EPISODE 504: I WILL DRINK UNTIL NEXT MORNING
True Story, I once almost got into a fistfight with Steven Spielberg over Kate Capshaw at the Oscars and we are now mortal enemies.
POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW
It’s rare to walk away from an Oscars in the last 10+ years feeling much beyond exhaustion or stunned disappointment. Everyone goes on about the length, but I think it’s also a function of the moment we’re living in. We’re more and more aware as a society of the ways our reality and those within it don’t live up to our expectations, the gaps to be found in areas like gender and race throughout our society and world.
And yet calling those problems out doesn’t mean they are quickly resolved. The broader arc of history might be bending toward real progress, but here in the weeds the road is a lot more windy.
So yeah, come the Oscars a deflated disappointment seems the norm.
But then, in a year which saw the Academy nominate no female directors, overlook fantastically diverse films like The Farewell, Hustlers and The Last Black Man in San Francisco, those same voters give Korean film Parasite not just Best Foreign Film, but Best Director, Screenplay and Film. No one could have predicted it, and it stands as a moment of the Oscars doing what they’re supposed to, which is inviting us all to relish and celebrate great art.
For me this tweet says it all.
When I was a student at UCLA I got the chance to be a seat filler at the Oscars. A couple hundred of us Bruins were positioned at the back of the theater, and at every commercial break as celebrities and other attendees would get up to get a drink or go to the restroom, Oscar staff would radio in how many empty seats there now were, and we would rush out to fill them. (The idea being that when the cameras pan the crowd there is never an empty seat.)
It was an insane, How is This Happening? experience (which included me at the very end walking past Steven Spielberg and Kate Capshaw, commenting on how incredible I thought she was, and him looking really put out and then taking her away, and ever since we have been nemeses.)
And the thing that most surprised me was how different the ceremony feels in that room. It’s like the oxygen has been infused with that sense of wonder you had when your parents took you to your first movie. All cynicism withers and dies, to be replaced with a kind of humble delight. How lucky am I to be able to be in this business, in any small way that I can?
It’s the same way I feel every year when they do the In Memoriam. Seeing the pictures of costume designers and editors and hair and make-up people that I’ve never heard of, it hits me all over again that this is a community enterprise, and that to be a part of it is a really special thing.
By the way, wasn’t Billie Eilish great?
I continue to try and figure out what is my place in that world of storytelling. But at moments like that final award last night I am grateful for it and the opportunities I’ve had even to be at its very margins.
Put another way:
Some of the best stories of the night, I thought, were in categories that don’t normally get a lot of attention.
For instance, Bombshell won for Best Hair and Make-Up. And it’s so well-deserved. The hair and prosthetics alone are so key to the characters. The New York Times did a great piece with their team in December, which covers everything from the way they completely reshaped the actors’ eyes through a combination of makeup and eyelashes, to the way make-up styles shift as women on Fox News get more senior.
In doing research, Baker said they noticed that the newer anchors wore more exaggerated makeup that was not as flattering as the makeup worn by more established women, and that as they moved up, their appearances became more natural. The transition, she said, seemed to denote the power they gained.
In the cinematography category – well, first of all can we revel in the giddy excess that is Julia Louis-Dreyfus and Will Ferrell?
There’s been a lot said about 1917’s now-Academy Award-winning cinematography, and rightfully so. As shot by Roger Deakins the entire film is woven together visually so tightly that it seems to be one incredibly long shot. The planning and organization needed to pull off that kind of experience, in a war film no less, is unheard of.
Here’s a short on that:
But I was also struck by an analysis of the Bruce Lee scene in Once Upon a Time… in Hollywood, which is also a “oner” (i.e. all one shot), but takes the exact opposite tack of 1917. Rather than attempting to draw attention to the fact this is all one shot, Once uses all the tools at its disposal to hide the technique. The idea being that while wow-inducing, oners also by their nature take you out of the story. They are the film equivalent of Evel Knievel getting on his bike and jumping over the Grand Canyon – incredibly cool on its own, but kind of weird to put halfway through Breaking Away.
#80sReferencesAreMySpiritAnimal
One of the strongest critiques of 1917 is that the technique distracts from the story. The video does give a pretty strong story reason for using the technique, namely that it creates a sense of propulsion and urgency. Personally I’m not sure it fully succeeds though. At times it feels like more cuts would have helped, if only to mark the passing of time.
For me the thing that’s really interesting about the Once shot is how the oner follows our own natural shifts in attention: We start on Bruce Lee, the one talking. But once Brad Pitt’s Cliff Booth enters the frame, we’re curious about how he’s taking all this and so the camera comes to settle on him. As the scene becomes a combat, first of words and then of fists, we want to be far enough back to see everything, so cinematographer Robert Richardson pulls back. It’s really a great piece of work.
If you want to know more, here’s that take I came across about it:
One movie that did not get any Oscar love, unfortunately in my opinion, is Shia LaBeouf’s Honey Boy. The film tells the story of his own life as a child actor, with his semi-broken semi-deadbeat dad as his guardian. LaBeouf gives an incredible performance as his father; you absolutely never know where his character is going to go, which creates a sense of danger that captures so well the experience of the son.
There’s some wonderful photos from the shoot. The film is now on Amazon Prime.
Three final short takes from this year in cinema:
1) For me some of the best films involve someone with a crazy dream that they won’t stop chasing. Jimmy insisting he’s going to get back the house his family lost in this year’s Last Black Man in San Francisco. Bruce Dern’s character insisting he won a prize and has to go to Omaha in Nebraska. Their persistence gives them so much pathos.
2) Jojo Rabbit, which won Best Adapted Screenplay and tells the story of a German child who has Hitler as an imaginary friend and dreams of joining his military, absolutely should not work at any level. But the film succeeds by being 100% faithful to the child’s naive, ridiculous point of view. Even as we look on his desires as crazy, we’re so immersed in seeing the world through the boy’s eyes that we don’t see the twists in the story coming. It’s a script filled with incredible sleights of hand.
(Also it has such a fantastically satisfying ending.)
3) 1917 has a great moment where the characters behave exactly as I would want to in their situation and it proves to be catastrophically terrible. It’s a reminder of what a great asset your audience’s beliefs are. Give the audience what they want and then turn that choice upside down, and man does that grab them by the throat.
(I also wonder if putting a twist like that at the center of the film is not a genius move, in that it gives the story new momentum at the very moment most films need it.)
Ferrell and Louis-Dreyfus on editors is even better than on cinematographers:
Turned in the new beat sheet for EVERYBODY SAYS DON’T on Friday. I’m a little afraid the center of the story has shifted from the guy I thought was the main character. Always more work to do; I just try to remember this:
Meanwhile I’m debating whether ANOTHER HUNDRED PEOPLE is a mini-series or a standalone film. I have to say, doing the research for this project has been equal parts inspiring and upsetting. It’s all good for the project, but man, humans have done some seriously terrible things.
Also hoping to take a first tinker this week at a detective idea that has kept popping up the last few months. Not sure what it is exactly, just nibbling around the edges for now. Let’s call it NOT WHILE I’M AROUND.
And, in The Year of Living Fearlessly-ish, I had lunch this week with a comic book essayist whose work I really admire. She writes regularly for Panel x Panel, which does fantastic deep dives into different comics. I’ve gotten to do a couple articles for them, one on the Incredible Hulk and one on a web comic I love called O Human Star. And it’s funny, I’ve probably been more nervous about those articles than most anything else I’ve written in the last few years. I’m not entirely sure that I understand why; somehow writing about comics seems to touch into a pretty personal part of me.
Point being, when this writer reached out to me to get together I was cold-sweats and should-I-cancel-at-the-last-minute nervous. Which turned out to be absolutely ridiculous, she was fantastic and generous and brilliant and we had a great time.
THREE TWEETS
What the World Needs Now
What the World Needs Meow (#sorrynotsorry)
My Big Idea of the Week
This last week was nuts. (I mean, Cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs Wacko.) And who knows what the new week holds.
But whatever it is, don’t let it shake you. Risk ugliness. In imperfection, there is beauty.
Thanks so much for reading. See you next week.