Five days ago (11.7) I posted a piece titled “How Will Trump’s Victory Affect Oscar Noms?” My basic take was that any award-worthy film that defies or argues against Trump or Trumpism (Emilia Perez, Karla Sofia Gascon‘s sure-to-be-Oscar-nominated “lead” performance, The Apprentice, Conclave) will probably win favor among the Academy’s hardcore progressives (i.e., the Jamie Lee Curtis branch).
Yesterday (11.11) former IndieWire guy and current @EDGLRD hotshot Eric Kohn addressed the same topic in a Hollywood Reporter piece (“How the Oscar Race Responds to Donald Trump“) and offered roughly the same conclusion.
With most of America not so much saying “yay, Trump!’ as “fuck the wokey,” Kohn believes that Hollywood’s leftist vanguard will push back strongly against Joe and Jane Bumblefuck by saying in effect “screw you guys…more wokey-wokey…we’re digging in!”
Kohn: “The 2017 Best Picture win for Moonlight both reflected and influenced a Trump-era bid for change…the choices the Academy will soon make can only do the same.”
Kohn, however, seems to think that Sean Baker‘s Anora presents some kind of anguished portrait of struggling have-nots. Anora, he says, is “a paean to the struggle of finding stability in a country that forces its lower-class survivors to hustle at all costs,” and that it serves as “a barometer of the mood of the many unsure or uneasy about the election results — right down to the teary exhaustion of its closing moments, when two characters drawn together by happenstance melt into the frustrations of their shaky futures.”
The joy and rapture of Anora lies is the glorious and obvious fact that it’s not wokey-wokey in the least, and thank God Almighty for that heavenly blessing.
Kohn’s article also states that Brady Corbet‘s The Brutalist, a 1940s saga of a tobacco-and-heroin-addicted Hungarian architect struggling to adapt to American capitalism, is “a sobering and uncannily timely testament to the contradictions between American immigrant promise and the inequalities that keep it unfulfilled for so many,” blah blah.
Kohn more or less concludes that if you’re against the cruel exploitation of immigrants you may want to think about giving Corbet’s film a Best Picture Oscar (or something like that).
The funniest part of Kohn’s piece states that Trumpies will have difficulty with the egalitarian spirit of The Brutalist. “Those who view Donald Trump as a cartoonish reality-TV character now threatening an American way of life will find much to identify with in the wakeup call endured by Adrien Brody’s Laszlo Toth,” Kohn opines. “Others who crave Trump’s more draconian approach to border control may not make it through The Brutalist.”
That’s me he’s talking about! I hated The Brutalist and found it so off-putting that I bolted during the intermission. Kohn is therefore implying I’m a Trumpie, but as much as I despise the woke mind virus, I voted for Harris because I considered her far less problematic than Trump.
The Brutalist is an agonizing film to sit through, and I’m predicting across-the-board rejection by Academy stalwarts. I hated it.
Excerpt from my 11.7 articl4: “I also think that more people will suddenly want to stream Ali Abassi‘s The Apprentice, a well-written, superbly acted drama about young Trump’s relationship with rightwing pitbull attorney Roy Cohn. If they have any respect for the grade-A artistry involved, they’ll certainly want to consider Best Picture and Best Director noms as well as a Best Supporting Actor nom for Jeremy Strong, at the very least.
“I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s also…how to put this?…a sign-of-the-times, wokey, gender-fluid acceptance factor to be found in Conclave. Which should help it among the Jamie Lee Curtis “we all need to lock arms and tell Trump to go fuck himself” crowd. [Note: The Conclave thing has nothing to do with gender transitioning.)”
