Awards Season 2022

[therewillbeblus]

It’s ironic how many people are comparing EEaaO as synonymous to Marvel in its ambitions, since the Daniels are insincerely playing with the subgenre of multiverses. In the Q&A I saw a year ago, Scheinert said he hated “multiverse movies” while Kwan liked them (though neither like Marvel, I believe), and Scheinert jump-started the genre-playing with an unused prompt, “What if, in the opening of The Matrix, instead of answering a phone, Neo had to [random sexual/scatological act].” Crash aged poorly because it sincerely approached racism and race relations with a tone-deaf, outdated logic. This is a movie made by two Emerson hipsters without ambitions of being an awards contender or anything more than a silly action dramedy with a heart that people can connect with, and it accomplished that for a lot of people (most people I know who don’t watch movies did see and loved this one last year). Some people didn’t gel with it, and that’s fine, but I don’t think it’s trying to cure racism or talk down to people or anything, so talk of warcrimes seems misplaced. It’s an interesting question to posit- if the intentions of the film/artists should play a role in our assessment, but personally I think there’s a better case for Green Book’s tone-deaf and transparently-sincere self-important messaging to be compared with Crash than a movie made by pranksters having fun released way outside of award season that connected with so many people that the masses chose to award it everything all at once

[bottlesofsmoke]

Thanks DI! I think I need to wrap my head around the scoring system for nominations next year, but i thought it was a fun twist.

Everything Everywhere All at Once was the earliest released Best Picture winner since The Silence of the Lambs. Is Green Book the last “normal” Best Picture winner? CODA and Nomadland were mostly streaming releases and Parasite was the first foreign language winner. I wonder if this trend of off-the-beaten-path winners will continue or if we’ll get back to big, end of the year Oscar-bait winners the further we get along after COVID, if that played a part.

Here’s a chart of the release dates of BP nominees and winners since 1960:

SpoilerShow

From Numlock Awards

I didn’t love EEAAO (I thought the action scenes, in particular, were not good) I don’t see how this is going to alter the kind of movies being made any more than any other BP winner. It’s not like it made an ungodly amount of money. La La Land, albeit not a BP winner, made like 4x as much. It seems a lot like the Shape of Water, an idiosyncratic genre-blending movie that really could only have been made by the people that made it (it also made more money than EEAAO). I can’t recall an influx in imitations after it won BP, if anything it opened the door for more unusual winners and rewarding more adventurous filmmaking, which EEAAO will probably do too, which is a good thing.

[ianthemovie]

it was shitty that they divided the dead into Oscar and non-Oscar winners.

Is that what the blurry fade in and outs were about? I didn’t make that connection. That’s stupid, but even if there was no internal logic, it’s still a weird way to organize images of people. If you want to honor artists one at a time, just show one pic at a time. The fade ins/outs were so awkwardly drawn out, it probably took longer than it would have to just scroll through as usual

They put a tiny statuette image next to the names of past winners, which I doubt most people even noticed. The winners and non-winners were mixed together. After the travesty that was last year's In Memoriam segment I'd say this year's was mercifully bland and inoffensive.

[therewillbeblus]

I didn’t love EEAAO (I thought the action scenes, in particular, were not good)

One of the highlights of the Q&A was when the Daniels talked about how they had such a small budget that they couldn't hire top-line choreographers, and instead had to hire two YouTubers who weren't specially trained in martial arts or choreography or stunt work, but were simply so obsessed with HK action cinema that they had memorized all the stunts and replicated some of them in this film. So nothing was "original," everything at least a variation of some movie from the 80s, only reproduced by amateurs. They did it for very cheap and the Daniels gave them cameos in the movie (as the guys fighting to get Curtis' trophy into a particular orifice), but I think it came out pretty good considering their resources!

[bottlesofsmoke]

That's funny, and to be honest they weren't any worse than your average Marvel movie, despite the difference in budget. I think that the presence of Michelle Yeoh and the obvious Hong Kong influence made it look all look worse in comparison to the better choreographed and directed action scenes in the movies they were aping.

[bad future]

While I understand these comparisons coming off as facile or a reach at having something, anything to take issue with in the year's awards juggernaut, I am going to confess to having also thought there might be something to the ways in which EEAAO reminds me a certain type of Disney or IP-based movie. Particularly the better ones, that tend to be embraced for being more ambitious and progressive "than they had to be," with EEAAO's focus on underrepresented demographics and family dynamics, high concept hook and onslaught of broadly appealing quirkiness and pop culture references. I'm thinking LEGO, spider-verse, some of the Pixar and probably some live action Marvel stuff.. to be clear, this combination of qualities is certainly welcome if I watch one of those fine-tuned Disney products; I'm not complaining about "wokeness" or "pandering!" (ugh.) The thing that took me aback when watching this film, even over the summer when the film being an awards player was not on my radar and it was just a modest indie hit, was the feeling that someone had taken the lessons of how to make one of those corporate products good and timely, and applied them to an original A24 film with no central IP to serve, no expectation of making a billion dollars, and theoretically none of the inherent compromise between the personal and commercial that presumably birthed that particular kind of appeal in its original context. (Well, not none; but the usual amount and not the kind that requires smuggling or approval from people with theme parks to consider.)

This is probably a galaxy-brain train of thought and I'm overestimating its uniqueness, but this felt to me like a novel instance of someone opting in to that framework on their own, the first film I've seen that felt unmistakably shaped by the Disney (etc) hits of the 2010's and accompanying fan cultures, without actually coming from the people or entities that made those originally. And in an "indie" package that can aspire to levels of "cool" and relevance inaccessible to Disney.

So from that angle I can definitely sympathize with concern that this EEAAO moment could be a harbinger of negative trends to come. Will the studios already making films in that vein immediately steal the baton back, with their methods feeling newly legitimized? (Barbie could be a strong test case!) Will Sundance start to look more like a weekend at the multiplex as people skip trying to get noticed by Marvel with dramas, horrors or whatever, and just start making non-Marvel Marvel movies?

But I also think this might be as significant a Best Picture win as Moonlight or Parasite -- maybe even more? -- because it feels so representative of this moment in er, maybe not "cinema" per se since that's too splintered to be represented cleanly, but let's say the film industry. It feels like a crystallization of a certain type of filmmaking that has been a major cultural force for the last decade, finally divorced from studio tentpoles and their baggage, and maybe a tipping point for how movies are packaged and sold and awarded. A potential path forward for the low to mid budget "indie" film, simply by playing Disney's game more cleverly and cheaply than they have been. Be more meme-able and stan-able and less sanitized, all at once -- A24 has been steadily evolving in the years since Moonlight, and may well have mastered this by now. And depending on if things do indeed go this way and if it's all as culturally bleak as it sounds, EEAAO may well go on to be an object of derision to rival Crash. But it would do so by actually representing something of its moment in the Oscar canon besides the Academy's cluelessness and attachment to familiar metrics of quality and prestige, which I think would make it much more valuable in the history books.

[knives]

To be fair, that’s how a lot of independent cinema has functioned basically since the big guys had films to program against. So much of Corman or Italian cinema was basically do what the majors are doing, but unfiltered and cheap.

[bad future]

That is true, and I find a lot of those (like the post 1977 space opera wave) endearing! There's just something extra disquieting about it now, as these things probably should be in the moment; probably just means I've lived long enough to be weirded out by kids. Cool, better get used to it! But I think there's another layer of uncanniness when they're not just saying, hey, we can make a movie with spaceships too; when what they're competing with is how Disney pretends to be your friend, by pretending to be Disney pretending to be your friend. It's a sensation not dissimilar to first seeing middle aged critics reflected in the face of Lights Camera Jackson, haha.

[MV88]

Participation was too low when we did the movie watching requirement, and enforcing it became a little ridiculous; that said, if MV88 wants to make a non-binding recommendation, I’m sure at least a few of us will seek it out and write up a response.

Oh, I will definitely make a recommendation! Just because I’m always interested in hearing what others have to say about it, why don’t we go with Robert Wise & Gunther von Fritsch’s The Curse of the Cat People (1944)? One of the most unusual sequels ever made, it’s really nothing at all like Cat People (which I also love, for different reasons) tonally, thematically, or stylistically. It’s not even a horror film even though it often gets lumped into the genre simply because of its association with the original. I honestly think it was way ahead of its time with some of the themes it touches on, and it could inspire some good discussion.

[therewillbeblus]

Great film- already wrote in-depth thoughts a few years ago, but since I only recently came around to Cat People this past Halloween, maybe I’ll do a side by side contrast of their respective thematic concerns instead.

Does someone create a film club type thread for concentrated discussion or do people just throw thoughts wherever they feel like it?

[swo17]

Maybe use this thread?

[soundchaser]

Curse of the Cat People reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but I’m not sure I could explain why.

[therewillbeblus]

Curse of the Cat People reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but I’m not sure I could explain why.

Love that. Please try, whatever you come up with will be interesting just for giving it a shot

[Altair]

It strikes me that, if one were to compare Moonlight and Everything Everywhere All at Once, that what unites them is their cultural specificity (African-American life in Florida, immigrant Chinese family in America), where it is because of their very focus on the unique dynamics of those communnities, people are actually able to relate to them and discover more universal qualities about family, inter-generational conflict, and so on.

[tenia]

Michel Ciment said about Yasujiro Ozu's movies : "It's funny because they're very specifically related with Japanese culture, but then in art, the more specific you are, the more universal you end up being".

[therewillbeblus]

The experience feels palpable, visceral, and we can identity with the universal emotional undercurrents if we so choose

[Michael Kerpan]

The first time I felt a sense of "reality" in a movie was when I discovered Ozu (despite liking/loving all sorts of things I saw before this).

[colinr0380]

Curse of the Cat People reminds me a lot of Twin Peaks: Fire Walk With Me, but I’m not sure I could explain why.

Love that. Please try, whatever you come up with will be interesting just for giving it a shot

That makes sense in that maybe it is because its about a father getting more and more angry and upset with his daughter as he feels her slipping away from him, which only causes her to retreat more into her fantasy world in response. While the mother looks on, ineffectually. And then the other inhabitants of the town get dragged into their little drama and start mirroring the central conflict behind their own closed doors.

And I definitely agree about The Curse of the Cat People. You don't need to have seen the first film to enjoy it (although it does help to have done so as to understand better where the parents are coming from in their reactions to this new situation), and its less a horror film than a strange kind of contemporary set fairy tale for children, although no less unsettling for that

[captveg]

I’m not convinced that we’ll be talking about him much, period. I’m definitely getting George Chakiris vibes

Maybe Butler too will appear in a weirdo vampire movie where he's hunted down by Wings Hauser.

I only realized a few days ago that Butler played Tex Watson in Once Upon a Time.. in Hollywood - would love to see him return to these kinds of grimy roles

I'm very curious to see how his take on Feyd in Dune: Part Two turns out.

[Black Hat]

Was it just me, or did anyone else notice that when winners were announced for supporting actress and actress categories, the other main competitors scowled, stayed still instead of clapping, and didn’t fake a smiley congrats? I know there’s been some beef with Yeoh and Blanchett but I still expected her to clap and fake it- she seemed to look down and away. Bassett and Condon also didn’t seem to move and looked pissed, staring straight ahead, while the other two smiled and clapped. I guess that’s an honest reaction, and I can’t really fault them for it, but I also can’t remember this really happening (I feel like I’ve always been transfixed on the other frontrunning loser’s disposition when the winner is announced for acting/directing categories since I was a kid, never the winner until they cut away to the walk up) outside of Denzel losing to Casey Affleck, though I’m sure it’s happened. Twice in one night seems excessive though

Just a few past examples of nominees who were purported to be visibly disappointed or upset when they didn’t win include Lena Olin in 1989, Samuel L. Jackson in 1994, Lauren Bacall in 1996, Bill Murray in 2003, and Eddie Murphy in 2006. Of course, none of those reactions compare to how about a quarter of the audience reacted when Elia Kazan won the Honorary Oscar, but that’s surely a different situation altogether.

Some of the best acting these people do are their reactions to winning or losing awards.

TWB - What's the beef between Blanchett and Yeoh about?

[hearthesilence]

Robin Williams was always honest about what it was like to lose.

[therewillbeblus]

TWB - What's the beef between Blanchett and Yeoh about?

I don't have much of a pulse on social media, but my understanding is that Yeoh posted an article to Instagram (written by someone other than herself, I believe) than expressed the opinion that Yeoh deserved the Oscar since there hasn't been much Asian representation in the Academy. The article was multiple paragraphs but one of them explicitly called out Blanchett as someone who doesn't need a third Oscar because she's already won, or something like that. Yeoh immediately took down the post, probably because it was in violation of the rules since Oscar voting was still open, or because she realized it contained damning content beyond just a boost for herself, who knows. She posted this just before voting closed, so some thought she was attempting to sway voters. Of course the internet blew it up and Blanchett is understandably not gonna love that, whether or not offense was intended. So it's not like Yeoh posted something that outright said she believes Blanchett didn't deserve it - the post was about something greater and written by someone else, but was seen as more passive aggressive and could very well have been

[Mario G.]

TWB - What's the beef between Blanchett and Yeoh about?

I don't have much of a pulse on social media, but my understanding is that Yeoh posted an article to Instagram (written by someone other than herself, I believe) than expressed the opinion that Yeoh deserved the Oscar since there hasn't been much Asian representation in the Academy. The article was multiple paragraphs but one of them explicitly called out Blanchett as someone who doesn't need a third Oscar because she's already won, or something like that. Yeoh immediately took down the post, probably because it was in violation of the rules since Oscar voting was still open, or because she realized it contained damning content beyond just a boost for herself, who knows. She posted this just before voting closed, so some thought she was attempting to sway voters. Of course the internet blew it up and Blanchett is understandably not gonna love that, whether or not offense was intended. So it's not like Yeoh posted something that outright said she believes Blanchett didn't deserve it - the post was about something greater and written by someone else, but was seen as more passive aggressive and could very well have been

That's definitely a major episodes in the saga, but my understanding is less to do with any one action and more to do with the whole campaign.

Blanchett was extremely pleased with her work on Tar and believed she deserved the award! Most other actors (anecdotally) believed she deserved the award and she probably would have gotten it if it wouldn't have been her third Oscar. She's not the most press available actress, so it was notable how out there she was for Tar. No appearance was too small, she outworked almost every other actress, but Yeoh somehow did even more (strength of EEAAO also helped). So I think you could see Blanchett getting more frustrated as the campaign dragged on that her work wasn't being rewarded. The sincere friendliness at the start of the campaign between the two started to slip into what we got on Oscar's night. At the end of the day I'm personally happy Yeoh won, but I completely understand Blanchett's frustration. You could sense the pride and magic she felt when it came to this performance, so it was personal in a way her other campaigns weren't. I'm not as clear on Yeoh's mental state regarding Blanchett. I perceived more annoyance from Blanchett than Yeoh, but, hey, her side was the one with steam!

That's all the idle chatter I've been privy to.

[therewillbeblus]

Yeah, I was just acknowledging that nobody knows what Yeoh was thinking (nor Blanchett, for that matter), but that regardless of the intent behind that post, it's hard to imagine being in Blanchett's position right before Oscar voting closes and not thinking 'WTF'. Also, to be a bit more charitable outside of chalking this up to her own selfish motives, I also imagine that Blanchett saw her win as a win for Tár the film. She knew that Field's work wasn't going to get recognized in any other category, and that mass voting audiences loved it, and probably took on a lot of that pressure to be the face of Field's "genius." When she lost, she also knew the film was going home empty handed, so her reaction could be in part sourced in a team dynamic, like a captain frustrated at a collective loss rather than only concerned about self-gain. She clearly loved Field and felt honored to collaborate with him on his vision

[Black Hat]

Thanks for the rundown TWB!

She's not the most press available actress, so it was notable how out there she was for Tar.

I know! It was wild the extent to which she put herself out there, doing press with some places more than once.

It's extremely interesting, if not telling, she felt so passionate about her work for a film that has as many detractors as well as boosters. I would imagine she's not pleased with all the negativity, she has nothing to do with, which now surrounds the film she won her prior best actress award for.

Personally, I was not a fan of her performance in Tár, way too showy to the point where it was self-conscious, don't ever show your work! Generally, I think her acting style has veered way off in a bombastic direction but, a lot of people go for that kinda thing, falsely thinking showy intensity equals good performance, so I'm in the minority there.

That said, this level of pettiness is great for the game.