Catching up with Oscar

[Updated through end of April.  By now the Oscars have been announced, but there are several prominent films I haven’t seen yet, including The Father, Minari, and Soul.  So I'll have to save those for a later post.  I was gratified to see Nomadland take the three major awards I anticipated it would, though I would've given the award for cinematography too, and maybe thrown in editing and adapted screenplay as well, even though Chloé Zhao did not really need to take home any more hardware.  I would have been okay with Carey Mulligan snatching Frances McDormand’s Oscar, since she had two already.  Anthony Hopkins will have to astonish me with his performance as The Father to justify the upset of Chadwick Boseman.  Daniel Kaluuya was certainly deserving, but I strongly dissent from the documentary and international feature winners (Collective would have been better in either category).
 
I focus this commentary around the Oscars even though I rarely respect the Academy’s selections, and almost never watch the ceremony itself.  It’s all part of the culture of celebrity (“being famous for being famous”) that I typically deplore.  But like other annual events (looking at you, Super Bowl), it becomes a whirlpool of public attention, sucking in observers on all sides.  So I enter the conversation to offer my views on something the public at large is looking at (or maybe not, which has also been one strand of opining).  This was a year when it felt as though I had a horse in this race, rooting for Nomadland to sweep the field.  But I note the reasonable manner in which the minor awards were distributed to other worthy films.  See my own ranking of the best films of 2020 here, though some Oscar nominees will actually fall into my list for 2021.]

I began this survey on the day the Oscar nominations were announced and will end it after the Academy Awards are actually given, catching up with various nominees.  Two of the notable Best Picture snubs were One Night in Miami and Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, while the lesser (and later) Judas and the Black Messiah got the nod.

And then a Best Actress nom went to Andra Day as the title character in The United States vs. Billie Holiday (MC-52, Hulu), which is not even close to those other portraits of Black historical figures.  Ms. Day does a creditable impersonation of Lady Day (though not up to Renee Zellweger’s Oscar-winning turn in Judy, or Diana Ross in Lady Sings the Blues for that matter), but frankly Lee Daniels’ film is a mess, unable to make a coherent story of the character’s life, uncertain whether to foreground the music, the relationships, the drugs, the institutional racism of the FBI, or the activism implicit in the singer’s refusal to stop performing “Strange Fruit.”  And the musical performances are needlessly tarted up by excessive editing.  I watched this film all the way through, but I don’t advise you to.
 
A surprise nomination for Best Documentary Feature went to My Octopus Teacher (MC-76, NFX), so I caught up with this worthwhile but hardly award-worthy nature film, about a South African filmmaker who at a low point in his career decides to return every day for a year to the same ocean spot near his house, for some icy free-diving.  In the process, he develops an intimate relationship with a female octopus, and so enters into underwater life in a more consequential way than the typical cinematographer.  The octopus is certainly a fascinating creature, the diver somewhat less so, unbalancing the film a bit, but still offering an unusually detailed natural history experience.
 
I’d pass if I were you, but you’re welcome to have Another Round (MC-80, Hulu).  Enough people liked this Danish film to earn it a nomination for best Foreign Language Film, but Thomas Vinterberg’s libation was decidedly not to my taste, despite his unlikely nomination for Best Director.  Four high school teachers decide that alcohol is a performance-enhancing drug, and start drinking during work, to largely predictable results.  This film did not reach me in either its manic or depressive moments.
 
To comment on Promising Young Woman (MC-72, AMZ), I have to confess that I’ve never seen, and have no desire to see, Fatal Attraction.  On the other hand, I admit to seeking out anything that stars Carey Mulligan, and this femme fatale role demonstrates another arrow in her quiver, masterfully aimed.  So my reaction to Emerald Fennell’s film is mixed, as is the movie itself.  Is it a rape revenge thriller or a black comedy, a satire on toxic masculinity or a case study in self-destructive PTSD?  Yes to all, but no to coherence, or targeted thematic approach.  Creatively cast (with the likes of Bo Burnham, Connie Britton, and Alison Brie playing aslant type) and designed (with multiple looks for the star, and the settings, as well as spot-on music selections), this #MeToo film elicits a firm “Yes, but…”  Up against Nomadland for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, and other categories, I can’t see this film coming away with anything but a consolation prize.
 
The Romanian documentary Collective (MC-95, Hulu) garnered two Oscar nominations, for Best Documentary and Best Foreign Film, and deserved them both.  Like Spotlight, Alexander Nanau’s film illuminates the process and the potency of investigative journalism.  After a horrific nightclub fire in Bucharest kills 27, even more people die in the burn hospital in following weeks.  The editor of Sports Gazette, an unlikely muckraking rag, forms a team to investigate.  The first half of the film follows their efforts to delve into medical malfeasance, which leads to the government’s resignation, and the installation of a technocratic caretaker administration.  The second half retains astounding access, now to the boyish new health minister, as he discovers just how deep the corruption goes, all the way from top to bottom it seems, aside from a few incredibly brave whistleblowers.  And the worst part is how relevant it seems to politics in this country; we can’t just say, “Oh, that’s Romania – a bunch of Draculas.”  Is our only choice between mobsters and mob?
 
Don’t know whether to call The Mole Agent (MC-69, Hulu) a documentary, let alone a nominee for best of the year, but Maite Alberdi has made a charming film, implicitly about gerontology.  A detective hires an 83-year-old man to go undercover and gumshoe an old folks’ home in Chile.  The geezer’s a tidy charmer and soon all the old ladies (who outnumber the men 10-1) are aflutter over him, and opening up about their lives and loneliness, in front of the documentary crew that was planted along with our mole.  John Grierson would turn over in his grave if this were to get the Oscar for Best Documentary, but he’d have to admit the film meets his definition of the term as “a creative treatment of actuality.”  But then, why not Borat too?  Collective is the clear favorite in this category, but Time and Crip Camp are worthy contenders.  [My Octopus Teacher shouldn't have been a surprise winner to me, I guess, since the Academy almost never honors the real best documentaries of any given year.  See my list for 2020 at the end of this post.]

Well, by now I’ve seen the Bosnian film that definitely should have won the Oscar for Best International Feature, Quo Vadis, Aida? (MC-97, Hulu).  A tough watch to be sure, but made with exhilarating sureness of touch by writer-director Jasmila Zbanic, the film details the Serbian genocide of 1995, when thousands of Muslim residents of the UN “safe city” Srebrenica were rounded up and summarily executed in what became known as the worst European war crime since WWII.  Our point of entry is a local schoolteacher recruited as a UN translator (an intense and impressive Jasna Djuricic), present in “negotiations” between the Serbian general and the Dutch commander of the helpless UN “peacekeepers,” with the town’s desperate leaders present but powerless.  Her husband and two sons are among those seeking refuge on the UN base, so her official role is superseded by frantic attempts to keep them safe.  The film has all the rising tension of a thriller, combined with a you-are-there potency of empathetic horror for the plight of all the world’s war-torn refugees.  A must-see, if you can bear it, and certain to make my best of 2021 list.

For my money, the only competition for that Oscar should have been non-nominee Martin Eden (MC-74, Kanopy), which did not win universal acclaim but was featured in the top ten of both M. Dargis and A.O. Scott of the NYT.  I’m with them, even if I found the end of the film profoundly disappointing, after being exhilarated throughout almost all of Pietro Marcello’s sweeping appropriation (rather than adaptation) of Jack London’s novel.  Turns out the problem was in the source, I discovered afterwards, as even London himself acknowledged; he makes his working-class hero, an autodidact writer, into an anti-socialist individualist, and therefore has to destroy him.  But up until the end, I was transported.  Marcello has been a documentarian and this film is in the great tradition of Italian neorealism, with obvious debts to Visconti and Truffaut as well, all influences endearing to me.  Luca Marinelli is brash and compelling as the title character, so you can believe his craggy visage would attract both the dark-haired waitress and the aristocratic blond student.  The location of the story is shifted from Oakland to Naples, and the time is somewhat unmoored in the 20^th century, with old documentary footage interspersed with scenes shot in varying states of period dress.  The film has a headlong, try-anything vitality that reminded me of Jules & Jim, than which I can offer no higher praise.