How To 'Fix' The Oscars | Plus, Our Picks Pool Leaderboard!
#170: Academy Awards recap, "Deep Water," "Windfall," "Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u"
Edition 170:
Hey movie lovers!
As always, you can find a podcast version of this newsletter on Apple or Spotify. Thank you so much for listening and spreading the word!
In this week’s newsletter: We’ve got to talk about the Oscars, with a quick recap of our picks pool. Then we’re playing catchup on some recent streaming movies, spread across Hulu, Netflix and Disney+. In this week’s “Trailer Watch,” it’s not a trailer at all, but rather a five-minute deleted scene from The Batman.
The Oscars Isn’t For Everyone
The only way to improve the Academy Awards ceremony is to give up on this notion of “saving” it.
What was once entertainment’s biggest night of the year is…still exactly that. Yet that title doesn’t mean what it used to. Back when the awards show was drawing 50 million viewers, in the mid- to late-90s, awards contenders were often multi-hundred million dollar cultural touchstones, and the show itself had no competition from thousands of streaming options or the infinite scroll of the internet.
I’d argue that interest in the charade of Hollywood elites giving each other awards has not decreased, so much as the ability to access things people actually enjoy or care about more has increased, and therefore the choice not to tune in is a pretty rational one.
So yeah, Oscars-as-cultural-monolith is dead and gone. It’s not coming back.
What then should the Academy Awards do?
How about embracing the core purpose of the awards show, which is to be the culmination and celebration of the year in movies.
That’s the opposite of what we saw on Sunday night. In an attempt to chase the cultural relevance of its former self, the Academy seemingly admitted the insignificance of its own product. Extended musical performances by the likes of Beyonce, Billie Eilish and Megan Thee Stallion, for example, placed an emphasis on celebrity and music with only a tangential connection to movies. Commercial breaks were filled to the brim with ads for television shows, as if to advertise the very product that has brought about their own obsolescence. Even a tribute montage to the 50th anniversary of The Godfather, which is the right idea, was presented bafflingly over exclusively rap and hip-hop music. Who is the audience for that?
None of this is to even mention “The Slap,” which is the only thing this Oscars will be remembered for, but why do stand-up comedians coming out to roast celebrities need to be a part of the show in the first place? What does that have to do with celebrating movies? What’s the best case scenario there?
What if, instead, the show used the three-hour (plus) program as an advertisement for all the movies of the year. Instead of shunting technical categories to a pre-broadcast recording, as was done this year, why not show why these categories are so cool, perhaps with side-by-side green screen footage for visual effects or clips of a scene with different audio tracks for best score.
And for those movies that weren’t nominated, there’s absolutely no reason why they aren’t celebrated during the show. Like, I can’t think of a single reason why Tom Holland — who is the biggest movie star of the year for the closest thing to a movie monocultural event in Spider-Man: No Way Home and also in surprise hit Uncharted — was not selected as a presenter and given a couple minutes to say “this is what this movie meant to me and wow, the reception to it has been incredible.” Big applause for him, everybody pats themselves on the back. There’s a couple million extra viewers right there, and you don’t even have to give him an award!
ABC would never allow its broadcast to do this, but if it were to open its advertising slots to other studios and streamers to advertise their movies, released and upcoming, perhaps that would create more anticipation for the release of any movies. Box office smash hits from any studio are good for every studio, as they rebuild those movie-going habits and reinforce the power of the product.
I guess what I’m saying is why not build a product that so brilliantly displays the greatness of Dune’s special effects, or Nightmare Alley’s production design, or West Side Story’s choreography, or The Power of the Dog’s directing, that people might actually be attracted back to movies, rather than chasing pop culture relevance from other avenues.
Oscars Picks Pool Results!
Aaaand now for the moment you’ve all been waiting for! Thank you so much to the 27 of you that participated in this year’s Oscars pool. Scores are out of 23 total categories, and names are presented exactly as they were entered. Here’s the leaderboard:
21: Brian Bedard
20: Chris Ulm
19: Nathan (Will Win This With A) Bang
17: Doug Greenberg
16: Matt Craig
12: Elizabeth Bang
11: Valerie Craig, Jess (Ruderman), Rach #1
10: Rebecca Nightingale, Steve Nightingale
9: Craig, David, josh motherf***ing lee, Garrett Craig, Daniel MF Rodriguez, Sam Himlin, Andrew Craig, Stefanie Cotner, Justin Birnbaum
8: Stephanie Gerding
7: Carol, Grace Moore, Devin Oyetibo, Jess Wall
5: Lukas Rose, Jordan Larson, Rhett Coblentz
As I did last year, I like to add a few fun facts about people’s picks:
In a cruel twist of fate, the winner of our pool this year is one of the few entrants who is NOT a subscriber to this newsletter. I reached out to him to give him a chance to gloat or deliver some trash talk, but as of now have not received any. Hope he puts the $54 prize to good use!
Entrants had watched on average about 4 of the 10 Best Picture nominees, but the number of movies watched had very little correlation to how many correct guesses people had. Nathan Bang, our bronze medalist, had watched zero of them.
In case you were wondering which movies were most popular amongst our subscribers:
You guys were all over Encanto. 25 out of 27 ballots correctly chose it to win Best Animated Feature, and some of the most common incorrect guesses were for the movie in Best Score (16 guesses) and Best Song (11 guesses).
The surprise of the night was Best Animated Short. Only three ballots picked winner Windshield Wiper.
56% of entries correctly guessed CODA to win Best Picture. Mind you, that was a betting underdog!
And exactly zero people in the entire universe predicted that the eventual winner for Best Actor would go up on stage and smack a man on live television. If you had, I would’ve ripped up the scoring system and handed you the cash prize immediately.
We’ll get back to our regular programming next week, but for now I wanted to catch you all up on some recent streaming releases!
Deep Water (Hulu): The less said about this much-hyped movie the better. It’s truly something to make an erotic thriller that is neither erotic nor thrilling, yet somehow in the hype of Adrian Lyne’s return to the genre he helped build we lost the fact that he’s 81 years old and hasn’t directed a movie since 2002. It shows here, with a tone that’s so patient and subtle that it’s practically snoozing, and the utter incoherence of the narrative leaves movie stars Ben Affleck and Ana De Armas out on their own to bring this home on the strength of their own charisma. They’re endlessly fascinating performers to watch, and if the tabloid fodder around this movie was any indication, equally fascinating people to follow, but this movie cannot possibly be recommended.
Windfall (Netflix): I’ve talked a few times about the perfect streaming movie — when small ambition meets really exceptional execution (and, let’s be honest, a 90-minute runtime). That’s the success of this tense little thriller starring Jason Segal, Jesse Plemons and Lily Collins, within the confines of a single house (and its garden). Plemons is a tech billionaire, Collins his reluctant wife, and Segal a thief-turned-kidnapper when the couple walks in on his robbery.
The rest of the movie unfolds like a psychological tug-of-war, as each character is put into situations where he or she must choose between two bad choices, ultimately making the situation far worse than before. There’s some great twists and really well-staged set pieces where the tension is turned way up, plus, I don’t know if I’m allowed to say this but Plemons is better here than in his Oscar-nominated The Power of the Dog performance. If you’ve ever wondered why he’s so good, this is example A.
Olivia Rodrigo: driving home 2 u (Disney+): If you’ve followed this newsletter for any length of time, you probably know how big of a fan I was of “Sour,” the pop album that launched 17-year-old Olivia Rodrigo into superstardom last year. The release of this film was a must-watch, but I was disappointed to see that it’s much less of a documentary and more of a cinematic performance of her album, featuring new arrangements and beautiful settings for what is basically a 75-minute music video. The behind-the-scenes footage was minimal both in quantity and revelation, which isn’t a huge surprise for a young and well-managed pop star, and one can reasonably wonder how interesting someone so young could really be no matter how immense the depth of her songwriting is. But the bottom line is I’m a big fan, so I enjoyed this a lot.
A new segment I’m trying out, tell me if you like it…
Stock Up: Damien Chazelle’s Babylon
Stock Down: Morbius
Trailer Watch: The Batman - a deleted scene!
It’s not a great week for movie trailers, other than a new look at Top Gun: Maverick that raised more concerns than anticipation. So let’s talk once more about The Batman, a near-$700 million behemoth at the box office that reminded audiences what movies can do. When the movie came out, I and many others criticized the movie for its shameless, tacked-on final scene. It felt like mentioning The Joker was an obligatory nod to sequels inserted by whichever corporation owns Warner Bros at the current moment.
Now, perhaps in response, the studio has released a five-minute deleted scene of a conversation between Batman and Joker that could’ve more seamlessly fit into the narrative of the movie. I can’t fully advocate for its inclusion, since the movie already carries an overstuffed three-hour runtime, but I certainly would’ve preferred this to the stinger sequence they went with.
As for this new iteration of The Joker, played by Barry Keoghan, I just feel bad that he or anyone would have to try to fill the shoes of Heath Ledger’s 2008 performance. An impossible task.