What Belloni means by “increasingly niche tastes” is that since ’16 or thereabouts, the film industry has increasingly fallen under the grip of aggressive progressives, otherwise known as wokesters (POCs, #MeToo-ers, LGBTQs, obliging guilty liberals, kowtowing corporations). And they’ve been calling the shots more and more, and it was this increasingly dominant influence that made last spring’s Steven Soderbergh Oscar telecast seem like such a suffocating experience.
We all understand that the Soderbergh Oscars absolutely killed whatever was left of the old mystique. They made it clear that the Oscars had been transformed into a West Coast Tony awards thing — awards that reflected the mentality of an elite membership that had its own progressive game going on, and to hell with skillfully finessed movies for the politically neutral meatheads — i.e., films that reach out to people and reflect their lives as actually lived.
(Sidenote: it’s heartening to note that one such film is Reinaldo Marcus Green‘s King Richard, due from Warner Bros./HBO Max on 11.19.)
Five or six years ago the “increasingly niche tastes” crowd, understandably goaded by the election of Donald Trump, decided that the older-white-male dominance had to be strongly diminished and that the world needed to change. And so theindustry, MarvelandD.Cbullshitfranchisesaside, needed to increasingly forego the usual escapist or emotional engagement elements and/or baseline reflections of real life that movies have historically provided over the decades, which meant mostly ignoring the experience of average Americans who live outside the NY/LA bubble.
“Since wokeness began to manifest in ’17 and certainly since the pandemic struck, the movie pipeline has been losing steam and under-providing, to put it mildly. Nothing even approaching the level of Spotlight, Manchester by the Sea, Call Me By Your Name, Dunkirk, Lady Bird, La-La Land, the long cut of Ridley Scott‘s The Counselor, Zero Dark Thirty or Portrait of a Woman on Fire has come our way from domestic filmmakers.
Above and beyond an array of pandemic suffocations, a significant reason for the strange absence of robust cinema, for this general faint-pulse feeling, is (wait for it) wokeness and political terror.
I personally feel as if a combination Amtrak and freight train that I’ve been riding on and living off most of my professional life (spiritually and economically) has jumped the tracks.
Even five years ago (summer of ‘16) we were all part of a hugely different landscape, or soul-scape even. Even with the overwhelming formulaic Marvel/D.C. scourge (which had begun around ’05) there were pockets of vibrancy…opportunities for surprises and odd possibilities….who knew?
Then the realm started to convulse and consume itself by way of four traumatic shake-ups that amounted to a perfect storm:
(a) the horror and chaos of Trump, and the sense that rural racist bumblefuck attitudes that Trump winked at and empowered (Charlottesville, George Floyd) + older white male sexist establishment attitudes (Weinstein, et. al.) had to be resisted head-on;
(b) regimented cinematic woke political currents (the traditional function of nervy smarthouse cinema up-ended by required SJW narratives & the transformation of Sundance and to a lesser extent Toronto into instructive progressive re-education camps);
(c) streaming overtaking exhibition (thus ensuring that the “go woke, go broke” effect wouldn’t interfere with said narrative); and…
(d) the concurrent pandemic effect of ‘20 and ‘21, which has all but killed exhibition (which had already been isolating itself by succumbing to the gladiator-arena syndrome, which was caused by a tidal shift in audience appetites due to adult-level dramas moving to cable and streaming).
The film world was far from idyllic before all this happened but the last four or five years have been shattering. The only upside I can see is that the pandemic ejected Trump from the White House, although the psychology of Trump Nation has obviously persisted if not metastasized.
World of Reel‘s Jordan Ruimy has posted a fairly persuasive projection of the 2021 Venice Film Festival, as well as a scoop about Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom (UA Releasing, 11.21) probably aiming to debut at the ’21 New York Film Festival. A source has told him that NYFF director Eugene Hernandez is close to locking down the world premiere of PTA’s Los Angeles-set period film.
Just to be thorough I checked with Hernandez myself this morning…crickets.
Ruimy is calling Soggy Bottom, which has something to do with a San Fernando Valley high-school student becoming an actor in the early ’70s, “the most anticipated movie of the year, without a doubt.”
Maybe, but I don’t think PTA is cooking with the old high-test these days. To me the PTA show peaked somewhere between Punch-Drunk Love and There Will Be Blood and started to gradually lose the mojo with The Master (’12), Inherent Vice (’14) and Phantom Thread (’17).
I’m sorry but we all experience peaks and valleys. Sometimes we bounce back — it happens in rare cases.
The only other things that people know about Soggy Bottom is that (a) Bradley Cooper plays a Jon Peters-resembling hotshot (and possibly Peters himself), and that (b) Benny Safdie will portray real-life politician Joel Wachs.
Dune, d: Denis Villenueve Blonde, d: Andrew Dominik Madres Paralelas, d: Pedro Almodovar The Power of the Dog, d: Jane Campion The Card Counter, d: Paul Schrader The Hand of God, d: Paolo Sorrentino Spencer, d: Pablo Larrain Decision to Leave, d: Park Chan-wook The Eternal Daughter, d: Joanna Hogg Driftwood, d: Michel Franco Il buco, d: Michelangelo Frammartino Mona Lisa and the Blood Moon, d: Ana Lily Amirpour Official Competition, d: Gaston Duprat, Mariano Cohn Freaks Out, d: Gabrielle Mainetti
…putting 60% to 70% of Hollywood Elsewhere behind a Patreon paywall, that is, you’re greatly mistaken.
I would like nothing better than for Hollywood Elsewhere to just cruise along like it has for the last…God, it’ll be 17 years on 8.4.21. (And nearly 23 years if you count the October ’98 launch of my Mr. Showbiz column, which was lamentably titled HOLLYWOOD CONFIDENTIAL.) I really wish I could’ve kept going as a free site until 8.4.23 — 20 years, nice and tidy.
Alas, the monsters began arriving on Maple Street back in early ’18, and before I knew it “the terror” had begun to infiltrate everywhere.
HE began making modest amounts of dough almost immediately after launching in August ’04, and the income began to grow a bit more by ’07 or ’08. For about seven years (’10 to ’16, let’s say) HE award-season ads were pulling down decent six-figure revenues, and from this I was able to savor a modest lifestyle that included travel, buying the rumblehog, Italian lace-ups, Prague touch-ups and so on. Hardly a life of luxury, but, as Randy Newman might’ve put it, “it was all right.”
Then came the politically correct lizards and crocodiles and Komodo dragons, and before I knew it ad revenue had begun to shrink. Because “they” didn’t like me (or were afraid of seeming vaguely supportive) and so little by little revenue began to dwindle. Or as Lady Bird Johnson used to say, to “dwinnel.”
The ’20 and ’21 Oscar season (COVID) was the worst in HE history. There’s no sense kidding myself from where I sit right now. I have to either launch a paywall and do the best I can (or the best we can, I mean…myself and HE ad guy Sean Jacobs) with the ’21 and into ’22 Oscar season, or find some freelance writing gigs or, God forbid, send out resumes and find a (choke) “job.”
Over the last two or three years some truly wonderful Millennials and Zoomers in the publicity and marketing end of things (initially at film festivals and then within distributor offices) decided that I’d become a kind of pariah. Except I’m not. I’m the same columnist I’ve always been — the same mentality, the same passion, the same edge. What’s changed is that the culture has tipped into a kind of rigid woke mindset — say the right things and repeat the party dogma or you’ll be cancelled.
I am a humanist, a sane person, a father, a husband, a good writer, and a left-center moderate. And I haven’t written anything, said anything or done anything to warrant pariah status. I haven’t changed — the culture has. Things have gone CRAZY in some ways. All I’ve said and written has been the same old plain-spoken stuff. I have a voice, a way of writing, etc.
Do we ALL have to sound like Anne Thompson and Eric Kohn in order to survive these days? Isn’t there room for just one of us — i.e., myself — to have a blunter, franker opinion?
The shunning of certain ex-Commie screenwriters happened between the early to late ‘50s, but that era finally ended. “Scoundrel Time”, somebody called it. The woke totalitarian era will come to an end also. Sooner or later, all pages are turned, all chapters end and all things pass.
I. Have. Done. Nothing. To. Warrant. This. Kind. Of. Treatment. Even that recent thing that got me kicked out of Critics Choice…that wasn’t me! I wrote nothing. A friend did and I posted it for 45 minutes. And then I took it down. It was nothing. It was bullshit. And yet Jen Yamato and Chris Bumbray‘s fanged teeth were soaked in saliva.
Thank God for the sanity and friendship emanating from the good people I’ve been lucky to regard as friends for the last two or three decades, and press credential-wise from the Telluride and Cannes camps. From my persepective these are thelastsanepeopleonplanetearth.
Wokesterism is a social-political plague — the new iteration of Maximilian Robespierre, the New McCarthyism, the New Victorians and surely a form of Bolshevik Totalitarian Orwellian insanity. Wokesters are suppressors and punishers — they’re against any concept of freedom that you or I or any semi-liberal person might recognize. I can’t wait for the zeitgeist to gradually swing in the other direction and for these reprehensible jackals to be on the run and/hiding in tall grass. And again, my core beliefs are liberalmoderate and I come from a place of adventure and satori and clarity of the soul.
Wokesterism is fundamentally guided by love and compassion and humanitarian goals and a respect for all modes of ethnicity and sexuality and what-have-you, agreed. But in the name of righteous cleansing these people have become the totalitarian brain police that William S. Burroughs was so properly terrified of…they’re against freedom of speech…they’re about punitive measures and suppression and ruining good people’s lives…in a phrase they’re the new Khmer Rouge…FUCKING FANATICS.
Critic friend several weeks ago….
“The weird thing to me in all of this is the number of people — i.e., more than half of Jeff’s readers — who do not get it because theysimplycannotseewhatisgoingon. They are such lockstep, go-along-with-the-crowd personalities that they think Jeff is talking about some fantasy in his head, rather than a genuine universe of real ideas that can no longer be expressed in the public square of mainstream media.
“Every time one of them says ‘Give it a rest, Jeff!’ I think: Here is someone who is truly, defininglyclueless. The house is on fire, and they just think it’s a warm day.”
Nobody loves great, earth-shaking cinema more than myself.
According to MSNBC’s Joy Reid in one of her “Absolute Worst” essays, Republican-backed legislation that would ban critical race theory has been introduced in “nearly” a dozen states. Reid says that critical race theory is a “decades old” concept, but in fact it’s a relatively recent education-system additive that explains the history of systemic racism in this country (which no semi-educated, fair-minded person would argue with).
It follows, unfortunately, that CRT has also metastisized into a woke belief system that says white Americans are fundamentally stained and poisoned by their history, and so they need to detoxify themselves by picking up a copy of Robin D’Angelo‘s “White Fragility” and work at cleansing themselves of a shameful past. They also need to absorb and accept the theology of The 1619 Project, which states that racism is the fundamental definer of the American experience.
However enlightened or well-intentioned this kind of re-educational process might be, it is believed in many corners of this country (including the better-educated cities) that critical race theory advances a new form of racism (“bad whitey needs to atone and be strictly schooled”) in order to counter historic racism.
I think we all understand that Average Americans (including liberal parents in big blue cities) are not going to go for this, and that CRT will be flayed as a campaign issue in ’22, you bet. I hate that my own distaste for and discomfort with critical race theory puts me in the same camp as a lot of horrible Republicans, but what can I do? All I can say is, you don’t have to be a crazy Republican to have arguments with CRT.
From a 1.27.21 Bari Weiss column: “Critical race theory is a threat to the most basic foundations of American life, including, but not limited to, equality under the law. It asks us to define ourselves by our immutable characteristics” — i.e., skin color. “It pits us against one another in an endless power struggle. It rejects Enlightenment tools of reason and scientific discovery as tainted. And it undermines our common humanity.
“[It holds that] America was born for the purpose of upholding white supremacy and it remains irredeemably racist. It claims that our founders were not primarily political geniuses but slaveholders who wanted to find a way to hoard their property. And while [last year’s George Floyd] rioters may have gotten a little out of hand, they weren’t wrong to target statues of men like Lincoln.”
I greatly fear the ’22 verdict on this issue from American voters.
Rose McGowan: “I do believe that Democrats, most especially, are in a deep cult…[a situation in which] you’re serving a master who might not be serving you…I always say ‘I come in peace’…I am not here to make people feel bad about their political choices, but I am here to say that you might be in a cult too, [especially] if you don’t know the signs,” blah blah.
Wait…is McGowan suggesting that mainstream establishment Democrats are members of a cult, or is she talking about the lunatic wokester fringe?
More to the point, why is she saying this on Fox, of all Godforsaken places?
The following is a rough blend of a riff I wrote this morning along with friendo reactions…it’s a bit of a bumpy ride:
Friendo #3: “Here’s the one thing I’d add, and I think it’s crucial. It’s not going to be like this, year in and year out. We’ll have some of that vibe, but this is a fad, a fetish, a current obsession of WWS (woke white supremacy). It’s really a pure expression of white supremacy. That’s one of the reasons it’s so fucking embarrassing. Last night wasn’t just jaw-dropping — it was high camp. ”
Friendo#1: “The awards attendees reflected the huge number of POC nominations, voted upon by the increasingly diverse membership.
“Even so, the event did seem more like the BET awards. And three Black visitors watching in my home were embarrassed by the over-wokeness of the whole enterprise. ‘Trying way too hard’ was the judgement.
“In short, the white woke Academy is still over-compensating for its recent #OscarsSoWhite past.
“Plus there was no FUN…no entertainment, no clips. The nominees looked like wax figures as they were introduced.”
THR‘s Scott Feinberg: “The Oscar telecast producers also leaned into diversity in their selection of presenters, which is admirable, although one can’t help but wonder what middle-America made of the fact that only four of the 18 presenters — Bryan Cranston, Brad Pitt, Harrison Ford and Joaquin Phoenix — were white males.”
HE: I’m hesitating to share an impression that millions probably had last night. I’m even hesitating to mention it to you guys. The impression (I’m emphasizing the “i” word as opposed to something more specific) is that the Oscars had suddenly become much more diverse, dominantly so, and that the lethal nightmare of police bullets was hovering or massing just outside Union Station.
It wasn’t all that, of course, with a healthy but modest amount of palefaces (Glenn Close, Laura Dern, Reese Witherspoon, Harrison Ford, Brad Pitt, Carey Mulligan) sprinkled into the smallish, Greek amphitheater dinner cafe. But still…
The fact is that for the last 90 years (or since the telecast began appearing on home screens in the early ‘50s) the Oscars have largely reflected an industry that has…well, actually not mirrored but under-represented the racial makeup and character of this country — currently around 61% Anglo, 13% to 14% African American, 18% Latino, 5% or 6% Asian percentage and a smattering of other tribes. The truth of the makeup of the film industry was probably honestly reflected in the mostly-white complexions of those who attended in decades past…
But all in a flash, Americans who watched last night were suddenly contemplating a new mandated reality, and in strikingly visual terms — an African American Oscar community that was happy to be there and to celebrate diversity and achievement but was also grieving over the deaths of so many African Americans by hair-trigger cops.
For those relatively few Americans who watched the show it almost certainly came as a bit of a shock…trust me, for those accustomed to the notion of the 61-39 split and those who live in the suburbs and rural areas where the Anglo percentage is almost certainly higher, and even to those who reside in mostly white and largely gay West Hollywood…
And especially for movie mavens who’ve been watching since the JFK, LBJ and Nixon eras, the visuals in last night’s show said “roll with it, America…this is the progressive vision of 2021 America…of diverse, progressive, inclusive Hollywood and the America it believes in…a culture that is now (to go by visual impressions) half Black — not 13% or 14% African American but seemingly or possibly 50%…a culture in which progressives have decided that the experience of African Americans has been under-represented and under-respected for too long, and that for the best of reasons it’s time to (am I allowed to think this?) over-represent the POC experience (not to mention the #MeToo perspective and the LGBTQ current), in part due to a general urban-liberal consensus that hinterland white folks and especially older alpha white males are bringers and enforcers of evil (racism, murdering cops, Trump supporters, Proud Boys, Oath Keepers, Fox News watchers, U.S. Capitol occupiers, mask refusers, Republican-controlled legislatures that are now conniving to suppress voters of color by passing new-styled Jim Crow laws) and that the stain and toxicity of white privilege has to be trimmed, Twitter-whipped, schooled, diminished, Critical Race Theory’ed and Robin D’Angelo’ed in order to make the US of A into a more just, compassionate, fair-minded society.
All of this came WHOMPING out of TV screens last night, and on top of (a) the decision to emphasize origin stories and warnings of police shootings in the acceptance speeches, (b) the absence of film clips, (c) no red carpet gowns, (d) no sassy humor, (e) no singing or dancing as well as Chloe Zhao wearing Chinese pigtails and white sneakers and the whole odd feeling of alternate Union Station rules and regulations, including Frances McDormand’s vaguely surreal wolf howl…
It was a strange, at times sodden or sad, and even a mildly alienating night of 170 stars or more precisely attendees…I hate to even think this but I fear that if I, an eccentric if reasonable left-center WeHo fellow, felt a teeny bit jarred by the import of last night’s show then many millions of older Joe and Jane Bumblefucks out there also felt a tiny bit “whoa!”-ed out by the Soderbergh Oscars, then I fear that the midterm elections of 2022 will be affected by this impression. I hate to say it, but I fear it.
Friendo #3: “All true, and all brilliantly stated on your part. And, of course, no one else would say it so honestly. Everyone in America saw it the way you described it. Period.
“Yes, McDormand and Hopkins won the top two acting awards, but were the votes that supported them a reflection of the idea that the industry is ‘ambivalent’ about diversity? Or were they a reflection of the fact that their competitors simply didn’t deserve to win?
“Anthony Hopkins in The Father gives a much greater performance than Chadwick Boseman in Ma Rainey.” Frances McDormand in Nomadland gives a performance that’s vastly more accomplished than Viola Davis‘s [huffing and puffing] in Ma Rainey.”
HE: “Except that Frances McDormand wasn’t the best — Day was. So it’s never really about that. It never really has been. It’s about what makes you feel good by voting for this or that nominee. Plus this was the first time since the mid ’90s that the winners of the Globe and SAG didn’t take the Oscar. So you see something was radically different. What’s funny sort of is that the Globe voters were being chased around and called racists and yet their wins were more inclusive — Andra Day (who deserved to win) and Boseman. Tough call with Hopkins, who was very, very good.
Friendo #3: “Yeah, but newcomers like Andra Day never win, and Frances McDormand was much, much better than Viola Davis.”
Jordan Ruimy: “The Oscars overdid the inclusivity portion of the ceremony. My semi-woke sister was complaining to me via text last night about how they were shoving a message down our throats.”
A little more than three years ago Andrew Sullivan, then a New York “Intelligencer” columnist, lamented how rabid campus wokesterism was becoming increasingly prevalent in various liberal workplace environments, and how “the whole concept of an individual who exists apart from group identity is slipping from the discourse.”
The article was titled “We All Live on Campus Now” (2.9.18). I re-read it this morning, and it’s kind of horrifying to realize that the Cultural Marxist insanity that Sullivan saw as a gathering manifestation has now become a ruling doctrine, certainly on Twitter and in big-media circles.
“The idea of individual merit — as opposed to various forms of unearned ‘privilege’ — is increasingly suspect,” Sullivan continued. “The Enlightenment principles that formed the bedrock of the American experiment — untrammeled free speech, due process, individual (rather than group) rights — are now routinely understood as mere masks for ‘white male’ power, code words for the oppression of women and nonwhites. Any differences in outcome for various groups must always be a function of ‘hate,’ rather than a function of nature or choice or freedom or individual agency.
“And anyone who questions these assertions is obviously a white supremacist himself.”
The culture, he explained, “is now saturated with the concept of ‘your own truth’ — based usually on your experience of race and gender. It is now highly controversial for individuals in one racial/gender group to write about or portray anyone outside it — because there is no art that isn’t rooted in identity. Movies are constantly pummelled by critics not for being bad movies but for being ‘problematic’ on social justice. Books are censored in advance by sensitivity readers to conform with ‘social justice’ protocols.”
Anyone paying attention to the here-and-now will tell you that wokester terror hasn’t ebbed in the slightest since early ’18, and, despite Trump being out of the White House and Biden policies doing a lot to calm people down, is probably even stronger. This is not opinion or conjecture. This is reality.
But not on HE comment threads. For every time that the worrisome presence of woke social Marxism (which is roughly equivalent to the spectre of German aggression in 1938 from a British perspective)…every time woke baddies are mentioned there are certain denialists and pooh-poohers who always pipe in with the same crap…”you’re being tiresome,” “stop obsessing”, “calm down already” and “threatened much, Jeff?” They know who they are**, and I’m getting really sick of their bullshit.
A friend wrote this morning that “the weird thing in all of this is the number of people — i.e., more than half of Jeff’s posting readers — who do not get it because they simply cannot see what is going on. They are such lockstep, go-along-with-the-crowd personalities that they think Jeff is talking about some fantasy in his head, rather than a genuine universe of real ideas that can no longer be expressed in the public square of mainstream media.
“Every time one of them says ‘Give it a rest, Jeff!’ I think: Here is someone who is truly, definingly clueless. The house is on fire, and they just think it’s a warm day.
** seasonalaffleckdisorder, victorlazlo5, Hud+Homer+Alma+Lonnie, etc.
Roger Ross Williams will produce and oversee the series, and will also direct the first episode. Shoshana Guy will serve as showrunner and executive producer. Kathleen Lingo, editorial director for film and TV at The New York Times, will also executive produce as will Caitlin Roper. The series will be made in collaboration between Lionsgate Television, The New York Times, and Oprah Winfrey’s Harpo Films.
HE on 7.30.20: “Don’t tell me that slavery and racism is and always has been this country’s central definer. The 1619 Project’s revisionist zealotry rubs me the wrong way in more ways than I’d care to elaborate upon.
“Slavery has always been an ignominious chapter in the first 245 years of US history (1619 to 1865) and racism has stained aspects of the culture ever since, but to assert that slavery and racism (which other cultures have shamefully allowed over the centuries) are THE central and fundamental definers of the immense American experience strikes me as abridgetoofar.
“One stone in the shoe is the 1619 Project’s contention that the American revolution against England was significantly driven by colonist commitment to maintaining slavery.
“Many factors drove the expansion and gradual strengthening and shaping of this country, and particularly the spirit and character of it — immigration, the industrial revolution and the cruel exploitations and excesses of the wealthy elites, the delusion of religion, anti-Native American racism and genocide, breadbasket farming, Abraham Lincoln, FrederickC. Douglas, the vast networks of railroads, selfishness & self-interest, factories, construction, the two world wars of the 20th Century, scientific innovation, native musical forms including jazz, blues (obviously African-American art forms) and rock, American literature, theatre and Hollywood movies, sweat shops, 20th Century urban architecture, Frank Lloyd Wright, major-league baseball, Babe Ruth & Lou Gehrig, family-based communities and the Protestant work ethic, fashion, gardening, native cuisine and the influences of European, Mexican, Asian and African cultures, hot dogs, the shipping industry, hard work and innovation, the garment industry, John Steinbeck, George Gershwin, Paul Robeson, Louis Armstrong, JFK, MLK, Stanley Kubrick, Chet Baker, John Coltrane, Marilyn Monroe, Amelia Earhart, Malcom X, Taylor Swift, Charlie Parker, Elizabeth Warren, Katharine Hepburn, Aretha Franklin, Jean Arthur, Eleanor Roosevelt, Carol Lombard, Shirley Chisholm, Marlon Brando, Woody Allen, barber shops & manual lawnmowers, the auto industry, prohibition & gangsters, the Great Depression and the anti-Communism and anti-Socialism that eventually sprang from that, status-quo-challenging comedians like Richard Pryor, Lenny Bruce and Steve Allen (“schmock schmock!”), popular music (Chuck Berry, Little Richard, Elvis Presley, Frank Sinatra and the Beatles), TV, great American universities, great historians, great journalism (including the NationalLampoon and Spy magazine), beat poetry, hippies, the anti-Vietnam War movement, pot and psychedelia, cocaine, quaaludes and Studio 54, 20th & 21st Century tech innovations, gay culture, comic books, stage musicals, Steve Jobs, etc.”
We all know that Hollywood Reporter contributor Gregg Kilday is really saying about the current Oscar nominees, and in particular those for Best Picture: He’s saying that 2020 (which includes early ’21) has been a dud movie year and a general downer for all concerned.
Everyone knows this and wants to move on and return to normal. All hail gains by women and POC filmmakers but nobody really loves the wokester progressive surge except those who’ve directly benefited. (And don’t forget that wokesters are the Robespierre-like architects of cancel culture.) Everyone’s morose and bummed and nobody gives a shit about the ’20 and ’21 nightmare because it’s an asterisk and a tragedy — a gloomy movie year defined by streaming and domestic hibernation and the slow suffocation of our souls…half-dying under a grim cloud.
Joe and Jane Popcorn aren’t exactly caught up in the thrill of the Oscar race, to put it mildly. Even professional Oscar watchers are having trouble maintaining a semblance of enthusiasm.
Kilday has posted five or six mitigating quotes that basically say “oh, no, this is a great year and streaming makes everything more accessible and we’re living through a great time.”
He’s also posted one honest quote from Unbroken producer Matthew Baer: “The grand slam for the Oscar best picture is a popular movie with artistic ambitions fulfilled. But given theaters were closed, popularity is difficult to judge. It’s ironic that this year Nomadland is a leading candidate because the business itself became displaced. Also, given nothing else matters in comparison to recovering from COVID, while winning an Oscar is the ultimate victory for artists, it will have less meaning in American culture this year.”
If theatrical was alive and thriving, the leading Best Picture contenders…well, who knows? But we all suspect the same thing, which is that they wouldn’t have stirred much in the way of crowds.
You can usually spot the likeliest Best Picture contenders from a pretty fair distance. Narrative, brand-name filmmakers, strong performances, woke-friendly theme, middle-class or family values, likely to be strongly promoted. By my count there are roughly 40 2021 films that could conceivably make the grade. But when you boil it all down and eliminate those are seemingly too popcorn, too genre, too weird or too indie-marginal…well, it cuts the list down.
Here’s a wild spitball roster based on intuitions, gut feelings, hairs on the back of the neck and little devils and angels sitting on either shoulder. By my count there are three films of color, and they’re all big musicals — Liesel Tommy‘s Respect, Lin-Manuel Miranda, Quiara Alegría Hudes and John Chu‘s In The Heights and, I suppose, Steven Spielberg‘s West Side Story, which is half Puerto Rican. The latter two could become contenders.
Other potential Best Pic nominees: (1) Paul Thomas Anderson‘s Soggy Bottom (9.10.21); (2) Wes Anderson‘s The French Dispatch (Searchlight, fall ’21); (3) Andrew Dominik‘s Blonde (Netflix, fall); (4) Adam McKay‘s Don’t Look Up (Netflix, late ’21); (5) Taika Waititi‘s Next Goal Wins (Searchlight, fall ’21); (6) Paul Schrader‘s The Card Counter.
Plus the two Shakespeares — Joel Coen‘s The Tragedy of Macbeth (A24, presumably late ’24) and Robert Eggers‘ The Northman (more or less based on the Hamlet saga, Focus, late ’21).
That’s a total of 8 plus the two musicals makes ten.
Guillermo del Toro‘s Nightmare Alley, (12.3.21); Denis Villeneuve‘s Dune (10.1.21); Sean Baker‘s Red Rocket, Edgar Wright‘s Last Night in Soho; Leos Carax‘s Annette, Apichatpong Weerasethaku‘s Memoria, James Gray‘s Armageddon Time; Jane Campion‘s The Power of the Dog; Ridley Scott‘s The Last Duel (10.15.21); Terrence Malick‘s The Way Of The Wind, Mission: Impossible 7 (11.19.21), No Time To Die (October 8)
Plus: Paul Verhoeven‘s Benedetta; Mike Mills‘ C’mon C’mon; strong>Celine Sciamma’s Petite Maman; Mia Hansen-Løve‘s Bergman Island; Tom McCarthy‘s Stillwater; Adrien Lyne‘s Deep Water (8.13.21); Jeremy Saulnier‘s Rebel Ridge; Ruben Östlund‘s Triangle of Sadness; Steven Soderbergh‘s No Sudden; Doug Liman‘s Lockdown; Clint Eastwood‘s Cry Macho; Ridley Scott‘s House of Gucci (11.14.21).
Southern friendo has suggested that on the basis of a few similarities between Ben Affleck‘s Argo and Aaron Sorkin‘s The Trial of the Chicago 7, the latter might surge into two or three unexpected Oscar wins. I mostly disagree in light of the fact that 2021 is, of course, a woke year in which films by and about women and POCs are receiving special consideration. There was no wokester current, of course, during the 2012 and early ’13 Oscar campaign season, when Affleck was working the room with skill and finesse.
Southern friendo: “The Trial of the Chicago 7 has been nominated for Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Sacha Baron Cohen), Best Cinematography (Phedon Papamichael), Best Film Editing (Alan Baumgarten) and Best Original Song — six noms in all. Nine years ago Argo was nominated for seven Oscars (Best Picture, Best Supporting Actor (Alan Arkin), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Film Editing, Best Sound Editing, Best Sound Mixing and Best Original Score). It won three — Best Picture, Best Editing, Best Adapted Screenplay — although like Sorkin, Affleck was not nominated for director.
“Chicago 7 has a great chance at winning Best Editing and Best Original Screenplay. And both films are/were boosted by a Supporting Actor nominee — Chicago 7 has Sacha Baron Cohen in this category while Argo had Alan Arkin. It doesn’t matter if said actor wins but he/she needs to be nominated. Since Sorkin was ‘snubbed’, this may be a narrative to [a win].
By the way an Academy friend comments that the last Best Actor slot was between Oldman and Mads Mikkelson. Oldman got in but just barely, this guy believes.
“Minari is still the Green Book of this year, being a fact-based true story that has ‘heart’. Based on the filmmaker’s parents’ story, just like GB was based on the writer’s father’s story.”
HE response: “Minari has heart, yes. Doesn’t deliver anything close to the emotional impact of Green Book, but yes, it has heart.”
Southern friendo: “The multi-nominated Mank is not going to win Best Picture because of the lack of a Best Original Screenplay nom, which has to really upset Fincher since his father’s script was the reason he wanted to make it in the first place
“What does that leave? Nomadland, of course — nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress (McDormand), Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Cinematography (Joshua James Richards) and Best Film Editing., Will it win Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay and Best Picture? Does it win cinematography? If so, that’s four. Won’t win editing. But if the Academy gives a Best Cinematography win to Mank or News of the World, then Nomadland wins three and all for Chloe Zhao, which would be historic.”
He also suspects that The Mauritanian‘s Tahar Rahim will win an Emmy for his upcoming performance in The Serpent (from Netflix on April 2nd). He plays real-life serial killer Charles Sobhraj, who preyed on traveling tourists and hippies in Southweast Asia.”