The Best Picture Nominees

Ten films are up for best picture this Sunday at the 95th Academy Awards, and for many years I’ve made an effort to see each nomination, though there have been a few exceptions. I didn’t see Black Panther in 2018, The Joker in 2019, and this year I’m not going to see All Quiet on the Western Front or Avatar: The Way of Water, as I’ve heard the former is like watching the first brutal 30 minutes of Saving Private Ryan for an unrelenting 147 minutes, and I feel like I’ve already seen Avatar, as it’s basically like the original from 2009, except with water (or so I’m told).

On the app Letterboxd I mark movies that reach me in a significant way – ones I’d either like to see again or that really moved me or excited me or made me think. Some years are duds: in 2021 only two films I saw rose to that level: The Worst Person in the World and King Richard. By contrast, 2022 was a very good year, with six of the 27 films I’ve watched to date (and I hope to see a few more soon) making the cut for me: The Fabelmans, TÁR, Triangle of Sadness, I Want You Back, Everything Everywhere All at Once, and Marcel the Shell with Shoes On. 

Of these six, the last is my favorite movie of the year. Marcel blew me away. It was funny, touching, impressive looking, thought-provoking, surprising…it was everything I want in a movie. And funnily enough, Jenny Slate – the voice of Marcel – is in two of the other films I loved in 2022: Everything Everywhere All at Once and I Want You Back, the latter a solid romcom on the same plain as two other good ones from recent years: Palm Springs and Long Shot. I would be happy watching any of those three films on a Saturday night.

There are people who love to hate on Steven Spielberg (yeah, Amy Nicholson, I’m talking to you), but I certainly don’t understand where it comes from, aside from maybe jealousy or a sense that Spielberg has gotten enough accolades and it’s time to make room for some others. While I get that sentiment, and I understand that people are upset that Jordan Peele’s Nope didn’t get the recognition it supposedly deserved (I haven’t seen it), The Fabelmans is an excellent movie. It also had what I consider to be among the worst previews I’ve ever seen, offering a series of out-of-context shlock that made the film seem like nothing more than a boy finding himself through his love of filmmaking. Nothing could be further from the truth. The film is about the destruction of a family. That’s its essence, and it tackles it beautifully and with much more heart and nuance than, say, Marriage Story, which I found to be laborious despite its wonderful performances (Scarlett Johansson deserved the Oscar for that one).

Everything, Everywhere All at Once was a great romp – creative, frantic, impressive, funny – except for the hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-message near the film’s climax. Aside from that, this was one of those exhilarating movie-going experiences that I was happy to see in a theater.

I’ve already blogged about TÁR, and I wrote, “…while I may not rush out to watch Todd Field’s TÁR a second time, I can’t stop thinking about it. And really, what more could you ask of a work of art?”  Well, since then I’ve decided that I do want to watch it again, along with Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Add it to the list!

As for Triangle of Sadness, it wasn’t perfect, but it was an entertaining commentary on social class, with a tad less subtlety than Bong Joon-Ho’s 2019 masterpiece, Parasite. Like, no subtlety at all with lots of bodily fluids! But still, it was a fun, suspenseful watch, and I marvel at how smartly Woody Harrelson has managed his career. Who would have thought when he made his Cheers debut in 1985?

Of the six films I loved in 2023, four were nominated for Best Picture, and one was nominated for Best Animated Feature. So which do I hope wins?

For Best Animated Feature, despite how much I love Marcel, it’s not as much an achievement in animation as it is in filmmaking, and I can’t deny the visual triumph of Pinocchio. I also unobjectively support Puss in Boots: The Last Wish since my daughter is listed in the credits!. It also happens to be a good movie. Any one of those three winning would be okay by me, but I wish Marcel had been nominated for Best Picture. It’s that good.

For Best Picture, my favorites are TÁR, The Fabelmans, and Everything Everywhere All at Once. I believe the latter is amazing but moderately flawed, while the first two are just about perfect. Everything Everywhere… is going to win and that’s cool by me, but if I had to choose one I think I’d go with The Fabelmans.

Regardless of the outcomes, 2022 was a damn good year for movies, and I have yet to see Living, Aftersun, White noise, Armageddon Time, Causeway, She Said, Babylon and After Yang. Since winter and spring theatrical releases are historically subpar, I’ll have to spend the next few months catching up on last year’s releases. Here’s hoping 2023 eventually rises to the occasion.

Screens, Streams and Creativity

In my last post I posed the question, “Is creativity in jeopardy of diminishing or dying altogether?”  It was inspired by Amy Nicholson’s comments on the Raiders of the Lost Ark episode of Unspooled, a podcast devoted to discussing the AFI’s top 100 American films of all-time.  She remarked, “I feel like something in us is just stuck because we’re not using our imaginations anymore, we’re just hitting rewind.”

While few would claim that there aren’t still amazingly creative things happening in the arts, if recent successful films are any indication Amy’s observation isn’t entirely unwarranted.  One need look no further than Disney’s recent output to conclude that original content isn’t always a major priority of film studios.  According to film critic William Bibbiani of @WilliamBibbiani, “35 of the top 50 films domestically (in 2019) were sequels, remakes, reboots, spinoffs or other films based on pre-existing blockbuster multimedia franchises.” 

That’s a staggering statistic.  Gone are the days when the most celebrated films were also the most-watched (think Forrest Gump, Silence of the Lambs, Rain Man, etc.).  Broadway has also fallen into the reboot trap.  I wrote about this seven years ago, and its sorry state certainly hasn’t improved in the ensuing years (think Mean Girls, Frozen, Moulin Rouge, Shrek, Tootsie, Dirty Dancing, and on and on…)

So why the devotion to reboots?  For film, the obvious game-changer has been streaming, which has dropped the average theatrical run to only four weeks.  Given this, it’s no wonder that studios are devoting fewer funds to riskier ventures.  But just when you think that all is lost, you hear the flip side of the same coin.  Yes, streaming may have shortened theatrical runs which has directly led to studios relying on well-established franchises, but it’s also opened up a world that heretofore was difficult to enter. 

Brad Pitt and Leonardo DiCaprio recently appeared on Marc Maron’s podcast, WTF, and they both discussed how as producers they are being given the green light to make films that wouldn’t have gotten financed years ago.  Streaming services are now making smaller films viable options (to hear this particular segment of the interview, go to the one-hour mark, though the whole interview is worth a listen). DiCaprio goes on to say that in the past these films would have to win an Academy Award to get any viewership at all, but now “millions and millions of people watch these documentaries as opposed to having to go through a theatrical system.”

Isn’t this exciting? 

And from my limited experience DiCaprio is correct.  I’ve watched more documentaries in the last ten years than in the previous forty years combined, and more and more of my friends are recommending documentaries, small films, and of course dozens and dozens of TV shows (some of them even worth watching).  Add to this the accessibility of short films that would never have been viewable prior to the Age of Streaming, and we’ve got so much wonderful output right at our fingertips, no one will ever be able to check the box that says, “All caught up.”

So it’s not all doom and gloom.  Creativity is alive and well, but like much of art these days, it may be fragmented.  You may not be hearing about a film or a book or a TV show by viewing the best-seller or highest-grossing lists, but with a little word-of-mouth and targeted searches you can find the original content that appears to be lacking in mainstream theaters.  I would argue that even theatrical runs have shown signs of life recently.  I’ve watched eight out of the nine Best Picture nominees and there’s not a dud among them.  2019 may be one of the best years of film in recently memory.  And it’s very likely that films like Roma and The Irishman, both of which appeared in theaters just long enough to qualify for the Oscars, have done far better with the new business model than they would have with the old one.

Yes, things are changing.  I imagine Walt Disney himself would be disappointed in his company if he were alive today.  But others are taking that creative torch and carrying it boldly in this century. Some things may be lost along the way, but creativity and human originality won’t be among them.

Freedom and Creativity

In Frank Capra’s film Mr. Smith Goes to Washington, the idealistic young senator says to Miss Saunders:

Men should hold (liberty) up in front of them every single day of their lives and say: "I'm free... to think and to speak. My ancestors couldn't - I can... and my children will."

Liberty has taken on an expanded meaning these days as we have access to virtually any piece of knowledge ever conceived of by the human race – good, bad or otherwise.  And it begs the question: can you have too much freedom?  Can having the freedom to do everything keep you from doing anything?

I thought of this while listening a while back to the podcast Unspooled, a fine series in which actor Paul Scheer and film critic Amy Nicholson spend an hour discussing each film of the AFI’s top 100 movies compiled in 2007.  It isn’t a perfect podcast, but I like that the two hosts lack pretension and are often watching movies for the first time, enabling them to see through some of the hype. 

Scheer and Nicholson also make astute observations about society from time to time, and no more so than during their podcast for the film Raiders of the Lost Ark.  Near the end of the episode, Nicholson reveals her concerns about human creativity, and whether its been stunted since this movie’s release, when VHS tapes allowed for cheap home viewing.  She says: “What changed in our generation when we were able to make Raiders the number one VHS tape and watch Raiders non-stop…are we stunting our imagination?  It worries me not because I don’t like this movie, it just worries me on my larger scale of somebody who wants more random creativity in the world.”  She goes on to share a story about Quentin Tarantino coming of age just before the VCR became ubiquitous, when after seeing a movie he’d buy the film score on LP and imagine the scenes while the music played, eventually coming up with his own scenes, reimagining the movie over and over again.  Similarly, Scheer said that after watching Return of the Jedi, he’d go back home and write down everything he could remember in chronological order so he could read it back and get to experience the movie again.  Viewing it at home wasn’t an option. Had Tarantino and Scheer grown up in the home movie era, perhaps they wouldn’t have become filmmakers or actors.

Does having immediate access to so much information at our fingertips hamper creativity?  Do we – in effect – have too much freedom?  Freedom to see almost any movie at any time at any place.  Freedom to look up almost any fact about science or human history with a few keystrokes.  To read any piece of junk written by morons.  To watch gangs of people fornicating.   In the Age of the Internet and constant connectivity, do we have the ability to say no to what’s available to us and proactively pursue an original thought?

In the aforementioned Unspooled episode, Scheer concludes, rightly so, that “we’re always living in a culture that adapts to what we have.”  After all, were it not for recorded music, we’d have to rely on performances or hearing music in our own mental jukeboxes.  Were it not for the written word, we’d have to remember stories our grandparents told us so that we could then tell them to our children and grandchildren.  The written word has given us much, but it would be foolish to say that it hasn’t hampered some of our capacity to tell stories verbally.  Likewise, being able to look up facts on Google at any time has probably hampered some of our ability to remember, and studies have shown that the Internet has most assuredly shortened our attention span.

Nicholson concludes, “I feel like something in us is just stuck because we’re not using our imagination anymore, we’re just hitting rewind.”

Next week I’d like to look at films in particular and how it’s not all doom and gloom. Creativity survives.

Stay tuned…