94th Academy Awards thread

Before going into the Best Picture nominees, I will comment on some of the changes in the ceremony. To great controversy, the Academy decided to present eight awards before the live broadcast as a way to save time and boost the popularity of the ceremony. Although tape from these presentations will be shown during the broadcast, I think that this was a mistake.

It reminds me of the New Coke fiasco. In both cases, the people in charge were seeing a decline in the popularity of their product. This sent them into a panic mode where the reigning philosophy was: "We must do something! This is something! Therefore, we must do this!" With New Coke, the changes did little to increase the popularity of the product. Instead, the changes simply ticked off the loyal fans. I see much of the same with the Academy Awards. Furthermore, in the current case, relegating categories to the preshow suggests that these categories are less worthy than the other categories. It should be no surprise that people in these fields might feel slighted.

I agree that a shorter running time would help the popularity of the broadcast. I would not reduce running time by relegating categories. Instead, I would eliminate stunts and other filler such as:

• No speeches from the Academy president.
• No inviting tour groups into the auditorium.
• No going to some multiplex just to interview people who are unfamiliar with the nominees.
• No pizza.
• No selfies.
• No asking Glenn Close to twirk.
• No musical numbers on whose boobs we may or may not have seen.
• No extended tributes to 50- or 60-year-old franchises.

In other words, the focus should be on the current nominees.

I suspect that the changes will "work." I put "work" in quotation marks because I believe that ratings will go up over last year, but it will be due to perceptions that the pandemic is subsiding, leading to theaters opening. This, and not the relegating of awards, will be the true cause of any increase in ratings.

There are real problems, but they are mostly out of the control of the people who are running the show. First, with the possible exception of the Super Bowl, nearly everything in the United States has a smaller audience than before. This is because there are more options competing for attention. Furthermore, with a lot of people cutting the cord, there are fewer channels that are available to nearly everyone in the United States. A decline in audience is inevitable.

Another problem is the growing disconnect between the best films and the most popular films. Over the last few decades audience tastes have moved away from "prestige pics" toward formulaic blockbusters while independent films targeted niche audiences. Many people will not tune in to see awards for films that they have no interest in.

Here are random thoughts about the Best Picture nominees going from my favorite nominees to my least favorite nominees.

Drive My Car

In general, I consider this to be a weak year for narrative English-language films. While I would love having documentaries nominated for Best Picture, that is not likely to happen. Therefore, it was likely that the best nominated film this year would be the one that is not in English. Fortunately, this film is a worthy nominee and would be even in a year with better films in English than 2021 had. It is not as plot-heavy as one might expect a three-hour film to be, but it is well-written and well-acted with good characters.

Dune

I think that it has become clear that the book, Dune, does not lend itself to being adapted into a single film. I hope that two films will be sufficient. In any case, this film is making me look forward to the conclusion, so it did its job well. This film is expected to get a lot of the technical awards and may end up with the most awards overall. However, I suspect that voters will wait to see the final installment before giving out the high-profile awards.

Belfast

Kenneth Branagh was nominated for Best Picture, Best Director (for a second time), Best Original Screenplay for this film. This goes along with his previous nominations for Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Live Action Short. He has now been nominated in seven different categories, which is a record that interests some people.

Overall, this film is well acted and tells a good story. I have seen several films that cast the Irish Republican Army (IRA) in a bad light. While the IRA deserves all the score that it received, it is good to be reminded that there were despicable people on the other side as well.

CODA

For those who are not aware, CODA is an acronym for Children Of Deaf Adults, although I assume that the pun on the musical coda was definitely intended.

I looked at several reviews of this film after seeing it. I found it interesting to see how many ways that reviewers could describe this film as being very predictable without making it seem like a criticism. This is pretty much a formulaic coming-of-age story about a teenager torn between duties toward her family versus her desire to be her own person, with a bit of the inspirational-teacher formula thrown in. Still, the acting was very good, which makes this an above-average example of the formula.

One aspect of this film that has received a lot of praise is casting people who are deaf as characters who are deaf. I have mixed feelings about this perceived need to have actors actually be like their characters rather than, well, acting.

In the second post of this thread, I proposed Patti Harrison for Best Actress for her performance in Together Together. In that film, she played a surrogate mother to a tech millionaire. She was excellent in that role even though she was not really pregnant. Not only was she not pregnant, but she cannot become pregnant. She does not have a uterus to carry a child as she was born with a penis. I do not care that she was a transgender actress playing a cisgender character. All I care about is that she was very good at it. I had a pretty good idea that I would be mentioning her in that post before I knew that she was transgender.

There are exceptions. Despite a popular misconception, it is not inherently racist for a person to appear as a member of a different race. However, there is a long history of members of the majority race (with majority referring to power, not necessarily to numbers) posing as a member of a minority race either to mock directly (e.g., many blackface performances) or to perpetuate unflattering stereotypes (e.g., Mickey Rooney in Breakfast at Tiffany's). As a result, many people rightfully cringe when they see a person present as a different race even when there is no ill intent. It is probably best to avoid many cross-race portrayals.

CODA is a remake of the French film, La Famille Bélier. The French film cast hearing actors in the roles of the deaf parents. My understanding is that the actors' signing was so bad that even deaf people needed subtitles to understand what the characters were trying to say. The casting in this film would be another exception. It seems quite reasonable to expect actors to be fluent in a language that their characters are fluent in.

If this film does win Best Picture, it would have fewer nominations than any Best Picture winner since 1932's Grand Hotel.

Nightmare Alley

I saw this film with a huge disadvantage. Not only have I seen the 1947 version of this film, but I saw it only three and a half months before seeing the 2021 film. This means that not only did I know the twists in this film, but they were fresh in my head. This is a competent version of the story, and it looked great. However, I did not see a good reason why we needed another version.

The Power of the Dog

I liked this film, but I do not see why everyone else is so gaga about it. I know that the ending was supposed to be confusing, but I did not think so.

With 12 nominations, this film was at least one time the favorite for Best Picture. While it might be a favorite in the same way that Nomadland was for 2020, but it is starting to look like a favorite in the same way that 1917 was for 2019, Roma was for 2018, or La La Land was for 2016.

King Richard

This is a pretty standard Oscar-bait biopic. I suppose that it is a good thing that a film with a nearly all African-American cast can be considered Oscar bait. The film appears to be a largely accurate depiction of what its subject claims to be true. It is not so clear whether the subject's claims are accurate.

Licorice Pizza

This film was nominated for best original screenplay, which may be the worst nomination this year. I understand that the film is intentionally episodic, but it went too far. It felt as if a dozen different writers were each given a basic description of the characters and told to write a scene without any knowledge of what came before or after. For example, Gary's mother was an important character in the beginning of the film. She went to a conference and, apparently, never returned. Plotlines like Gary's mistaken arrest or Alana's flirtation with acting went nowhere.

Then, there is the pachyderm in the domicile: this film is about a relationship between a 15-year-old boy and a 25-year-old woman. Despite the popular perception, the woman sets and maintains boundaries across 95% of the film, but the other 5% of the film is still there. Society in general and Hollywood in particular tend to be rather blasé about sexual exploitation and rape when the victim is male. However, this is still problematic. I understand that the 15-year-old was the one doing the pursuing, but that is the pedophile's (or, more accurately in this film, ephebophile's) fantasy. The film probably should have made Gary 17 going on 18, perhaps with Alana being 28. This would make the age difference less distracting and bring the ages of the characters closer to the ages of the actors.

On the positive side, the acting was a strong point in the film. Bradley Cooper was very memorable despite having little screen time, and Alana Haim was great. They deserve nominations far more than the screenplay does.

I guess that the writers branch of the Academy was impressed (or amused) with the fact that nearly all of the major characters either were real people or were at least inspired by real people, with Alana being the only character who was only lightly inspired by real people.

West Side Story

I consider this version to be a better film than the 1961 version of West Side Story. In particular, the 2021 film removes much of the casual racism in the first film. For example, Latino actors play the Latino characters in the 2021 film, whereas mostly white actors in brownface played the Latino characters in the 1961 film. Even the lone Latina actress (Rita Moreno) was in brownface in 1961.

Also, this is a very good looking film. Here are a couple of stills:



Ansel Elgort, who played Romeo Tony, has a couple of #metoo allegations against him, which makes this review a bit easier for me. Before I learned about the allegations, I might have euphemized and said that he was miscast. With these allegations, I have no problem stating bluntly that he was terrible in this film. West Side Story is a variation of Romeo and Juliet. A lot of people think that the play is about love, but it is not. It is about obsession. I never got the feeling that Tony was anything more than smitten with Juliet Maria. I never got the feeling that Tony was so close to Mercutio Riff that Tony would be driven to murder over Riff's death. We have to be told that Tony used to be a fearsome fighter who was traumatized by severely beating a rival because nothing in Elgort's performance indicates this.

As to Rachel Zegler's performance as Maria, she looks pretty and is a very good singer. However, I never got the feeling that Maria was anything more than smitten with Tony.

Overall, the acting, and my general distaste for musicals, make this one of the weakest films on the nominee list. The fact that I still consider it better than the 1961 version says more about how much I dislike that version than about my feelings toward this version.

Don’t Look Up

This was probably the most frustrating film of the year. It could have been great.

Perhaps the biggest difference between the comet-collision metaphor and actual climate change is that the former is immediate whereas climate change takes place over decades. This is not a bad thing for the film. After all, climate change is not the only crisis where people seem to be willing ignorant. Another is the COVID-19 crisis. There were many aspects of this film that seemed to fit COVID better than they fit climate change, such as how the crisis split families.

Many people involved with this film claim that the film's critics are simply climate-change deniers. I concede that there are some statements from critics that do sound like climate-change denial. However, despite the great ideas, there were serious problems with the execution in this film.

There was a big problem with pacing. The film let itself get distracted too easily. Perhaps the worst aspect was the relationship between Randall Mindy (Leonardo DiCaprio) and Brie Evantee (Cate Blanchett). I am not sure what the film was trying to say. Was this a very unsubtle way of suggesting that journalists are in bed with scientists? I doubt that this is particularly common, figuratively or literally. Was it a way of suggesting that Mindy was a flawed individual? If so, I appreciate the effort, but there were better ways to do so. For example, Mindy could be arrogant and not suffer fools or at least have a hard time translating complex concepts for a lay audience. This is closer to the actual problems in communicating the complexities of climate change. Was this just a way to separate Mindy from his family so that they could have an emotional reunion at the end? Again, there were better ways to do this, such as having him spend so much time trying to call attention to the comet that he neglects his family's needs. Far too much time was spent on a relationship that went nowhere.

Much of this film was painful to watch. However, in the last 15-20 minutes of the film it finally achieved its potential. If the rest of the film were as good as the ending, this film would be much higher on this list. As it stands, I can see how the ending makes people forget how weak the rest of the film was.