THB #652: 7 Weeks To Oscar - Turbulance
I have been chewing on this for months now… probably hinted at it before.
I think the Top 6 Best Picture nominees are now pretty well locked down and that the winner is highly likely to come from this group, notably containing all 5 slots from both DGA and SAG (alphabetical):
A Complete Unknown - SAG/DGA
Anora - SAG/DGA
The Brutalist - DGA
Conclave - SAG/DGA
Emilia Pérez - SAG/DGA
Wicked - SAG
I have a list of 10 more titles that could fill in - still a great honor - the other 4 Best Picture slots. If you put a pool noodle to my head, I could easily reduce this list to 6, but that’s not the point of today’s newsletter, particularly with 2 days now left in AMPAS nomination voting…
A Real Pain, Babygirl, Dune II, Gladiator II, Nickel Boys, Nosferatu, Queer, September 5, Sing Sing, The Substance
I’m already moving on to Phase II of the Oscar season which won’t officially start until Oscar nominations land next Sunday, January 19.
My position for much of the season is that A Complete Unknown is the movie to beat. Why? Because it has the least negativity around it. I mean, Film Twitter won’t acknowledge it. But who cares? The goon squad at the even-worse-than-when-Tom-O'Neil-was-running-it Gold Derby has been dragging it’s feet all season and still has it at #7, which for a bunch of precursor obsessives is a joke.
Anyway… I am not here to piss on any of these likely nominees, but you have heard the same buzz I have heard, no doubt, including “Too Long,” “Too Depressing After The First Act,” “Creepy,” “Lightweight,” “Good But Not Great,” “What The Fuck Was That?,” “I Am So Sick Of Them, Not The Same Performance Again,” and more!!! You may guess what comments go with which films, but the truth is, I have heard more than one of these comments about some of the films and some of the same comments about multiple films. It’s just that kind of season.
The question of the moment, to me, is, “What is going to change in Phase II?”
Well, I’m glad I asked.
Here are the 3 factors that I am looking at as we move to the next Phase: The Fires, The New Old President, and, “Woke-ism.”
The truth is, I am more unsure than I was just a week ago about how these very potent emotional issues will play out in terms of Oscar.
The 2 movies that have felt most like they are accelerating lately, in Best Picture and Best Documentary, are The Brutalist, a movie about a Jewish man and his family escaping to America near the end of the Jewish Holocaust and finding that challenges of religious prejudice exist everywhere (even in his own family) and No Other Land, a middling piece of doc filmmaking on an important subject, Israel grabbing land from Palestinians on the West Bank, that has been accelerated to winning all the major critics groups awards by the fact that it has not been offered domestic distribution, making its embrace by critics groups equally - if not more - political than the film itself.
How do you see this playing out with Oscar voters? No idea at this juncture. SAG went for Adrien Brody, but didn’t give The Brutalist an Ensemble nomination or supporting noms for Guy Pearce or Felicity Jones. PGA didn’t give a doc nomination to No Other Land. Obviously, these could just be choices that were made with no political thinking. Or with political thinking, even if it was a subtle shading.
LGBTQ+ is a factor in the stories of 3 of my 6 locked finalists. (I’ll let you decide which ones and how… if you can’t figure it out, send me a note.) Is that helpful? Is it relevant?
Some of the most powerful men in tech and filmed entertainment are bowing their heads to the return of Donald Trump. Would something a bit gay be a good way to give The Donald The Finger? Maybe. Or maybe people tighten up.
For me, the closing moment of Anora is one of the great cinematic moments of the year. But I am shocked by how many people, women in particular, don’t see it as a moment of growth for the character. I disagree and try to explain every time, but you can’t really fight how someone reacts from the gut.
Going outside of the 6, the constant discussion of how Babygirl and Nosferatu are turning on women in theaters to the point of near-orgasmic distraction is fascinating. I am a fan of both movies and haven’t written about how I see them on the issue of sex… I think mostly because the sex thing is, when really discussed, pretty controversial. In private conversations, I have found that my position of both films conflicts with some other people in a very black or white kind of way. Two very interesting films that I quite like.
As for A Complete Unknown, the complaint I have heard is that the movie is not as deeply complex as Dylan himself… to which I respond - and usually find agreement - that if any filmmaker tried to get inside Dylan’s head, the people who love him Dylan (from a distance) would HATE the movie. So for them, it’s pretty much a no-win offering. When I point out that Dylan vetted the script in some depth, people who want to argue that they don’t love it (many simply do) shrug and mumble, “Well, Dylan’s Dylan.” No duh. Aside from awards, I personally have the take that the strength of the film is that Dylan isn’t explained… we just experience his choices. Some disagree. That said, I haven’t met anyone who actually dislikes the movie. I can’t say that for any of the other movies.
It’s been 22 years since a musical won Best Picture In spite of a hard charge late in their season, Chicago beat The Pianist, as Adrien Brody won Best Actor. That ended a 34-season drought for the genre. Back in the 1960’s, musicals won 4 of the 10 Best Picture awards. Will Wicked, Part I break the streak (that did or did not include the upset of La La Land, depending on who you ask)?
Do The Fires mean that a lot of Academy voters - now featuring more than 3500 international members - will be in the mood to honor something more serious… or more frivolous? Or will the non-Angelenos take The Fires into account at all?
Do ANY of these 6 movies have a HAPPY ending? (And I don’t mean a death orgasm.) I could argue “yes” for a couple of them… but even then, it’s messy at best. There are some triumphant endings… but “happy” is elusive. I mean, Elphba gets her groove… but she is now, officially, “Wicked.“
I have heard every one of these 6 movie titles spoken aloud when I have asked, “What is your #1 movie?” Whatever film the most recent awards event leaned into usually gets the most verbal votes. But it keeps changing. This remains the Season of The Freak™.
And I just don’t know.
Final voting (for the win!) starts in a month… February 11. That’s a long time in this pinball machine of emotions we are currently living in.
It was only 5 days ago when the first fire started in the Palisades at 10:30 in the morning. It feels like it’s been weeks.
Trump was elected 2 months ago, with be inaugurated in 9 days, and started having his butt kissed by powerful liberals even before he was elected. Part of that has been an active pushback against an already reduced DEI profile in the industry.
The last time a season felt this way to me, this late in the game, was The Oscars for 2006, held in 2007, with nominees Babel, The Departed, Letters from Iwo Jima, Little Miss Sunshine, and The Queen.
One movie is 100% in a foreign language from a legendary director of Americana, one in multiple languages with very serious themes and American stars, there’s a well-loved comedy with serious subtext, an early lock was a strong British character piece with a lead actress locked for Best Actress, and there was the mob movie with Nicholson and his dildo for the locked-in Best Director that was dismissed as a Best Picture winner until late in the season.
The Queen won BAFTA. Babel won The Globes for Drama (while the musical/comedy winner, Dreamgirls, was left out of the 5 by Oscar voters). Little Miss Sunshine won SAG and the then-more-important Indie Spirits. Non-Oscar nominee United 93 won NYFCC, Letters from Iwo Jima won LAFCA, and non-Oscar nominee Pan's Labyrinth won National Society of Film Critics.
While Scorsese, Schoonmaker, and Monahan racked up awards all over, the only Best Picture award from a “major” that The Departed won before Oscar was the then Broadcast Film Critics Association (now CCA).
I drank with Graham King, the producer of the film, a couple nights before Oscar and his question wasn’t “Will we win?” so much as “Can we win?” I felt the movie would win at that point and told him so… momentum seemed to be going their way… but I also acknowledged that it was a crap shoot. The only film I thought could not win was Letters From Iwo Jima, which I loved (and love), but would have been the greatest shock winner in the history of the Oscars.
Timmy now has to be considered a major movie star with A Complete Unknown passing $50 million domestic on day 19. But there is nothing with the superstar roster of The Departed this year. Wicked and Anora have the fun of Little Miss Sunshine, but add music and sex work to excite and confuse. Emilia Pérez and Babel have some things in common, though the Frenchman Audiard is working in Iñárritu’s native Mexico and Iñárritu went to Morocco, Japan, the United States, and, yes, Mexico. The Brutalist has the auteurist feel of Letters from Iwo Jima. And Conclave is like The Queen on steroids.
Of course I am stretching to make these comparisons. Mea culpa.
But passions were high that season too. DGA and SAG and eventually PGA will hand out awards. And those wins will likely point to winners at that point in a well-worn season. Some will casually say, “I always knew that was going to happen.” But they don’t. We are all guessing in a choppy sea.
Back in 2007, I think that Scorsese going wire-to-wire as Director - like Kathryn Bigelow and The Hurt Locker - ended up being decisive. People doubted the likelihood of those BP wins early on and slowly warmed to them. We don’t have a wire-to-wire anything this season. Not in any in the “Top 8” categories.
I usually have what I call “the default film” by this date in the season. That’s the movie where the vote will go if nothing else fights its way to the top. Half of the last 14 winners were what I considered “the default film.”
I don’t have one this year. Every time I have thought I had one, things changed.
We will get there. Getting to this list of 6 took longer than normal. Everything seems to be dragging out this season.
Put on those seat belts… it’s going to be a bumpy February.
Until tomorrow…
Ok David: I'll bite.
Explain to me how that last moment in Anora is a "moment of growth" for the character. I'm definitely one of the detractors on this one, and I keep wanting to feel that the ending is something more than an epic fail. It isn't.
You've got this two bit whore. In the first section of the film, EVERYTHING for her is about getting PAID. EVERYTHING is a negotiation with this little emotional infant. This is a kid who would rather hold on to his video game controller most of the time, than screw this girl. And she gets paid ridiculously well that whole time.
There is simply no way in this world that THAT girl marries that kid without knowing literally ANYTHING about him. She spends every waking moment of her life trying to get a read on guys; that's who she is and what she does. So; she's going to marry this kid. OK. Never. And even the marriage is a complete arrangement; it's a financial negotiation like everything else for her.
She also will treat Igor like a complete piece of shit through the entire film, including the last 20 minutes, the trip back to the mansion, the final night there, that conversation, him taking her to the bank to get paid yet again. She treats him like something to scrape off her shoe. Accuses him of being a rapist, that's just one thing she does.
THEN he presents the wedding ring to her; another payout. HIS reasons for that are not that complicated; he likes her, he's doing her a solid. He's the most human person we see in the story, and despite her treatment of him, he's STILL infatuated with her; not as a whore per se'.
She goes to screw him as a result, it's what she does for getting paid. And then stops when he tries for something more intimate than what she does for a physical living. She wouldn't even screw a John if they used their hands, or demonstrated anything that would be like sincere affection. And she stops him too.
Emotional growth. WT natural F.
Great analysis. I’ve still got some catching up to do with some of these films, but had the opportunity to see a 70mm print of “The Brutalist” the other day!