Magic Mike’s Last Dance director Steven Soderbergh to Rolling Stone‘s Marlow Stern (as transcribed by Jordan Ruimy): “This year’s [Oscar telecast] is going to be very telling. You cannot this year say, ‘Well, they didn’t nominate any popular movies!’ You cannot say that. So, we’ll find out if that’s really the issue or if it’s a deeper philosophical problem, which is the fact that movies don’t occupy the same cultural real estate that they used to. They just don’t.
“I’m sure that [streaming] is part of it. In cultural terms, they don’t matter in the same way that they did twenty years ago. As a result, especially for younger viewers, it’s not as compelling as it once was. They’re going to learn a lot this year. We all will.”
HE to Soderbergh: “We will learn nothing except what we already know, which is that the Woke Awards Mafia (which includes a small army of suck-up journalists) are still nominating films that support their myopic worldview, which leans heavily toward identity politics.
With the exception of Top Gun: Maverick, the ten 2022 Best Picture nominees simply aren’t that good…really. Nine of them failed to pass HE’s Howard Hawks test (2.8). It was just a mildly shitty year because of an army of mildly shitty people pulling the strings.
The actual best films of the year were (a) Empire of Light, (b) Close, which A24 decided not to open domestically until this month, (c) Happening (Best women’s-abortion-rights flick since Four Months, Three Weeks, Two Days; (d) Vengeance; (e) She Said; (f) Emily The Criminal; Top Gun: Maverick; (g) Tar (despite the many irritations); (h) Ron Howard’s Thirteen Lives; (i) James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water; and (j) James Gray‘s Armageddon Time
