After the Oscars

The songs weren't bad, and the drumming was memorable; the winners were mostly deserving, I can recall only one over-the-top dance number--"Just Ken"--and  Jimmy Kimmel took care of business as well as Johnny Carson ever did. The early focus on Barbie was gratifying to see. The worst bit involved a pseudo-streaker. I didn't "get" it.

Kimmel's worst joke—horrific, really—was to remark that in Germany The Zone of Interest fell into the rom-com category. The technical awards and the always tedious speech by the president of the Academy were scuttled. But the In Memoriam episode, brief though it was, didn't come off well: the camera was so far removed from names and faces that you couldn't see or read them, and the flailing dancers in the foreground looked ridiculous. By the same token, the film clips were meager. That's too bad. Jack Nicholson, Harrison Ford, and Meryl Streep were nowhere to be seen, which is fine by me. And the show was wrapped up by 9:30. It was hard to believe.

I can't recall an Oscar ceremony that gave us less to complain about. 

Then again, what do I remember about the event from previous years anyway? Not much.

Can anyone even remember which films won the Best Picture Oscar in recent years? I don't find it easy.

I just now called up a list of nominees, year by year. Here are some winners, followed in some cases by a runner-up that might have taken home the prize with equal justice.

Everything Everywhere All at Once ... or Tar?

Coda ... or Licorice Pizza?

Nomadland

Parasite ... or Ford vs. Ferrari?

The Green Book ... or Black Klansman?

The Shape of Water ... or Phantom Thread?

Moonlight ... or Hell or High Water?

Spotlight ... or The Big Short?

And so on.

I read a fair amount of Oscar chatter before the ceremony, and sometimes almost forget how trivial it all is when compared to the experience of actually seeing a film. Any film. For example, the energy, sweep, detail, drama, intensity, and moral import of Oppenheimer stagger the imagination. It's a very good film, I think. The question of how many statues it won seems vapid by comparison.

On a much smaller scale, The Holdovers  also won my heart. It's full of humor and sorrow and truth. And purposeful lies. It isn't a Christmas movie or a coming of age movie or a Vietnam movie or a 70s movie, though all of those elements play a part. It's one of those movies that develop organically as we learn more about the characters, and it's fair to say that even Classical Studies—you know, Latin and Greek, Horace and Thucydides—come into play, as do race and class and parental loss and academic vanity. 

Paul Giametti shines as the harsh and frustrated instructor, so lovelorn he's forgotten what the word means, though he does love his Latin quotations about nobility and sacrifice.  But the entire cast is up to the challenge of making a seemingly arbitrary and unpleasant situation into a funny and moving tale. Well done all the way around.

American Fiction also works well, though not quite so touchingly, as both a family drama and a charming, if someimes bitter, comedy about how academia, the publishing industry, and the reading public shape the dialogue about underrepresented communities. Very shrewd.

Past Lives  is a quietly enigmatic film that follows a few decades in the life of Nora, who emigrates to Canada from Korea at the age of twelve with her parents. Nora seems unperturbed by the change; a few frames later she's become an adult and moved to New York to pursue a career as a playwright. 

The plot centers on her relationship with Hae Sung, the boy she left behind in Korea when they were kids. They reconnect online and begin a vague, dreamy correspondence about where their lives are going, how they still think about each other, and so on. Meanwhile, Nora meets Arthur, a likeable novelist and self-styled New York Jew. The two are happily married by the time Hae Sung decides to come visit.

Barbie is a colorful, fun-loving, ingenious romp that examines gender roles with tongue partly in cheek. The production is unique and audacious. 

 Maestro is full of dazzle and bluster but it fails to offer a broadly satisfying portrait of its subject, the conductor, composer, and educator Leonard Bernstein. Nor does it probe very deeply into Bernstein's marriage or the career and personality of his wife. Director and star Bradley Cooper chose to focus instead on himself—er, I mean, the maestro's numerous gay affairs, and viewers are left with an energetic but hollow "long-suffering wife" tale, in which the musical genius and emotional complexity of the ostensible subject is largely missing. As Richard Brody put it in the New Yorker, Cooper "left out all the good parts." 

I fell asleep during The Boy and the Heron. The portraits of bird life are inaccurate and uncomplimentary, the facial expressions of the humans lack dimension, and the voices are cartoonish. Oh? It is a cartoon? Well, that explains it.

Anatomy of a Fall had piqued my interest even before it won the Oscar for best original screenplay. It revolves around the question of whether a depressed author living in the Alps killed himself by jumping out a window or was pushed by his wife. Neither of them are all that appealing, and the French courtroom scenes are full of badgering lawyers asking tendentious questions. Meanwhile, no one makes the slightest effort to look for the murder weapon, presuming there was one. Our sympathies come to rest with the couple's sight-impaired son and his cute dog, who also happen to be the prime witnesses.

In the end, it isn't that hard to figure out what happened. But I'll leave you in suspense, while also noting that the recent Japanese film, Decision to Leave, covers similar ground in more suspenseful and entertaining ways.

Now, on to the International Film Fest and the summer blockbusters!