THB #425: Oscargasm: Sex & The Season

The Academy and Sex have a very odd relationship. And this season, we are about to get a refresher course in just how ready The Academy is to deal with this thing, with which we all live every day of our all-too-human lives.

Because this is, easily, the most sex-forward Oscar season in memory. There are a few titles that do not hinge on sex and how the audience feels about it. The Holdovers is a very fine film about a man who has stopped pursuing sex, a woman who has lost all interest in it in her grief, and a boy who is thinking about it all the time (as boys do), but isn’t really dealing with that journey in this story. The movie is not without the issue of sex, but it just isn’t in the forefront, challenging the audience on the idea of how comfortable it is.

When you look at the Best Picture winners, you can see that the membership’s comfort with sex comes (so to speak) in waves. There was the 4-year run of Spotlight (investigating sex abuse), Moonlight (a man who eventually finds his sexuality deals with his complicated history), The Shape of Water (interspecies love/sex and acceptance), and Green Book, which in spite of winning The Award, got pilloried for feeling like a step backwards in the conversation about both being gay and being Black in America.

In the four years since, Best Picture has returned to the more comfortable territory of class struggle… Parasite, Nomadland, CODA, and Everything Everywhere All At Once. Not that there’s anything wrong with that. (Yes, I know the daughter in EEAAO is gay.)

Before the 2015-2018 run, you really have to go back to 2002 to find a Best Picture winner, Chicago, that is steeped in the issue of sex.

This season, as more and more people are seeing the movies on offer, it is becoming super clear to me that we are about to find out just where Academy members - who are really just a reflection of a large, educated group of people who tend to carry all of the biases of society as seen by any large, educated group… more so now than ever - feel about sex.

At the very top of that mountain are two movies that will surely be nominated, Oppenheimer and Poor Things. The third conversation about Oppenheimer with almost anyone is about the few minutes of sex in the film. (1st, wow, that was amazing… 2nd, wow, that was long)

close, but no cigar

Some people are really angry about Florence Pugh, as Jean Tatlock, in various states of nudity, in various stages of sexual action with Cillian Murphy’s Oppenheimer. Some see the sequences as unnecessary and exploitative… even to the point where the fact that Oppenheimer had an endless number of affairs and we don’t see the sex in any of those is an irritant to some. Spread it out! “Is it necessary,” some ask, “to have Jean actively writhing on the naked, but unexposed, Oppenheimer in the interrogation section?” Others see the few sequences with Tatlock as critical to filling out the portrait of Oppenheimer, whose life seems to have put sex right behind physics in his scale of priorities.

Poor Things is not so subtle. In this highly-stylized Yorgos movie, which takes us from Bella Baxter’s pre-verbal years to her maturity in the end, sex isn’t weighed down as an act of shame and Bella engages in whatever way suits her throughout the film.

Oh… I misspoke… it’s not an act of shame for Bella specifically. The audience is still bringing whatever they feel about sex to the movie. And honestly, I don’t want to judge anyone else on how they react to this. It’s often deeply personal and I respect people’s rights to engage as they see fit. People tell you a lot about themselves when they tell you how they feel about the film. Not in detail. But the range of feelings about the sex in the film and then the range of feelings about how we imagine how others will feel about the sex in the film is quite remarkable.

Again… my interpretation of the film sees the issue of sex, for Bella, as objective and enlightening most of the time. As such, the idea of mocking others for finding it uncomfortable is antithetical to the film. The mastery of the film is that it can be objective the point of being painful. It let’s us reflect on it and ourselves. And that should be respected, as it is for the variety of characters in Bella Baxter’s world.

This brings us to the gayest Oscar season in history. I count six earnest contenders that explore queer people, each in a very different way, and live to tell the tale. (I will do my PC apology here if anyone is offended by the broad language for LGBTQ+ in these last 2 sentences or the paragraphs to come… the intention is not negative in any way.)