Oscar, Where Is Thy Sting? Reflections on Plague-Year Movie Watching

Like all streaming beings, I’ve watched a lot of movies during the plague year. So I actually viewed most of the films nominated for Academy Awards, which were announced yesterday. The good news is that the Hollywood establishment is now spotlighting a more diverse range of filmmakers. The bad news is that the overall quality of moviemaking hasn’t significantly improved.

 The Oscar nominations were still dominated by two white men, with David Fincher’s Mank and Aaron Sorkin’s The Trial of the Chicago Seven vacuuming up a lot of nominations. Although these two films explore troublesome subjects – the corruption of creativity in Hollywood and the anti-imperialist radicalism of the 1960s – they still are limp, formulaic exercises. I’m a big fan of actor Gary Oldman, but the only memorable performance in Mank is the cameo by Charles Dance as William Randolph Hearst. Nobody plays a smooth, old reptile better than Dance.

Gary Oldman as screenwriter Herman Mankiewicz and Charles Dance as Citizen Hearst

What more can be said about Sorkin – he’s the kid always waving his hand for the teacher’s attention in civics class. He means well, but his idea of ‘60s radicalism seems largely derived from his childhood viewing of The Mod Squad.

The insufferably well-meaning Aaron Sorkin

It was dismaying to read that Netflix dominated this year’s Oscar selections, with 35 nominations. The streaming empires that are taking over Hollywood obviously like prickly subjects to get viewers’ eyeballs, but these films ultimately play it safe. The streaming giants seem to know they now have global, captive audiences and they want to titillate and divert them but not add any angst to their locked-down lives.

Even the movies by the new wave of women and non-white filmmakers generally lack bite. I strongly liked Chloe Zhao’s Nomadland, but as readers reminded me, she took a dive on Amazon (did she hope for a Prime Video distribution deal?), depicting work life in one of its robotic warehouses with a rosy glow.

The only film nominated for Best Picture that has the true grit of its subject is Judas and the Black Messiah, which was made by old-fashioned studio Warner Brothers. Young director Shaka King was not afraid to conjure the darkness of the Fred Hampton story, the charismatic, 21-year-old Black Panther leader who was betrayed by one of his top deputies and assassinated in his bed by a FBI/police death squad.

Daniel Kaluuya as Fred Hampton

Filmmakers with courage and creativity need to remind themselves: the Revolution will not be streamed.