America in 2020 was a dystopian nightmare. It was a blur of darting eyes over masks, empty shelves where toilet paper and hand sanitizer used to be, protests in all 50 states, the mask wars, unfiltered hatred between two opposing political sides, autonomous zones, Proud Boys and Antifa, a mob that busted into the Capitol, an election that tore the country apart.
American culture split into their dividing worlds – online they built communities of rivals on Facebook, Twitter, TikTok, Instagram. Hook-up apps were mostly off limits. Now there was a public arena for public shaming and all at once American culture on the left, and the ruling class that profits off of it, turned into a daily – hourly – ritual of panic, persecution and purges. What choice did the big corporations have but to pander or else themselves be shunned? This has left art and the Oscars and all of Hollywood in a state of paralysis and fear. Probably the most telling and visible example of what we’re all living through in the awards community were the members of the HFPA taking to the stage on Golden Globes night to apologize for themselves.
People out there in the world just went about their daily lives as best they could, masked up, shut in, locked down – with not a lot to keep them distracted. Somehow the Oscar race managed to make its way carefully down the tracks laid out for it already. Those of us who cover it know the track well. We follow our instructions every year as we’ve defined it over time. The idea is to find the best movies, theoretically. But really it is about that third step – the step that decides ahead of time what “they” will go for and what they won’t.
Back in 2000, when I first started, the Academy wasn’t led around by anyone except publicists and even then minimally. Variety and the Hollywood Reporter covered the Oscars but mostly to profile contenders. People like me saw what we thought was wrong with the Oscars back then – that the movies weren’t good enough. That film critics knew better what films were great and worthy and lasting but the Academy – they were a populist joke. What the public liked, what the Academy liked was simply not the best in a given year. So people like me tracked the films and guided the best ones, or so we thought, into the race. At first, way back when, it was about our own opinions. We would push – or advocate – for films and contenders that we thought deserve recognition.
Sometimes that would work and we would feel fulfilled, like we accomplished something because we got the Academy to nominate something worthy. Between then and now, with various changes to the system, like pushing the Oscars back by a month, and expanding the Best Picture ballot, while at the same time Hollywood making ungodly amounts of money on branded franchises that sold well in China and elsewhere in the world – the Oscar race changed from the Academy deciding what films to nominate to the machine deciding – the machine being people like me. The Oscar game turned into critics and journalists also covering the Oscars – the machine became bigger than the whole purpose of the Oscars in the first place: to find the best films of the year according to the Hollywood industry.
This year the game became all too visible to anyone paying attention. All you have to do is look at what films people are buzzing about vs. what films are in the Oscar race. The disconnect is stark and obvious by now: these are two very different worlds. One is entertainment for people. The other is about finding the movies the Oscar voters will choose and pretending like it’s an actual contest. By the time the movies get to the Producers Guild the lineup is more or less set and it will have been influenced mostly by people who cover the awards and have micro-managed the process.
But that doesn’t mean that the movies aren’t worthy. That doesn’t mean the hot house flowers selected for the Academy aren’t great films. They are. They are the greatest of the year much of the time. That isn’t the problem.
I was watching Mank for the 20th time or whatever it was last night and I was thinking, how could anyone complain about this year in film when David Fincher made this movie? He didn’t make it to make money. He didn’t make it to win Oscars. He didn’t make it to impress critics. He made it for the same reason every year in May people climb Mount Everest. Because it’s there and because it’s one of the hardest things a person can do. He made a complex, complicated puzzle that exists for the pure art of it. Just to do it. It rattled around in his mind and his heart for 30 years and then finally he decided now was the time. Fuck it.
One of the reasons Chloe Zhao’s partner and cinematographer works with her today is because when they were both at NYU film school he saw a lot of people sitting around talking about making movies. But Chloe stood out, he said. She was just doing it. She has made history, yes that’s true. But she also produced, wrote, directed AND EDITED Nomadland. I mean, come on. No other woman in Oscar history has ever done all of those things. Only a couple of directors have ever even been nominated for writing and directing and editing. Nomadland, like Mank, is a gift. It is not the fault of these movies that they are cogs in a machine that has robbed them of some of their life and their beauty.
Look at the Sound of Metal. What an incredible film that is. Who would have ever thought that the struggle to gain back the ability to hear would turn out to be the wrong decision? That the sound of grinding metal sound would be preferable to absolute silence? Riz Ahmed’s character has to choose between the life he wanted and the life he must now accept. It is just one of the films about loss in the race. The Father is also about loss – life, people, a sense of reality slipping away. Unlike Sound of Metal, Anthony Hopkins has no alternative. He must face down his own mortality.
Lee Isaac Chung invites us into his own childhood in Minari, growing up as a Korean-American in Arkansas, of all places. Rather than tell the story you expect – how the people rejected them – they tell a different story about a family struggling to make their farm work and to find their future in the land. It is so much from a child’s perspective, not just watching his parents try to hold together their marriage but watching how Americans worship God. I love the small touches, like seeing sushi for the first time or drinking Mountain Dew. Obviously these tiny moments resonated throughout his life. But there is nothing quite like the ending when they all discover what home really means and only part of that is where there house is settled. Like Minari they can set their roots anywhere and thrive.
What a surprise Emerald Fennell’s Promising Young Woman turned out to be. Here is another film produced, written and directed by one person, by Fennell. It’s a wholly original story that centers on a broken and broken-hearted female protagonist who can’t seem to get on with her life. It is dark and playful, funny and tragic. The choice of music and production design are such a strong thumbprint from such a brand new director.
When Aaron Sorkin writes a movie he’s always investing into a larger concept at the same time he’s writing great dialogue. That’s the thing about any movie Sorkin has written, from A Few Good Men – the conflict between needing a strong and ruthless military and their in-house abuses that are unethical, “and my existence while grotesque and incomprehensible to you saves lives. You don’t want the truth because deep down in places you don’t talk about at parties you want me on that wall. You need me on that wall.”
To An American President – how to lead a country while also having every mistake you’ve ever made twisted into something ugly, “America isn’t easy. America is advanced citizenship. You’ve got to want it bad. Because it’s going to put up a fight. It’s gonna say, ‘You want free speech? Let’s see you acknowledge a man whose words make your blood boil who is standing center stage advocating at the top of his lungs that which you would spend a lifetime opposing at the top of yours. You want to claim this land is the land of the free? Then the symbol of your country cannot just be a flag. The symbol also has to be one of its citizens exercising his right to burn that flag in protest.” The Social Network – a great idea that changes the world can’t really fix the problem of loneliness, “You had one friend. I was your only friend.”
And of course, in the Trial of the Chicago 7, still the most generally loved of the bunch, Sorkin confronts the dilemma of the counter culture generation that did so much yet set their own causes back by decades, “My problem is, for the next 50 years when people think of progressive politics they’re going to think of you. They’re going to think of you and your idiot followers passing out daisies to soldiers and trying to levitate the Pentagon. They’re not going to think of equality or justice, they’re not going to think of education or poverty or progress. They’re going to think of a bunch of stoned, lost, disrespectful, foul-mouthed, lawless losers and so we’ll lose election.”
Finally, Shaka King’s powerful Judas and the Black Messiah which features a beautiful love story at its center that isn’t often talked about – where Deborah Johnson (Dominique Fishback) must navigate falling in love with a Civil Rights leader who is a threat to law enforcement and government. Obviously the story revolves around Daniel Kaluuya and Lakeith Stanfield but the love story, to me, is really the most moving and unforgettable part of it.
It isn’t the movies. The movies are gifts. They are gems dug up in a dark mine most people can’t access. Even if no one watches them they should. And as Rilke says in Letters to a Young Poet, “If your own life seems poor, do not blame it. Blame yourself for not being poet enough to call forth its riches.” And indeed, complaining about the movies themselves is an example of lazy pointless waste-of-time thinking.
It isn’t the movies. It’s the Oscar race. It’s how it has its own track which has deviated from the main highway, like the Bates Motel. It now has to find a way to rejoin the main interstate or else be forgotten by time.
Academy voters hate and will never vote for superhero movies or blockbusters or thrillers or comedies or horror films. They won’t even go there unless something crosses over into the elitist world of critics. That means the films that are making an impact and are part of the evolution of American culture never get anywhere near the Oscar race. The Oscars can’t change because the process will not let them. The process keeps them stuck in time by giving them only what the voters want. We give them what they want because that seems to prove that somehow they have picked the year’s best.
The good news is that you can see a better version of what the Oscars might look like when you look at the Producers Guild with ten nomination slots. Over the years some of the culturally impactful films showed up there but never made it into the Oscar race – Gone Girl, Nightcrawler, Wonder Woman, Straight Outta Compton. Big movies and smaller movies are allowed on that lineup. Beginning next year, the Oscars will once again have ten Nest Picture nominees.
Here is hoping that subtle but significant change will enable the Oscars to macro out of the trap that people like me try to forecast, on the hunt for movies “they” will like. Here is hoping the Oscars can catch up with time and cultural shifts and expand their tastes to include the dreaded “genre” movies. It isn’t even going to be about theatrical vs. streaming. It’s going to be about remembering that the Oscars are designed to honor films that touch audiences. Forgetting that those audiences count is the opposite of what films and what the Oscars should be.
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Best Picture – The Oscar Race Gives More Than it Gets – Awardsdaily – The Oscars, the Films and everything in between. - Awards Daily
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