The Tip Sheet is spinning off. Introducing Space Invaders, a newsletter about movies and pop culture that invades this space on Saturday. Arrives irregularly during this pilot phase.
The Oscars is at once pomp and pompous. It’s the calcification of all the self-importance that Hollywood carries for itself, but it’s also a populous spectacle that pits our favourite movies against each other as if the culture itself is at stake. That’s kind of weird when you think back four decades to the 1984 Oscars where Terms of Endearment swept the major award categories with wins for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, and Best Adapted Screenplay, but when was the last time you heard, saw, or talked about Terms of Endearment?
Maybe that’s our loss, but maybe it’s a pointed reminder that the Oscars don’t decide what endures, or what’s impactful in the long term; Forrest Gump beat Pulp Fiction, Shakespeare in Love beat Saving Private Ryan, and Green Book beat Roma, The Favourite, A Star is Born, and The BlacKkKlansman. And yet, this Sunday, so much airtime, ink and pixels will be expelled to express calamity and woe about the end of culture because of what the Oscars got wrong.
Also, you’ve got to keep in mind that there’s politics. Matt Belloni’s podcast The Town has been very good the last few weeks taking us behind the wizard’s curtain to see how the awards are made, and how the entire enterprise has the campaign infrastructure of a U.S. presidential election. On the other hand, May December actor Charles Melton was evidently sending samples of the family kimchi recipe to Academy voters and influencers, which has some serious school presidential campaign vibes.
Now, considering all those caveats, let’s talk about who’s going to have a good night on Sunday.
Save for an Act of God, it seems unlikely that any movie other than Oppenheimer will win Best Picture and that anyone other than Christopher Nolan will be Best Director. This is some of those aforementioned politics because Nolan’s not only winning due to the dramatic and technical achievements of Oppenheimer, but it’s also for his two decades as a leading blockbuster filmmaker, technological innovator, and activist for the theatrical moviegoing experience. Put simply, it’s his time, the right time, and with the right movie.
Timing is also on Robert Downey Jr.’s side. Getting an Oscar for playing the role of the villainous (?) Lewis Strauss in Oppenheimer is the completion of his 20-year comeback after finally kicking his drug habit. He was nominated the first time at age 25 for Chaplin, and then spent the next decade in and out of rehab. Marvel made him a star, but Oppenheimer made him an actor again, and the Oscar will cement that. Also, like Jamie Lee Curtis’ win for Best Supporting Actress last year, it’s the Academy’s chance to crown Hollywood royalty.
But belated validation is recurring theme with this year’s Oscars. In the Best Actor race, Paul Giamatti is the front runner in a contest that includes Cillian Murphy, the star of Oppenheimer, Bradley Cooper, who seems to be all about getting an Oscar of his own these days, and Jeffrey Wright, who, like Giamatti, has been a recognizable and accomplished supporting player in dozens of movies for the last 20 years.
Unlike Wright though, Giamatti’s at least gotten a nomination once before even if it was for Cinderella Man – one of those Oscar movies you forget ever existed – and not the more obvious pick that people things, which is Sideways. Playing lead in another Alexander Payne movie maybe Giamatti’s Oscar redemption, but it’s still a cultural crime that he’s only getting that recognition now, and that Wright will likely go home empty-handed in the process.
There’s a similar race in the Best Actress category, a fevered competition between Emma Stone and her go-for-broke performance as a sexually-liberated Bride of Frankenstein in Poor Things, and the history-making nomination of Lily Gladstone, who’s the moral and emotional centre of Killers of the Flower Moon. Stone has her Oscar though, and it would be a little on the nose if the first Indigenous woman to win an Oscar was deterred by the Academy giving Stone a second. It also seems right that Gladstone would end up being the standard bearer for Killers, the one lock for a movie that has 10 total nominations and too much competition.
Things get even easier in the Best Supporting Actress category because Da'Vine Joy Randolph seems to be only one in the conversation as the likely winner, and maybe that’s because she’s the only one that feels like she’s there for the whole movie. America Ferrera got a nod for giving the big thematic monologue in Barbie, Emily Blunt gets a pro forma nom for playing Oppenheimer’s putupon wife, Jodie Foster is here because she’s Jodie Foster, and Danielle Brooks, filling Oprah’s shoes in The Colour Purple, completes the quintet. How can this not go to Randolph who brings quiet, personal dignity and strength to The Holdovers as Giamatti and Dominic Sessa push and yell at each other?
It does seem like these 96th Oscars will go down as one of its most predictable, which is a shame because shouldn’t we be drawn in for the drama of unpredictability? Isn’t the surprise why we’re here? The Oscars seem to have solved one problem in that many of this year’s nominees are from well-known and popular movies, but do we still want to watch knowing that Oppenheimer’s going to win a lot? I guess that will be determined.
Also to be determined: Who wins for animation, the pop-art of Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse or the godfather of the artform, Hayao Miyazaki, with The Boy and the Heron? Does Wes Anderson finally become an Oscar-winner for the Netflix short The Wonderful Story of Henry Sugar? How many statues does Barbie take home even while Greta Gerwig and Margot Robbie were shut out of their spotlight categories of Best Director and Best Actress respectively? And who wins visual effects, the bombasity and massiveness of Napoleon, Guardians of the Galaxy, or Mission: Impossible, or the human scale tragedy of Godzilla: Minus One?
And speaking of human tragedy, how badly is Jimmy Kimmel going to bomb? He will return for his fourth turn as host if only because hosting the Oscars is one of the most tankless jobs in show business and he’s done it before to some degree of satisfaction. Complaints about the Oscars, who’s hosting, who’s nominated, and who won are all among life’s inevitabilities, and yet every year we keep coming back for more. What we need is an Oscar for gluttons for punishment, and surely, we are the winners!
The Oscars are live this Sunday at 7 pm on CTV.
The Bookshelf:
500 Days in the Wild (Sun)
The Braid (Sat-Sun, Wed)
The Holdovers (Tues-Fri)
Poor Things (Sat, Fri)
Smoke Sauna Sisterhood (Tues-Thurs)
The Taste of Things (Sat-Mon)
Starting Friday: Perfect Days
Galaxy Cinemas – Woodlawn:
Article 370
Blackia 2
Bob Marley: One Love
Demon Slayer: Kimetsu No Yaiba – To the Hashira Training (thru Wed)
Digimon Adventure 02 The Beginning (Tues, Thurs)
Dune Part Two
Imaginary
Kung Fu Panda 4
Labyrinth
Madame Web (thru Wed)
Migration
Navalny (Sun)
Ordinary Angels (thru Wed)
Oye Bhole Oye (thru Wed)
Painting the Modern Garden: Monet to Matisse (Sun)
PAW Patrol: The Might Movie (Mon-Thurs)
Peppa’s Cinema Party (Mon-Thurs)
The Super Mario Bros Movie (Mon-Thurs)
Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (Sun-Mon)
Trolls: Band Together
Starting Thursday: Love Lies Bleeding, The American Society of Magical Negros
Galaxy Cinemas – Clair:
Argylle
Bob Marley: One Love
Cabrini
Dune Part Two
Imaginary
Kung Fu Panda 4
PAW Patrol: The Might Movie (Mon-Thurs)
Peppa’s Cinema Party (Tues-Thurs)
The Super Mario Bros, Movie (Tues-Thurs)
Trolls: Band Together (Tues-Thurs)
Wonka
Starting Thursday: French Girls
Mustang Drive-In:
Closed for the season.
Princess Cinemas – Twin:
Amélie (Sun, Thurs)
American Fiction (Sat-Thurs)
Anatomy of a Fall (Sat, Tues-Wed)
Barbie (Sat)
Drive-Away Dolls (Sat-Sun, Wed-Thurs)
Fantastic Mr. Fox (Mon-Tues, Thurs)
Poor Things (Sat-Tues, Thurs)
The Princess Bride (Thurs-Fri)
Shrek (Tues-Wed, Fri)
Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse (Mon, Fri)
The Taste of Things (Sat, Tues)
Turning Red (Mon-Wed)
The Zone of Interest (Sat-Sun, Tues)
Starting Friday: Love Lies Bleeding
Princess Cinemas – Original:
About Dry Grasses (Sat-Sun, Wed)
Fungi: The Web of Life (Thurs)
Perfect Days (Sat-Sun, Tues-Thurs)
The Rocky Horror Picture Show (FrI)
The Taste of Things (Fri)
Werner Herzog: Radical Dreamer (Sat-Sun)
Apollo Cinema:
Gaami (Sun)
Manjummel Boys (Sat, Wed-Thurs)
Poor Things (Sat, Tues)
Premalu (Tues)
The Third Man (Fri)
Wonka (Sat-Sun, Thurs)
The Zone of Interest (Sat-Sun)
This week on End Credits, Tim Phillips co-hosts as we dive into one of the Oscar nominees for Best International Film. We’re going to talk about the new film from the legendary Wim Wenders, a German-Japanese co-production called Perfect Days, and in other news we will head back to 1984 to talk about the legacy of the rock ‘n’ roll mockumentary This is Spinal Tap.
And finally, feel free to reach out to me by email at adamadonaldson [at] gmail [dot] com, or find me on Facebook, Twitter, and, of course, GuelphPolitico.ca!