A Brief History of People Complaining About the Oscars

“There’s an old saying in show business,” Andy Dwyer once opined, “the show must go wrong. Everything always goes wrong, and you just have to deal with it.” He was, of course, merely misinterpreting the old saying ‘the show must goes on’, but in his way he might well have been referring to the Oscars, the age-old celebration of motion pictures that has never, not once, not a single time in its 94 years, had a show that went right. That’s because no matter what they get right, they get so much more wrong, and whatever is wrong is what people have always wanted to talk about the next day. 

The first couple decades I watched the Oscars, the 90s and the Aughts, there seemed to be a generally agreed-upon social contract that the ceremony would be too long and too stuffy. Oh, there were changes year to year, a different host or a new theme, but those were cosmetic; the spirit and the structure endured. And the viewer and critic complaints during and after were all part of the show in the same way that complaining about referees goes hand-in-hand with watching a sporting event. Now, however, the Oscars have been gripped by the continuous improvement culture of the Instaeverything Twenty-Tens. Those complaints are no longer an ingredient of the Oscars, they are interpreted as feedback, engendering an ongoing obsession with making a big dumb awards show more efficient. 

That efficiency compulsion manifested itself once again last week when the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences announced this year’s telecast at the end of March would shunt eight awards to off-air positions, awarded before the telecast while most of the attendees presumably are still on the red carpet and to be edited in later, including Best Film Editing, which seems to be a delicious joke that went right over the galaxy brained Academy’s head. Mostly no one liked these announced changes; pretty much everyone complained about it. I’d like to claim I will reserve judgement until I see the final product, but why would I? It will be awful! It always is!

To wit:

“Hollywood presented its lite Oscars on Monday evening, a trimmed-down version of the usual affair. The evening’s traditional dawdling was kept to a minimum, as were jokes, idle remarks and lengthy acceptance speeches. And it all went to show that people - talkative, time-wasting, inefficient people - were never the Oscar show’s problem in the first place. If anything, they gave it a personality that this year’s streamlined program lacked.” – The New York Times, 1985

“There’s no magic like movie magic. Even ‘Nightline’ covered the Oscars Wednesday night. Ted Koppel doesn’t do that for the Emmys. But Wednesday night’s show about the movies – the Academy Awards telecast on ABC – was surprisingly devoid of magic. It was on the musty side, and compared with last month’s Grammycast, absolutely moribund.” – The Los Angeles Times, 1989

“The show was determined to honor women as sanctimoniously as possible, provided it could retain the usual quota of dancing girls. And the prevailing tone of condescension was established early on.” – The New York Times, 1993

“This Academy Awards made for a tedious evening by any standard. The show seemed to have already taken place a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away; what reached us was the light of faded stars.” – Slate, 1998

“I remain addled by lack of sleep and troubled by self-loathing for once again having sat sluglike in front of the Oscars for all those pointless hours. And yet who would have missed Whoopi’s last words? Thanks so much, girl, for giving the billion-person worldwide viewing audience permission to make movies. I’m sure Eisenstein, Renoir, Bergman, Kurosawa, Fellini, and so on were all really hobbled by the lack of your imprimatur. Hollywood’s self- absorption has no bounds.” – Slate, 1999

“Squarer than robot shit. All the joy and irreverence of a hotel management seminar. Strictly by the book, and the book was the New Zealand census, apparently, and less interesting. The fearful cadavers of the Academy laid down the law with their spotted old talons and brought down an unbearable evening of easy-to-chew television for the elderly and prim that looked and sounded like a slowed-down version of the Lawrence Welk show without all the stimulating colors.” – Salon, 2004

“Does anyone else feel that they’ve been inoculated against Oscar fever? For your consideration: The Academy Awards have jumped the shark.” – Slate, 2007 (Just now in 2007 the Oscars have jumped the shark? Had Slate not been reading its own coverage?)

“Somewhere in New York, a huge weight has been lifted from David Letterman’s shoulders. As Sunday night’s Academy Awards began, Hugh Jackman’s opening number (pardon me, but did he sing the words ‘pubic hair’? At the Oscars?) has surely obliterated all memory of the Uma-Oprah thing. Not to mention taking years off the lives of the poor folks preparing to launch publicity for ‘X-Men Origins: Wolverine.’ They can only hope those teenage boys were too miffed that ‘Iron Man’ wasn’t nominated to watch.” – The Los Angeles Times, 2009

“Perhaps next time more thought will be put into actually making this a good television event. You can trot out all the big-name actors or directors you’d like, but nobody at home paid $11 to watch. The Academy Awards may be about movies, but it’s a TV show. Nobody feels any regret walking out or snapping off the set if you don’t entertain them. A good host is invaluable. This year, the Oscars hit a new low. Like it fell into a hole.” – The Hollywood Reporter, 2011

“The hedged-bets, have-it-all ways ceremony made Sunday night’s one of the longer and most self-conscious Oscars imaginable. Even the music played to expel overly loquacious winners was arch: the theme of Jaws. But it wasn’t the acceptance speeches that prolonged the night; there were too many stars doing fatuous presentations. And by the time Michelle Obama made a surprise cameo, via satellite, to announce the best picture, it was almost midnight and too late to revive a sagging evening.” – The New York Times, 2013

“The event was, in several senses, a corporate retreat, a gathering-in away from any edge of new ground – a quest for invulnerability in the age of the instant Internet gotcha, even at the risk of an air of mortal stasis.” – The New Yorker, 2014

“The fact that it took so long for the Oscars to get to its grand, bizarro finale speaks directly what needs to be fine tuned and fixed about the telecast.” – Vulture, 2017

“It was, in most ways, settling back into being its normal, boring, pre-Moonlight self. The ceremony was too long, as always, and there were too many bits and too much huffing and puffing over the magic of movies, as always, and the night’s big winners could easily have been improved if the Academy’s choices had just a dash more flavor and risk — again, as always.” – The Ringer, 2018

From the Couch: the 2022 Winter Olympics in Review

When Mexico’s Donovan Carrillo, the first Latin American to compete in the figure skating long program, finished his final routine at the Beijing 2022 Winter Olympics, he blew faux kisses to the COVID-mandated faux crowd. Then he grabbed one of those ephemeral kisses in his hand and planted it on the Olympic rings carved into the ice, evoking his having reached the pinnacle of sport. That’s how the Olympic rings – blue, yellow, black, green, and red – have come to be viewed, as a symbol of the world’s preeminent athletics competition. The rings, though, like any symbol, are eternally malleable. Even now it is generally accepted that the founder of the modern Olympics Pierre de Coubertin intended those five ovals to represent the five competing continents though a dig through history suggests de Coubertin merely meant for the rings, unveiled at the 1920 Antwerp Summer Games, to epitomize the previous five Olympics.

At the Opening Ceremonies for the 2014 Sochi Winter Games one of the five animatronic snowflakes meant to open into the fifth Olympic ring malfunctioned, leaving four rings and a snowflake, emblemizing an Olympics of substandard infrastructure. The Olympic rings became a pretext for “sanitizing the area”, to borrow the egregious code of then-Police Capt. Billy Wedgeworth for displacing homeless, in 1984 L.A. President of the International Olympic Committee (IOC) Thomas Bach might tell you the rings crystallize the Olympic Movement, ostensibly finding a peaceful global harmony through sport. Of course, after the Beijing Opening Ceremonies where the Ukrainian delegation marched past Vladimir Putin, appearing to playact being asleep as cocky indifference to the global mess he’s currently brewing, and host country China tended to its Nothing To See Here policy vis-à-vis human rights abuses by enlisting Uyghur cross-country skier Dinigeer Yilamujiang as one of the last Olympic torch bearers, daring viewers to bury their heads in the sand, even Bach confessed the Olympic Movement was a simple emblem. Maybe to him the Olympic rings signify nothing more than luxury living, which is why Oslo backed out of bidding to host the 2022 Games, refusing to cater to the lavish tastes of Bach (and cronies), engendering his pitiful verbal tap-dancing about political neutrality and the Xi regime in the first place. I try hard to see the Olympic rings as Donovan Carrillo sees them, but too often anymore I see them as they were in Sochi – broken.

Indeed, in declaring “my mission is to use sport as a force for unity”, the American born Freestyle Skier competing for China Eileen Gu might have been reading off an IOC-penned script. In the Big Air Freeski event, Gu admirably, thrillingly lived out the Olympic motto of Faster Higher Stronger in eschewing playing it safe on her last run to secure Silver by busting out an improbable sounding maneuver called a double cork 1620 that she had never landed in competition to win Gold. “I compete for myself,” Gu said afterwards, “and I’m the one who did the work.” It mirrored notably irritable Luxembourg skier Marc Girardelli many Olympic moons ago dedicating his medal to himself, which I always thought was funny if not astute, that despite medal counts and national anthems, the Olympics should emphasize the individuals. Girardelli also viewed the Olympics as less important than World Championships – once hilariously saying he would prefer a nice Napa red to a Gold Medal – and, in its way, he might have been on to something. Whatever Gu’s overriding intent in representing China, and she came across deliberately evasive on that topic, she inevitably became a tool of Chinese propaganda. At the Olympics, you’re never really competing for just yourself.

The Olympic Motto might be Faster Higher Stronger, but the Olympic Oath, taken right there in the shadow of the Olympic rings, references competing “by the rules and in the spirit of fair play” and in 2000 snuck in a line about committing “to sport without doping.” Of course, several years later American Marion Jones admitted using steroids in those very Games, and eight years after Russia was exposed as running a mind-blowingly extensive doping scheme at its own 2014 Sochi Winter Olympics, the Russians were back at it, or the Russian Olympic Committee (ROC), I should say, since the IOC feigned punishment by not allowing the nation to compete under its own flag. And early in Beijing, after helping the ROC secure Gold in the Team Event, Russian figure skater Kamila Valieva was revealed in December to have tested positive for a banned heart medication thought to improve endurance.

Heralded by those who know such things as perhaps the greatest women’s figure skater ever, Valieva’s Gold Medal in the hallowed individual women’s competition seemed as inevitable as that glorious, relentless forward march crescendo in her long program musical score of choice, Ravel’s Bolero. Would that it were so simple. After the positive test came to light, owing to a strange lag in result reportage from the Swedish lab where it was sent, Valieva was provisionally suspended until the Court of Arbitration of Sport reversed that suspension, clearing her to compete, indicating that sanctions under the World Anti-Doping Code were unclear for what it considered a “protected person”, meaning a minor, meaning the 15-year-old Valieva. It was an appallingly ironic turn of phrase – “protected person” – revealing an extraordinary loophole a cynic might say Russia deliberately utilized, her age pointedly leaving her unprotected, at the mercy of her controversial coach Eteri Tutberidze and handlers, reemphasizing an infuriating Olympic epidemic of athletes not competing for the glory of sport but sacrificed at the altar of sporting glory. To not let her compete, the Court explained, when she had no time to mount a legal defense, might cause her “irreparable harm.” They had no idea.

Valieva fell twice in the Long Program, finishing fourth and emotionally coming unglued while she was still skating, her real time trauma allowing the IOC to evade a mess of its own making in failing to truly punish Russia for state-sponsored doping and award a Gold Medal to someone who might eventually have it taken away. Her sobs in the immediate aftermath were so raw and stricken I could hardly watch. But to not watch felt like malpractice; this, I thought, is what the Olympics has wrought. Her teammate Alexandra Trusova won Silver and cried too, but from anger rather than joy. “I hate this sport,” she was quoted as saying. “I won’t go onto the ice again.” And Valieva’s other teammate, Anna Shcherbakova, the Gold Medalist, the nominal winner, just sort of stood there, appearing shell-shocked, tellingly alone, becoming a visual manifestation of a Russian figure skating culture that notoriously churns through these young women one Olympic cycle at a time, useful only in the service of winning Gold and once they have…forgotten. It was breathtakingly brutal, the whole broken system laid out before us. “I need to be alone for several hours just to sit in a quiet room,” Shcherbakova said, “just to ponder, just to think.”

That’s not to suggest Beijing was devoid of moments of grace. The women’s snowboarding slopestyle was a mesmerizing competition of going for broke reminding me that in vain snowboard runs often inspire me the most, like Austria’s Anna Gasser flying so far off the second jump she looked as if she was trying to leap the Grand Canyon, valiantly crashing out. And even though American Julia Marino was in first place, when New Zealand’s Zoi Sadowski-Synnnott surpassed her score, Marino embraced her. At competition’s end, the medal winners and even several others huddled, jumping up and down, cheering for...what? Everything! A celebration of life! When Dutch speedskater Kai Verbij recognized on the penultimate turn in his 1,000 meter race that he did not have enough speed to pass in front of Canadian competitor Laurent Dubreuil going from the outer to inner lane as scheduled lane changes dictate, rather than risking collision and ruining the Canadian’s chance at a medal, Verbij sacrificed his own chance and held up, allowing Dubreuil the space to roar away and win an unlikely Silver. Verbij’s explanation moved my soul: “When I exited the inner lane, I saw his higher top speed and knew: I have to get up, otherwise I would ruin his race and I’m not that kind of asshole.” At curling, American Matt Hamilton accidentally touched a stone in play during a match against the ROC, a violation he copped to it in adhering to the sport’s honor system, though rather than having the stone removed, as was ROC’s right, they let it be. It wasn’t exactly the Christmas Truce of 1914, but with the Russia/Ukraine standoff as a backdrop, it also didn’t feel like nothing. 

In another year at another Winter Games, Team Great Britain’s rivetingly bananas 12-11 semifinal victory over Team Sweden in Women’s Curling, where each team managed to stage a stupefying comeback, would have been a balm. And yet for the first time in my Olympics-watching life, the athletes could not quite redeem this Olympics, every marvelous feat of strength tempered by surrounding context, the whole competition as unforgiving as all that artificial snow, as hollowed out as the COVID bubble in which it was forced to take place. Even the fortnight’s most transcendent event, Nils van der Poel of Sweden overcoming an Olympic record by Patrick Roest from the Netherlands and a two second deficit with three laps left to set another Olympic record and win Gold in the 5,000 meter long track speed skating race, proved fraught. Afterwards, van der Poel ripped his Dutch competitors, claiming they lobbied for advantageous changes to the ice. Whether or not this was true, I have no idea (the Dutch vociferously denied it), but it spoke to a prevailing mood of outrage, underlined in van der Poel courageously calling out China’s violation of human rights. At the same time, in discussing his desire for life away from the ice and unique training methods, like joining the Swedish army for a year, van der Poel also continued the conversation Simone Biles and others began at last year’s Summer Olympics about mental health, floating the idea of retirement and drolly observing “When you are a professional athlete in a sport that sucks as much as speedskating sucks, you’ve got to find a way to make it suck a little less.”

The ROC led the Men’s 4x7.5km Biathlon Relay by considerable margin nearly the whole way…until Eduard Latypov, skiing the last leg, came to the final shoot and missed four of his five shots. Just like that, in a matter of seconds, his team was pushed from first to third, with Norway winning Gold and France the Silver. After the race, Latypov talked about the wind throwing off his rhythm, waiting for the gusts to settle but knowing he must work fast. “I tried to change things up,” he said sadly, “but here it was more of a psychological issue.” American skier Mikaela Shiffrin could relate. In an interview with the AP’s Howard Fendrich before Beijing, Shiffrin confessed that even if memories of the Olympics are “worth it”, the Olympics themselves are “not really an enjoyable process overall.” As if proving herself prophetic, Shiffrin, among the world’s best and rarely prone to skiing out of events, skied out of three. After missing a gate in the slalom, her best race, she sat down in the snow off to the side of the course for 20 minutes. 

There was some consternation about how long NBC kept its camera trained on Shiffrin, but to me, it was the most potent image of the Games. There were microphones down below all waiting to ask her what happened, and she would eventually answer, graciously and revealingly. But first, Shiffrin, like so many athletes in Beijing, like so many of us the world over in this endlessly weird and upsetting era, just needed a minute. 

Friday's Old Fashioned: People, Hopes, Medals (1960)

The 1960 Winter Olympics in California’s Squaw Valley, since renamed Palisades Tahoe due to the derogatory nature of the original name toward indigenous Americans, were put in place before the place in question existed. Instead, the bid was sold as an undeveloped site that could be built into a Winter Olympics site, one that would subsequently be transformed into a premier winter resort area near Lake Tahoe, frequented by celebrities. Indeed, “People, Hopes, Medals”, the official documentary of the 1960 Games, might have done better to add one word to that succinct title: Stars. I’m not just talking about Hollywood So & Sos like Jayne Mansfield, Tony Curtis, and Bing Crosby, all glimpsed on camera checking out the quadrennial sporting spectacle and foreshadowing Palisades Tahoe’s shimmering future, but the athletes themselves. Director Herbert Meisel likes images of the athletes not merely in competition but just before, looking right into the camera with big, beaming smiles, framing them like catalogue cover models. When we briefly end up behind the scenes as skiers wax their skis, the narrator notes that this waxing process is almost too mysterious to understand and then forgoes trying to understand it at all. Instead the camera finds a female skier applying lipstick while looking in a hand mirror and getting ready, I guess, for her close-up. 

These Games were in America, but “People, Hopes, Medals” was a (West) German production. That might well be why the very first athlete we see compete is downhill skier from Deutschland and why we even briefly hop across the ocean to Munich where the German Nordic Combined winner Georg Thoma triumphantly returns home. Then again, he was the first non-Nordic to win the event and perhaps that was worth lingering over. Even so, the movie feels American in its presentation, the dueling German narrators – Heinz Fischer-Karwin and Heinz Maegerlein – frequently evoking “The stars are out!” narrators of the Oscar red carpet in their breezy tenor. They also crack jokes, wondering aloud at one point what event they should segue to next. (They even sometimes poke fun at spectators and competitors in a way that I wouldn’t hesitate to call mean-spirited.) There are other Olympic documentaries that have nonchalant passages, like 1956’s “Rendez-Vous a Melbourne”, but rarely one that is as thoroughly nonchalant as “People, Hopes, Medals”, sort of assuming the perspective of the spectator we see in the shadow of a ski jump platform smoking a cigarette, playing it cool.

That relaxed manner is mostly expressed through music. Here and there Meisel lets the soundtrack drop out to revel in the sounds of the game, like the less famous U.S. hockey upset of the U.S.S.R., where prominent boos can be heard from the crowd, though to what point and purpose is never exactly explained. But that’s an outlier, as if fearful such vérité will mellow the buzz, instead opting for a nigh omnipresent score of orchestral big band music that renders so much Olympian bravado, from the ski slopes to the skating rink, as carefree. When we see cross country skiers huffing and puffing, or windy conditions at the top of the downhill run, the dissonance between the image on screen and the jauntiness of the score is profound. Honestly, I kind of loved this jovial approach, especially in light of our recently (understandably) dour Olympics, to feel like I had just wandered into a full length 1960s newsreel recounting our Olympic athletes like so many radiant silver screen gladiators. In one avant-garde touch, Meisel will from time to time cut to a reoccurring image of fireworks. “Stars, all of them stars,” the narrator says each time, equating an athlete’s preceding feat of strength with a comet streaking across the sky. 

Ray of Light: EW Edition

Yesterday we eulogized Entertainment Weekly as a print publication by taking a walk through its Fall Movie Preview covers during the aughts and the twenty-tens. But let’s add a postscript to that eulogy with my all time Top 5 Favorite EW Covers, as best as I can remember them anyway, tracking from a resplendent pun to an incredible for all the wrong (right) reasons promotional still to an indelible homage to Movie Star elegance at the graphite 10 million mile level to her eminence. Long live EW.

 

Another Walk Down Entertainment Weekly Fall Movie Preview Lane

Last week the truly grim-sounding entity IAC Dotdash announced that the six magazine titles it had acquired from Meredith Corp would cease print publication. That included Entertainment Weekly, the pop culture periodical that bloomed in the 90s and became essential reading for so many of us wannabe cinephiles, Lisa Schwarzbaum and Owen Gleiberman becoming the fourth and fifth movie critics I read semi-regularly after Roger Ebert and the Richards, Corliss and Schickel. EW’s discontinuing print is for all the usual reasons too disheartening to discuss (even as I post, these malevolent bastards continue bleeding out my hometown newspaper The Des Moines Register), which is why I would prefer to look reality straight in the eye and deny it, retreating into cozy, pitiful nostalgia. After all, reminiscing what’s lost and will never be again is at the top of my Skills on the resume, especially where Entertainment Weekly is concerned. 

Last year we took a trip down memory lane involving EW Fall Movie Preview covers of the past and I thought, why not pour one out for Entertainment Weekly by picking back up where we left off, at the turn of century. It turned out to be a wild ride. 

2000

I seem to remember Tom Hanks showing up at the 2000 Oscars with the initial scraggly outlines of that beard and making everyone wonder what was up with his new look. But no, it was just the beginning of his “Cast Away” beard, back in those halcyon days when a movie about Tom Hanks being alone could land the cover of the foremost pop culture magazine rather than get buried on one of the 119 streaming services. 

2001

Talk about a time capsule. Do the kids remember this celebrity relationship? Do people my age remember this celebrity relationship? Now, thank goodness, Pe and Tom are with their true soulmates: respectively, Javier Bardem and “Mission: Impossible” stunts, the way the universe always intended.

2002

Marty gets the EW Fall Movie Preview hammer over LOTR, inconceivable today. Plus, take note of Reese Witherspoon is up there in the window on the right-hand side for “Sweet Home Alabama” which will become important in a moment. 

2003

In retrospect it seems odd that Russell Crowe’s “Master and Commander” never got a sequel, but in retrospect doesn’t that also seem just glorious? This impeccably crafted, joyously watchable action-adventure as a one-off? 

2004

Pour one out for the Oscar campaigns no one remembers. 

2005

Three years after Reese was in the small window at the top for “Sweet Home Alabama” she was upgraded to the cover. This was her “Walk the Line” year, after all, winning the Oscar and coming on the heels of pulling down a cool $15 million for the second “Legally Blonde 2”, on top of the world, looking down on creation. 

2006

Uh oh. Signs of Intellectual Property. But then, Daniel Craig as James Bond was as big a reason for the cover here as just James Bond.

2007

Sometimes you don’t recognize the tipping point until you’re past it. Because it’s not just Reese here, getting the Fall Preview cover for the second time in three years. It’s how they pitch this issue with no movie names and just names of the starring actors. Angie and Will and Jodie and Brad and Nicole and Patrick Dempsey (wait, what, how’d he sneak in there?) and Julia and Denzel and Keira. Little did we know, the sun was setting on the stars. 

2008

Because here comes that Wizard, what’s his name. I mean, really. Kate & Leo couldn’t get the cover? KATE & F***ING LEO??? This is the end. My only friend, the end. 

2009

True story: every time I see “Twilight” showing on some tv channel I didn’t even realize I had I think to myself, “Oh, the one with Paul Newman and Gene Hackman (and Reese Witherspoon)?” It is never that “Twilight.”

2010

Now as we enter the twenty-tens, the wheels truly fall off, following “Twilight” with “Harry Potter” again while Reese is shunted back to the little window and the era of endlessly trying to sell us Ryan Reynolds as something approximating a Movie Star has begun. 

2011

And now we go back to “Twilight”, just trading covers with “Harry Potter” at this point, and Rooney Mara can’t even get the little window as “The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo.” 

2012

The “Twilight” saga again??? Are you kidding me??? Take one autumn off!!! His majesty, Daniel Day-Lewis, was The Great Emancipator!!! That didn’t warrant a cover???!!!

2013

Phew. We really needed a reset. This’ll get the job done, like a parody of an EW Fall Movie Preview over as the real EW Fall Movie Preview cover. 

2014

This isn’t just a parody of EW Fall Movie Preview covers, this is a parody of wedding photos. Savage.

2015

Well, obviously. I mean, this feels more like a Summer Movie Preview issue but they released it when they released it and the golden goose was back. And though they return to just the names of the movie stars down there in the bottom right-hand corner, rendering those names in the same colors as the snow and the lightsaber just seems to make them fade into the background.

2016

Right here, right now, in February of 2022, I have no idea what this movie even is. 

2017

Hardly.

2018

Gaga & Bradley became the hit of the awards circuit in 2019 when they kept cosplaying as Bruce & Patti in the “Tougher Than the Rest” video, but man...this cover goes to show that chemistry was already in full effect. 

2019

Don’t Try and Make Me Grow Up (Before My Time) by New Order. 

Licorice Pizza

The most prominent motif in Paul Thomas Anderson’s not-quite-coming-of-age movie “Licorice Pizza” is people in motion. When teenage Gary Valentine (Cooper Hoffman) is briefly spirited away by the cops, twentysomething Alana Kane (Alana Haim) races after him. When Alana is forgotten by some half-mad Hollywood actor during a crazed golf course motorcycle stunt, Gary sprints through the fairways toward her. This running, in their faces and their movement, is often vigor verging on mania. Being young, after all, means being overwhelmed with an energy you don’t always know how to apply, a sensation the freewheeling “Licorice Pizza” embodies, as if Anderson had stopped his own “Boogie Nights” after the first hour-and-a-half. And if the narrative can frequently feel like its spinning circles, not exactly building to something substantial, if it had, I’m not sure it would have been right.

Gary meets Alana at this school on picture day where she is working as a photographer’s assistant and sashaying through the breezeway in a miniskirt, recounted in a tracking shot framing Alana Kane as much as Alana Haim like a movie star. This deliberate Hollywood sensation is furthered in Gary being a child actor, fancying himself a movie star, just sort of slipping into the shot and bantering with her as if he’s reciting dialogue from a screenplay inside his head. She meets him on his wavelength by essentially improvising as a scene partner, their chemistry emitting a conspicuous flirtatious charge. That’s why it makes sense when she accepts his offer to meet him at a mahogany-lined steakhouse, a distinctly grown-up location at once at odds with his age but in right line with his air. “What are your plans?” he asks, establishing his insistently adult persona and simultaneously underlining her lack of one. 

He’s 15, but acts older; she’s 25, but acts younger. It’s as if he’s longing for the promised land of adulthood without realizing it will eventually harden into Alana’s lack of a rudder, laying bare the eternal conundrum of youth being wasted on the young. That horizon line of adulthood is a hazy thing in “Licorice Pizza.” Gary might be in high school but homework comes across less valuable in this environment than hustle. Indeed, as his child acting star wanes in auditions gone awry, he re-imagines himself as a merchant, going into the waterbed business with Alana, born from a groovy salesman pitching such aqua mattresses as “the future”, a wry evocation of what constitutes the future to a horny teen. This would all be unintentionally ridiculous if not for Hoffman’s impeccably purposeful ridiculous braggadocio, though what lurks beneath the character is less clear, his surname underlining how lovingly and uncritically Anderson views him. Alana is more fully realized, which is to stay she struggles with self-realization. Look at the way she hunches over the wheel of her car when she drives, you can practically feel this pent-up aggression rising off her. She has a fury to burn with her lot in life, but Haim never lets it shade into bitterness. There is too much joy, like the whole world is her canvas, and when she makes a few marks she doesn’t like, she just tears off the page and starts again. 

That feels true to “Licorice Pizza’s” lack of a straight-forward plot, built out of incidents, Anderson taking his cue from the movie’s parody of William Holden, Jack Holden (Sean Penn, reminding us how he can excel at having fun and having fun with himself), who insists on recklessly recreating one of his movie stunts at a golf country club. Sometimes the whole movie just seems to exist as an opportunity for Anderson to dare himself, like the sequence in which circumstances force Alana, with Gary riding shotgun, to pilot a truck that has run out of gas in neutral through the hilly streets, the lack of music, immense sound design and tense editing create an unexpectedly, deliciously thrilling moment. In a way, “Licorice Pizza” becomes a kind of antithesis of Stephane Lafleur’s “You’re Sleeping, Nicole.” Filmed in a dreamy black and white, that 2014 French Canadian indie was about a young woman on the cusp of adulthood sleepwalking through her summer, the conclusion emblemizing the emotional geyser that has been rumbling within. “Licorice Pizza”, on the other hand, in Anderson’s 70mm sepia tones is the exact opposite, a summer that is all action, recurring explosions of emotion. 

That’s not to suggest Anderson is merely looking through nostalgia-tinted glasses. The 1973 Oil Crisis puts a significant dent in Gary’s waterbed trade and though initially there is a kind of vintage royal glow to Jack Holden, his increasingly deranged behavior gradually mutes that glow. It’s a parody of Old Hollywood giving way to a parody of New Hollywood as a coked up, crazed mess in Bradley Cooper’s even more deranged turn as Jon Peters, this all-of-a-sudden, small subplot becoming a virtual monster movie where Gary and Alana, having delivered a waterbed to his residence, can’t escape him. This is the scene triggering their getaway in the truck running on empty, which concludes with Alana sitting by herself on a curb, watching Gary and his adolescent compatriots celebrate their survival by waving gas can nozzles in the manner of their genitalia in the middle of the street. 

Like Alana telling a pack of teenagers to “Fuck off”, it’s one of several moments when you see Alana weighing her inability (refusal) to grow up, punctuated by her noticing an advertisement for a local politician, Joel Wachs (Benny Safdie), running for Mayor, impulsively deciding right then and there to join his campaign. In another movie this would have triggered Alana finding herself, as the saying goes. Instead it climaxes with her character dispatched on something of a melancholy public relations quest and another character, pointedly a man, telling her who she is, what she is, mirroring a similar moment with Jack Holden. In truth, Alana does not know herself any better than she does at the movie’s start, revealed in Haim’s demeanor, and leading to the movie’s conclusion which comes on as much a balloon bursting as it does a hot air balloon floating away. 

Who Should Be the Oscar Host(s)?

The upcoming Oscars, Rebecca Keegan reported yesterday for The Hollywood Reporter, will not only have a host but three hosts, as if making up for the last three years in which they had none, a true galaxy brain overcorrection. “This year’s Oscars,” writes Keegan, “will be a three-act show with each one-hour act emceed by a different host, according to two sources with knowledge of the telecast planning.” Keegan continues: “the multi-host strategy helps address the biggest deterrents for potential emcees — the time commitment of preparing for the lengthy show and the often unflattering glare of the spotlight that the high-pressure gig can shine on entertainers.” So, who should the hosts be?

Well, obviously they should be Brody, Hooper, and Quint, you don’t need me to tell you that. Brody will get hour one, of course, warning everybody that this the Oscar show is going to run over its scheduled time if we don’t cut performances of Best Original Song (which will not be cut). Hooper will come on for hour two and tries to use rational thinking to condense the categories and pre-scripted bits to keep the show on time until Quint comes on for over three, goes overboard and ends up dragging the show into hours four, five and six. 

No good? What about Eddie Adams, Dirk Diggler, and Todd Parker? Eddie Adams gets hour one and Dirk Diggler gets hour two (with Reed Rothchild as his Ed McMahon for both hours) until Todd Parker takes the third hour hostage.

Too dark? Let’s go the “Bachelorette” route instead. Caplan’s Gena will get hour one, because she’d be aces with the wisecracks, and Fisher’s Katie will take hour two into crazytown, and Dunst’s Regan will bring things back under control in hour three and wrap up the show up at exactly 11 PM ET (10 PM CT) by telling the Best Picture producer trying to give a speech that it’s time to go because “nobody gives a shit about your agent.” 

Still no? Fine. Then it has to be these three. That’s my final offer.

Friday's Old Fashioned: One Light, One World (1992)

The 1992 Albertville Winter Olympics were the first held in France since the Grenoble Games of 1968. Those were recounted in a pair of films, including Claude Lelouch’s “13 Days in France”, which is not merely my favorite Olympics documentary but one of my favorite movies period. It was wordless, dependent almost exclusively on music, editing, aesthetic. In “One Light, One World”, on the other hand, the hero of the Grenoble Olympics Jean Claude-Killy appears throughout in one of those sit-down, talking head interviews belying not only the monotonous tack that this movie takes but the disappointing, if not maddening, overall devolution of Olympics docs. Carlos Saura’s 1992 Summer Olympic movie was an arty exception, but by this point, his approach had become the outlier and the Albertville version the norm. Indeed, “One Light, One World” opens with an apologetic disclaimer of its own inconsistent visual quality, explaining the production was culled from 16mm film as well as standard definition video and images from television broadcasts. If Olympic athletes have continually pushed the boundaries of their respective sports, the accompanying Olympics movie have done the inverse, reducing themselves down to virtually nothing. 

The title “One Light, One World” evokes how, despite the French Alps setting, the movie is not French, either in language or style, directed by, as near as I can discern, a trio of Americans, none of whom have done much directing before or since. But the movie also manages to shoehorn in a bit about how politics have no place at the Olympics, brought home in a monologue by American bobsledder Herschel Walker citing the camaraderie of competitors at the Olympic village as the kind too often besmirched by the intrusion of affairs of various states. Mr. Walker, who finished seventh in the 2-man competition, had no idea what was coming 30 years later. The events themselves, generally recounted by switching between basic archival footage and talking head interviews, not only is less than thrilling but puts into perspective just how great Bud Greenspan was at this approach in his “16 Days of Glory” movies. If they were frequently (overly) epic in length (his movie on the 1988 Calgary Winter Games is nearly three and a half hours), he excelled at creating comprehensive and dramatic retellings with minimalist fuss. “One Light, One World”, on the other hand, is pared so far down it reduces its stories to mere highlight shows with little care of what makes the respective sport go. Bonnie Blair’s win in the 500m speed skating event feels like a condensed spot for the nightly news. The Gold and Silver Medal winning Austrian sisters Doris and Angelika Neuner in Women’s Luge mention the captivating nature of the sport’s speed though the movie is content simply to know this, unable to demonstrate what makes the speed captivating through movie language.

The narrator is the one note of distinction. If Greenspan utilized dry, just-the-facts narration of people like David Perry and Will Lyman, “One Light, One World” employs the voice of none other than the Movie Trailer Guy himself: Don LaFontaine. Perhaps at the time LaFontaine was not so much of a pop culture phenomenon, but his deep, dramatic voice was used to sell so many middling thrillers for the reason and its presence here is distracting. Undoubtedly, the words he is tasked with reading are of no help. “There is time to contemplate the ride ahead. And then there is no time…except to go.” That sounds like a bad movie trailer. It is better, though, than the abundance of inspirational platitudes, about “forever fuel(ing) the flame with their desire to be something more” and such, which broaches the territory of inadvertent self-parody. So does the musical score. All sleek, soulless synthesizers and drum loops, it sounds like leftover takes from some 80s video game. (Occasionally mixing the score with event play-by-play only furthers that sensation.) Alberto Tomba, La Bomba himself, the Italian slalom rock star whooshing down a mountain to such sonic dross is akin to Michael Jordan slam dunking in “Come Fly With Me” to the improbable sounds of Yanni. When the new sport of Freestyle Skiing is recounted, LaFontaine notes it was “Born out of the revolutionary American lifestyle of the 1960s.” I laughed out loud. Freestyle skiing might have been but “One Light, One World” was not. 

Some Drivel...in Capsule: Playing Catch Up

As previously explained lamented in other posts, I got through my time in the Roman COVID hotel through year-end screeners. I watched a lot. And I watched some more when I returned, though my mind was still foggy (not that the fog has necessarily lifted). Writing reviews of all these, it just feels like too much, except perhaps in special circumstances. But I did jot down notes at the end of each viewing to preserve my initial reaction and mindset, at least, and so will, as writer brain fog permits, type up some drivel on those movies in capsule form. We continue our catch-up drivel today with “Tick, Tick... BOOM!” (yes, but no), “King Richard” (yes, but no), and “Being the Ricardos” (no, but yes).

Tick, Tick… BOOM! I can’t speak to Andrew Garfield’s singing but there’s this thing he does as the late Jonathan Larson where he sort of looks around the room like he’s sizing up how it and the accompanying event taking place within might come across on the stage. That’s true to director Lin-Manuel Miranda’s vision of an artist drawing from real life, which is accentuated in the movie’s hyperkinetic editing by Myron Kerstein and Andrew Weisblum, pogoing from real life to the stage and back again, as if for an artist there are no boundaries between the two. This is not just Miranda literalizing the freewheeling nature of Larson’s creative process but deepening his real world foibles, such as in the remarkable “Therapy”, where Garfield’s air seems to transform self-satisfaction at broadcasting his relationship issues to the whole world into something truly thrilling. Yet even if moments like this suggest how “Tick, Tick… BOOM!” does not shy away from the mess that Larson leaves in his wake from devoting so much to his craft, it also winds up in a rush to pardon Larson for such sins. Maybe that doesn’t matter in real life. It might not! But the movie thinks it does and doesn’t do the necessary work just as Garfield does not either to make us believe he’s worthy of it.

King Richard. Less about tennis superstars Serena and Venus Williams than their father Richard (Will Smith) who molded them, King Richard both benefits and suffers from hindsight. Though it emits familiar notes of inspirational sports movies past, Richard Williams is not simply a conventional underdog but a black man rattling the cages of a lily-white system. In another movie, the Williams Sisters’ coach Rick Macci would have been the main character, but there, played by Jon Bernthal with great comic exasperation, he is forced to ride the Richard Williams wave like everyone else. And even if “King Richard” never quite shapes Venus and Serena into true individual personalities, it also makes clear how the narrative essentially gets handed off to them at movie’s end with a stalling strategy utilized against Venus in her second professional match neatly evokes how she is now essentially on her own. Even so, a tougher movie is kicking to get out, suggested in Aunjanue Ellis’s stellar turn as the tennis wunderkinds’ mother Oracene Price, evoking Sarah Paulson in The Post in so much as she transcends The Supportive Archetype. Though she challenges Richard, the movie (pre-approved by Serena and Venus) elides his true thorniness, and not because it wants to be a fairytale. His showboating for the camera and the press is mentioned but never seen; he is accused of mistreatment of his daughters but the accusers are just narrative bowling pins to be knocked down. We know how this all turns out, so he can’t be wrong, only right, steering clear of dimension that Smith, while charismatic, can’t add on his own. He’s not so much a King as a Prophet. 

Being the Ricardos. Aaron Sorkin’s week in the life of “I Love Lucy” is lit so dark that the movie feels less true to the high-key lighting of so many sitcoms than the dive bar William Frawley (J.K. Simmons) frequents, rendering the “Being the Ricardos” as something akin to Sorkin’s own “Studio 60 on Sunset Strip” during sweeps week, cinema as prestige TV. On the other hand, Sorkin is not making a movie about “I Love Lucy” the same way he is not making a movie about Lucy Ricardo but Lucille Ball, condensing several real world events that afflicted both Ball and her husband and co-star Desi Arnaz (Javier Bardem) throughout their careers into one small window. This is about how the sausage gets made and the sacrifices a performer makes in commitment to her craft. And it’s why Kidman is not really funny and not really supposed to be funny. She’s channeling Michael Jordan in “The Last Dance” as much as anyone, her darting eyes making clear she takes in everything on and off the set, exhorting everyone else on the show to keep up with her, compartmentalizing right before our very eyes as real world problems intrude. Indeed, “Being the Ricardos” ends on an odd note in which J. Edgar Hoover, of all people, gets to play the hero, as if Lucille Ball can only earn a happy ending once all her edges have been sanded off. It’s weirdly triumphant though Kidman lets in sadness nonetheless, that the price of fame and artistic freedom is whittling away all sense of a private persona until only the public one remains. 

Some Drivel On...the Oscar Nominations

The buzz on this year’s Oscar nominations, at least in circles where people pay (too much) attention to such things, was not good. I mean, there is always concern over what will not get nominated as opposed to what will, but that worry seemed even more pronounced, fatalistic even, the same people who would have taken to the streets of Hollywood Boulevard if Jared Leto had been nominated for “House of Gucci” acting as vaingloriously tragic as Jared Leto in “House of Gucci.”  (Leto was not nominated.) I’m not sure what was causing the doom and gloom. The other awards nominees and winners, I guess, or the general sense of melancholy that has defined the Pandemic, or the relentlessness of Lady Gaga performatively campaigning how much she wanted an Oscar causing all the people who performatively Don’t Care About The Oscars to perform that much harder and really bum themselves out. Then the nominations broke early on Tuesday morning and devolved into a mess so fascinating that even conventional nominations – J.K. Simmons for “Being the Ricardos”! Judi Dench for “Belfast”! – seemed shocking. It was sort of fun, and it allowed for a brief reprieve of the dire forecasts, at least until 12 months from now when we repeat this whole process and everyone gets pre-outraged again. (See all nominations here.)

The emergent push and pull between the old guard and new guard of Academy voters that has become paramount the last few years was on display once again. Although Kenneth Branagh’s critically pooh-pooed “Belfast” was grandfathered in for Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay nominations so, too, did Ryusuke Hamaguchi’s “Drive My Car” earn nods in the same categories (and Best International Feature). A three-hour Japanese adaptation of Uncle Vanya? What is the world coming to? (Something good?) Guillermo del Toro’s remake of the 1940s noir “Nightmare Alley” and Steven Spielberg’s “West Side Story” redux might have been a box office flops from being pitted against Marvel’s “Spider Man: No Way Home” but the former films earned a Best Picture nod and the latter did not. That push away from the mainstream might elicit out of touch accusations from the sort of people who lament each year that only movies they have never heard of get nominated. I don’t know, when I was young buck watching movies the Oscars were exciting because they made me watch movies I never would have thought of watching in the first place. “Nightmare Alley” is streaming on HBOMax and fellow nominees “Dune” and “King Richard” are streaming there too. “Power of the Dog” is streaming on Netflix as is fellow nominee “Don’t Look Up.” And whether such streaming availability is an indicator of our present or a sign of our future, in this moment, they are all so easy to watch! (“Drive My Car”, on the other hand, is not.) Speaking of which, “Power of the Dog” earned the most nominations of any movie, 12, including Jane Campion for Best Director, and you have to wonder if it has emerged as Best Picture favorite which would be a fairly rad winner. 

In Best Director, Campion, Branagh, and Hamaguchi were joined by Spielberg and Paul Thomas Anderson for “Licorice Pizza.” Denis Villeneuve, who directed “Dune”, did not earn a nomination despite his film being up for Best Picture. There was speculation on social media that Villeneuve was eschewed because the Academy was waiting to nominate him for Dune Part 2 which reminds me of the late William Goldman laughing away such narrative bunkums. To sort of paraphrase him, do you really think all the Academy voters all got together at The Ivy and collectively chose to wait on voting for Denis?

Will Smith seems the front-runner for Best Actor with “King Richard” and though my “Card Counter” loving heart was disappointed in Oscar Isaac being passed over, seeing Denzel Washington nominated in the same category for playing Macbeth in the same year as Smith is really pretty cool. Let’s try to savor it. 

Best Actress is a loaded field with topliners Penélope Cruz, Olivia Colman, and Nicole Kidman. In getting nominated for “Eyes of Tammy Faye”, Jessica Chastain earned the annual slot for the Movie We Are All Pretty Sure Does Not Really Exist. Kristen Stewart, who had openly declared that she did not care one iota whether she was nominated, wound up nominated for “Spencer” after being written off by everyone while Lady Gaga, who had essentially declared that she wanted an Oscar more than anything in the world (for right now), was not nominated for “House of Gucci.” Does that mean the Oscars are finally starting to go punk rock? That if you express disdain for the whole affair you are more likely to be nominated than if you ply voters with prime rib luncheons and free booze? I can’t say for certain but I certainly hope whoever is producing the Oscar telecast is already conspiring with Lady Gaga to do a bit midway through the show where she tries to show up unannounced on the red carpet and is turned away by an usher. 

In the end, reactions to Oscar nominees are just a swarm of individual desires and predilections come to life or denied which is really all ‘snubs’ are about. If you liked the movie or the performance or the costume design and it wasn’t nominated, the movie or performer or costume designer in question was snubbed; if you didn’t like the movie or the performance or the costume design and it wasn’t nominated, the Oscars got it ‘right.’ So let me just formally say right here that as a Kirsten Dunst stan for going on 23 years, who has seen every movie she’s made (except for “Woodshock”, still gotta get to that one), her first ever nomination in the Best Supporting Actress for “Power of the Dog” might be the happiest an Oscar nod has ever made me. Maybe it doesn’t sound like it. I confess, my enthusiasm for Oscar Nomination Day and even the Oscars themselves has waned over the years for a variety of factors. Once upon a time I might have poured a Tuesday Morning mimosa in celebration. As it was, I just checked the nominations when I woke up, saw her name, and went about my morning. But still, it was a pretty wonderful morning. 

I’m not crying, you’re crying.

2021 Random Awards

As always, her eminence Nicole Kidman is here to present Cinema Romantico's annual awards of cinematic randomness. 

Line / Line Reading of the Year: “Let’s get this over with so we can go home and eat banana cake.” – Nicolas Bro, “Riders of Justice”

Line of the Year runner-up: “It was another time, it was another Ennui. Must be nearly six months ago, I guess.” – Timothée Chalamet, “The French Dispatch.”

Line Reading of the Year runner-up: “Fuck off, teenagers!” – Alana Haim, “Licorice Pizza”

Monologue of the Year: “Precisely! He’s a Renaissance master of the highest order! He mines the same vein as Piperno Pierluigi when he illuminated the Christ before God’s heavenly altar in 1565! ‘Maw’! Nobody has an eye for things nobody has ever seen like ‘Maw’ Clampette of Liberty, Kansas! We should be ashamed to even gather in her presence! Why the fuck did she say fresco?” – Adrien Brody, “The French Dispatch.” Part of this mini-monologue’s success is the baroque verbiage, certainly, and how it hilariously emphasizes the concluding ‘fuck’ that much more. But it’s also Brody’s delivery. If his art dealer character is realizing the masterwork in question is, unfortunately, painted into a prison wall, negating its commercial potential, the way he does not even give “Why the fuck did she say fresco?” a split-second to breathe after everything he has already said makes it seems like he is recognizing in his mind midway through his mini-monologue that she said fresco but he still needs to get everything else out for his own sake before he acknowledges that recognition. 

Best Shot: tie between, respectively, “Passing” and “The Card Counter.” In the first shot, director Rebecca Hall and her cinematographer Eduard Grau transform the shop from which Tessa Thompson’s Irene has just been passing for a white person into The Sunken Place (coinage: Jordan Peele) while the second shot, the final image in “The Card Counter”, is Paul Schrader returning once again to the end of his beloved “Pickpocket” (1959) but elevating it into the mystic. 

Best Craft Services: Toast, “Get Back.” How much toast and marmalade did those four lads from Liverpool go through during recording anyway? 

Best Accent: Riley Keough, “Zola.” I want to be clear: Keough’s so-called blaccent in Janicza Bravo’s sensational film is good in terms of quality, not in terms of moral righteousness. When it comes to the latter, Keough’s accent is pure evil, which is what it’s intended to be, embodying appropriation rather than merely appropriating. It is so revealingly terrifying, in fact, that it seems to have frightened virtually every film awards voting body from acknowledging that Keough’s bravura turn even exists. 

The Annual I Like My Brandy In A Glass Award (presented to the best drink in a movie): Suicide, “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.” God tier throwaway joke. 

The Annual “Now We Can Eat” Award (presented to the best meal in a movie): tie between the pan-roasted squab, chanterelle mushrooms, pommes Anna, and huckleberry jus that Nicolas Cage’s character serves in “Pig” as both a peace offering and conscious rejection of violence and the Shabbat dinner in “Licorice Pizza” that comically reminds us sometimes meals are not about food at all but expressing bewilderment at your daughter’s choice of boyfriend. 

The Annual Penélope Cruz Award (presented to the best hair in a movie): Willem Dafoe, “The Card Counter.” One look at that hair and you know everything you need to know about Major John Gordo.

The Annual French Connection Award (presented to the best car chase in a movie): “Licorice Pizza.” Like the award’s namesake, Paul Thomas Anderson impressively only needed a single vehicle (and no gas!) to mount a spectacular car chase. 

The Annual Muslin Sock Award (presented to the best special effects in a movie): “The Green Knight.”In this, the CGI age, so often special effects that are supposed to be of our world never feel that way, too artificial, too far away. When The Green Knight enters King Arthur’s hall, however, he is in the room, gloomy realism mingling with ancient magic in a way that is as fabulous as it is foreboding. 

The Annual “Isn’t This a Lovely Day (To Be Caught in the Rain)” Award (presented to the best dance in a movie): Ed Harris, “The Lost Daughter.” There’s this thing guys do, guys that specifically can’t dance, where they try to dance, sort of, for awhile, and then give up and just start enthusiastically jumping up and down. And in the most unlikely “Livin’ on a Prayer” scene in movie history, Ed Harris nails this faux-dance. 

The Annual Keira Knightley Green Dress Award (presented to the best piece of clothing in a movie): George Harrison’s Psychedelic Boots, “Get Back.” See Above. Also, honorable mention to the entire wardrobe of Glyn Johns in the same film.  

The Annual Ruby Slippers Award (presented to the best prop in a movie): Angelina Jolie’s Ray-Bans®, “Those Who Wish Me Dead.” Those sunglasses will forever mark my glorious 2021 return to the movies (before Delta & Omicron). 

The Annual “Then He Kissed Me” Award (presented to the best use of pop music in a movie): “Everyday People” by Sly and the Family Stone in “Summer of Soul.” Bit of a cheat, perhaps, because this is a performance in a concert documentary rather than soundtracking a moment or scene in a fictional film. But in this case, the judges (me, me & me) have ruled an exception is in order. Because man, the organ at the start is asking the congregation to rise and the congregation, baby, is America. This, I realized in the moment, should be our National Anthem. “They simply seem,” wrote Wesley Morris of the sequence, “sent from an American future that no one has to mourn.” Listen Here

The Annual “Best of My Love” Award (presented to the second best use of pop music in a movie): “Stumblin’ In” by Chris Norman & Suzie Quatro in “Licorice Pizza.” Paul Thomas Anderson honors the 1970s as the height of movie theme songs by incorporating an actual 1970s song as what essentially functions as his main characters’ unofficial theme. Listen Here

The Annual “Nowhere Fast” Award (presented to the best original song in a movie): “My Heart Will Go On” by The Math Club in “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.” I am no doubt certain that a remix of a preexisting song, one that has already won an Oscar no less, would not qualify for Best Original Song under the arduous, asinine Academy Award criteria. But this is Cinema Romantico. And in Kristen Wiig and Annie Mumolo commissioning their very own “My Heart Will Go On” remix for an unlikely party hearty sequence between two middle aged ladies from Soft Rock, Nebraska and a mixed-up assassin who just wants to be in a committed relationship, “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar” demonstrates that a quarter-century later the legend of Rose DeWitt Bukater endures. Listen Here 

The Annual Buck C. Turgidson Award (presented to the best facial expression in a movie): Kirsten Dunst, “The Power of the Dog.” See Above. Friends, let me get personal for just a moment. There’s this thing that happens when you’re an introvert, when you’re at parties where you don’t really know anyone or don’t really know anyone well and the person you’re with goes off with someone else and all of a sudden you’re just left standing there alone and this hot flash of fear surges through your body. In this shot, as the socially overmatched Rose Gordon, in her pained expression and her subtle yet undeniably desperate little move toward her husband who has just departed, like she’s spiritually trying to reach out and grab him and bring him back, Kirsten Dunst captured this sensation implicitly and perfectly. I crumbled. 

The Annual Runaway Jury Award (presented to the best middling thriller of the year): “The Courier.” Not sure a Top 10 Films is in the cards this year. Mentally, I just don’t feel up for it, though you can kind of discern from these awards what movies might have made it. What I will say is that Dominic Cooke’s thriller “The Courier” would have likely been slotted in at #10. It is imperfect, certainly, and not really the 10th best film of the year, of course, whatever the hell best means. But it’s got some pace, and it’s trying some things visually, and its actors are mostly playing something, and the scene where two of the main characters attend the Bolshoi is like a last supper at the ballet, and I really wish we could get ten more movies in its vein every year. 

The Annual Elevator Killer Award (presented to the best cameo in a movie): [redacted], “Barb and Star Go to Vista Del Mar.” No, not the cameo at the end; the cameo midway through. This cameo was so good I simply refuse to spoil it for anyone who hasn’t seen it. Reader, my jaw literally dropped. It was my single happiest moment in the COVID hotel.