Oscars 2022—and 1992
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Oscar watchers must be delighted. Barely more than a week ago, Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog was the clear frontrunner in the races for best picture and director, but as Kyle Buchanan notes in the New York Times, after the actors, writers, and producers guilds gave their top awards to Sian Heder’s CODA, the former category at least has since become a real nail-biter. Buchanan predicts a win for CODA.
At Slant, Eric Henderson isn’t buying it. There is, he points out, “no modern-day precedent for a film without a DGA, ACE Eddie, or BAFTA picture nod, or any major critics’ awards for best picture, to go into Oscar night with the fewest nominations of any best picture contender (including a miss in that telltale film editing category) and still somehow translate that into a top win . . . And even if we’re willing to admit that The Power of the Dog, despite its let’s-not-forget twelve nominations, isn’t everyone’s bouquet of paper flowers, and even if we’re willing to accede that Oscar is breaking precedent more often these days than it’s sticking with business as usual, take a closer look at the films that the Academy Awards have been favoring as of late—Nomadland, Parasite, Moonlight—and tell us again that The Power of the Dog’s momentum is just a mirage in the mountain.”
It’ll all be sorted on Sunday, but in the meantime, as the New Yorker’s Richard Brody writes, “it’s bad news for the Oscars that, well before the broadcast, the ceremony is news.” ABC has reportedly strong-armed the Academy into bumping the presentations of the awards for hair and makeup, editing, sound, production design, and original score as well as all three short-film categories to a pre-show taping from which clips will be sprinkled throughout the broadcast. As Brody sees it, “this change is only the latest step toward alienating viewers who are passionate about movies, while doing nothing to attract others—as if an hour’s difference were all that kept the Oscars from getting Super Bowl ratings.”
- Year in, year out, the one essential read before Oscar night is Baffler critic A. S. Hamrah’s spoiler-laden round of reflections on the contenders. This time around, David Lynch’s Dune fares far better than Denis Villeneuve’s, and as Ashley Clark and Glenn Kenny point out on Twitter, Hamrah’s three paragraphs on Licorice Pizza unlock something in Paul Thomas Anderson’s film that countless other reviews have missed. A running motif in Hamrah’s piece is the Felicity Ace, the massive cargo ship that sank on March 1, taking with it thousands of luxury cars and a total estimated value of hundreds of millions of dollars. “These days,” writes Hamrah, “each Oscar movie is like a Porsche, a Lamborghini, or a Bentley on that cargo ship, packed and streaming, going down without a crew, part of a semi-automated supply chain that has issues getting its pricey goods to the public. The Oscars are the abandoned auto show of that industry.”
- In the entire history of the Academy Awards, only three films—Frank Capra’s It Happened One Night (1934), Miloš Forman’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975), and Jonathan Demme’s The Silence of the Lambs (1991)—have won the so-called “Big Five,” best picture, director, screenplay (original or adapted), actor, and actress. “It’s hard to imagine a movie never repeating the achievement, but it’s just as hard to picture the theoretical movie that might,” writes Keith Phipps at the Ringer. Delving into the making of Silence and the protests it sparked, Phipps notes that, when it was released in February 1991, “audiences were surprised and shaken by a disturbing, deeply considered, and remarkably executed movie about an erudite cannibal, a killer with a basement dungeon and a gift for needlework, and an FBI agent determined to seek justice. If few could have predicted that the world would embrace such a film before its release, fewer still could have imagined its night of victory one year later.”
- In 2002, the major Hollywood studios formed a joint corporation, Digital Cinema Initiatives, which eventually “scrubbed celluloid film almost entirely from the film industry, ushering in the most significant technological shift since the introduction of sound,” writes Will Tavlin in n+1. “This revolution was invisible, and it was designed to be that way. Its success depended on audiences never noticing at all.” Tavlin outlines the impact of this fundamental shift on shooting, editing, distributing, exhibiting, and ultimately, preserving movies and explains why we may be heading toward “a mass closure of smaller-market theaters, an even shorter theatrical window, and higher ticket prices as theatergoing is repackaged as a premium experience. In other words, a moviegoing experience whose sole purpose is to qualify studio films for Academy Awards and make the price of a Disney+ subscription look like a good deal.”
- As Chan Is Missing turns forty, director Wayne Wang talks to Oliver Wang in Film Quarterly about the origins of his first feature as an experimental film, the connection between Chinese written characters and Soviet montage, and his place in the history of American independent cinema. Eventually, the conversation turns to representation. “I was very conscious of the fact that we come from a history of racist stereotypes of the Chinese, from Fu Manchu to Charlie Chan to Suzie Wong,” says Wang. “The characters in Chan were intended to create a complexity out of all the different characters that exist in Chinatown, and not only complexity, but trying to get at something authentic about these people. All the way down through the years, including Crazy Rich Asians, we still don’t really have a palette of authentic, calm, complex Asian American characters on-screen, right? We’re still struggling to deal with that.”
- From today through Sunday, New York’s Museum of the Moving Image will screen four features and a short film by Ukrainian director Valentyn Vasyanovych. In Reflection, a surgeon is abducted and tortured by Russian forces in Donbas in 2014. When Reflection premiered in Venice last September, Leonardo Goi spoke with Vasyanovych for Reverse Shot. “I wanted to show these atrocities to remind Europe, and the whole world, that these barbarities aren’t happening far away, in some distant past, but right here, right now,” said the filmmaker. “If we don’t resist the Russian invasion, Ukraine will disappear as an independent state, and the countries of the former Socialist Bloc will be next. No one is immune to this aggression.” Sergei Loznitsa, talking to Graham Fuller in the Guardian, sounds a similar alarm, noting that “the countries that have the means to stop this . . . claim that if they intervene, it will result in a world war, whereas the world war has already begun.”
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