The Official Oscars Preview!
#126: The Academy Awards are this Sunday! Does Anyone Care? Plus "Shiva Baby," "Mare of Easttown," "From Dusk Till Dawn," and "The Forty-Year-Old Version"
Edition 126:
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: Oh baby, it’s Oscars week! Let’s talk big picture, picks, and your last chance to join my winner-take-all pool. Then we throw in a new round of recommendations for a hidden gem movie, a new HBO drama, Quentin Tarintino’s one shining moment as an actor, and a new take on a New York City love story.
It’s Academy Awards Weekend! Does Anyone Care?
As I’ve said many times before, finding out who will receive the little golden statues on Sunday night is far from the most interesting thing about the Oscars.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s super fun to try to predict the winners.
In fact, I’m running an Oscars pool for readers of this newsletter (available HERE), which you can play free or join the $2 winner-take-all prize pool. And get this! One reader decided to throw an extra $100 in to juice the pot. So whoever can pick the most correct out of the 23 categories will be walking away with a nice little stash of cash, plus permanent bragging rights over me (unless I win, in which case I’ll be using my platform here to mercilessly remind you all of my dominance for the next year).
What the Oscars “season” really represents is the one time of year when the spotlight of the world (or at least the “general culture”) turns its attention toward movies and the movie industry — not dissimilar to things like March Madness or The Masters.
With that spotlight comes the overwhelming desire to paint with a broad brush. What happens at the Final Four, or around Amen Corner at Augusta, or on the Oscars stage is used to set the narrative for the entire year.
And this year, the narrative is pretty clear … “Nobody Cares Anymore.”
Commentators are taking the lack of cultural buzz and the inevitability of rock bottom television ratings on Sunday night to be a death knell for the whole operation. Movies don’t matter, they say, the Marvel shows on Disney+ are the biggest thing in entertainment, the Arclight theaters are closing, Alamo Drafthouse is in bankruptcy, and Gen Z just wants to play videogames.
This broad analysis seems to forget or at least minimize the impact of a global pandemic. Movie theaters were closed for over a year, which forced the hands of companies bleeding cash and also eliminated moviegoers’ ability to share the kind of collective experience that can simulate a monocultural moment. Plus the movies capable of creating that kind of excitement — like Steven Spielberg’s West Side Story, the new James Bond film No Time to Die, Wes Anderson’s The French Dispatch and Lin Manuel Miranda’s In the Heights etc. etc. — were never released, leaving us with a slate of niche films that wouldn’t have attracted large audiences in any era of moviemaking.
Not that it would’ve made much of a difference. Last year’s Oscars slate had five movies that grossed more than $100 million domestically and still produced the lowest TV ratings in Academy Awards history.
There’s a fundamental disconnect between what the Oscars should be and what they want to be. The ceremony is supposed to be a celebration of the cinematic art form, as pretentious as that sounds, yet the Academy is obsessed with the notion that every Joe Schmoe should also care about its masturbatory exercise.
Which is ridiculous! For starters, not everyone who watches a movie wants to interact with a piece of art that’s going to making them think and feel deeply. Popular movies have never been the same as the “best” movies. And besides, the awards aren’t merit-based anyway. Best Picture doesn’t go to the year’s best movie.
The awards are actually given to the candidates who have run the best campaign, very similar to a political election. This presents a Catch-22. The Oscars can’t be merit-based as long as there are multi-million dollar campaigns, but without the hype cycle (e.g. taking movie stars off of talk shows or cancelling events that create media buzz) you can’t create the spotlight on the industry which is the whole point of the show.
The Oscars, ideally, should be influencing the larger culture rather than trying to reflect it. When a small indie like The Hurt Locker outdueled the biggest movie of all time Avatar for Best Picture in 2010, some curious viewers might have discovered a great movie they never would’ve seen.
Think about projects like Moonlight. Without the full weight of the awards apparatus, that thing wouldn’t have been seen by more than like a couple dozen journalists, film professors, and personal friends of Barry Jenkins. But now there are a ton of people who literally identify themselves by and through its story.
If anything has changed, it’s simply access to each of our own personal Moonlight experiences. For a rising generation, an awards hopeful like Nomadland isn’t just squaring off against populist movies like Godzilla vs. Kong and increasingly influential TV series like “The Falcon and The Winter Solder,” it’s also going head to head with every past Oscars winner and every awesome movie that never got awards recognition, every single night, especially this year when the theater experience was eliminated and these options are presented as equally sized boxes on my streaming queue. I loved Nomadland, but I’d never recommend it to someone over 2008 Best Picture winner No Country For Old Men or even a half-dozen other Frances McDormand movies.
So while I do worry about the financial future of movies, the cultural impact of the art form is in no danger. If studios aren’t going to put large budgets behind smart, challenging adult dramas, then the Academy Awards will continue to recognize smaller and less commercial movies. And those who care about movies as art will continue to care about to whom we hand the little gold statues.
On that note, I decided not to publish my full Oscars ballot here like I did last year. I don’t want to spoil the fun of our competition. You can find betting odds and tons of predictions online. I’m expecting a big night for Nomadland, the Best Actress race is wiiiide open, Chadwick Boseman is inevitable and if Daniel Kaluuya doesn’t win we riot.
Happy Oscars weekend!
You have until 1 hour before show time to JOIN OUR OSCARS POOL.
Something New
Shiva Baby ($VOD): This is one of those super small, niche movies I never would’ve found had it not been highlighted on a recent podcast I listen to. The premise is somewhat familiar, a Graduate-esque young woman trying to find her identity and place in the post-college real world, but it’s set over the course of a day at a New York-adjacent shiva (a Jewish post-funeral ceremony, for the uninitiated) where everything that could go wrong does go wrong, including confrontations with a high school ex-girlfriend and a guy who has been her sugar daddy (though both are lying to family about the arrangement). The whole thing plays out like a horror movie, and if cringe comedy makes you uncomfortable then this 75-minute whirlwind is not for you. But it’s super clever and features some of the funniest situational family “oh that’s so real” moments I’ve ever seen in a movie. Overall a really nice little hidden gem indie.
Mare of Easttown (HBO Max): All of my thoughts about movies above do not discount the fact that a lot of the best stories are now being told in six- or eight-episode limited series. The latest is is this HBO drama starring Kate Winslet as a detective in a small Pennsylvania town with a troubled past (it would be far more surprising to find a TV detective WITHOUT a trauma in their past, but I digress). It’s the type of town that rarely gets spotlighted on screen, and even less frequently with the specificity and empathy that showrunner Brad Inglesby (writer of Out of the Furnace and last year’s The Way Back) displays for the true blue collar, middle class lifestyle. At this point, any HBO prestige drama miniseries is worth at least a try.
Something Old
From Dusk Till Dawn (1996, Netflix): Most casual movie watchers are not aware how badly Quentin Tarintino wanted to be a movie star. Thankfully for those of us who love his writing and directing, he wasn’t a very good actor. The closest he ever came to in-front-of-camera stardom was this mid-90s Robert Rodriguez cult movie starring alongside George Clooney (who at the time, pre-“ER” and pre-Out of Sight, was not that big of a name). This movie has a lot of elements that are central to the Tarintino aesthetic: pulpy violence, colorful language, foot fettishes (lolz), and Harvey Keitel, who a few years earlier saved Tarintino’s Reservoir Dogs from the scrap heap by signing on as a producer and co-star. The movie also features a snake-charming Salma Hayek, a young Danny Trejo, and other cult heroes all turning into vampires at a truck stop bar near the Mexico border. What a wild movie.
Something to Stream
The Forty-Year-Old Version (Netflix): I’m ashamed it took me this long to get around to Rahda Blank’s New York-set dramady in the spirit of classic Woody Allen movies (with a lot less baggage). Of course Blank’s version of NYC is Harlem, the Bronx and the rougher side of Brooklyn, through which she weaves her semi-autobiographical story of a struggling playwright combatting middle age by trying to become a rapper. The writing is sharp and surprising, with vivid specificity toward place and character and something real to say about racial disparity. Blank proves to be a big talent, and it will be interesting to see what she’ll do next as she moves beyond her own fascinating story.
Trailer Watch: Together Together
Way too often trailers end up being way better than the full movies. But I saw this movie at Sundance, loved it, have been waiting to hype it to everyone I know, and then this trailer came out and it suuuucks. It’s so corny and cookie-cutter, two things the movie very much are not. When’s the last time you watched a platonic rom-com? Or any movie that stars a transgender actress playing a totally cis gender leading lady?
It tugs at the heart strings, as you’d expect, and makes you laugh way harder and more frequently than you anticipated. In a lot of ways it’s your typical “Sundance movie,” but I’m not so cynical as to think that’s a bad thing. Patti Harrison is a breakout comedy star, and Ed Helms is perfectly cast as the cornbread earnest white dude. Their chemistry makes this movie sing. It’s out in select theaters today (Friday) and will be available video on-demand on May 11th.