The Show Goes On: the 98th Academy Awards

The run-up to the 98th Academy Awards was frequently cited by Oscar prognosticators as perhaps the most unpredictable ever, at least among three of the acting categories (Jessie Buckley had Best Actress locked up virtually from the beginning). Yet, the awards season has become so long, that by the time of the actual Oscar ceremony itself, that unpredictability had looped back around, transforming so much surprise into predestination. Not even Sean Penn eschewing showing up at the ceremony to collect his Best Supporting Actor trophy for “One Battle After Another” was all that surprising. “Frankenstein” collected three Oscars, “Sinners” earned four, and “One Battle After Another” won six, including Best Picture, Best Editing (Andy Jurgensen made a two-hour-and-forty-minute feel like one, tops), and the inaugural Oscar for Best Casting. I would have voted for “The Secret Agent” in the latter, but Cassandra Kulukundis was no less deserving. For casting newcomer Chase Infiniti, yes, and for all the impeccably chosen faces comprising The Christmas Adventurers Club, certainly, but also for getting Eric Schweig back into the masterpiece-making business. I hope Schweig was there last night. If there was a true surprise at the 98th Academy Awards, it was Best Live-Action Short ending in a tie between “The Singers” and “Two People Exchanging Saliva.” It warms my jaded heart that the Olympics still allows ties, and it turns out, the Oscars warms it for allowing them too. 

Unpredictability, however, does not in and of itself make for a good Oscar show and the 98th was plenty good, fun and dumb, heartfelt and affecting in equal measure. Conan O’Brien returned as host after last year and can return next year, as far as I’m concerned, so ably has he filled this role; to paraphrase Sydney Pollack in “Michael Clayton,” he’s found a niche for himself. He’s good at his gig because he excels at taking the piss out of what he has just genuinely exalted and lets us in on the joke without making the whole thing a joke, not least because he really seems to love movies. The best bit of the night was sending up streaming movies that require dialogue to continually restate the plot for so many people listening as much as they are watching by recreating a scene from “Casablanca” as so comical exposition with a game Sterling K. Brown in the Dooley Wilson role. Honestly, he could have turned that into a recurring bit throughout the show. How about Conan and Jennifer Lawrence as “McCabe & Mrs. Miller?” True, the scripted banter between presenters was even worse than usual, which caused so many of those moments to drag, but then again, enlisting Nicole Kidman to present Best Picture was perfection. I know, she was there with Ewan McGregor to celebrate the 25th anniversary of “Moulin Rouge,” but I saw it more as Kidman’s Pure Camp as AMC ambassador taken to its apex. She should be grandfathered into the role of Best Picture presenter for life. Kidman is here! Sit up straight!

Even if the outcomes skewed inevitable, how can you be bored when history is made? Autumn Durald Arkapaw became the first woman and, by extension, the first woman of the color to win the Oscar for Best Cinematography for “Sinners.” Michael B. Jordan won Best Actor for the same movie and referenced the five Black men that won Best Actor before him, as well as Halle Berry, the only Black woman to win Best Actress, placing his victory in a historical context. No-show Penn joined the three-timers club, going to show once again that even if nobody seems to like him, everybody seems to like his acting. If Paul Thomas Anderson earning Best Director for “One Battle After Another” was not historical, it was momentous, one of our foremost modern auteurs finally, deservedly winning an Oscar. And when he mentioned his fellow nominees, I took heart in knowing that even if Ryan Coogler won Best Original Screenplay for “Sinners,” that someday he will win for Best Director too. Nothing filled my heart with joy as much as Amy Madigan winning Best Supporting Actress for “Weapons.” At first, I really thought hers was just a happy-to-be-nominated deal, but somewhere along the way, momentum built, maybe because 40 years between nominations in a business where for women it can feel like it’s getting late early, as the sage Yogi Berra once said, she demonstrated that no, nuh uh, it’s never too late. Plus, it was an important, oft-forgotten reminder that she and Ed Harris are one of our Top 5 Celebrity Couples: not quite an indie Joanne Woodward and Paul Newman, but something in that vein. 

As if taking presenter Jimmy Kimmel’s words to heart about documentary filmmakers being the truth-tellers, the winners for both documentary short and feature were the ones who most openly acknowledged the current political realities of our tumultuous world. Well, them and Javier Bardem who in presenting Best International Feature with Priyanka Chopra literally said “No to war and free Palestine” with what appeared to be a smile on his face. He wasn’t making light of anything, of course, but to my eye, appeared to be demonstrating how easy it is to simply say something while cheerfully communicating to multitudinous bad faith actors he knew were lying in wait: Come at me, bro. Whining about people being woke is just another way to bury your head in the sand. 

The one detail that even good iterations of the show have gotten wrong in the past, this version got right - the in-memoriam segment. Maybe losing so many vital names of the industry snapped the producers into focus, but for once they forewent yoking some other performer or performance to the segment and just let the segment speak for itself, buttressing it with brief commentary on some of the biggest names: so many tear-filled faces for Rob Reiner, Rachel McAdams testifying to Diane Keaton and her fellow Canadian Catherine O’Hara, and Babs on Bob (Barbra Streisand’s ode to Robert Redford). It was the first in-memoriam I can recall that truly let us linger on the names and faces and think about what they meant. It was heartrending, and wonderful, and in a way, made me even madder that the Honorary Academy Awards are shunted to their own ceremony months earlier. Why on earth would the Oscars not want Tom Cruise receiving his first Academy Award at the actual ceremony? That is to take nothing away from his fellow honorary award recipients Debbie Allen and Wynn Thomas, but my God, this is Tom Cruise; he was literally name-checked in this year’s Best Picture!  

Cruise has left significant footprints on the history of cinema and so, too, has Paul Thomas Anderson. It’s why it was so moving to see him finally be recognized by the Academy. Is “One Battle After Another” really his best movie? God, I don’t know and I don’t know that I can think of a more boring question today. In speaking after winning Best Picture, in fact, Anderson sort of summarized that point and the point I was trying to make on Friday by literally naming all five Best Picture nominees from 1975. “There is no best among them,” he said. “There is just what the mood might be that day.” I don’t know how my mood is going to be tomorrow, or the next day, or next month, or Oscar Sunday next year, but after that show last night, I gotta tell you, in a way I did not see coming, it’s pretty good. I guess there was some sort of surprise after all. 

(Big) Best Picture Questions

“Time doesn’t exist, yet it controls us anyway.” – Comrade Josh, One Battle After Another

What, exactly, do we want from the Academy Award for Best Picture? Should it be the movie that most captures the public’s imagination? Should it be the movie that makes the most money? Are those two things interchangeable or are they incompatible or are they somewhere in-between? Should it be a movie that says something? If so, what should it say, and how should it say it? Subtly or with great force? Should it take sides, or should it take no sides at all? Should it be topical, or should it be more universal? Should it be, simply, the best movie of the year? But how on earth do you quantify the best movie of the year? You think it’s “Oppenheimer,” but I think it’s “Barbie,” and it was “Barbie,” you’re wrong, sorry, but where does that get us? Do we really want art to be an ice dancing competition? But then, I’m not voting and you’re not voting; the Academy is voting. What does any of it have to do with us? Maybe they just want to reward the movie that gave the most people jobs.

Maybe what the collective “we” wants more than anything, though, is a Best Picture winner that stands the test of time. That is what so many lists sprouting up this time of year would seem to suggest, anyway, the ones counting all times the Oscars got it wrong, and the people telling you for the millionth time that “Goodfellas” should have won Best Picture over “Dances with Wolves” in 1990 would seem to suggest it too. But expecting 11,000 people to predict by majority what movie will measure up three or four decades from now is asking a lot. “The Last Emperor” swept the Academy Awards in 1987, winning all 9 categories in which it was nominated, including Best Picture and Best Director, and yet, who remembers it, who talks about it? There was a whole “Frasier” episode about this phenomenon with the eponymous psychiatrist repeatedly thwarted in his attempts to watch and enjoy “How Green Was My Valley”: “It won five Academy Awards!” he bellows to the indifferent teenage clerk at the video rental store. “It’s a classic!” Twenty years later, that is how I feel about “Million Dollar Baby,” a movie that the culture at large discarded. Would I have told people in 2005 that “Million Dollar Baby” would last forever? I did tell people that! But whether something is timeless can only be measured with, well, obviously. “They come where they come from,” the esteemed Roger Ebert said in 2003 regarding this very subject. “You never know until they arrive.” To paraphrase Brad Pitt in “Moneyball,” I’ve heard people say for years about certain movies that this one will endure, “trust me, when I know, I know, and when it comes to this movie, I know,” and they don’t.

If aging has taught me anything, it’s that for all their pomp and circumstance, the Oscars are as ephemeral as they are everlasting, and that they tend to capture fleeting moments in time more than they portend the future. “The Silence of the Lambs” became an unexpected pop culture juggernaut and lightning rod in 1991; “The English Patient” put an exclamation point on the 90s indie revolution in 1996; like Kevin Costner and “Dances with Wolves” before him, Ben Affleck and “Argo” were carried away on a sudden wave of goodwill in 2012. On a recent episode of The New Yorker’s Critics at Large podcast, Michael Schulman noted that generally the Best Picture nominees of any given year indirectly evoke a larger cultural feeling reflective of their respective moment. Mark Harris’s book Pictures at a Revolution captured one of these moments in full detail, an awards season pitched between the last vespers of the Golden Age and New Hollywood. I will not launch into yet another impassioned defense of “Titanic,” but at the time of its Oscar triumph in 1997, William Goldman, a fervent admirer of it, was also foreseeing a future in which people wondered what the fuss had been all about. In the moment, everybody knows everything, but in the end, as Goldman said, [say it with me] nobody knows anything. 

Ah, and yet, during this very awards season, Janan Ganesh of the Financial Times has notified us that “Hamnet” will stand the test of time, and Matt Neal of ABC Radio in Australia has advised us that “Sinners” will stand the test of time. All this talk of time is funny because it was a central subject of several Best Picture nominees. “Train Dreams” advances the idea that we can only understand our existence through the rearview mirror; Kleber Mendonça Filho’s superb “The Secret Agent” demonstrates how history can become buried beneath the sands of time while “Sentimental Value” illustrates that time alone does not necessarily heal all wounds; in one breathtaking sequence, “Sinners” draws past, present, and future all together at once in the same room. “One Battle After Another” draws all those concepts together too. Rather than having a character say, “We may be through with the past, but the past ain’t through with us,” as he did in his own “Magnolia,” writer/director Paul Thomas Anderson creates a vibe, to use the parlance of our times, that improbably blends the 1960s/70s and the present-day. And in adapting and remodeling Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland as the story of a burned out revolutionary and his burgeoning revolutionary daughter, PTA embodies the endless tide of the 250-year battle over America’s soul going in and out.

Whether “One Battle After Another” is better than “Sinners,” or whether it deserves Best Picture more, honestly, means less to me than how both movies suggest a way forward in an industry that has been stuck at a crossroads doubling as a cul-de-sac for years now. Both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” are event films with a pulse, pop moviemaking with a distinct auteurist bent, supreme craft and relentless energy intertwined with a deeper meaning. Of course, both movies were produced by Warner Bros., which is merging with Paramount, run by one our most prominent uncaring idiot sons, and the code that was just cracked might intentionally be lost forever, one more moment in time destined to slip through our fingers.

1995 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

The 90s were a boom time for movie soundtrack compilations and 1995 was the peak. The #1 selling single on the Billboard Hot 100 was Coolio’s “Gangsta’s Paradise,” culled from the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack, while the #4 selling single, Seal’s “Kiss from a Rose,” was included on the “Batman Forever” soundtrack. Other big Billboard hits of the year like Diana King’s “Shy Guy” and Dr. Dre’s “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” came from the “Bad Boys” and “Friday” soundtracks, respectively. The “Friday” soundtrack spent two weeks as the top-selling album in America and the “Dangerous Minds” soundtrack was the top-selling record for all of September. Oh, but there was so much more.

There were soundtracks with contemporary appeal, like those for “Empire Records” and “Mallrats” reflecting the era of alternative rock, and soundtracks with a historical pull, like “Dead Presidents” collecting so many great old R&B and Soul tunes that it released a Part One and Part Two. The Parker Posey-fronted cult classic “Party Girl” would have been unthinkable without its club-ready soundtrack while the “Boys on the Side” soundtrack was like proto-Lilith Fair. I requested for the latter for Christmas in 1995 and though Bonnie Raitt’s “You Got It” was the big single, as a Sheryl Crow stan, I most enjoyed her giving the Derek and the Dominos slice of blues-rock “Keep on Growing” a pop bent. (Wait, I have to stop and listen again right now. We continue.) Raitt’s song was a cover too, of Roy Orbison, and that brings me to my point: virtually none of the music I have mentioned was eligible to be nominated for the Academy Award for Best Original Song.

Covers are disqualified. That’s why Whitney Houston could not be nominated, never mind win, for her globe-conquering “I Will Always Love You” from “The Bodyguard” in 1992, remember. Songs not written specifically for the movie itself are ineligible too, which disqualified “Kiss from a Rose,” plucked from Seal’s eponymous album released a year earlier. Songs that include samples are also ineligible which is why “Gangsta’s Paradise” in addition to “Keep Their Heads Ringin’” and “Shy Guy” could not make the cut. In a year where so much current pop music bled over into the movies, so much of it could not be recognized, leaving a Best Song category that looked like so many Best Song categories before it, not quite five unsalted crackers lined up in a row but close. And that is why I am here to reimagine this category if I, and I alone, were the judge and jury. Because what a category it could have been. 

1995 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees (winner in bold):

Colors of the Wind from Pocahontas - Music by Alan Menken and Lyrics by Stephen Schwartz

Dead Man Walkin’ from Dead Man Walking - Music & Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen

Have You Ever Really Loved a Woman? from Don Juan DeMarco - Music & Lyrics by Bryan Adams, Michael Kamen & Mutt Lange

Moonlight from Sabrina - Music by John Williams and Lyrics by Marilyn Bergman

You’ve Got a Friend in Me from Toy Story - Music & Lyrics by Randy Newman

Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means that “God Moving Over the Face of The Waters” by Moby in “Heat and “Three Little Birds” by Bob Marley in “Strange Days” are ineligible. Add, say, “Love Is Strange” by Mickey & Sylvia in “Casino,” “Come Here” by Kath Bloom in “Before Sunrise,” and, of course, “Techno Syndrome” by The Immortals in “Mortal Kombat” and, my God, what a category. Alas.

In researching this post, I was shocked to learn that the “Don Juan DeMarco” soundtrack was initially slated to include a duet recorded by, get this, Tori Amos and Michael Stipe. That song, “It Might Hurt a Bit,” was not included and never released, shunted for a Bryan Adams ballad that despite featuring preeminent flamenco guitarist Paco de Lucia still, in the end, feels like a Bryan Adams ballad. And arriving as it did on the heels of both “Robin Hood” and “The Three Musketeers,” this one was like the dishwater left in the sink after all the dishes have been cleaned. Enough was enough, alright, Academy. It was time to move on to other things. Like Salt-N-Pepa’s body-positive “I Am the Body Beautiful” off the “To Wong Foo, Thanks For Everything! Julie Newmar” soundtrack that as best I can tell, deployed a wholly original beat which would have made it eligible. 

Ok. Time to address the elephant in the room – my main man, Bruce Springsteen. His theme for “Dead Man Walking” is solid. His musical spareness in this era could sometimes get the best of him, but it works well for this one, and though he cribs one lyric from his own songbook, he splits the difference with one that is just classic Bruce: “Sister, I won’t ask forgiveness. My sins are all I have.” But the truth is, Springsteen wrote a similarly themed sort of song the same year, “Highway 29,” that is vastly superior, as was his Oscar-winning Best Song two years prior, “Streets of Philadelphia.” And anyway, while “Dead Man Walking” is a very good movie, “Clueless,” strange as it might sound to compare them was better and deserved a Best Picture nod and the principal song of the “Clueless” soundtrack, Jill Sobule’s “Supermodel,” which was, in fact, written for the movie and therefore eligible under the Oscar’s rules, deserved a Best Song nod too. Springsteen is out and Sobule is in.

I am tempted to include “Ask for You” from the “Higher Learning” soundtrack, Raphael Saddiq’s bop that got all the way to #19 on the Billboard Hot 100, but I can’t bring myself to leave off “You’ve Got a Friend in Me,” the foundational linchpin of “Toy Story” and the whole subsequent series. Of the actual nominees, that probably should have won, and it will be the only song to retain its nomination, even if I suspect that Randy Newman would tell me to keep it if he’s not getting the retroactive win. 

The easy listening of “Moonlight,” meanwhile, is barely worth a mention, reminding me of a line from Public Enemy’s “How to Kill a Radio Consultant”: “When ‘A Quiet Storm’ comes on I fall asleep.” The winning “Colors of the Wind,” meanwhile, is fine, I guess, but mostly just riding the coattails of the Disney songs that won this same award three of the four years preceding it. Because there is one soundtrack that some astute readers may have noticed I had not yet mentioned: “Waiting to Exhale,” a Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds-produced record so good that it was #1 on the charts for five weeks in early 1996, earned 11 Grammy nominations, and even forced self-proclaimed dean of the rock critics Robert Christgau to grudgingly grade it an A-. That none of its songs were nominated speaks to the 68th Academy Awards nominating but a single black nominee in all categories, leading to natural backlash, fury, and protest, much of it spurred by the recently deceased Jesse Jackson a couple decades before #OscarsSoWhite. I mean, no one could even mount a bad-faith argument about the American cultural meritocracy when it came to the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack because if that were true, the album would have had two nominations in this category, at least. 

The lead single was Whitney Houston’s “Exhale (Shoop Shoop)” which was nominated for Song of the Year at the Grammys and was #14 on Billboard’s Hot 100 for 1996. It was a quality song, you don’t need me to tell you that, but remember, I’m judge and jury here and I’m giving the first spot to TLC’s “This Is How It Works.” Because I love the song, of course, and also because I like imagining a bunch of white septuagenarian and octogenarians watching a performance of a song by three black women coaching their men through sex while a person in the production room sits there the whole time on panicked edge like Beaker with his finger hovering over the broadcast delay button. It might have been the greatest five minutes in Oscar history. Alas. 

But. In the end, the faux retroactive Oscar can only go to one song off the “Waiting to Exhale” soundtrack, and it goes to Toni Braxton’s. If you ask me now, 30 years later, to explain what 1995-96 sounded like, well, I might just play you Toni Braxton’s “Let It Flow.” 

A Few Quicks Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations

Though I don’t anticipate the Oscar nominations with the same zest as I once did, I still enjoy the festive hullabaloo and am so glad they continue announcing them before sunrise (PT) to ensure the whole thing maintains that Christmas morning-like sensation. The current state of American affairs, though, left me feeling underwhelmed this year, even if it was a good one for movies, and a work obligation made it difficult to react to the announcements in real time. But when I finally sat down to give the nominations thorough consideration, I found myself with at least seven things to say.

A Few Quicks Thoughts on the Oscar Nominations

1.) I guess after its unexpected nomination for Best Picture, which I have no doubt has to do with some kind of back room politicking, I’ll have to find the time to watch “F1,” but like Miles Raymond and merlot, I am not watching “Bugonia.” I’m not even anti-Yorgos; I like some of his movies! It’s just...I needed a year off from him, I really did, and even more than that, I wish Emma Stone would stop working with him for a while and so I refuse to encourage her.

2.) “Sinners” setting the record for all-time nominations, which it would have done even without the rightful nod for the new Casting category, is a genuine feel-good moment for Hollywood. And so, in its own way, is “Wicked Part 2: The Search for More Money” getting skunked. It’s good because maybe that will be a lesson to suddenly wary producers about over-leveraging their product, and it’s good because this year’s Oscar ceremony will not have to be a continuation of the “Wicked” marketing campaign. Ding dong, that shit is dead.

3.) I’m not sure what will win the inaugural casting award, but I’ll be rooting for “The Secret Agent.” The Brazilian genre-twister that was also nominated for Best Picture and Best International Feature is a bounty of distinctive faces and personalities. 

4.) Oscar nomination day is a day for celebrating, yes, but it is also a day for complaining and here is my grievance: two days ago, I said that if Colleen Atwood did not win the Oscar for Best Costume Design, I was going to be pissed, and hey, guess what, she didn’t even get nominated. She’s won before, so she’s square, but still; I’m not sure any movie did any of its crafts better than “One Battle After Another” did costume design. And though the movie’s timeline is purposely fuzzy, it is contemporary, and that, I assume, considering all the other nominees, is the issue, as it so often is in this category – they so rarely nominate contemporary films because I feel like contemporary costume design does not leap off the screen in the same way. I hope Leo wears his bathrobe and Terminator X glasses to the ceremony in protest.

5.) Ok. Enough complaining. Amy Madigan landing her first nomination and first in 40 years for Supporting Actress in “Weapons” would take the cake if it wasn’t for Delroy Lindo landing his first nomination ever for Supporting Actor in “Sinners.” That guy makes everything he’s in just a little bit better. And though I suspect neither of them will win, getting to bask in the promotional circuit for the next month-and-a-half will be victory enough. I hope they enjoy the ride. 

6.) Rose Byrne also scored her first nomination for Best Actress in “If I Had Legs I’d Kick You,” deservedly, because she carries that movie in so many ways, and in the one official year-end vote I have, I voted for her. I’m sure she won’t win either, but I’m so happy for her, nevertheless. What can I say, it’s the Bulgarian clown in me. 

7.) I’m not making predictions, here or later, but if there is anyone out of whole list that I would like to see win, well, it’s an obvious one: Paul Thomas Anderson for Best Director. It’s richly deserved for “One Battle After Another”; it’s overdue, anyway, in the grand scheme of things; it’s time.

A Four-Week-Late Oscar Take

It is evidence of my year-end frazzled state of mind that when Friend of the Blog Jaime asked me on New Year’s Eve what I made of the recent announcement that the Academy Awards would be leaving broadcast television in 2029 to stream exclusively on YouTube TV that I did not really have an answer because I had not really given it any consideration. I was frazzled, and just plain burned out, but also, when I first saw the news, I also just figuratively shrugged from an admitted air of inevitability. After all, we live in a world where cable and satellite television is becoming increasingly antiquated. The winners of both Outstanding Comedy Series and Outstanding Drama Series – “The Studio” and “The Pitt,” respectively – at last year’s Primetime Emmy Awards were streaming series, and if you wanted to watch the Bears/Packers NFL playoff game on Saturday night, you had to have Amazon Prime, or else. Indeed, not long after the Oscar news, media observers were already suggesting it was just a matter of time before the mother of all live events, the old AFL-NFL World Championship Game, goes streaming too. 

Jaime was optimistic about the news, and once I thought about it, and once I worked through my middle-aged, Gen-X, three-channel era angst, I felt optimistic too. The Oscars have spent at least a decade apologizing for themselves, to paraphrase The New Yorker’s perturbable Richard Brody, which is why they are always trying to reinvent the wheel, taking draconian measures to shorten the length of acceptance speeches, shunting various awards off air, eliminating the honorary awards altogether by giving them their own off-air ceremony, and adding various forms of unrelated razzle dazzle at the expense of celebrating the whole reason we are watching in the first place. It was the late William Goldman who was always went against the grain by arguing the Oscars were not too long but too short, that rather than just showing a smattering of brief clips of nominated movies, the telecast should show fuller clips and truly celebrate the nominees rather than pay mere lip service between commercials.

Goldman’s vision might just be possible by moving the telecast to streaming, providing them a chance for liberation, as Clayton Davis put it for Variety, noting that the YouTube TV deal includes not just the ceremony but the red-carpet coverage and even the Governors Ball afterwards. It suggests Oscar Sunday as something akin to Inauguration Day coverage, the whole shebang, giving viewers the opportunity to tune in and tune out and tune in and tune out, etc., eavesdropping on the whole big affair. Mark Harris, one of our pre-eminent Oscar-ologists, seemed cautiously hopeful on the New Twitter, writing that the best-case scenario was the Oscar show being true to itself, glory hallelujah, but the worst-case scenarios being a desperate attempt to, quote-unquote, youthify. What such youthifying would mean, he didn’t really say, probably because as an Old Person, like me, he doesn’t really know. Maybe it means an alternate Nickelodeon Slimetime Oscar-cast, or maybe it means an alternate cast for everybody hosted by Drinks With Broads, or maybe it means a parade of TikTok influencers. I mean, what were Billy Crystal’s old Oscar opening numbers if not proto-TikTok videos?

The Olympics were another ancient broadcast TV entity that resisted the digital world for ages and, on some level, as an old-timer Olympics enthusiast, I understood it. The appeal of the Games was partly monocultural, that when you sat down to watch it in primetime, you were watching along with the rest of the world, or at least, the rest of America. That is why the deliberate minimization of coverage, ironically, made it feel bigger, and I assume that NBC feared providing an all-access digital pass would render the event too diffuse. Instead, by moving coverage of every single event online to their streaming platform Peacock, the exact opposite has happened, rendering the Games what they always have been but viewers at home have never truly been able to fully comprehend: that is, a virtual sporting kaleidoscope. True, NBC has retained a traditional evening broadcast for anyone who might not choose to pay for Peacock, and I do not necessarily like the idea of the Oscars freezing out anyone who would rather not shill out for YouTube TV. But if streaming has made the Olympics feel bigger than ever before, my hope is that if the Oscars do this right, they will come to feel that way too. 

2001 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

The nominees for Best Original Song at the upcoming 97th Academy Awards include two songs from “Emilia Pérez,” an original Elton John number from the documentary for his Farewell Yellow Brick Road concert tour, “Like a Bird” from “Sing Sing,” not to be confused with (God help us all) “Like a Bird” by Tiffany T*ump, and “The Journey” by Diane Warren from Tyler Perry’s “The Six Triple Eight.” This is Warren’s 16th Oscar nomination, five shy of Meryl Streep’s 21 Oscar nominations, which are 33 short of John Williams’s 54 and 38 short of Walt Disney’s 59. So, Warren has a long way to go to approach the record, but still, 16 is an impressive haul, even if she’s never won, recipient of an Academy Honorary Award in 2022 after getting stiffed all those years. Were all her nominations truly earned?

Gees, I don’t know, and I wasn’t about to scour every year to find out. And though I originally intended to go back to the scene of her first nomination in 1987 for “Nothing’s Gonna Stop Us Now” from “Mannequin,” which stood no chance in the year of “(I’ve Had) the Time of My Life” from “Dirty Dancing,” well, in my Best Original Song revisitations, I had already traveled back in time to the 80s, as well as the 90s, and so I figured it was time to bring this pointless exercise into the current century. When Warren was nominated in 2001, did she deserve it given what else might have been nominated that year, and whatever did win, should it have, at least if I, and I alone, were the nominating committee? Let’s find out!

2001 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees & Winner (in bold):

“Until...” from Kate & Leopold – Music and Lyrics by Sting

“If I Didn’t Have You” from Monsters, Inc. – Music and Lyrics by Randy Newman

“May It Be” from The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring – Music and Lyrics by Enya, Nicky Ryan, and Roma Ryan

“There You’ll Be” from Pearl Harbor – Music and Lyrics by Diane Warren

“Vanilla Sky” from Vanilla Sky – Music and Lyrics by Paul McCartney

Of course, we are required to remember right up front that Best Original Song is strictly limited to original songs in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means “I’ve Told Ev’ry Little Star” by Linda Scott in “Mulholland Drive” and “These Days” by Nico in “The Royal Tenenbaums” are ineligible. Add “69 Police” by David Holmes in “Ocean’s Eleven,” “Beat It” by Michael Jackson in “Zoolander,” and Jamie O’Neal’s version of “All by Myself” in “Bridget Jones’s Diary” and, as always, my God, what a category. Alas. 

The unexpected box office hit “Save the Last Dance” hearkens back to the glorious era of Julia Stiles: Movie Star just as the movie itself hearkened back to the golden era of the movie theme song with Fredro Starr and Jill Scott’s “Shining Through” which itself hearkened back to (borrowed from) Cyndi Lauper’s “True Colors” which is going to touch any Gen-Xer’s soul. As such, it takes the place of Warren’s “Pearl Harbor” theme. Sorry, Diane, you’ll have to settle for 15 nominations. 

At the 2014 Tony Awards, Neil Patrick Harris gave Sting a lap dance during a performance of “Sugar Baby” from “Hedwig and The Angry Inch.” And though the 74th Academy Awards might have finally been ready to give Oscars to two African Americans for leading roles, it probably was not ready for John Cameron Mitchell to give Jack Nicholson a lap dance on live TV. But that’s not my problem. I wish it would have happened, and even if it didn’t, “Sugar Baby” from the movie version of “Hedwig and The Angry Inch” still should have been nominated. And in an ironic twist that I think the writer of “Every Breath You Take” could appreciate, it replaces Sting’s “Until...” and knocks him down to three Oscar nominations all-time.

I’ll be honest, I am desperate to give Natalie Imbruglia a retroactive Oscar nomination for “Cold Air,” her contribution to the “Y Tu Mamá También” soundtrack, but then I re-listened to Enya’s nominated song. And while I might contend the LOTR trilogy is terribly overrated (to paraphrase Elaine Benes talking about “The English Patient,” stop telling your stupid story about the stupid ring and just throw it in the fire already), Enya is not. She stays. 

Paul McCartney had earned both an Oscar nomination and a win thirty-one years before in 1970 for “Let It Be.” But do you know who has never been nominated, before 2001 or after? Her majesty Mariah Carey, that’s who, the same woman who remains but one elusive #1 hit away from tying, ahem, The Beatles for most all-time. And while “Glitter” was a cultural punching bag, set those preconceived notions aside and the fact is, “Want You” should have been a hit itself. A #1 hit? Eh, I’m not sure, maybe more like #26, but a hit, nevertheless, and imagine Mariah following Enya at that Academy ceremony. 

Newman’s victory that year was a big deal given his scads of prior nods and no victory to show for it. You can see how big a deal it was in the reaction after his name is announced and I hate to take that away from him. But he has since gone on to win again, in 2010 for “We Belong Together” from “Toy Story 3,” whereas the late Adam Schlesinger was nominated only once in 1997 for penning the title track to “That Thing You Do!,” losing to Celine Dion’s unbeatable Rose and Jack ballad. And so, with the benefit of hindsight, but also with objective analysis vis-a-vis their two songs and every other eligible song, it is absolutely clear in retrospect that the Schlesinger penned “Pretend to Be Nice” from “Josie and the Pussycats” was the real Best Original Song in 2001. [Bangs gavel.]

96th Academy Awards: Back to the Basics

After several years of chaos, woebegone makeover attempts, and Pandemic-related alterations, the Oscars finally returned to their true form as a big dumb show. They were entertaining, and eye-rolling, and enervating, and out of touch, and sporadically sincere, and sometimes stupid. There was plenty to complain about, of course, and that’s good! Complaining is part of the show! The 96th Academy Awards were, in other words, an inspired, in manner of speaking, version of a classic dish with Steven Spielberg, on hand to present Best Director, assuming the old Jack Nicholson and Meryl Streep role of unofficial Academy mascot, a sort of pomp and circumstance win for Auteur Theory. The show started an hour earlier (7 PM ET, 4 PM PT) even as it hilariously, literally, started several minutes behind schedule, yet never felt overlong despite, as it always does, running long, because by starting earlier it effected a nifty mental sleight of hand and still felt shorter. Maybe that’s a trick you can only manage once, so best enjoy it this year, whiners. 

Hosting for the fourth time, Jimmy Kimmel was mostly harmless, echoing a mostly harmless show, working best, it turned out, as a straight man. Like when John Cena was enlisted to present Best Costume Design via a bit, uh, honoring the 50th Anniversary of the infamous Oscar streaker that really, truly worked, impeccably timed and, this is crucial, not stepping on the toes of the ensuing winners, evocative of a smartly coordinated bevy of presenters that amusingly kept the train rolling. The “Twins” reunion of Danny DeVito and Arnold Schwarzenegger was a welcome homage to all of us old fogeys who rented that 1988 comedy from the Roadshow Video in West Des Moines; John Mulaney won this year’s coveted Why Doesn’t He Host Award? with an unlikely variation on the old observation that he could be funny just by reading in the phonebook by being funny in just recounting the plot of “Field of Dreams.” Maybe next year Mulaney could recount the plot of “Meet Joe Black?”

The most memorable moment of Kimmel’s opening monologue wasn’t even a joke, it was his honoring Hollywood as a union town by bringing out “the truck drivers, Teamsters, and IATSE union members” who supported the WGA and SAG-AFTRA during their strikes, the only moment all night that referenced the industry’s year of significant and righteous upheaval. Hollywood might be at a tipping point, but most everyone pulled their punches on that topic, save for Cord Jefferson who in winning Best Adapted screenplay for “American Fiction” decreed “Instead of making one $200 million movie, try making twenty $10 million movies.” Hear! Hear!

After an early run of downline awards for “Poor Things,” the evening was dominated as the Oscar fortune tellers predicted by Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer,” winning Best Editing and Cinematography and Original Score and Actor and Supporting Actor and Director and, yes, Best Picture, too. The latter was announced by living legend Al Pacino who, whether by some sort of ill-conceived comedy bit or going off the cuff going wrong, inadvertently underlined the moment’s lack of suspense by opening the envelope and essentially just sort of muttering something like, oh, hey, “Oppenheimer,” again. Kimmel, however, opened the evening by addressing “Barbie” first, the movie that shared a release date with “Oppenheimer,” creating a summer box office bonanza between them and forever linking the two in the public’s mind, an idea the Oscars only enhanced. “Oppenheimer” won seven, “Barbie” only one, but the latter won the show in spirit just as much. Ryan Gosling knocked his performance of “Barbie’s” Best Original Song nominee “I’m Just Ken” out of the park, and then he appeared onstage with “Oppenheimer” star and nominee Emily Blunt (see above) to comically address the ostensible Barbenheimer feud, my favorite moment of the whole night. More than anything, the 2023 year in Hollywood was defined by Barbenheimer phenomenon, and this moment hilariously lived it. 

Hollywood’s insistence that the show must go on, alas, has rarely felt as embarrassingly true as it did when ABC followed Ukranian director Mstyslav Chernov in winning Best Feature Documentary for “20 Days in Mariupol” saying he would rather have no Oscar and no war with an image of all the “I’m Just Ken” performers waiting in the wings. In fact, the Blunt and Gosling bit followed Jonathan Glazer winning for Best International Feature for “The Zone of Interest” and being the one person all evening to openly condemn the ongoing atrocities in Gaza, denouncing “the holocaust being hijacked by an occupation which has led to conflict for so many innocent people.” In its way, so many attendees sporting ceasefire lapel pins as their method of silent solidarity put into perspective the potential cost of saying something aloud, and in the image of Glazer’s hands clearly shaking as he read his statement from a sheet of paper, you could see the weight of his words in real time. Courage.

The acceptance speeches are generally a good barometer of the evening and last night, they trended up. The team that won Best Visual Effects for “Godzilla Minus One” joyfully took the stage together, all holding toy kaijus in their hands, and Takaski Yamakazi gave a loving, halting speech that might have technically got lost a little bit in translation but emotionally still shone through. Robert Downey Jr. won Best Supporting Actor for “Oppenheimer” in vintage RDJ fashion, refusing to take it too seriously in a way that still suggested just how thankful he was to be up there at all. Da’Vine Joy Randolph’s speech in winning Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers” acknowledged both the importance of representation and its limits, drawing a line all the way back to Hattie McDaniel in 1940, heartbreakingly noting “I pray to God I get to do this more than once.” Then there was Emma Stone. In winning Best Actress for “Poor Things,” her second Oscar, she defeated Lily Gladstone for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” who would have become the first Native American Academy Award winner. It was a difficult truth that seemed to emerge in Stone’s reaction, not overwhelmed, exactly, but overcome, I think, in manifestly grasping what had been denied in her victory. She acknowledged all her fellow nominees, but she singled out Gladstone, sharing it with her, she said, a sentiment that can sometimes ring hollow, though not here, because you would see the wrenching complication of it on their both faces. Stone has already gotten to do this twice, you might say, and she recognized it, and thread an impossible needle. She deserved it, but she also didn’t, and she expressed both those truths at once. 

That denying of history with Gladstone underlined the Academy’s ongoing, oddly strained relationship with its own. Academy President Janet Yang’s cursory mention of the Governors Awards winners, lifetime achievement recipients all of whom were merely glimpsed in images beamed to a backstage wall, was bad enough. It was improbably made worse when it was accidentally interrupted, through absolutely no fault of her own, by Billie Eilish who had just won Best Original Song with her brother Fineas O’Connell, because in a baffling move, the producers chose to have Yang address the camera in the wings where the winners walk through. The In Memoriam segment, meanwhile, the one thing that should be impossible to screw up but always is, was screwed up yet again, by thoughtlessly reducing the screen recounting the deceased to the background and emphasizing an interpretive dance and Italian tenor Andrea Boccelli and his son Matteo performing in the foreground. It’s an In Memoriam segment, not a concert, and every single person the movies lost in 2023 deserved better.

Then again, the Oscars resurrected a bit from the 2009 ceremony in which 5 Best Acting winners from the past returned to highlight the 5 nominees in each Best Acting category. The scripts there could have occasionally had more oomph, and they worked best when there was a true cosmic connection between the presenter and the actor, like Sam Rockwell speaking to Robert Downey Jr., or Lupita Nyong'o speaking to Da'Vine Joy Randolph, or Nic Cage to Paul Giamatti, but I appreciated them for illustrating a historical through-line. I loved the shot of Cillian Murphy winning Best Actor for Oppenheimer as he ascended the stage and into a sort of polite scrum of his peers congratulating him, the new member of a highly eccentric lodge. No one, though, seemed to get the historical perspective better than Christopher Nolan. 

“To the Academy, movies are just a little bit over 100 years old,” he said in winning Best Director for Oppenheimer. “We don’t know where this incredible journey is going from here. But to know that you think I’m a meaningful part of it means the world to me.” Whatever I think of his movies, I admire Nolan for his commitment to creating experiences for the big screen, the biggest, these days, it seems, even if in those lines, he humbly saw himself as merely one ripple in the rain. 

Book Review: Oscar Wars

At the end of the 89th Academy Awards ceremony on February 26, 2017, Warren Beatty and Faye Dunaway took the stage at the Dolby Theatre in Hollywood to announce the winner for Best Picture. Beatty opened the envelope, hemmed, and hawed, and held the card inside the envelope out to Dunaway as one might hold a menu at a roadside diner in the middle of the night upon realizing they do not, alas, serve breakfast all day. Seeming to think Beatty was being a card himself, Dunaway chuckled, glanced at the card in his hand, and announced the winner, or what she thought was the winner, “La La Land.” But the winner was not “La La Land.” They had the wrong envelope. The winner was “Moonlight.” The kind of mishap typically relegated to the realm of urban legend had happened, and even if people behind the scenes of the Oscar ceremony were scrambling in real time to set things right, it was essentially left to not victorious “La La Land” producer Jordan Horowitz to explain what had occurred, summoning the real victors from “Moonlight” to the stage.

Even now, it’s surreal to watch, the show’s host, a crestfallen, almost visibly ill Jimmy Kimmel, trying to intercede, and Beatty explaining himself as in the background various people hand the Oscar statues they did not win to the people who did. (Dunaway, at some point, disappears backstage before flitting out for the Governor’s Party, as if quietly suggesting the shindig’s overriding frivolity no matter who wins, or that maybe the ceremony is just a vessel for the afterparties.) This is where New Yorker staff writer Michael Schulman concludes his sensational 2023 book Oscar Wars: A History of Hollywood in Gold, Sweat, and Tears. After all, in recounting the nine decades of Academy Awards, the author finds an institution mired in perpetual crisis, where the line between winners and losers is often blurred, and the line between Black and White is not, and a ceremony that tends to be most rememberable when something goes wrong.

What are the Oscars, and who, exactly, are they for? This is the broad query regularly put forth by the inimitable collective “people” in advance of the Academy Awards, and then after them, especially if the TV ratings were bad. As Schulman’s intro suggests, however, the Oscars are essentially anything for everyone. They are for the pundits, some of whom have regrettably transformed Oscar prognosticating into a full-time job, an enervating year-round activity a la equally enervating never-ending NFL mock drafts. They are for fashionistas, the red carpet just one more runway. They are fodder for opinion columnists, and culture writers. They are the enemies of art, judging it rather than considering it, even if they are what force an industry to view their commercial products as art in the first place. They are as much a scapegoat for the industry’s flaws as they are a symbol. They are for you, and they are for me, and so, they are for all of us and none of us, which is why, as Schulman wryly notes in his first sentence, the Oscars are always getting it wrong. But more than anything, Schulman reckons, the Oscars are about power, “who has it, who’s straining to keep it...perpetually redrawing the bounds of the Hollywood establishment.”

Through this light, the colloquial and existential adage that Awards Don’t Matter has never rung hollower. They do matter, a lot, an industry talisman, and Schulman proves it again and again in eleven rollicking chapters spotlighting Oscar season altercations between management and labor, between Old and New Hollywood, between independents and studios, between rival producers, and rival actors. And they mattered, Schulman illustrates, almost immediately, long before they possessed a historical footprint, highlighting not just the ambitious nature of Hollywood but the innate magnetism of awards. Echoing Carey Mulligan, who recently told The Hollywood Reporter that any actor claiming not to care about winning an Oscar is lying, Schulman evokes the cravings of the silver screen’s biggest, from Frank Capra to Bette Davis to Joan Fontaine to Olivia de Havilland. When the latter lost to Hattie McDaniel for Best Supporting Actress in 1940, she told Entertainment Weekly years later that she “ceased to believe in (God).” For one night, at least. 

Yet, the scope of Oscar Wars simultaneously puts into perspective how so often these awards season scuffles are rendered immaterial by the ultimate agent of indifference, time. William Randolph Hearst and gossip columnist Hedda Hopper might have worked to kibosh Orson Welles winning Best Picture for “Citizen Kane,” or maybe, as Schulman also submits, that was the studio system putting the kibosh on an uppity auteur, but either way, “Citizen Kane” has essentially gone down in the record as the greatest movie of all time, rendering its lack of Oscar love as laughable. The yawning 62-year gap, meanwhile, between McDaniel becoming the first African American to win an Oscar in 1940 and Halle Berry becoming the first African American to win Best Actress for “Monster’s Ball” in 2002 demonstrates the overriding inadequacy of the victories. Like Sidney Poitier, who became the first Black man to win Best Actor in-between in 1964 but whose career ultimately became stuck between a rock and a hard place, the passage of time exposed McDaniel and Berry’s awards as Potemkin Oscars, mere emblematic offerings, a way for Hollywood to claim progress even as everything continued like normal (a new normal, you might say), and the winners were cruelly left twisting in the wind. The book’s most heartbreaking moment is Berry recalling how returning home in the aftermath of her historic victory, she was already sensing how nothing was going to change. The Oscar might lead your obit, as William Goldman said, but so often their real value proves fleeting. 

Given such recurring narrow-mindedness, it almost beggars belief that the Academy Awards could have lasted a century. It’s not just their homogeny, but their cowardice during the 1950s blacklist, and the anti-labor sentiment rooted in their very conception. Yet, while it might be a stretch to deem the Academy adaptable, more like grudgingly reactive, Oscar Wars also illustrates how it has proved itself to be a wily survivor. Unions threatened the existence of the Oscars almost before they got rolling, yet they wound up co-existing instead, and when the Academy became old and out of touch in the 1960s and was revealed as too old and white in the 2010s, voter purges and infusions of diversity from Academy presidents, respectively, Gregory Peck and Cheryl Boone Isaacs, managed to keep the ship on course. They even survived the infamous opening number of 1989 starring Rob Lowe and Snow White, though show producer Allan Carr did not. You begin the chapter thinking Carr made his own bed; you end it feeling as if Hollywood metaphorically slit his throat, an appeasement to the public so that next year, the show could go on.

Despite the Academy’s instinct for self-preservation, in his epilogue, Schulman nevertheless leaves us with the unmistakable impression that the Oscars are at a crossroads. True, they have benefitted from the most recent membership makeover engineered by Boone Isaacs, apparent in this year’s nominations, and there has always been a push and pull between the public’s taste and that of the Academy. But the divide has never seemed bigger, provoking questions not just about Oscar taste but relevance, reflected in dwindling ratings that has led to all sorts of desperate attempts to rope in a broader viewing audience, exasperating the motion picture lifers, a real lose-lose. And that’s to say nothing of the larger existential questions like streaming, and supply chain issues affected by the recent WGA and SAG-AFTRA strikes. In another time, Will Smith’s Best Actor win in 2022 might have been held up as a happy moment, but instead his slapping Chris Rock mid-ceremony became a symbol of something else, an Academy on the verge of coming undone. Schulman ends his book by describing the image of Smith dancing at the Oscar afterparties, a man Gettin’ Jiggy wit it as Hollywood burns.

1993 Oscar Best Original Song: Revisited

Mark Ronson and Andrew Wyatt’s “I’m Just Ken” and Billie Eilish and Finneas O’Connell’s “What Was I Made For” from “Barbie” marked the 18th time two tunes from the same movie were nominated for the Best Original Song Academy Award, the most recent being “La La Land” in 2016, the first being “Fame” in 1980. The tenth came 30 years ago when both Bruce Springsteen’s “Streets of Philadelphia” and Neil Young’s “Philadelphia” from Jonathan Demme’s Best Picture winner of the same city’s name earned nods. Bruce won the Oscar, and though revisiting this category given my being a widely known Springsteen devotee would seem pointless, well, hey, don’t forget, I’m mad at Bruce, our 1-percent blue collar hero whose obscene ticket prices are just a reflection of the market, man, so what if you have to sell your house up in Fairview to be able to afford to go see him. Maybe he won’t win our retroactive category! You never know! TBD.

1993 Best Original Song Oscar Nominees & Winner (in bold):

“Again” from “Poetic Justice” – Music and Lyrics by Janet Jackson and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis

“The Day I Fall in Love” from “Beethoven’s 2nd” – Music and Lyrics by Carole Bayer Sager, James Ingram, and Clif Magness 

“Philadelphia” from “Philadelphia” – Music and Lyrics by Neil Young 

“Streets of Philadelphia” from “Philadelphia” – Music and Lyrics by Bruce Springsteen

“A Wink and a Smile” from “Sleepless in Seattle” – Music by Marc Shaiman; Lyrics by Ramsey McLean

We are required to remember right up front that this category, as the name implies, is strictly limited to Original Songs, in whatever byzantine way the Academy defines originality, eliminating old pop hits used in movies which should be a category unto itself but, as always, do not get me started. That means “I’ve Got You, Babe” by Sonny & Cher in “Groundhog Day,” as evocative a deployment of pop music in cinema as you will ever get, is verboten, as is a personal favorite, “I Ain’t Got Nobody” by Louis Prima in Mad Dog and Glory.” Add “Blue Moon Revisited (A Song For Elvis)” by Cowboy Junkies in “Untamed Heart,” “Slow Ride” by Foghat in “Dazed and Confused,” and “Saturday Night” by The Bay City Rollers in “So I Married an Axe Murderer” and, once again, my God, what a category. Alas. 

It’s true that the “Sleepless in Seattle” soundtrack was ubiquitous in 1993, going all the way to the top of the Billboard chart, but do you what soundtrack went to #17 on the Billboard chart that same year? “Judgement Night,” that’s what, a forgettable movie I think I might have watched at someone’s birthday party but with a soundtrack that featured hip-hop and rock artists collaborating and that was destined to appeal much more to a rap-obsessed central Iowa teen. So, “A Wink and a Smile” gets the heave-ho, and though a lot of other “Judgement Night” soundtrack fans might disagree, remember, I’m the sole judge and jury in this category revisitation, and “Missing Link” by Del tha Funky Homosapien and Dinosaur Jr. gets the nod by a mile.

I am tempted, really tempted, to nominate a deep cut in the form of “Don’t Waste My Time” by Lisa Taylor from “The Meteor Man” soundtrack in place of “Again”...but then I listened to “Again,” well, again, and I can’t do Janet like that. That song is still dope. It stays. 

Delbert McClinton’s “Weatherman” sort of sounds like something the quirky singer-songwriter might have come up with on his own, but no, it was recorded specifically for “Groundhog Day,” and as such, gives “Philadelphia” the boot, no disrespect to Neil Young. 

As it turns out, 1993 was a heck of a year for material appearing on soundtracks that didn’t qualify for Best Song because of the Academy’s aforementioned byzantine rules, chief among them Tina Turner’s “What’s Love Got to Do With It.” That song won three Grammys but was ineligible at the Oscars. But there was also Boy George’s “The Crying Game,” which was a cover and therefore ineligible too, and even “Soul to Squeeze,” from “The Coneheads,” which I owned on cassingle, even though I never saw the movie, my second favorite Red Hot Chili Peppers track after “I Could Have Lied,” but recorded for the band’s celebrated fifth record “Blood Sugar Sex Magik,” not the movie, and disqualified. 

As best I can tell, however, and I really did dig into it as much as I could without emailing director Jon Turtletaub, “Rise Above It” from the “Cool Runnings” soundtrack, credited to a band called Lock Stock & Barrell that I could not find much about, and featuring MC PC and Howard Chen, was an original specifically for the beloved (by me) movie about the Jamaican bobsledding team. (I remain available, free of charge, to write the essay for its Criterion edition.) And because the American version of the “Cool Runnings” soundtrack was egregiously released sans “Rise Above It,” and because this was 1993 and before the advent of every single song in the history of the world being a digital click away, and because “Rise Above It” was never going to appear on Q-102 in Des Moines so I could tape it to a mix, I was forced to record it by literally holding my boombox up to the television speaker during the montage featuring the song as it played on my rented VHS. I really did this! And unless we get a last-minute note before the faux restaging of the ceremony, we are including it over the elevator dross of “The Day I Fall in Love.” In fact, you know what, I have loved “Rise Above It” and “Cool Runnings” so much, for so long, that...

I was almost going to do it, I swear I was, but I can’t just because I’m mad at Bruce. I’ve written variations of this before, but in eschewing director Jonathan Demme’s request for a rock song to essentially write a hymn instead, Springsteen transformed the opening credits of “Philadelphia” into nothing less than a preamble of America itself. I watch it now, and I still get goosebumps. What’s more, in rewriting history, I don’t wish to erase Burce’s Oscar speech, “Back to the Future”-style. Have you seen that Oscar speech? Eloquent, thankful, and to the point. “The Line” is a model of the story song, and that is the model of an Oscar speech. “You do your best work and you hope that it pulls out the best in your audience and some piece of it spills over into the real world and into people's everyday lives, and it takes the edge off of fear and allows us to recognize each other through our veil of differences. I always thought that was one of the things popular art was supposed to be about, along with the merchandising and all the other stuff.” 

[Wipes away a tear.] Dammit, it’s almost enough to make me think I’m not mad at him anymore. 

Let's Remember Some Early Paul Giamatti Roles

If the Oscar fortune tellers are to be believed, Cillian Murphy has emerged as the front-runner for Best Actor, meaning that it might well not yet be Paul Giamatti’s “time.” I can’t lie, it breaks my heart a little bit. Then again, if Giamatti does not win, perhaps it’s appropriate. Perhaps this isn’t the way Giamatti was meant to win. After all, twenty-ish years ago, when Giamatti was first blowing up, a New York Times article by the late David Carr wrestling with the actor’s unlikely leading man status, Giamatti said of himself: “I have the mentality of a supporting actor.” Indeed, Giamatti might have graduated from the illustrious Yale School of Drama, but there were no red carpets rolled out for the 56-year-old when he first showed up on the Hollywood. His father Bart might have been the Commissioner of Major League Baseball, but in Hollywood, Paul was no golden boy, no Bryce Harper, no Adley Rutschman, he was just some guy; he was Steve Buechele, he was Tim Teufel, he was Mike LaValliere. 

His first official credit was in the 1991 thriller “Past Midnight,” which was also Quentin Tarantino’s first credit (he got one as producer after rewriting the script), and which I have never watched though the trailer kind of makes me want to? After that, it’s a bunch of itty-bitty bit parts, and then a step or two up from itty-bitty bit parts, and then some smaller supporting roles, even after his break in Howard Stern’s “Private Parts.” “I think those are the hardest,” Giamatti said of his early roles at the Santa Barbara International Film Festival’s Cinema Vanguard Awards. And it’s why even though I wouldn’t mind discussing the actor’s prickly surprise in roles like “Win Win” and “Barney’s Version,” or even going long on his electrifying delivery of exposition in “San Andreas,” in seeking to celebrate Giamatti, I find myself thinking most about his earliest roles, when we didn’t even know it was him.

Singles (1992). “I thought he was literally going to swallow her,” says Campbell Scott to Kyra Sedgwick after their date in Cameron Crowe’s comedy about the credited Kissing Man (Giamatti) slovenly making out with his lady friend across the way. And that’s how Giamatti plays it, committed to the bit, and even getting a one-word line, “What?,” which is not angry, or loud, just genuinely incredulous. Wasn’t everybody publicly making out in coffee shops in early-90s Seattle?

Mighty Aphrodite (1995). If his part in “Singles” was designed to stand out, his part as the Extra Guilds Researcher in Woody Allen’s 1995 comedy was designed as just the opposite. And he does what is asked, nothing more, a team player. If he didn’t turn out to be Paul Giamatti, would you have even remembered he was in it? I didn’t! And I once owned this movie on VHS!

Donnie Brasco (1997). As FBI Technician, Giamatti, and Tim Blake Nelson in one of his earliest roles too, are enlisted as the inherently geekier counterpoints to the cooler undercover Johnny Depp while he is giving his unforgettable monologue about what “forget about it” means. In fact, here Giamatti gets to take his own stab at “forget about it,” as if giving us an orange with none of the juice, and going to show, years before “Spy” (2015), that deep down, every technician wants to get on the field. 

My Best Friend’s Wedding (1997). Released the same year as “Private Parts,” you could make an argument that Giamatti’s walk off role here demonstrated his burgeoning excellence just as much. It’s one scene, but as Richard the Bellman, Giamatti effortlessly transitions from service industry schmo to guardian angel, the way his character shares a cigarette with the one played by Julia Roberts underlining not only how they share the scene but how so many little moments like this one go together to make something big.

Saving Private Ryan (1998). If in “My Best Friend’s Wedding,” Giamatti winningly played off Julia Roberts, in “Saving Private Ryan,” he winningly played off Tom Hanks, or more accurately, winningly portrayed the loser spiritual opposite of Tom Hanks, no small thing. And in doing so, he renders it totally believable that this meathead would pull off his boots in the middle of a skirmish to try and get out a hitchhiker to trigger the sequence’s climax. 

The Truman Show (1998). If Steven Spielberg employed Giamatti as the spiritual opposite of Tom Hanks, then Peter Weir employed Giamatti as the spiritual opposite of Christof (Ed Harris), creator and executive producer of the eponymous reality television show, the schlemiel to Christof’s God. You need the guy who will lose track of “the world’s most recognizable face,” you call Paul Giamatti. 

Some Drivel On...the Oscar Nominations

Oscar nominations, so many ripples in the rain.

So, how’s it going? The new membership of the Academy of Motion Pictures and Sciences, I mean, which after deserved blowback in recent years has embraced diversity and youth while still retaining enough outmodedness to make the spirit of the Cocoanut Grove proud: after all, Billie Eilish and Leonard Maltin are Academy members now! And you can see this in the nominations for the 96th Academy Awards, unveiled yesterday, which were as vexing as they were satisfying (and can all be found here), especially where Best Picture was concerned, utilizing all ten slots to encompass a wide spectrum. If there was anything that decidedly wasn’t a surprise, it’s that my Top 5 Favorite Movies of the year earned a total of zero nominations, including “Fallen Leaves,” which I might have thought had a chance, for something, maybe. Eh, whatever. You can stream it on Mubi; watch it anyway; who cares; watch the other Aki Kaurismäki movies on Criterion; watch a middling thriller! 

2024 was defined in so many ways by the Barbenheimer phenomenon and continued apace in the nominations, though if Greta Gerwig’s “Barbie” still leads both the global and domestic box office sweepstakes, Christopher Nolan’s “Oppenheimer” won in terms of Academy Award nods with 13 to 8. (Yorgos Lanthimos’s “Poor Things,” in fact, earned 3 more nods than “Barbie,” further evidence of the old William Goldman line about nobody knowing anything.) That baker’s dozen includes not only the big uns like Best Picture and Best Director and Best Actor for Cillian Murphy, but Best Score and Best Sound, where even an “Oppenheimer” agnostic such as me would confess to its excellence. It even dragged Emily Blunt to a Best Supporting Actress nod, an incredible performer for whom this blog has repeatedly stanned, so don’t come for us (me), but who, through no real fault of her own, is an acting non-entity in her nominated role. Penélope Cruz in “Ferrari” would have eaten her lunch.

“Barbie’s” haul was mostly down along the production line, which is all richly deserved, even as its unlikely omissions in a couple top line categories will provide unwanted ammunition to the freshmen economics students claiming “Barbie” is doing capitalism rather than being art. What’s more, Ryan Gosling earned a Supporting Actor nod (yay!) while Margot Robbie was, well, let’s avoid the word snubbed, shall we, and say, laughably overlooked, as if the Academy toed the Pop Culture Company line that Gosling stole the movie even while Robbie (her turn in “Barbie” in conjunction with her cameo in “Asteroid City” made her this useless blog’s Performer of the Year) was, in fact, making the whole movie right in front of their face with her face. And though America Ferrera got a Supporting Actress nod, undoubtedly because she recited the Big Monologue, Gerwig herself was left out of the Best Director race, all the more remarkable because she was also left out of the Best Director race for “Little Women” (2019) but wasn’t for “Ladybird” (2015) for which she deserved a Direction nomination least. Sigh. It’s complicated. She knows.

Though I would have put Sofia Coppola number one on my ballot for “Priscilla,” Gerwig was more deserving than Lanthimos for “Poor Things,” a movie which I will write about, eventually, and where I thought the direction ultimately interfered more than enhanced. As it is, a woman was nominated, Justine Triet for the French drama “Anatomy of a Fall,” and Jonathan Glazer was nominated too, for “The Zone Interest,” and because of that, it’s hard not to be a little happy. These are people, like their fellow nominee Martin Scorsese for “Killers of the Flower Moon,” who try to make films, not movies, to paraphrase Kit Ramsey, whether they work or not, for you, or for me, or for anyone else. Anyway, that category is Christopher Nolan’s to lose, just as “Oppenheimer” is certainly the favorite for Best Picture, leaving me to dream of Oprah returning to present it so she can modify her Golden Globes envelope-opening from “Oppenheimerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr!” to “the Father of the Atomic Boooooooooooomb!”)  

In terms of the acting categories, the biggest news was Lily Gladstone becoming the first woman of Native American descent to be nominated for an Oscar with “Killers of the Flower Moon” and Jeffrey Wright earning his first Oscar nomination as Best Actor in “American Fiction.” Paul Giamatti, meanwhile, earned his first Best Actor nomination in “The Holdovers.” And though I had problems with the latter, I didn’t have a problem with Giamatti, and even if I did, I don’t think I’d care. It should be His Time; his inexorable march to the podium in March would be well deserved and overdue, and he might be Hollywood’s most unwittingly equipped to go through the next six weeks without letting the stress affect him. In fact, in our era, where these races are monitored so closely and dished about so incessantly there are no longer any real surprises, let’s close this recap by ranking the coronation levels for our probable acting winners.

1. Robert Downey Jr., Best Supporting Actor for “Oppenheimer.” LEVEL: Reagan over Mondale. 

2. Da’Vine Joy Randolph, Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers.” LEVEL: LBJ over Goldwater.

3. Lily Gladstone, Best Actress for “Killers of the Flower Moon.” LEVEL: Clinton over Bush.

4. Paul Giamatti, Best Actor for “The Holdovers.” LEVEL: Obama over Romney.