Oscar Post-Mortem: thoughts on politics in acceptances speeches and two best picture nominees I missed

“Painting..is an instrument of war.” - Picasso

“Shut up and act (or write or play football or do anything but talk about political issues)” - Too many people who know nothing about art or politics.

I didn’t really do much to celebrate the Academy Awards this year because my mind has been elsewhere. That said, I did see all of the best picture nominees and a few others, but if I’m honest, I’ve weighed in on the movies I genuinely cared about. Well, except Nickel Boys, which was gripping and used first-person camerawork to good effect. 

Emilia Pérez was a disappointment that I’ll have more to say about, below, as well. I feel I should at least give these films some due. They made it to the nominations and while one is more engaging and challenging than the other, I’m reluctant to completely dismiss the other. 

More to the point is that I didn’t watch the show this year. I checked out Conan O’Brien’s monologue and enjoyed it well enough, but I figured I’d catch the winners on Monday and was unsurprised. I’m glad Anora did so well, although a part of me wishes Demi Moore had won. I’m a little, not “disappointed”, but maybe surprised that neither Margaret Qualley nor Daniel Craig received any notice for their work in The Substance and Queer, respectively. But so it goes.

All in all, it was business as usual and I was also unsurprised at the peanut galleries complaining about how recipients “politicized” the awards and can’t they all just shut up and stick to acting. Or directing, etc. It’s this that I feel requires a little more scrutiny.

The average American is ill-suited to complain about their fellow citizens choosing a stance or speaking out about it when they have the platform to advocate accordingly. Even more so do directors, writers, actors and others who come from an international background, very often with stories that are by their very nature, political. 

Additionally, politicians who get in on the act and roll their eyes when a mere actor stands for something she believes, only show themselves to be ignorant of First Amendment rights and just what the nature of art is.

That quote from Picasso dates from 1945, but during the occupation, when his villa was visited by German officers, one of them saw a postcard of his masterpiece “Guernica”, a testimony to the slaughter of thousands in a bombing ordered by Franco. The generalissimo had asked Hitler if he could borrow the Luftwaffe to silence dissent in the village of Guernica. The officer said something to the effect of “that’s some work you’ve made” to which Picasso replied, I didn’t make it, you did. So much for the apolitical nature of art and artists.

Some will argue that no one wants to hear showbusiness people go on about their politics. Why not? Are they not allowed to? Are they not at least as informed, if not more than, the non-show-business person? In many cases they are and it’s galling to think that for decades, it’s been the case that people roll their collective eyes when a recipient of an award uses the moment to draw attention to an important issue.

It may be clumsy, it may ham-handed, or it may be well-delivered; it doesn’t really matter. I want to know that artists are engaged in the world. 

Of course, there are those who say that an awards show is not the place for this sort of thing. Again, it’s that person’s three minutes; let them use it how they wish. In some cases, sure, maybe just saying “thanks to my agent, family, and god” is good enough, but in times like these, I say the more the merrier. We live in a mad world and if someone began reciting the alphabet, I’d be for it.

In the end, and it appears most people who write such comments may not be aware that many of their entertainments are likely implicitly, if not explicitly, political works. Much of what was on view in this year’s Academy run were works centered on gender, belonging, race, class, and oppression. In any given year, you could likely make the same observation.

Pity the polity so poorly educated that it can neither appreciate the politics of the works nor understand the working of politics as part of the fabric of our lives.

The Movies

Nickel Boys was a pleasant surprise and I was happy to see it nominate for Best Picture. The first person point of view camera often comes across as a gimmick, but here it lends an interiority at once vivid and filled with trepidation. 

The film tells the tale of two Black teens thrust into a reform school modeled on the Dozier School in Florida years prior to the passage of the Civil Rights Act. The inhumanity of what the young men go through is so pervasive, but to the film’s credit, rarely graphic. It really does’t need to be.

The film starts with Elwood, a promising young man who is wrongly accused of car theft (as an accomplice), who is sent away to the Nickel Academy reform school where he attempts to maintain a degree of composure but runs afoul of the bullies and is introduced to brutal punishment at the hands of the superintendent.

He meets and bonds with Turner, a kid not so innocent, from Houston, who keeps his head down for the most part but is not above not telling Elwood about his grandmother’s visit of passing her letter onto him. But that’s a minor mishap compared to the hell that both kids have to endure. This is 1962 and if Black adults barely have their rights recognized, how fewer do children.

There are time jumps in the narrative that show Elwood in later years following news about Nickel, with stories of abuse coming out, as well as tales of graves of children murdered in cold blood. Ethan Herisse and Brandon Wilson have an easy, lived-in chemistry and your heart breaks for each and both, and then all their cohort.

Joslyn Barnes and RaMell Ross’s script comes to life under Ross’s direction. The film has a pace that seems to slow down at those moments when tension increases. It’s not about suspense; it’s the stress and the impact it has on these young people. Early in the film, we meet Elwood as little boy, surrounded by love and warmth. As he gets older, his grandmother tries to teach him to keep his eyes open, and be on his guard.

If there are white folk who are at all interested in trying to step into a Black person’s shoes circa 1962 - and can we really claim we’ve come that much farther? - this may be as viscerally close as you can get. 

Turner’s upbringing is more rough and tumble and there’s much I can’t speak of without ruining the film, but he’s a study in contrast to Elwood. The denouement took my breath away and only makes me want to read Colin Whitehead’s novel more.

That Nickel Boys received a Best Picture nomination is fitting. It’s a remarkable film that stretches the medium and while much of the technique of Jomo Fray’s cinematography seems to have set up a distance between some critics and the film, it works for me by plunging us into a world no one should ever have had to inhabit.

As for Emilia Peréz, I wish I could say that it’s a diamond in the rough or a masterpiece of sorts, but it’s frankly, a mess. There are fine performances throughout - Gascón is a rock-solid actress and yes, Zoe Saldaña deserves the nom and the win, but while Jacques Audiard seems to want to attempt a camp approach of Almodóvarian proportions, he lacks an understanding of the emotions at the center and periphery of the Spaniard’s work. Even if we take it at face value that Audiard wanted to recreate a kind of telenovela sensibility, it just doesn’t work. It doesn’t work as a compelling drama because it’s not; it doesn’t work as farce, though it has farcical elements; and it doesn’t really work as a musical; the tunes are tedious and the movie seems to work against the score.

I appreciate Karla Sofia Gascón’s work here and this was not tokenism. She does a fine job with what she’s given, if much of what she’s given is couched in regressive “trans panic” structures. Did she deserve the nomination for Best Actress? I think so. Both she and Saldaña turned in strong work; it’s too bad they weren’t in a stronger film. As for her racist tweets that were uncovered and are said to have detailed the movie’s campaign, I hate to hear about this stuff from people who are already marginalized and in need of allies more than alienation. I’m hoping that those posts don’t reflect who Gascón is today and she can have something of a successful career, as I’d like to see more of what she’s capable of.

Altogether, I can’t say it’s been a bad season. I think it’s tough in any given year to expect that genuinely great films will sweep the Oscars, but I have to say Anora is that and I’m happy for Sean Baker and all involved. I’m glad, too, that films like Nickel Boys and I’m Still Here got the recognition they deserved.

I’m hoping that in the days ahead, we see more shots fired over the bow into the oncoming darkness. Art is a weapon against the enemies that would crush imagination, freedom, and love. We’re going to need more of it as time wears on.