Oscars 2021: The big picture just got smaller
Oscar nominees reflect a strange year of shut cinemas and streamers in a state of rampant, unsteady richness.
What a strange thing the Academy Awards have become in the time of COVID. For the better part of a year no one went near a cinema and the streamers reigned.
How many of the people who might be cheering on Anthony Hopkins in The Father or Carey Mulligan in Promising Young Woman will have seen their performances? If you have seen Viola Davis in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom or Gary Oldman in Mank you’re likely to have encountered them on Netflix rather than at the local cinema.
In that respect the Oscars are a bit like Gideon Haigh’s recent short book about offices: they were in the process of being obliterated (or at least radically transformed and derogated) when the virus came along and showed the necessity of what had been feasible for quite some time.
It’s not so long ago that 2019 best foreign language film of the year Roma — which did not win the best picture award though it won best director and best cinematography — originated with Netflix, though of course (but is it of course?) it had its fullest life, compositionally and dramatically, if you saw it on a proper cinema screen with hundreds of other people feeling the same emotional impact at the same instant.
Last year diehards had crowded to see Al Pacino and Robert De Niro, at the late height of their powers, directed by the great Martin Scorsese in what looked like a return to form with The Irishman. Did it matter though with two other eminent actors, Hopkins and Jonathan Pryce, facing off in The Two Popes as Pope Benedict and Pope Francis respectively?
It seems an exciting prospect if an improbable one that Hopkins –– about as good an actor as the world has known, a great Shakespearean who went from playing Othello and Pierre in War & Peace for the BBC to terrifying the world as Hannibal Lecter in The Silence of The Lambs –– could win another Oscar for The Father, that strange and piteous French play by Florian Zeller about a man with dementia, which presents the bewilderment and wonder as well as the heartbreak of his condition from his point of view.
The film is directed by Zeller (though in English, using Christopher Hampton’s translation) and it has been nominated not only for the colossal vertiginous grandeurs of Hopkins’s performance but as best picture. Olivia Colman, who plays the daughter, has been nominated for best supporting actress — though that award is said to be earmarked for Glenn Close in Hillbilly Elegy. And it seems entirely appropriate that Close should get an Oscar after eight nominations. It’s never good for the Oscars when the likes of Peter O’Toole and Alfred Hitchcock failed to get one.
If The Father could win best picture, what about Nomadland with Frances McDormand –– also nominated as best actress –– playing an elderly woman making her way through the American west, surviving in a van, surveying life, glimpsing what’s left to her as she journeys.
McDormand is as good at the kind of lean, wry thing she does as an actress can be and this elegiac film directed by Chloe Zhao has the advantage at this time of reckoning and transition of being quasi-documentary in range and tone. It can be seen on Hulu.
If history of one kind or another is your focus there’s plenty of it in these Oscar nominations. It was historian Eric Hobsbawm who said that it made you hate the world if you contemplated what it had done to that matchless singer Billie Holiday, and Andra Day has been nominated as best actress for playing her in The United States vs Billie Holiday, which highlights the insinuating racism that was part of what destroyed her and that she also highlighted in that scarifying song Strange Fruit.
It’s hard to see the impulse behind the Black Lives Matter movement as irrelevant to this nomination or to Judas and the Black Messiah, which is focused on the Black Panthers and is also up for best picture. Does it have anything to do with the acclamation Davis has received for her leading role in Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom, which you can see on Netflix? Some think the acclaim is wildly exaggerated, but with the Oscars you always have to allow for cultural influences, which are understandable and defensible but not strictly aesthetic.
There’s Sound of Metal with Riz Ahmed, which has the remote possibility of the first Muslim winning a best actor Oscar and which is on the somewhat off-putting subject of a heavy-metal drummer losing his hearing.
Mank, directed by David Fincher (of Fight Club and House of Cards fame), has a strong bravura performance by Oldman as Herman Mankiewicz, brother of the more famous Joe (who wrote and made All About Eve), and the burden of its tilt on history is that his contribution to the script of Orson Welles’s Citizen Kane was what made it great. It’s a big and staggering performance for a natural character actor such as Oldman and it’s directed with a superlative moody grandeur by Fincher.
When it appeared on Netflix a few months ago, it looked a bit good for television — if that’s not too much of a contradiction in terms in this context — though the actual thesis and the brief impersonation of Welles are unconvincing.
On the other hand Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago 7 looks like a bizarre nomination for the best picture Oscar because this offering from Netflix, which presented an all-star cast ranging from Sacha Baron Cohen to Michael Keaton, was so obviously just first-rate TV.
It brought alive a highly charged moment of modern American history, one full of drama, which may well fill baby boomers with nostalgia and wonderment for their radical youths. But Citizen Kane it is not.
All of which casts the best director category in the strangest light. It would be weird if Fincher were to win it for Mank even though the direction of that bit of Hollywood anti-history is magisterial, stylish and striking, because the whole of Mank seems such a displaced thing.
I haven’t encountered enthusiasts for Minari, the film about a family of Korean immigrants to the US who battle with the prospect of making good in Reagan’s America, which suggests it might be strange if Lee Isaac Chung won the best director award for it.
On the other hand there is considerable interest in the fact Zhao has been nominated for best director for the very well-made Nomadland, and if she wins she will be the first woman from China to do so.
Promising Young Woman, the film for which Mulligan is nominated for best actress, is directed by Emerald Fennell, whom readers may have seen as Camilla Parker-Bowles in season four of The Crown. It also may interest The Crown devotees that Vanessa Kirby, the young Princess Margaret of the earlier seasons of the show, has been nominated for best actress for Pieces of a Woman and these snowball’s chance in hell films are always worth watching because their nomination reflects some body of aesthetic judgment because they’re not ticking any boxes or offering any belated recognition for earlier triumphs.
This is not to deny that I’m all for Mulligan receiving every kind of recognition for achievements past, present and to come. In Promising Young Woman she’s hunting down sex offenders, which certainly tallies with the spirit of the times; however, Mulligan is a joy to watch whatever she does.
She’s also in a film that flitted through cinemas and settled as a streamer a few months ago that is not up for an Oscar: The Dig, directed by Simon Stone. This is a small film and a semi-documentary one about the finding of the Sutton Hoo burial ship, but it’s an almost flawless piece of work with Ralph Fiennes as the local working man excavator and Mulligan as the woman on whose property the astonishing treasure trove, so elegant in its almost fin-de-siecle magnificence, is found.
The Dig shows that Stone, the man who did Euripides’s Medea in Brooklyn with Rose Byrne, is a superb director of actors.
Fiennes is utterly, sturdily, a decent working man who knows how to uncover a great archaeological find and Mulligan shows, effortlessly and grandly, why she is a successor to Judi Dench and an actress of the same stature.
The woman who came to prominence playing journalist Lynn Barber in An Education is 35 now and in The Dig she does that supremely difficult thing of playing a woman perhaps a dozen years older. She does it flawlessly, poignantly, speaking in pre-war upper-class English to create this portrait of a good woman who knows she’s on to her last stretch.
It’s a performance that reminded me of Wendy Hiller, an actress who won Oscars in her day and who was the original Eliza Doolittle in the first film of Shaw’s Pygmalion with Leslie Howard as Higgins.
Stone and Mulligan are reminders of what has been possible in this strange year of shut cinemas and streamers in a state of rampant if unsteady richness.
I’m not sure that the best piece of drama I saw this year was not the Irish miniseries The Virtues. And when I saw the first episode of Mare of Easttown on Binge the other night with Kate Winslet and Guy Pearce I did get the strongest sense of how the streamers had taken over the precision and moral fierceness we once, maybe a while ago, associated with Hollywood drama.
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