long live independent film yeah
emilia pérez sucks // the brutalist sucks // anora kind of sucks too // elegy for the good movies of 2024 & hope for the spring
My goal with this newsletter is to write about new films as they reach general release, plus some seasonally appropriate commentary on other film events and interests. This week we’ve got some thoughts on the winners and losers of the 2024 Academy Awards. My greatest hope right now is that I’ll get it together enough to put these out every Wednesday, but right now it seems like this is a Thursday newsletter.
The last time I watched the Academy Awards was when James Franco and Anne Hathaway hosted in 2011, a peak I assume will never be topped. I still watch the returns every year and ask my wife too many questions about what happened, so here are my informed takeaways from this year's terrible award season and what the winners and losers mean for the future of movies.
LOSER: DOGSHIT FRENCH MOVIES
While tens of people tuned in to the Oscars on Sunday, I spent the evening watching Emilia Pérez. It's not nice to kick a dog when it's down, but I wasn't prepared for just how bad this movie would be. To focus on its offensiveness is too generous because its ability to offend depends on it being watchable. This thing is shot like a Foundation for a Better Life PSA but without the finesse to make me cry. It’s boring, it’s ugly, it’s impossible to follow. I was most excited to experience the music numbers, but even those were a let down, the moments of schadenfreude cringe few and far between. I've had the “I see, I see, I see” bar from the vaginoplasty song stuck in my head for the past two months, but the revelation from the full viewing was the line "Huelos a la comida - picante! picante!", delivered by a child who, like everyone in this movie, seems to be dangerously parched. If this film's almost-success isn't the result of some sort of payola then my only conclusion is that a majority of people in the film industry are stupid. We've reached a sad place when the most hopeful answer is corruption.
I am confident that Emilia Pérez will live on as a perennial trivia answer. For that, I guess, we’re blessed.
WINNER: DOGSHIT AMERICAN MOVIES
As bad as Emilia Pérez is, it’s been awhile since I’ve been as angry at a film as I was at the The Brutalist. I hated it almost as much as last year's 3-hour-plus offering about a Great Man emigrating to America to design something ugly and experiencing opposition for it. I felt like an insane person watching Oppenheimer as it rolled into its Best Picture win, and I found myself palpably losing my grasp on reality after leaving The Brutalist this weekend, less angry at Brady Corbet for subjecting me to his wreck of a vision and more at all of the supposedly smart people around me who thought it was watchable. Abominable writing, incoherent plotting, and maybe the worst depiction of WASP culture ever put to screen. Who enjoyed Guy Pearce's performance? Apparently everyone, so I guess I have bad taste.
I can force myself to understand why some people can get behind the Zionist bent of this movie, but I don't understand how anyone can forgive the disgusting, stupid, and indefensible rape scene that sets up the plot for its final 45 minutes. I thought the Game of Thrones years brought us to universal agreement that it's basically impossible to justify a rape scene, but social justice is illegal now, so who knows. I resisted the urge to walk out and was rewarded with an epilogue that duck tapes a bow onto this disaster in the form of AI-rendered buildings, a speech by a mute character who has somehow become her own mother!?, and a goofy synth outro that has nothing to do with the film’s aesthetic palate. "It's not the journey; it's the destination" - is the destination Israel? I don't get it. Maybe the rest of the world is smarter than I am. Or maybe just more forgiving.
LOSER: TRANSFORMATIVE MODERN MASTERPIECES THAT WILL SOMEDAY BE DESCRIBED AS SEMINAL
I’m already writing things I’ll later regret and don’t want to get too deep into the Academy’s treatment of Nickel Boys. If you have to snub it for Best Picture, fine. If you really have to give Cinematography to The Brutalist, fine, I concede that too. But ignoring a truly innovative adaptation of a difficult novel in favor of a rewired airport thriller like Conclave has to be the Academy’s greatest offense of the night.
It’s not worth getting mad; RaMell Ross is a real director and doesn't need a thumbs up from Hollywood to know it. I'd say he's going to change cinema, but he's already changed it. We are lucky to be alive in a world that will someday include more of his films.
WINNER: DID YOU HEAR SEAN BAKER WON A RECORD-BREAKING 4 ACADEMY AWARDS?
Sean Baker’s coronation has seemed inevitable since his Palm win, and I assumed it was a safe bet he’d get the Oscar sweep when I learned he had a shot at a record-breaker. The gushing is annoying, but maybe that’s okay. I don't like Anora, but there's something refreshing about how normal it is. It’s grounded in a certain materialism that addresses the world as it actually exists, free from tropes and references and impossible fantasy. It's too long, it's tonally inconsistent, and it's pornographic, but at least these are criticisms I’d lob at life in general. If the result of Sean Baker's ascendency is a bunch of copycats who make movies about normal people in real places caught up in spectacular situations that are filmed in a way that makes me feel alive, then great. In his third acceptance speech, Baker told us how important it is to go to movies in theaters; he didn't explicitly applaud people who write about movies on the internet, but I am going to include myself in the ranks of people doing the important work of supporting the theatrical experience. I'm going to continue buying movie tickets and telling the five people who read my writing to do the same. If all of you in the Academy would please return the favor by once in awhile putting out a movie that isn't total slop, then we can call it even. Anora is a mess and from all accounts doesn’t work as a home-viewing experience, but one thing it’s not is slop. For that I’ll stop my hate from going unchecked for a moment and claim those four trophies as a win for the real world.
LOSER: VICTIMS OF THE CRUELEST MONTH(S)
I needed a palate cleanser after this tortuous weekend and finally got around to watching a real movie, Luca Guadagnino’s Challengers. Fun cinematography, great performances, a tight script, a romp but also an exploration of the lengths we'll go to to create the spectacle we want to see. Everyone loved it, it was in theaters for months, and it centered on an actress who is a real star and should be treated like one. So of course it got nothing.
Challengers isn't alone; all of the 2024 spring releases got screwed. We had a genuine cinema event with Dune: Part Two (March, two small wins), the aforementioned Challengers (March, nada), a new indie horror classic with I Saw the TV Glow (May, nada), and a dystopian masterpiece with Furiosa (May, nada). These are four great movies that hit all the buttons that people supposedly care about (trans identity, Zendaya, IP, poly stuff), all made by Them or rising-Them directors. I am pretty sure all of them will survive 2024 and make a major impression on future generations of movie watchers. No one will remember what month they came out or how many awards they didn’t win.
WINNER: 2025, A YEAR THAT EVERYONE AGREES WILL DEFINITELY BE GREAT
All that is done, a new March is upon us, and there's already stuff coming up that could be next year’s biggest snub. Will Black Bag be Steven Soderbergh’s second good movie of 2025? Is Mickey 17 going to rule? On Becoming a Guinea Fowl almost certainly will. Universal Language is coming to Minnesota this weekend and seems to have been created in a lab to be my favorite movie of the year. Spring is the most interesting season meteorologically, and maybe that’s true cinematically as well. It's hard for me to write that the future is bright and honestly believe it, but cinema is young and we're only just tapping into what it has to offer. A pox on this award season - and so we beat on to the next one.
Thanks for reading this week’s installment of life is disappointing. If you found this recap slightly less disappointing than the rest of your life, consider liking, commenting, I guess pledging me money, or (probably most usefully to everyone involved) subscribing. Subscribing will get you exactly what you get here but sent to your email inbox. You can probably figure out a way to send it straight to your spam so you can make it seem like you’re supporting me without actually having to read anything, which will be great for both of us. See you next week.