Blinded by 2020

Of the nine movies nominated for Best Picture, I have seen and written about eight, and, of those, not a one lacks some extraordinary measure of insight or ambition. We have had a few bumper crops in recent years, but absent—in this selection—is either the extremely well-made conventional film (like Selma or Spotlight) or a Weinsteinian Oscar grab like The King’s Speech or The Imitation Game. His grabbing days are thankfully over.

The one I missed, Ford v. Ferrari with Matt Damon and Christian Bale, is the one that might fall most neatly into those categories, but it is also the least talked-about of the contenders, which is itself a remarkable change: being talked about as an Oscar movie nowadays means being complained about as a straight-white-dude movie, which is to say a movie about what is naively considered to be a dying breed. Quentin Tarantino, by attacking that naivete head-on—though, in a weird way, also affirming it—perhaps deserves credit for drawing the fire that Green Book just stumbled into.

Alas, I feel like a trophy winner at the moment the play-off music begins to chide them offstage. (The key difference is that my orchestra is an oven timer; there are hors d’oeuvres to be made.) But an observation I would like to make now—and hopefully develop later—is that these nominees are, in the sense of ideas and worldviews, a model of pluralism—but the ways in which their ideas and worldviews both enhance and rebut one another is also a testament to how difficult pluralism is to achieve—much less to sustain. The ongoing Democratic primary season bears this out too.

Little Women

Little Women does not, for the most part, feel like a current film. Obviously, the Louisa May Alcott book, published 150 years ago, is a classic—and Greta Gerwig has adapted it in full period splendor. It stumbles early on, insecure about how to juggle the host of characters and hops in the timeline, which forces the wandering eye to scramble as it takes in all the Victorian fabrics and wallpapers. Gerwig’s recreation of a Bowery street scene is so thorough that one wishes Jo wasn’t in such a rush, even if slowing down would defy her constitution. But the movie increases in sureness as it goes along.

Though the book is autobiographical, and widely considered to be timeless, it is set in a unique moment of 19th-century American history, when most of the men were off fighting the Civil War, leaving the women to their own devices. And there is another level of specificity, too, that the movie elides: Alcott grew up in Concord, Mass., to parents who hobnobbed with the likes of Emerson and Thoreau. There was perhaps no other place in the country at that time that was as receptive to women with artistic ambitions.

The March sisters, archetypically, each have their own: Jo (Saoirse Ronan) wants to be a writer; Meg (Emma Watson) an actress; Amy (Florence Pugh) a painter; and Beth (Eliza Scanlen) a musician. Their mother (Laura Dern) has a bleeding heart, and donates Christmas breakfast to an impoverished family (the Marches are poor, too, but float on their social clout); and their aunt (Meryl Streep), a realist, milks money and clout for all it’s worth.