These days, everyone is talking about getting back to normal. It’s what we wanted during the worst days of the pandemic, and it’s what former U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Nikki Haley is pitching each time she gets in front of a microphone.
My needs are a little simpler: I just want the Academy Awards to get back to normal.
By “normal,” I do not necessarily mean “good.” We are all familiar with the multitude of great directors to be bypassed or neglected by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. Neither Alfred Hitchcock nor Howard Hawks ever won competitive Oscars. Douglas Sirk was never even nominated. Orson Welles won one competitive Oscar, but it was for co-writing, not even for directing, Citizen Kane. The Oscars were never about fine aesthetic judgments, but they did, for decades, accurately reflect how Hollywood preferred to think about itself.
From 1929, the year of the first ceremony, through the early 2010s, the Academy Awards functioned chiefly as a vessel for what we would now think of as virtue-signaling. By honoring films that were self-important, more often than not grandly conceived, about pressing social themes or significant historical events, the industry sought to remind the world of the value of what it did. Many of the most famous best picture winners from the midcentury embody this preference: The Best Years of Our Lives, On the Waterfront, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia, In the Heat of the Night, and more. If this preference for the Big and the Serious came at the expense of more commercial yet more artistically expressive talents like Hitchcock or Sirk, so be it.
I was born in 1983, and my prime years of Oscar watching, always in the company of my movie-mad mother, began about a decade later. The movies that won best picture in those years fit the earlier pattern: Dances with Wolves, Braveheart, The English Patient, and, for Pete’s sake, Titanic. My own favorite films from these years were not even on the academy’s radar — say, Whit Stillman’s The Last Days of Disco, Clint Eastwood’s Absolute Power, and Peter Bogdanovich’s The Thing Called Love — but that was OK. These best picture winners were good movies. Some, such as The English Patient, were even great.
Sometime after the turn of the millennium, though, the academy started to lose confidence in itself. Like the WASP establishment or the Ivy League, the Oscars represented a seemingly monolithic institution that was ultimately undermined from within. Though liberal to its marrow, the academy was targeted by the burgeoning “woke” enforcement squad, which, in 2015, promulgated the hashtag #OscarsSoWhite to register outrage over the lack of racial diversity among nominees. Inevitably chastened, the academy took measures to swell the ranks of its voting-eligible members, from around 5,700 in 2012 to about 9,400 at the last count.
And, just to make sure that no film lacking proper representation could sneak by on the strength of its quality alone, the academy now insists that movies must adhere to “representation and inclusion standards” to have even a shot at being nominated for best picture. A multitude of means are available for producers to meet the criteria, including having “at least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors … from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group” or a central storyline that focuses on characters or themes from various communities — namely, women, the aforementioned underrepresented racial or ethnic groups, performers who identify with a letter in the LGBTQ+ alphabet, or those with disabilities.
Phew! Although this representation mandate is new as of this Oscar season, the overall effort to pacify our cultural commissars has already scrambled what it means for a movie to be “Oscar caliber.” Hollywood is no longer trying to advertise its virtue and dignity but instead is desperately chasing our confused times. Over the last half-decade or so, best picture winners tend to be split between bizarro movies to appeal to the kids (The Shape of Water, Parasite) and politically correct or otherwise obscurantist art-house fare to pacify the “woke” (Moonlight, Nomadland, CODA). To get more than 10 people to tune in, summer blockbusters are now routinely nominated, including Black Panther (a Marvel movie!) and Joker (DC!). Call me crazy, but I prefer Driving Miss Daisy.
And so we come to the 96th edition of the Academy Awards, to be held at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood on March 10. This year’s list of 10 best picture nominees is more tolerable than usual but still comes with plenty of oddities and concessions to popular tastes and faddish notions.
Though I have no particular affection for it, Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer is in keeping with the academy’s traditional preference for large, fundamentally impressive historical epics. Although Bradley Cooper’s Maestro did not satisfy contemporary audiences’ taste for being shocked and awed, I felt it was the superior example of an old-timey best picture nominee: Not unlike, say, Gandhi, the film buys into the great man theory of the movie biopic, but this is refreshing in the present environment. Cooper’s obsessive recreation of Leonard Bernstein’s appearance and insane overreliance on Bernstein’s music for the score suggested that, for him, his hero’s attributes and artistry counted for more than his flaws and foibles — a nice change of pace in our era of cancel culture. Plus, the movie has the best performance by an actress all year: Carey Mulligan as Bernstein’s wife, Felicia, whose reaction to being given a cancer diagnosis in an antiseptic doctor’s office will break even the coldest of hearts.
That’s more than one can say about Barbie, the nomination of which should rightly aggravate the makers of G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra, The Garbage Pail Kids Movie, and the American Girl movie adaptations. Of course, we know that it is not the movie’s appropriation of a toy that resonated with academy voters but its “woke” renunciation of that same toy. In the allegedly liberating finale, the title character makes an appointment with a gynecologist, but director Greta Gerwig has simply traded prisons for Margot Robbie’s Barbie: Once she was defined by women’s beauty standards, now she’s defined by the women’s healthcare apparatus.
Equally in tune with contemporary values is Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon, which dredges up one of the most deplorable episodes in American history: the attempt by a group of white people to make off with land belonging to Osage Indians by any means, including murder. This is the only best picture nominee that has a master filmmaker’s patina, but after years and years of attempts to recast American history as consisting of one racist plot after another, it all has a certain plodding, predictable quality, one not helped by the 3 1/2-hour running time. This is a film intended to induce nods of agreement in its enlightened audience, not stir complicated responses.
Infinitely more daring is Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction, starring Jeffrey Wright as Thelonious “Monk” Ellison, an earnest, ambitious black novelist. Having grown weary of assertions that his serious novels are insufficiently race-conscious, Ellison comes up with a satire of the kind of book by a black author that might placate white liberals. “It’s got deadbeat dads, rappers, crack, and he gets killed by a cop in the end — that’s black, right?” Ellison says of his parody. Those white liberals then, predictably enough, proceed to canonize it. This is a bracing, lively broadside of a movie.
Alexander Payne’s companionable Christmastime boarding school comedy The Holdovers is objectively excellent, though every time I see the slightly slovenly Paul Giamatti in a movie, I think back to an incident some 20 years ago. When I went to a press screening of American Splendor, starring Giamatti as ill-tempered, ill-kempt comic book writer Harvey Pekar, a fellow critic commented that he recognized his fellow critics on-screen in the movie — to which I, in my Brooks Brothers blazer and Faconnable button-down shirt, should have said: “Speak for yourself, buddy!”
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The Zone of Interest and Past Lives are eminently worthy films, but the seemingly admirable Anatomy of a Fall suffers from what I might call foreign film bias: The multilingual film, about a woman (Sandra Huller) contending with accusations that she has offed her husband, has a plotline entirely appropriate for an episode of Forensic Files. But when heard in French (or in French- or German-accented English), it sounds high-flown and impressive. The nomination of Poor Things strikes me as being in the mold of the recent preference for outlandish, grotesque, CGI-enabled cartoons on the order of The Shape of Water. I will never comprehend the popularity of such movies. Give me Fred and Ginger instead.
My own favorite theatrical release of the year — Michael Mann’s sinuous, sensuous biopic Ferrari — was entirely omitted from consideration. But, then, I never expected the movies I liked to be nominated even in the good old days. I must concede that the Oscars are a little more normal this year, but it will take more for me to watch them again. I consider tuning in if Billy Crystal returns as the host, the ban on Will Smith is extended, and James Cameron retires from making movies about the Blue Man Group and makes another big epic about doomed lovers swept away by history.
Peter Tonguette is a contributing writer to the Washington Examiner magazine.
