ways, drags her down. She could still take it. But Mulligan’s been poised for some time towards Oscar’s embrace the same way that a heat-seeking missile is poised to take down an enemy compound. And this all-out performance of a fierce, wounded feminist avenger, especially when juxtaposed with her un-nominated, but noteworthy turn as an emotionally-tough-yet-physically-fragile aristocrat in The Dig, seals Mulligan’s reputation for range and raw nerve.
Best Supporting Actor
Daniel Kaluuya, Judas and the Black Messiah LaKeith Stanfield, Judas and the Black Messiah Leslie Odom Jr., One Night in Miami Paul Raci, Sound of Metal Sacha Baron Cohen, The Trial of the Chicago 7
Yet another example of what should have been acknowledged as a lead performance that’s (kind of) a ringer in the supporting category. Some think having Stanfield in the mix make a cancelling-out effect, or even a tie, inevitable. Ties are not unprecedented, but it won’t happen here. And I’ve been hearing about “cancelling-out effects” for most of my adult life and now believe them to be as mythological as sports teams getting a championship for no other reason except that they’re “due.” Gambling tip: next time you hear somebody make a pronouncement like that, hook them immediately for whatever hard cash you can risk. And thank me later.
FWIW: If I had a vote, it’d go to Raci, without a second thought.
Best Supporting Actress
Amanda Seyfried, Mank Maria Bakalova, Borat Subsequent Moviefilm Glenn Close, Hillbilly Elegy Olivia Coleman, The Father Youn Yuh-jung, Minari
So wide open, as noted earlier, that there’s no such thing as a dumb guess here. Coleman’s recent win for The Favourite makes her the least likely winner. But as I’d warned the year she got that Best Actress prize, quite a lot of people love her and as noted above, The Father’s been picking up some momentum on the home stretch. Close’s work was, by common consent, the best thing about her movie and the Academy seems to be searching for some way, any way, to give her a win after eight tries. Bakalova’s turn as apprentice Kazakh journalist and would-be-sex-partner to Rudy Giuliani may have been the century’s most audacious comedic impersonation and she’s been getting considerable buzz for it. Seyfried already has amassed a great deal of industry-wide affection, and it’s hard to imagine an Oscar contender going away empty-handed after picking Gary Oldman’s pocket in a black-and-white movie in which Orson Welles is more of a supporting character than hers is. Except..in situations such as this, dark horses always have a chance. And since the marvelously bawdy and winsome Youn Yuh-jung has won the SAG, she’s no longer a dark horse. Nevertheless I insist it’s still wide-open.
Best Adapted Screenplay
Borat Subsequent Moviefilm
Nomadland
One Night in Miami
The Father
The White Tiger
Usually I go with the Writers. Guild on these, but I’m having trouble picturing the same crowd who put their heads together on Borat Subsequent Moviefilm converging here as one big winner, though it’d certainly be my preference. Kemp Powers is already assured of a win for co-directing Soul (see below). But he’s been such a conspicuously entertaining media presence throughout the Oscar campaign season that it isn’t hard to see him scoring a rare double here. Of course, if Nomadland gets a monster surge of momentum towards the home stretch, I’m an idiot once again.
Best Original Screenplay
Judas and the Black Messiah Minari Promising Young Woman Sound of Metal The Trial of the Chicago 7
Definitely going along with WGA on this one for its serrated edges and willful ingenuity. Dark as hell, almost literally speaking, but in its weird, deterministic way, the most fun of these assembled nominees. (I mean, not that “fun” has anything to do with it, but…)
Best International Feature
Another Round (Druk) Better Days (Shaonian de ni) Collective Quo Vadis, Adia? The Man Who Sold His Skin
Thomas Vinterberg’s Best Director nomination was about as big a “tell” as you can expect as to how this one’s going to go. But it’s also the closest Vinterberg has come to a “feel-good” movie and that will count for a great deal with the general consensus.
Best Documentary Feature
Collective Crip Camp My Octopus Teacher The Mole Agent Time
I took Crip Camp to my heart for how authoritative and touching it was in rendering the rise of the handicapped-rights movement. And this grizzled old newspaperman greatly appreciated Collective’s intricate, rousing examination of how investigative journalism can effect change, even in a government as corrupt as Romania’s. But Garrett Bradley’s multi-layered chronicle of a Black woman entrepreneur’s efforts to overcome heavily stacked odds in freeing her husband out from under an egregiously lengthy prison stretch is the most innovative picture among this year’s entire slate of feature films, fiction or nonfiction. This doesn’t necessarily mean it will win. But for those who still appreciate how movies can still catch you by surprise in the things they do (or don’t), it’s, so to speak, Time.
UPDATE (4/23/21): Way too late to take my hand off this piece, but the New York Times this morning has My Octopus Teacher the overwhelming favorite and I should’ve known it carried even more of a feel-good vibe than Time. I’m prepared to concede defeat on this one. My only comfort is that it won’t be the only one.
Best Animated Feature
A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon Onward Over the Moon Soul WolfWalkers
A lay-up, of course. All the same, it’s a drag that Pixar releases one of its finest features the same year that the Ireland-based Cartoon Saloon gives cel painted animation a gratifying jolt with the enrapturing WolfWalkers. The jazz beaux and the romantic folklorist living within me are deeply divided — though I doubt either of them will grieve all that much if the Saloon scores the (unlikely) upset.
Best Cinematography
Judas and the Black Messiah (Sean Bobbitt) Mank (Erik Messerschmidt) News of the World (Darius Wolski) Nomadland (Joshua James Richards) The Trial of the Chicago 7 (Phedon Papamichael)
I don’t know who has the edge here, so I’m going to presume that what Messerschmidt does with shadows and light emit dazzle sufficient enough to carry the day.
FWIW: Of course, if Nomadland runs the table, etc etc.
Best Original Score
Da 5 Bloods (Terence Blanchard) Mank (Trent Reznor & Atticus Ross) Minari (Emile Mosseri) News of the World (James Newton Howard) Soul (Trent Reznor, Atticus Ross & JonBaptiste)
Reznor and Ross’ only real competition here is with themselves and Stephen Colbert’s unflappable bandleader pushes this one over the hump with the kind of acoustic jazz charts the movies have hitherto forsaken.
Best Song
“Husavik” from Eurovision Song Contest: The Story of Fire Saga “Fight for You” from Judas and the Black Messiah “Speak Now” from One Night in Miami “Io Se (Seen)” from The Life Ahead “Hear My Voice” from The Trial of the Chicago 7
Leslie Odum Jr., the song’s co-writer and performer is compensated for not getting the Supporting Actor prize for re-enacting Sam Cooke. It must be nice….
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Just so you all know: I had a tougher time than usual with my annual everything-but-jazz list and not for the reasons you think. There was an awful lot that gave me comfort and joy in the past year because what else did I or anybody else have to do in 2020 but seek such things whenever they could be found. So I left a lot of things I could have included to the side. But I don’t regret anything I retained because the main point for me is to let you know that I recognized and embraced the same things you did and also found out stuff that you may not know about, but need to. So here we go and sorry if I missed something. Chances are I didn’t. But because I once again reside in the global capital of It Is What It Is (a.k.a. Philadelphia), I’m in no position to regret anything here. Next year? That’s next year. For now…in no particular order…
American Utopia– I saw it live in January on one of its last pre-lockdown Broadway performances and again this fall as a Spike Lee movie. The whole bouncy, juicy enterprise is just as you’ve heard: an invigorating, beautifully staged tonic for nerves frayed and hopes stressed by the previous four years (if not longer). Yet for all the show’s ecumenical uplift and big-tent benevolence, I couldn’t help but think back to its producer-writer -star’s early life as a Talking Head. And by “early,” I mean all the way back to Talking Heads ’77 and such lines from that long-ago breakthrough as: “Other people’s problems/They overwhelm my mind/They say compassion is a virtue/But I don’t have the time.” Of course, David Byrne’s a different person from whatever or whoever he was back then, as am I. And I’d like to think he now wonders sometimes, as I do, whether the spirit animating that chorus from “No Compassion” is in any way partly responsible for whatever culminated over the intervening decades into a Donald Trump administration (especially given how some of you kids, at whatever age, may not be as fluent in irony as you think you are). But while there’s plenty of Heads music to sing along with here (and you invariably will), you’ll never hear a song like that in this show. And you don’t see even a trace of Byrne’s I’m-smarter-than-you glower from those late-seventies days when CBGBs was the place to go for the Next Big Thing. You do hear a lot from Byrne’s gnomic side; the part of him that can’t stop bringing up potato chips even as he’s urgently decrying injustice in all its domestic and foreign manifestations. Only now it doesn’t register as smart-assery so much as cozy schtick and, as such, it enhances Byrne’s bright-beaming avuncularity and, yes, compassion. He’s evolved from not-having-the-time-for-empathy to: “As a people, we’re a work in progress. Who we are extends beyond ourselves.” Just another way of saying “Happy New Year.”
Lovers Rock – Taken together, the films that make up Small Axe, Steve McQueen’s multi-tiered chroniclie of the West Indian experience in London from the 1960s to the 1980s, are a revelation, sweeping and intimate in their depiction of tribulation, perseverance and resistance in the face of white bigotry. The eruption of militant Black protest is given the same respect as the determination of a young Jamaican to protect his community by becoming a patrolman. The harsh coming-of-age of a celebrated YA writer illuminates an era as powerfully as the account of promising, but misunderstood Black children systemically funneled into subpar educational facilities. At times, McQueen can be overly emphatic. In Education, for instance, he piles on the soul-killing drudgery imposed upon warehoused children, making you, at one point, resent the movie almost as much as the clueless white teacher mangling “House of the Rising Sun.” But you don’t in the least mind the way McQueen goes all out in Lovers Rock, a one-of-a-kind depiction of a 1980 reggae house party in which two young people (Micheal Ward, Amarah-Jae St. Aubyn) manage to go through a full courtship during a tightly wound night of music, food and dance. You’re spellbound by the way these smart, resilient and beautiful kids inject their own martial arts movies into “Kung Fu Fighting.” And you give in to rapture as the young women keep swaying to and singing the lyrics of Janet Kay’s “Silly Games” after the record stops playing, in key and keeping the beat. You fall in love with the movie in the same way that the movie – and McQueen’s series — loves its people.
The Queen’s Gambit – Its worldwide popularity has set off the inevitable backlash for any number of perceived sins, e.g. too slick, too soapy, too pulpy, whatever. But I was all in with this Netflix adaptation of Walter Tevis’ novel, if for no other reason that I preferred living a world in which America’s leading contender for global supremacy in chess dead center in the American century was a moody, pill-popping orphan girl from Kentucky instead of the bombastic, deranged Bobby Fischer. In the lead role of Beth Harmon, the winsome Anya Taylor-Joy grabbed and sustained your attention with the way her complicated, not-always-admirable character grew from gangly teenaged social awkwardness to demure grownup self-possession, even when, near the crest of triumph, she’s still barely holding it together. Verisimilitude is always valuable when it comes to such period melodrama and the series kept excellent time with its sense of detail from the fifties showroom nature of the furniture to the sixties chic of its fashions and, most especially, the soundtrack that took in the Vogues’ “You’re the One,” the Association’s “Along Comes Mary,”Quincy Jones’ chrome-plated arrangement of “Comin’ Home Baby,” Gillian Hills’ “Tut Tut Tut Tut,” and Shocking Blue’s “Venus.” The supporting cast was uniformly excellent; in particular Marielle Heller as Beth’s thwarted dreamer of a stepmother and Moses Ingram in a best-friend-from-childhood role that she almost single-handedly rescues from hackneyed “magical negro” convention. But it’s Taylor-Joy’s star-making show all the way through. And her total magnetism was more than enough to get most of us to dust off our old chess sets and figure out how her character’s huge, espresso eyes are able to see everything happen before it happens – as useful a skill in art as it is in chess.
Glynn Turman – In a world that makes much more sense than this one, Glynn Turman would be nationally renowned as a generational icon of his profession. It’s enough to say that, at 73, he is a living, breathing retrospective of Black cultural advancement from the civil rights era to the present day. At 12 years old, he played Sidney Poitier’s son on Broadway in the original production of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun. Less than a decade later, at 21, he helped integrate TV’s Peyton Place and was to the 1975 coming-of-age comedy Cooley High what fellow child actor Ron Howard was to its 1973 counterpart American Graffiti. Over the succeeding decades, he became as much of a cult hero for the parts he got (the spit-and-polish Army colonel on A Different World; the sleazoid Baltimore mayor in The Wire) as for the one he didn’t (he auditioned for Han Solo in the first Star Wars movie, but George Lucas reportedly backed away from the idea of a Black Han playing approach-avoidance games with White Princess Leia). Plus which, he was once married to Aretha Franklin. This year found people sitting up and taking full notice of Turman’s contained intensity and mastery of space. In Netflix’s production of August Wilson’s Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom he was Toledo, the circumspect piano player for Ma’s band trying to retain composure and dignity amidst the tempest of resentment and rage in the recording studio. And in the fourth season of FX’s Fargo, he was Black mob consigliore Doctor Senator, who displays so much shrewdness, gravitas and diplomacy among the short fuses going off like fireworks throughout circa 1950 Kansas City that you wish he were in charge of all the city’s warring mobsters, Afro- and Italo-American alike. The attention Turman’s been getting for these turns is as gratifying as the grace with which he’s greeted the renewed acclaim. He seems more than happy to be regarded at this stage in his long and illustrious career as an “actor’s actor.” And while some of us still wish he were regarded as so much more, if he’s cool with that status, we should be, too.
Soul– Ethan Iverson has declared this latest Disney Pixar project to be the best jazz movie in a long time. And as I’ve written elsewhere, I’m with him on this — with the caveat that one of the things that disquieted me a little was its implication that the jazz calling and the dedication it requires so obsessed Joe the protagonist that it kept him from appreciating everything in his life that had meaning and resonance. Most of us who love music (and I’m not just talking about “the music,” but all music) believe it to be one of the gateways towards embracing life in all its outward and inward graces. Maybe Pete Docter’s movie was saying the same thing ultimately. But I fear it will nonetheless give haters more ammunition for disdaining or dismissing “the music.” As soon as the closing credits started rolling, there was also the melancholy suspicion that Soul wasn’t going to find as much love out there as other Disney/Pixar inquiries into the metaphysical such as Coco or Inside/Out. It left more questions open than answers, which makes it my favorite DizPix movie since WALL-E – and 2008 now seems a long time ago. Meanwhile, the jazz head in me was more caught up with the movie’s digressions and diversion e.g. the rat dragging the pizza slice in one direction while the cat is dragging another one in the other; the offhand little jibe by the afterlife’s gatekeepers over how too many new souls were being herded into the hovel set aside for self-absorption; the modernist depiction of those gate-keepers that tipped its cap to the UPA and Terrytoons shorts of the 1950s; and. most of all, the characterizations of all its Black supporting characters from the older ladies rocking with Joe’s mom in the tailoring shop to the brothers at the barber shop simultaneously keeping it real and cool. When Oscar time rolls around, I’ll be rooting for Wolfwalkers to win the best animated feature prize because those guys at Cartoon Saloon deserve the love for keeping hand-painted animation alive and kicking in the digital age. But as Ethan says, if there’s an envelope somewhere for Best Jazz Movie of this year (if not the last 10-to-30), this is what it’ll say on the card inside.
Quarter Life Crisis – I’ve watched enough Netflix stand-up comedy specials over the now-all-but-completed decade to know that the raunchiest, most incisive and most double-dog-daring of these comics have been women. I’ve found something to like and/or admire in most, if not all their provocations. But for whatever reason, none of their specials have kept me coming back for seconds this past year like this recital by Taylor Tomlinson. The title refers to her up-front fatigue with being in her twenties. “I am done with this shit!” she declares. “They are ten years of asking yourself, ‘Is this a phase or is it a demon? Am I fun or should I go to a meeting?’” She’s had a fairly conventional rise through the talk-show circuit and Last Comic Standing duels, but has somehow pulled together a fascinating self-portrait of a Millennial caught squarely in a conflict between her nice-girl upbringing and her nascent yearnings to be a bona-fide mean girl. (And she probably would be, if she didn’t find mean girls to be lame as well.) Watching this tension play out is what keeps you strapped in her passenger seat, along with her gift for the seemingly offhand, Day-Glo zinger. (“[If] love is blind, lust is Helen Keller.”) She’s got so much figured out at such an early age, even with her white-bread religious upbringing, that you can’t wait to see what’s spilling out of her next. And even if she doesn’t figure all of it out (and who does?), it’s still going to be fun watching her try well into her thirties.
James McBride – If this country has a Poet Laureate, then why shouldn’t there be, officially or otherwise, an office for “America’s Storyteller”? McBride has been a rock-solid contender for the title ever since his canonical 1995 memoir of his mother, The Color of Water, endeared itself to generations of readers. He has since demonstrated his chops as a screenwriter (Miracle at St. Ann’s), socio-cultural history (Kill ‘Em And Leave: Searching for James Brown and the American Soul) and short-story writer (Five-Carat Soul). This year provided a double-jolt of added luster to McBride’s reputation: his critically acclaimed novel, Deacon King Kong, an effervescent, humane comedy of errors set in and around a circa-1969 Brooklyn housing project and Showtime’s multi-part adaptation of his award-winning 2013 historical novel, The Good Lord Bird, a boisterous picaresque about a young Black boy’s adventures in Antebellum America with the insurrectionary abolitionist John Brown, played with bravado and poignancy by Ethan Hawke. An accomplished jazz saxophonist, McBride not only knows the secret to holding an audience, but to reaching into its core for shared trauma, yearning and faith. He is capable of making everybody laugh at the same joke at once, which doesn’t seem possible in a time as polarized as ours. If you wonder where to go next, I’d suggest both Five-Carat Soul and the James Brown book, the latter as indispensable in its rock-pop-critical-bio subgenre as Chet Flippo’s Your Cheatin’ Heart, Nick Tosches’ Hellfire and Peter Guralnik’s Feel Like Going Home.
First Cow— I’ve heard Kelly Reichardt’s latest exemplar of sneaky-great filmmaking described as both an “anti-western” and a “near-western.” It’s almost as if she were working beyond John Ford’s vision, except I suspect Ford would appreciate exactly where First Cow was coming from, even if it is set all the way back to 1820s Oregon and carrying an implicit anti-capitalist message that Depression-era insurgents could identify with. (Two ill-fated wanderers, one Jewish, the other Asian, struggle to make a business for themselves by using milk from a rich man’s cow to make ambrosial desert cakes.) It’s a movie that’s both beyond and steeped in its genre conventions and as somebody cheering for the western, in any form, to carry on however it’s able, I’m delighted to see both her and her movie get their props.
Julie Nolke – Not that we’ll ever be nostalgic about 2020. But should the (albeit unlikely) occasion arise to retrieve a taste of what it felt like to be alive in that near-unprecedented maelstrom, the YouTube series of videos by this Canadian comic actress will bring it all back alive. And, just as they did during the past nine months, her videos will continue to offer solace and commiseration for our shared bemusement and exasperation.
Stephen Wright & Steven Wright –Just before Everything Changed earlier this year, I came across two very different and eerily relevant novels written by two very different authors with almost the same name. (Neither of whom, to be clear, are stand-up comedians, though each is very funny in a grim, caustic way.) Looking back, I’m a little startled by how effectively both books nailed down deeply rooted illnesses in the American psyche that explained a lot of messed-up behavior over the succeeding months in the face of mass disease and systemic racism.
First there was Stephen Wright’s Processed Cheese, a surrealistic pillow stuffed with sharp objects. It’s set in a funhouse version of present-day America whose largest, wealthiest metropolis is called Mammoth City, whose wealthiest and most powerful resident, Mister Menu, lives in a penthouse apartment of a very shiny skyscraper. One day, Mister Menu’s supermodel wife (Her name? Missus Menu, of course) hurls a canvas bag loaded with cash at her husband. The bag sails past him, off their terrace and fifty-two stories to the street where it lands smack dab in front of an unemployed-and-desperate citizen named Graveyard. Not knowing where the million-dollar sack came from or to whom it belongs, Graveyard takes it home to his wife Ambience and, once they’re convinced no one’s looking for their money, they proceed to Live Larger than they ever have before, buying everything and anything they want. You name it: sex, drugs and other commodities with brand names like Walleyed Monkeys champagne, DominationDonuts, the HoochieCoochie flatscreen TV and, inevitably, guns like the Gibe & Cloister 418 firearm or “The Last Judgment” (with a) “silver barrel engraved with lifelike drawings of people in sexual positions most of us couldn’t even imagine.” All this and more sounds as over-the-top as that canvas bag’s trajectory and yet this Stephen Wright, a meta-novelist highly recommended by the seemingly incongruent likes of Toni Morrison and Stephen King, applies a thick Buster Keaton-esque sheen on all this slapstick avarice. You can think all you want that it’s way too outrageously conceived to have anything to do with you– until the next time you walk out of your house and see all those empty Amazon boxes spilling out of the nearest available dumpster.
Unlike Processed Cheese, The Coyotes of Carthage by (the other, differently spelled) Steven Wright is set in this plane of reality. But it’s no less trenchant or unsettling. Its protagonist (not at all the hero) is Dre, a jaded young Black operative for a K Street consulting firm who’s assigned by his bosses to supervise a ballot initiative enabling a metals conglomerate to strip mine an Appalachian rain forest in South Carolina. Saying the least, an African American smarty-pants seems the least likely person to galvanize a predominantly white and right-leaning constituency into parting with such fertile land. So he pulls hidden levers and disperses dark money to enable a local bar owner to become the face of the initiative. Eventually, the trickery and duplicity involved in making people vote against their own interests take their toll on Dre, whose self-loathing reaches red-zone levels. “Aren’t elections about getting people to like you?” the bar owner’s God-fearing wife asks Dre. “That’s a common misconception,” he answers. “Elections are about getting voters to hate others.” Whatever happens over the next 12 months and beyond, both these novels are neon-lit arrows pointing to the pile of crap we’re going to have to clean up if we want to survive as a democratic republic.
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It will do no good to say, as we tend to do every year at about this time, that there are far more important things to think about than the damn Oscars. Of course there are. There always will be. The hum of impeachment hearings in the background as I’m writing this blog keeps pulling my attention away from such burning issues as whether Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood is better than Jackie Brown (not quite) or whether Charlize Theron’s impersonation of Megyn Kelly is as scary or as bravura as Renee Zellweger’s of Judy Garland. (A hard “yes.”) But here I am asking myself these questions anyway and you know why, don’t you? Because you can be entertained by senate hearings for only so long and we go to the gauze of Oscar because we need escape hatches from solemnity.
The troublesome part comes in gauging whether the media industrial complex now cares more about the Academy Awards than movies. Moving pictures come and go through whatever delivery system we can imagine and we still wont know for another ten years which of these movies will last, or what we’ll even mean when we talk about movies in 2030. I am sure that no one will remember or care who wins what in a couple weeks because none of you (I bet) will remember who won what a year ago.
I do know this: a borderline-exceptional year for movies yielded, as I wrote someplace else, one of the least exceptional list of Academy Award nominations in years. Not that the movies themselves are bad. Quite the contrary. But this was a year so filled with quality pictures that the Academy could have taken more chances, nominated less-expected-but-just-as-worthy movies and actors. We can delve deeper into the MIAs as we always do: with a For Whatever It’s Worth (FWIW) blurb, whenever and wherever applicable.
The competition, as depicted below, is pretty much coated with chalk; in sports terms, this means prohibitive favorites with apparently unimpeded rides to victory, especially in the acting categories…maybe.
What I’m also sensing from this year’s assortment is a (somewhat) reactionary bent from an academy that may have gotten (somewhat) fed up with the hoops it’s had to leap through over the previous decade on matters of diversity, independent films and streaming services. If there were a comic-book superhero movie successful enough to be worth the trouble, members might not only have nominated it, but given it several key awards just to spite the cinema snobs.
Oh wait. There is, in fact, a comic-book supervillain movie showing signs of doing exactly that on the evening of February 9th.
Zounds! That means this thing is bearing down on us harder than usual this season. So why wait any longer to get to the picks? The future, in more ways than one, is now.
Best Picture: Ford v Ferrari The Irishman JoJo Rabbit Joker Little Women Marriage Story x-1917 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood Parasite
Director:
Martin Scorsese The Irishman
Todd Phillips, Joker
Sam Mendes, 1917
Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood x-Bong Joon Ho, Parasite
The Irishman looked like an early favorite heading into the season. But the suspicion here is that, as with Marriage Story, there’s just too damn much Netflix around this stuff for movie traditionalists to come to terms with. Roma had the same problem last year, along with English subtitles. This latter aspect would seem to disqualify Parasite, though its overall popularity is far broader than Roma’s ever was. Something tells me that, of all the rest, 1917 is exactly what we think of when we think of “Oscar bait.” It has all the elements: a big-screen narrative far more suited to theatrical than living-room viewing; technical virtuosity in service to a grandly mounted tribute to The Human Spirit (plus it’s a truly absorbing ride); and it has Sam Mendes, who carries the kind of cachet of Serious Adult Film Director that Fred Zinnemann, William Wyler or David Lean used to carry into battles for Oscar, even though I happen to think he’s closer to Zinnemann than to the other two. That Mendes already has one of these (2000 for American Beauty) won’t necessarily keep him from getting another. Lately, however, the splits between best film and best director have happened more often than they used to, and Parasite has connected so hard and deep with all kinds of audiences living life in the 21st century’s global economy that it’s not inconceivable that its director will be honored individually for it, along with the all-but-inevitable Oscar the movie will receive for what they’re now calling “International Feature Film.”
FWIW: Just for the record, my favorite movie of 2019 was The Last Black Man in San Francisco, which is the very antithesis of whatever “Oscar bait” means. I also would have been OK with The Irishman or Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood winning the top prize. But those two, I think, were made for the longer haul of historic debate, not for Oscar’s ultimate approbation.
Lead Actor:
Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory
Leonardo DiCaprio, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Adam Driver, Marriage Story x-Joaquin Phoenix, Joker
Jonathan Pryce, The Two Popes
Phoenix has specialized in desperate, marginalized men driven to erratic, often explosive (mis)behavior. He once played somebody with those traits named “Joaquin Phoenix” who showed up on David Letterman’s couch seemingly intent on setting his career on fire. Here he’s perceived as having gone “all out” with this persona and there’s nothing Hollywood likes better than honoring performances perceived as being “all out” as opposed to just “out there.” It will do no good to maintain that he was better in Inherent Vice or even The Master because those characters just, you know, bothered people. As God’s Lonely Guy who became Batman’s nemesis, he’s made marginalization palatable, even tamer, by ramping up the pathos and making The Joker (or is it now just “Joker”?) a surrogate for all those who feel left out. Which is no small achievement – and destined for the Academy’s enshrinement.
FWIW: Of course, I preferred the quieter and thus more unsettling alienation afflicting Banderas’ aging artist in Pain and Glory. And however much I became annoyed with Driver’s younger, more mercurial artist in Marriage Story, I believed him to be much more an embodiment of the present-day zeitgeist than Phoenix’s prancing sociopath. But I’d much rather talk about Eddie Murphy’s noticeable absence from this list. What happened? Was Murphy’s Rudy Ray Moore not outrageous enough? Or would the Academy have been more wowed if he’d done his own spin on Moore’s Dolemite character? Maybe there simply wasn’t enough room for Murphy – or, it would seem, for anything else connected with Dolemite is My Name, which may not have been the year’s best, but was a better and more revelatory movie than Green Book. And while I understand Adam Sandler’s relief over not having to wear a tux for a few more nights, he should have been in this mix for his nitro-powered jitteriness in Uncut Gems.
Lead Actress:
Cynthia Erivo, Harriet
Scarlett Johansson, Marriage Story
Saoirse Ronan, Little Women
Charlize Theron, Bombshell x-Renee Zelwegger, Judy
As with Phoenix, Zellweger is this year’s exemplar of a performer going “all out,” specifically in an eerily on-point evocation of a stage-and-screen legend in decline. Also as with Phoenix, pathos has a lot to contribute to her big lead — and she does all her own singing, too. It’s such a compelling turn that almost everything else about the movie blurs around it. And this could be a problem for her. She wouldn’t be the first star whose movie ultimately lets her down. (It seems a recurring liability in biopics.) Because of this as well as some shade being thrown on her movie by Garland’s daughter Liza Minnelli, Zellweger’s lead is the one most vulnerable to an upset – though one wonders if a Scarlett Johansson win would be much of an upset. Hers is the performance on this ballot that grows on you the most with its emotional variety and tonal progressions. And the fact that she’s under Academy inspection for another performance in another category could enhance her chances here. Hollywood worships Judy Garland and admires anybody willing to do her justice. But to take a cue from Sally Field, Hollywood likes, really likes Scar-Jo and could show her how much they do in this category – or even in the other one. But we’ll get there soon enough.
UPDATE (2/6) — Forget Marriage Story. Not at all as beloved in L.A. whose residents, I sense, feel somewhat dissed by their depiction. It’s Zelwegger after all.
Supporting Actor:
Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood
Anthony Hopkins, The Two Popes
Al Pacino, The Irishman
Joe Pesci, The Irishman x-Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
I hope Pitt appreciates the magnitude of his competition. All the other guys have won before and been nominated more often. The thing is: Pitt does appreciate it, which is what makes him as lovable among voters as Johansson. Then again, they liked Sylvester Stallone, too and Mark Rylance picked his pocket (deservedly so) four years ago in this category. The same thing could very well happen here as this is the one category where acting chops are given heavier weight than in others. (Pesci or even Hanks could be the beneficiary.) Pitt’s performance, however, is a marvel of subtle grace and containment, verities of terrific screen acting that never – or practically never – are honored by Oscar whenever they surface. I’m still going with Pitt, but I think his triumph here will be a bigger “upset” than most believe.
FWIW: Would Christian Bale or Matt Damon in Ford vs. Ferrari qualify here or for lead actor? Either way, I’d have been happy to see one or both in this board game along with Wesley Snipes in his sneaky-great eccentric turn in Dolemite.
Supporting Actress:
Kathy Bates, Richard Jewell
Laura Dern, Marriage Story x-Scarlett Johansson, JoJo Rabbit
Florence Pugh, Little Women
Margot Robbie, Bombshell
Dern is Hollywood royalty and Hollywood’s been waiting for an opportunity to reward her years of daring and diligence. Though I think her harder-than-it-looks work in Little Women was what should have landed here, her icy, commanding divorce lawyer is likely very familiar to most Academy voters and the shock of recognition alone could be enough to power her to the winner’s circle.
FWIW: Then again, Johansson’s performance as single mom to a Nazi brat in JoJo Rabbit is, as critics have observed, the luminous soul of the movie and if she doesn’t upset Zellweger in the lead category, she could very well pull it off here. (UPDATE (2/6) — I’m now thinking she will.) As for MIAs, my one-and-only here is Idina Menzel as Adam Sandler’s taking-no-shit-and-giving-negative-fucks wife in Uncut Gems
Adapted Screenplay
The Irishman, Steven Zaillian JoJo Rabbit, Taika Waititi Joker, Todd Phillips, Scott Silver Little Women, Greta Gerwig The Two Popes, Anthony McCarthy
Here is where the consolation prizes are usually given for those movies otherwise overtaken elsewhere and it’s where I think Irishman avoids getting skunked for the night – though either Joker or JoJo could take it away.
FWIW: The case has been advanced — though not, in my opinion, made – that Gerwig’s interpretation of Louisa May Alcott’s book errs too much on the side of modernist, or even post-modernist thinking, robbing the story of the warmth and magic that has sustained it through several previous adaptations. I can’t believe that the Academy carries similar qualms, but I suppose it’s as good an excuse as any to wave her along. I hope in any case that I’m wrong about this.
UPDATE (2/2) — Whoops! The WGA has spoken and it done fell in love with JoJo. Nobody said a motherin’ word about Irishman or Joker or any of Those People. I’m going with them, though it’s by no means a mortal lock.
Original Screenplay: Knives Out, Rian Johnson Marriage Story, Noah Baumbach 1917, Sam Mendes and Krysty Wilson-Cairns x-Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, Quentin Tarantino Parasite, Bong Joon-ho, Jin Won Han
Another strong field, and the tendency as always is to go with the dude with the smartest, freshest mouth in the pack. Johnson’s crafty script is a dark horse. But here is yet another opportunity to gauge the degree to which Parasite has become a global phenomenon.
FWIW: OTOH, if 1917 gets this, the night is essentially over.
Animated Feature:
How to Train Your Dragon: The Hidden World I Lost My Body xKlaus Missing Link Toy Story 4
Jérémy Clapin’s odyssey of a disembodied hand in search of its owner was one of the most original films of any kind this past year. Of course, this means it hasn’t a chance in hell of overtaking Buzz and Woody’s latest adventures. Curiously, though, any of the remaining three contenders could.
UPDATE (1/27) — And if the shockeroo pulled off by the “Annies” the other night is any indication, it looks as though it’s going to be the St. Nick origin story.
Best Documentary Feature:
American Factory, Julia Rieichert, Steven Bognar The Cave, Feras Fayyad The Edge of Democracy, Petra Costa For Sama, Waad Al-Kateab, Edward Watts x-Honeyland, Tamara Kotevska, Ljubo Stefanov
Despite the Obamas’ enthusiastic endorsement, American Factory likely wont overtake the near-miraculously rendered account of Macedonian beekeepers in conflict over the future of their ancient trade – and in a larger sense, the future of the planet. That it’s also nominated in the category just below speaks to its preeminence.
Best International Feature Film:
Corpus Christi Honeyland Les Miserables Pain and Glory x-Parasite
Sorry, Maestro Almodóvar. But the South Korean juggernaut, as dark and wild as anything you’ve wrought in the past, is too strong for your masterly elegy to overpower.
FWIW: I was sort of hoping for some love here for Mati Diop’s haunting, allusive Atlantics.
Cinematography: The Irishman Joker The Lighthouse x-1917 Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
Robert Richardson’s orchestration of sunlight and shadow in Once Upon a Time… is invaluable in achieving a sense of a lost world that almost, but never, was. I’m rooting for him, but guessing that Roger Deakins will repeat a year after his long-denied first-time win.
Original Score:
Joker Little Women Marriage Story 1917 Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Some hallowed names – John Williams, Alexandre Desplat, Randy Newman, Thomas Newman – are assembled here and they all showed up and produced big-time. Nevertheless it’s the relative newcomer — Hildur Guðnadóttir – who scores big on her first try.
Original Song:
“I Can’t Let You Throw Yourself Away,” Toy Story 4 x-“I’m Gonna Love Me Again,” Rocketman
“I’m Standing With You,” Breakthrough
“Into the Unknown,” Frozen 2
“Stand Up,” Harriet
If anybody is going to beat a drama-laden rouser from the Frozen machine, it’s Sir Elton, who even at or near his dotage can out-rouse anybody who throws down the spangled gauntlet.
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Another year for people to hurry along into the dustbin – and the one just ahead doesn’t look at the outset to be much better, at least politically. But culturally at least, 2019 was a whole lot better than one comes to expect in Times Like These. So maybe pessimism about the immediate future is misplaced, though I’m keeping my cards hidden for now. Whatever the future holds, here once again is my own private top-ten of everything that got a rise out of me in the past year. And once again, they are in no particular order:
The Last Black Man in San Francisco – It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a movie three times in the same year, much less have it grow inside my head with each viewing. The first time I saw it, I came away thinking of it as a lyrical, idiosyncratic meditation on the cumulative impact on gentrification and the ways it has, over generations, shattered whatever meaning to be found in the words, “home” and “roots.” The second time I saw it, I listened closer to its dialogue, its depiction of families vulnerable to fault lines of denial, delusion and not-so-benign neglect. For whatever reason, the third viewing brought out in sharp relief the speech by budding playwright Montgomery Allen (Jonathan Majors) about the violent death of a friend and how whole lives, especially those belonging to young black men, are so often put in boxes by others and how it’s left to those young men to break out of those boxes by themselves. It made me think of boxes I’d been forced to occupy and bust open on my own throughout my life and, in the context of Joe Talbot’s debut feature, I started to wonder, with some distress, whether home, or even the desire for home, made up a kind of box that constrains one’s best aspirations. I bet if I watched it for a fourth, fifth and seventh time I’d start thinking of other, different things to unsettle me. No matter how many times I see it, the one line that’ll stay with me belongs, appropriately, to Jimmie Falls, the movie’s star and co-screenwriter, who gently chides a bus-riding sourpuss for bad-mouthing the home town that’s picked him up and slammed him down: “You don’t get to hate it, unless you love it.” Some movies are too small for the thoughts that contain them. But this movie has a soul big enough to set free hundreds of dreams, whether renovated or built from scratch.
Watchmen– “I’m not a Republic serial villain,” Adrian Veidt/Ozymandias insists in the original 1986-87 Alan Moore-Dave Gibbons graphic novel just before he makes millions of heads explode in New York City. Damon Lindelof’s sequel/reinvention for HBO made America’s heads explode by fashioning a harrowing version of a 1940s Republic movie serial spiked with sex, drugs and sociopolitical science. Among the many miracles of this brash and daring venture, the most noteworthy may be how it shares with its source material the way it weaves pulp mythology of costumed vigilantes into an oddly plausible version of 20th century history, leaving us all in pretty much the same sorry, disheartening mess we’re in at the precipice of true-life 2020. On a far less cosmic level, I have along with many others in the Twitter-verse found among many new reasons to love Regina King the way her character says “motherfucker” with the sweep and precision of a nothing-but-net three-pointer.
On The Media – I’ve long stopped watching nightly newscasts and would just as soon skip whatever the 24-hour news cycle has to offer at any given interval. But for the sake of whatever sanity I can maintain when dealing with the awfulness of the present, I never miss WNYC’s inquiry into all things media. Week after week, co-hosts Brooke Gladstone and Bob Garfield, along with their doughty support team of editors and producers, manage, with probing intelligence and gimlet-eyed scrutiny, to get at whatever’s been bothering me about the way things are and – mostly – aren’t covered by what we used to call “the press.” They are the go-to source for slicing and dicing though the smoggy mendacity of the Trump administration and its enablers. They secure your trust by chasing down truth, lies and, most of all, context. It isn’t enough, for instance, to say that the justice system is dysfunctional. So they will give you the historical factors – cultural, political and racial – behind mass incarceration. And not just that issue, but also poverty, climate change, education, foreign policy and housing. The program’s signature achievement in this especially estimable year was its series on “The Scarlet E,” as in “eviction,” one of many stories festering in post-Millennial America that doesn’t get as much attention in the media biosphere as, say, whatever Bill Gates is or isn’t doing with his money – even though they’ve got that covered like a blanket too. More than most of the media it holds accountable, this series fulfills the basic requirement for delivering the news by telling you things you didn’t already know and reminding you of things too important to forget.
Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood & Dolemite is My Name – If I owned a repertory house or a drive-in, I would make these a double feature that I made sure to exhibit every year (late summer, I think). Though they’re set a few years apart from each other near the hinge of the 1960s and 1970s, both movies appear to be conversing from opposite ends of the culture about a transformative era for American movies. Traditions that were either falling apart or recombining in Quentin Tarantino’s iridescent alternate history of 1969 were pulled from back alley trash compactors by the working-class L.A. schemers and dreamers brought to merry life by director Craig Brewer and screenwriters Scott Alexander and Larry Karaszewski. The reinvention of Rudy Ray Moore (Eddie Murphy in what some keep insisting is a “comeback” even though he’s never really gone away) gives off a giddy vibe of a rags-to-raggedy-ass-riches saga, a kind of lounge-lizard’s version of Up From Slavery with an upraised middle finger goading you to eat its dust. Once Upon a Time…is in a starkly different manner a Pilgrim’s Progress saga, though you’re left wondering at the end whether it’s Leonardo DiCaprio’s has-been TV western hero or Brad Pitt’s deceptively blithe stuntman-handyman who’s made the most progress. Such questions matter more than whatever conclusions some have extracted from Tarantino’s vision – and it is more than anything a vision, whatever you want to make of its depictions of both imaginary and real-life characters.
The Old Drift– My favorite novel of the year is best described by its author Namwali Serpell as “the great Zambian novel you didn’t know you were waiting for.” It begins with an implausible accident at the start of the 20th century involving three individuals in a hotel along the Zambezi River in what was then known as the Northwestern Rhodesia territory. The lives of their families – one African, one British, one Italian – are intertwined for what’s left of that century and for several years into the 21st. In between, there are sagas within sagas; some dealing with a woman’s hair that cannot stop growing and whose fallen strands make things grow out of the ground. Another story arc is based on the true-life effort by Zambia’s “Minister of Space Research” to train his newly independent nation’s best and brightest science students to beat both the Russians and Americans to the moon before the end of the 1960s. Eventually the tangled destinies of these and other characters are swept up by a public health calamity referred to here as “The Virus.” Serpell’s novel dares to imagine her native country into a technologically advanced near-future that is at once exhilarating and frightening in its prospects. Add to all this the constant presence of mosquitoes as both a kind of Greek chorus and vigilant corporate godhead and you have a willfully imaginative and (I almost forgot to add) gorgeously written contribution to the shelf of such novels as The Tin Drum, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Midnight’s Children and (wothehell) Adventures of Huckleberry Finn that realize a whole country’s heritage and destiny in a rich, capacious fictional narrative. I also forgot to mention that this is Serpell’s first novel.
Kristen Scott Thomas on Fleabag — There was a lot to love about the second season of Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s universally-acclaimed series, beginning (of course) with Waller-Bridge herself and her bemused, stressed-out and agreeably horny alter-ego stumbling and grappling through her fraught early thirties. I was all in on her Fleabag persona throughout her search for love, even if the approach-avoidance thing with The Priest (Andrew Scott) began to grate for reasons having nothing whatsoever to do with its presumptive “impropriety.” For all its humane and bittersweet wit, the series, for me, glowed brightest in the approximately five minutes Fleabag spends in a bar with Belinda (Thomas), a corporate mogul fleeing a cocktail party in her honor. Over martinis, Belinda gives Fleabag – and us – the gift of her wisdom about things like menopause, why women are better able to deal with pain than men and the categorical imperative to flirt. Never before have I (and, I’m betting, anybody else I know) seen Kristin Scott Thomas so juicy, so fired-up-funny and lit-from-within as she is here. No wonder Fleabag makes a pass at her. We all would. But instead of a tumble, Belinda bestows to Fleabag something more precious by declaring, “People are all we’ve got.” And in case you didn’t hear her, she repeats, “People. Are. All. We’ve. Got.” Much as you don’t want to agree (and almost everything else about the series encourages you not to), you know, deep down, that she’s right about this, along with everything else she’s laying down.
Rolling Thunder Revue: A Bob Dylan Story – A word to those who insist on believing that Martin Scorsese’s meta-mixing of imaginary sidebars to the actual Rolling Thunder tour conducted by Dylan during the Gerald Ford administration is somehow contiguous to the “fake news” ethos abetted by the Right. That word is, to be polite as possible about it, no. The movie states its business at the outset: what else would an old magic trick be doing there? If you can’t tell from jump street that it’s playing fair with its variations on a theme, that’s on you, not on Scorsese and not on Dylan. I may disagree with the latter’s typically gnomic pronouncement that wearing a mask is a means of telling the truth. (As with much else with Dylan, he borrowed that observation from someone else; Oscar Wilde. I believe, in this case.) But the movie’s mischief is nonetheless consistent with a rock music tour whose whole concept was steeped in shadows, disguise and craftiness. Those whoppers with Sharon Stone and Jimmy Carter may rankle the literal-minded. For me, the movie’s willingness to tease at and toy with the parameters of literal and figurative storytelling is far less a concession to the present-day political madness than a provocative means of climbing out of the smog. To elaborate: I remember going to a November 1975 Rolling Thunder gig at the Hartford Civic Center deep in the doldrums of economic blight, especially in down-and-depressed New England, and coming away from the show feeling buoyed and even cross-eyed hopeful about the immediate future. Which is sort of how I felt when this movie was over. I can’t tell you why any more than I could explain my reaction back in the day. It may have something to do with being more open to possibility and risk than to cloistered indignation and fear. Or maybe it has something to do with whatever Allen Ginsberg is telling us all to do at the end of this film: “You who saw it all or who saw flashes and fragments, take from us some example, try and get yourselves together, clean up your act, find your community, pick up on some kind of redemption of your own consciousness, become mindful of your own friends, your own work, your own proper meditation, your own art, your own beauty, go out and make it for your own Eternity.” Now you tell me: what does any of this have to do with whether something is fake-fucking-news or not?
In the Dream House – Imagine a warm-hearted Patricia Highsmith who retains enough delicacy and detachment to train upon herself as well as those around her. But Carmen Maria Machado’s not writing a thriller – or more to the point, she’s not writing just a thriller. Her memoir of a psychologically abusive relationship with another woman inhabits multiple genres and motifs. Its chapter headings conceive segments of this story, by turns, as a “road trip to everywhere,” or “bildungsroman,” “lesbian pulp novel,” “creature feature,” “comedy of errors,” “sci-fi thriller,” “soap opera,” “American gothic” and “stoner comedy.” There are also categories such as “hypochondria,” “dirty laundry,” “word problem,” “queer villainy,” “Chekhov’s gun,” “house in Iowa,” “apartment in Philadelphia,” “second chances” and so on. Maybe you can figure out a narrative of sorts from these clues. But Machado is not only engaging openly and honestly with personal pain, but probing for different ways to articulate it. In the process, she reinvents “memoir” itself as an arena for scholarly speculation, cultural inquiry, links to folklore, fairy tales and even an especially grisly episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. She is using all her imaginative resources to get to the kind of truth promised, but intermittently achieved in more conventional memoirs. Besides Highsmith, you think of W.G. Sebald and Raymond Queneau and their experiments with narrative and reminiscence. The real thrill one feels in reading In the Dream House is in encountering a means of personal storytelling that is original and, in more ways than one, transformative.
Russian Doll – Nadia (Natasha Lyonne) is a brittle, habitually grouchy New Yorker who’s in a unique rut. She keeps coming to at the same birthday party at a friend’s apartment, leaves and, in some way or another (falling down stairs, struck by a car, blown up by a gas stove, etc.), dies soon after, only to find herself immediately getting ready to leave the same party and the same apartment for yet another “Appointment in Samarra.” So far, so “Groundhog Day.” But this Netflix series is different in many ways, not least because eventually Nadia finds that she’s not the only one going through this. “I die all the time,” a guy named Alan (Charlie Barnett) tells her as the elevator car they’re sharing is about to crash to the ground. So now they’re each other’s chronic-death buddies, roaming the streets of Lower Manhattan in search of clues, patterns, some kind of rational explanation for their shared predicament before one or both of them get killed again. Somehow this feels less like a “Groundhog Day” variation than a post-9-11 version; one where New Yorkers feel stalked and at times overcome by the prospect of death from anywhere, but are somehow more intensely in pursuit of life. What makes this more than a clever conceit is Lyonne’s magnetic presence. As with everything she does, Lyonne combines the brassy tempo of a thirties screwball-comedy heroine with the brainy poise of a fifties TV private eye. She keeps us on the edge of our seats even though we know she’s never really going anywhere. At least, we hope not.
Little Women– Louisa May Alcott’s novel is so durable and well-crafted that it’s next-to-impossible to make a bad movie out of it, even if you were trying hard to do so. The challenge, however, comes in trying to find new ways of telling the story that doesn’t mitigate its power to charm and move its audiences and Greta Gerwig, of whom I said two years ago (Lady Bird) had the stuff to be a great director, has deftly rearranged the March sisters’ saga into fragments that shift back and forth through time. You notice Gerwig’s innovations without being in any way thrown by them and the glue holding these elements together are the uniformly superb performances, perhaps the most subtly remarkable of which is Laura Dern as Marmee, who is at once remote and warm, imperious and giving; able to contain what she concedes is a deep well of anger over her circumstances while wearing her circumspection as though it were her own battle uniform. Gerwig’s film arrives at year’s end like an unexpectedly bountiful gift to her audiences, emotionally accessible, yet quirky in parts, especially in those dance sequences. But Gerwig does love dance and she’s learning how to make her craft move to its own rhythms.
And now, as a public service to at least two people who’ve asked me about it, my own private top-ten movies of the 2010s. Once again, as with the preceding inventory, these are in no particular order. They are also submitted with no additional comment beyond those you’ll (probably) find elsewhere on this site:
Moonlight (Barry Jenkins) Toni Erdmann (Maren Ade) Phantom Thread (Paul Thomas Anderson) Only Lovers Left Alive (Jim Jarmusch) Mad Max: Glory Road (George Miller) Get Out (Jordan Peele) Hell or High Water (David Mackenzie) Lincoln (Steven Spielberg) Cold War (Pawel Pawlikowski) Moonrise Kingdom (Wes Anderson)
BEST DOCUMENTARY: The Act of Killing & O.J.:Made in America (tie).
BEST ANIMATED FEATURE: Spider-Man: Into the Spider Verse & The Shaun the Sheep Movie (tie).
BEST SUPERHERO MOVIE: See directly above.
FILMMAKER OF THE DECADE: Paul Thomas Anderson
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