HE to Gold Derby-ites: So are some of you guys feeling a little more supportive of EthanHawke‘s career-best performance in FirstReformed? In the wake of his having won the Gotham Award prize for Best Actor, I mean.
For weeks ESPN’s Adnan Virk and I have been the only ones to predict Hawke as a Best Actor finalist in the Oscar race. The rest of you have been hanging back. I get that the four Best Actor locks are Bradley Cooper (A Star Is Born), Viggo Mortensen (Green Book), Christian Bale (Vice) and Rami Malek (Bohemian Rhapsody). But Hawke is absolutely the guy to fill that fifth slot. Wake up and smell the Schrader coffee.
Gold Derby-ites to HE: It doesn’t matter how good Hawke is in First Reformed. It doesn’t matter because A24 opened it last May, and that means we don’t give a shit. Period. Gold Derby hotshots will only support performances in films that have opened in the fall. We don’t care about quality or what the Movie Godz believe in. We live and breathe by our own code.
I’ve met Jason Clarke socially two or three times, and there’s no correlation between the dude he is at the dinner table — loose, casual, funny, kind-hearted — and the glum, dismissable guys he’s always being hired to play in films.
Clarke has had four interesting roles over the last decade — John “Red” Hamilton in Public Enemies, the CIA torturer guy in Zero Dark Thirty, Ted Kennedy in Chappaquiddick and “Malcom” in Dawn of the Planet of the Apes. Otherwise he’s always getting cast as cuckolds (in Mudbound, All I See Is You and the forthcoming The Aftermath) or guys who end up dead (First Man, Everest) or as villains.
The real-life Clarke is bathed in charm and alpha vibes, but put him before a movie camera and he turns into a downhearted gloomhead who’s always coping with the shitty end of the stick. Unfair, not right, reboot required.
Worse in their view, the NBR has given its Best Actor trophy to Viggo Mortensen, whose chances of winning any acting awards had been dismissed by NAPSCA reps after he mistakenly used a verboten term in a post-screening discussion.
In a joint statement, NAPSCA co-chairs Brooke Obie and Inkoo Kang have said that “the NBR is obviously entitled to hand out its top awards to any film or filmmaker or performer it chooses…we wouldn’t want to inject ourselves into any private voting dynamic. However, we would be derelict in our duties as moral and ethical arbiters if we didn’t express disappointment that they chose to honor Green Book, which, as we’ve patiently explained, fails to reflect the current politically correct values and conversations that we would prefer to see in commercial cinemas these days.
“Peter Farrelly‘s decision to tell a story set in 1962 obviously goes against the grain of current progressive thought, and we strongly disagree with this. We will be meeting later today to discuss measures that will hopefully nip this in the bud.”
The other NBR awards:
Best Director — Bradley Cooper, A Star Is Born
Best Actress — Lady Gaga, A Star Is Born
Best Supporting Actor — Sam Elliott, A Star Is Born
Best Supporting Actress — Regina King, If Beale Street Could Talk
Best Original Screenplay — Paul Schrader, First Reformed (yes!)
Best Adapted Screenplay — Barry Jenkins, If Beale Street Could Talk (really?)
Best Animated Feature: Incredibles 2 (give me a break!)
Breakthrough Performance: Thomasin McKenzie, Leave No Trace
Best Directorial Debut: Bo Burnham, Eighth Grade
Best Foreign Language Film: Cold War
Best Documentary: RBG
In the view of Vulture‘s Mark Harris, Green Book’s Oscar campaign hasn’t necessarily derailed. Which is another way of saying it may be on track. Harris actually allows that the film’s A+ CinemaScore “suggests that the audience (at least the primarily older, largely white audience that showed up) is loving what it sees.”
HE to Harris #1: That’s been obvious from the get-go, bruh. I was there for the first big Toronto Film Festival screening, and people were levitating when it ended. I was told yesterday that a paying audience somewhere in the Hartford area clapped when it ended. Last month my 30 year-old son and his 29 year-old wife told me they “LOVED” it. And look at what just happened with the National Board of Review! But you know what I love? The way you indicate that the film’s admirers are behind the curve…on the slightly doddering, fuddy-dud side.
Harris says that Universal is hoping to ape the award-season success of last year’s Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, “which made more than half its money after its ninth week of release and earned Academy Awards for Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell. There were loud critical complaints that in Three Billboards, the black characters were plot devices, abstractions designed to facilitate the growth curve of the white protagonists. That didn’t matter to Academy voters, nor will it matter to some of them that Green Book is a movie that could have been made 30 years ago.”
HE to Harris #2: That was one of the first things out of my mouth last September, Mark. That except for the material dealing with Don Shirley being gay, Green Book could have been made in 1987. But — hello? — it’s still a really good film. It walks softly and uses a deft touch, applying just the right English and timing to make this kind of story deliver just so. And it doesn’t harm anyone. And it believes in mutual respect and compassion. And it isn’t selling a “white savior” or a “magic negro” story. It’s just about a couple of 1962 guys, one of them being a blustery old-school racist and the other being on the priggish, constipated side. It delivers in low-key fashion from start to finish, and it believes in modesty and hugs and the taking of small steps.
“But Academy voters themselves, almost 30 percent of whom have joined only in the last four years, are changing, too, so who knows?,” Harris writes with a note of hope and optimism. He means that the New Academy Kidz might push back against Green Book while embracing, say, Barry Jenkins‘ If Beale Street Could Talk, a movie that muses along and winds up flatlining toward the end, like a Wong Kar Wai flick that’s run out of gas.
“It used to be a certainty that you’d never go broke selling white people stories of their own redemption, and that may still be true,” Harris allows. “But in 2018, it suddenly seems possible that you’ll never get rich that way either.”
The concern of the moment is that recently opened critical and film-festival favorites (Widows, Green Book, Boy Erased, The Front Runner, Can You Ever Forgive Me?, Beautiful Boy) are underperforming or limping along while generic family-friendly sludge movies (Ralph Breaks the Internet, Creed II, Dr. Seuss’ The Grinch, Fantastic Beasts: The Crimes of Grindelwald, Bohemian Rhapsody, Instant Family, A Star Is Born) are making all the dough.
The general social-pledge attitude of the moviegoing audience used to be that (a) they would pay to see low-rent, mass-appeal popcorn fare (horror, CG-driven, superheroes, stupid comedies) all through the winter, spring, summer and early fall, but that (b) they’d willingly shift gears and pay to see prestigious, well-reviewed, award-contending movies in November and December.
The new general attitude seems to be “fuck the prestige human-drama movies…we’ll watch them on Netflix or Amazon when they come around in three or four months.” Even in the case of a feel-good flick like Green Book, which audiences are completely in love with (I heard yesterday that it got a standing ovation in Hartford from a regular paying audience)…even with Green Book they seem to be going “ehh, well, maybe not…I can wait.”
What’s happening here? What’s happened to the good old “okay, we’ll pay to see well-made, adult-friendly movies during the year-end holidays” contract? The willingness to engage with adult, semi-complex, reality-reflecting movies seems to be dwindling.
Question: Imagine if Sidney Lumet‘s The Verdict had never been made and released in ’82, but had been made by, say, Steve McQueen or David Fincher or David Gordon Green and released over the Thanksgiving holiday. If the McQueen-Fincher-Green version has been just as good as the Lumet, would it also be getting the bum’s rush from audiences? Or would it prove the exception to the rule?
The Verdict opened on 12.10.82, and wound up making $53,977,250, or $140,340,850 in 2018 dollars.
Here’s an audio file of a Vice q & a that happened at Manhattan’s SVA theatre the night before last (11.25). The participants are Vice director-writer Adam McKay, star Amy Adams, composer Nicholas Britell, and producers Dede Gardner, Jeremy Kleiner and Kevin Messick. Thanks to Blackfilm’s Wilson Morales for providing the file. Again, the mp3.
