Oscar Catchup: 2024

The Academy Awards are the purest glimpse into a murky standard: how “mainstream” American culture wants to see itself represented. This has become an ever thornier subject of dispute, at least since The Dark Knight was perceived to be snubbed in 2008—which was, not coincidentally, two years after the emergence of Twitter. Since then, a little gold statue with a sword but no genitalia has been a battleground for competing populisms. In fact, in the battle over which vision of the mainstream should win out, the very notion that we have a mainstream has come under attack.

Credit: Warner Bros. Pictures via AP

Central to most of these attacks is the concept that any kind of “canon” is patently elitist. One vision of the world will inevitably be privileged. And so it seems a little ironic that the two most obvious standard bearers for the cultural left that are up for Best Picture, Poor Things and Barbie, are also the most uncompromising about what ideas qualify as mainstream.

It seems just as ironic that Anatomy of a Fall, perhaps the most highbrow film nominated—The Zone of Interest vies for this distinction—also makes the most sweeping case for liberal open-mindedness. Maestro, likewise, is an implicit defense of the idea of cultural consensus in that it venerates a quintessentially American artist: that is, an artist whose critical esteem is matched by his wide (and enduring) popularity. And, in a way that seems oddly fitting, The Holdovers is a throwback to an era when movies like The Holdovers were shoo-ins for Best Picture. Which is to say, an era before the film is set; The French Connection was named the Best Picture of 1970.

Poor Things

In Poor Things, the inexplicability of the images is charming. That is, it’s charming till they are all explicated. The production design evokes a 1930s James Whale horror flick and Emma Stone’s raw libidinal quirks have the inspired transgressiveness of the surrealist short Un Chien Andalou (1929). Willem Dafoe plays a mad scientist who looks like what would happen if Dr. Frankenstein raided Lincoln’s tomb. He belches petroleum bubbles.

When the film shifts from black-and-white to color, the palette is also a stunning recreation of Old Hollywood daydreams: sunset peach and brick-road yellow, a lapis lazuli gown as rich as a Belgian chocolate. The music, by Jerskin Fendrix, creeps and crawls like an army of ants—and there is a dance number/fight scene at a formal ball set to an instrument out of Dr. Seuss. This is all choreographed deliriously, like a lead-footed polka.

In the past, Yorgos Lanthimos’s filmmaking has been twee. He would use wide-angle lenses the way J. J. Abrams uses lens flares: weird for weird’s sake. In Poor Things, which Tony McNamara adapted from Alasdair Gray’s novel, his form vibes with the content. But impressive as his style is, its whimsicality gets weighed down by the one-track logic of the story.

Asteroid City

Asteroid City is set in Wes Anderson’s 1950s, as opposed to the ’50s he lived through. (He was born in 1969.) In The Grand Budapest Hotel, the filmmaker flipped through eras like lenses in an eye exam, putting the artist at a safe distance from his subject. The layering in this film does something else; it opens a conduit between past and present and their analogues: fiction and reality. Anderson seems self-possessed; he doesn’t hide behind his vision.

Perhaps the best way to get at it is to say that where Budapest was vertical, as in a monopoly, Asteroid City is horizontal. Anderson’s primary storyline, which involves gifted children, their parents, military brass, and scientific personnel encountering a U.F.O. in the Desert Southwest, and being placed under lockdown for it, is framed by its backstory, which casts that story as a play by a gay writer (Edward Norton) working with an austere ensemble that resembles the Actors Studio under Lee Strasberg, and this is framed by a making-of television documentary narrated by Bryan Cranston, doing his best Rod Serling—the voice of a cynical yet reassuring authority.

In effect, Anderson weaves together disparate strands of ’50s Americana, from highbrow (Method acting) to middle (anthology series) to low (flying saucers). He has explicitly set the story in the backyard of nuclear peril and in the same month (September 1955) as James Dean’s death: parallel truths that are stranger than fiction. All that makes these strands coherent is the very fact of his weaving. He salvages flotsam from a dream and the dream is collective nostalgia. The pieces fit together almost despite themselves.

Barbie

The genesis of Greta Gerwig’s Barbie is a primal scene. Girls cosset baby dolls on the twilit savanna, aping the primates from the “Dawn of Man” sequence that launched Stanley Kubrick’s 2001. They rehearse maternity without enthusiasm because, Helen Mirren intones on voiceover, this is the only vision of a future they have. Her delivery is august: she parodies authority by having it, the way “Thus Spake Zarathustra” does. A plastic colossus stands in for the galvanic monolith. Barbie has liberated girls from the porcelain prison of motherhood. It is a stellar opening.

For Gerwig, this is the Dawn of Woman: not being made from Adam but breaking free from his rib cage. Her tongue appears to be planted in cheek, but male self-seriousness, exemplified by Kubrick, is the butt of the joke. It implies the patriarchal dissonance Barbie later rails against—that Gerwig wants to be held in the same regard as a male auteur like Kubrick while cutting his pedestal down to size. This must be a primal headache.

Over the course of the film, Barbie (Margot Robbie) and Ken (Ryan Gosling) journey from the girlboss paradise of Barbieland to the real world so Barbie can confront the girl who “owns” her about why her perfect doll-house life is suddenly being blemished by cellulite and meditations on mortality. But Ken, who has only ever existed in relation to Barbie, feels “seen” in the real world. Like a modern Brometheus, he smuggles the patriarchy home with him, and the Kens scupper Barbieland’s female regime because the Barbies lack the antibody to fend this foreign concept off. Meanwhile, male Mattel executives struggle, in vain, to literally put Barbie back in her box.

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is an infernal machine constructed for the sole purpose of keeping Quentin Tarantino from being held to account for the infernal machine he has constructed. Circumspect critics, who see his beautifully crafted, fruitfully ambiguous horse, miss the army of litigious Trojans inside it. It is a masterpiece of resentment and self-dealing.

Whereas his Obama-era revenge fantasies—Inglourious Basterds (2009) and Django Unchained (2012)—used historically oppressed groups as agents of violence against their universally condemned adversaries, in the Trump era, Tarantino sees that the easiest way for him to profit off controversy is to make his protagonists cis white men. (Spoilers!) With the Manson gang cast as the villains, the alternate-history mechanism depends on the men intervening in the most notorious homicide in Los Angeles history, which claimed the lives of Sharon Tate, her guests—and her unborn child.

As usual, the good guys are works of pulp fiction. Rick Dalton (Leonardo DiCaprio) is an alcoholic hack actor on TV Westerns and Cliff Booth (Brad Pitt) is his pliant assistant: stuntman emeritus and patron saint of chill. Cliff is also a trigger without a warning—he was acquitted for killing his wife in an aside that has nothing to do with character development and everything to do with the filmmaker-troll’s dream of squeezing the word “problematic” out of every hot take. This way, Tarantino can signal to one segment of the audience that nostalgized idols are always flawed and, by way of a brief flashback to the wife being a bitch, signal to another that she got what was coming to her. It’s bothsidesing, plain and simple.

The Wolf of Wall Street

Martin Scorsese’s The Wolf of Wall Street redefines binge-watching. Leonardo DiCaprio rises over the crest of a callipygian call girl, aligning derrière with moonface like the planets in 2001. A plastic straw bridges one crater to another, conveying what I assume to be stardust; he’d shove the whole Milky Way up his nostrils if he could. This film left me with the knee-jerk desire to brush powder off my own nose, but it left me with a lot more than that.

Psychopaths—emotional black boxes—are a hurdle for dramatists; they lean on psychopaths as plot conveniences (or plot conveniences disguised as existential statements, like Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men or Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight) or they camp them up and play them for irony like Hannibal Lecter, an aesthete who acquired supernatural powers as his sequels ground on. Scorsese has dealt with psychopaths before, but perhaps never so vividly and so casually as he does here. Putting DiCaprio’s Jordan Belfort (and the stockbroker’s fellow pump-and-dump fraudsters) front and center, Scorsese and Terence Winter—who wrote the script—blaze past the mystique of psychopathy that captivates and incapacitates so many artists. Making society’s upper crust look like twits is nothing new, but these men who reached extraordinary heights of wealth and prestige came from a Long Island upbringing that was middle class at most. They manage to fly so high because they’re light; there’s less to them than there is to most people. These assholes really couldn’t care less about prestige or high society. In at least this one regard, they are no different on the inside than addicts on the other end of the social ladder who scrounge for a high wherever they can find it; they have blinders on that spare them from all other considerations; they’re slaves to their own drives, and, in most contexts, would be rather pathetic. The difference is they can sell, and that’s all one needs to win in a laissez-faire economy.

The difference about The Wolf of Wall Street is that the filmmakers don’t deny how awesomely, overwhelmingly seductive Belfort’s salesmanship is. Nor do they see his drives as alien or inhuman or evil. Narrated by Belfort, the film is scaled to his carnality; we get deep inside his shallow mind, which only operates from one conquest to the next, and the effect is that he’s sharing his grandiosity with us. He wants to share, wants us to be like him; if we are not, that’s our loss (and probably his gain at our expense). Belfort’s enthusiasm is disarmingly generous, as illustrated by a speech he makes to his minions when he lauds a female broker who pulled herself up from single-motherhood in debt to a six-figure salary or more; and DiCaprio is generous, too, in how he shares the limelight with the supporting players: a canny, confident move that’s also perfectly in character for a con man who knows how to work a mark. Scorsese jumps headlong into Belfort’s drives because they are what define him.