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Awards Season: Week 10
Another week down! We're already more than a third of the way through February! 2020 is gonna be over before we know it and each subsequent year will feel even shorter! Pretty fucked up imo!
Anyway, after a week of fairly mild winter temperatures, we've shot back up to zero-degree gorgeousness. Our planet is burning up and I'm going to enjoy as much of the horror show as possible on my way down with the ship, yee-fucking-haw.
This weeks has gotta be the week I take care of summer trip stuff, I keep procrastinating, and I can't do that forever! It's just been so long since I've travelled ANYWHERE, I think I might be nervous? Just gotta buckle down and book.
Maybe I'll do that after I update this! Which means I should try to keep this short and get straight to the movie spoiler zone!
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): I swear I like this movie more every time I watch it! It's a hot mess where the whole is not as great as the sum of its parts, but the parts are all so good!! From that ridiculously comic book-y opening and all the fun little quippy asides that I've really missed over the last few years on down, I just... REALLY love this movie. Hawkeye gets both a fun personality and a secret family! The sheer elegance of the Mjolnir party scene that's nothing but characters shooting the shit for a really long time and then having it later do double duty as shorthand to let us know we can trust Vision! Cap's 'dance hall as war zone' vision! Even the nonsense Thor sideplot works SO much better in retrospect, now that we have the proper context for it as opposed to it just being 'vague table-setting future movie stuff I guess'. I could go on about all the shit I love in this movie for a really long time!!!
And then I had a little John Schlesinger marathon! Four movies, all new to me!
A Kind of Loving (1962): Hmm, I suppose miserable, toxic heterosexuality is a kind of loving, yes. It's just not a very interesting one. Very standard 'asshole marries the girl he knocks up even though he's over her and everyone is sad forever' stuff, here.
Billy Liar (1963): So the protagonist here is DEEPLY fucking annoying and also a total piece of shit. He's also DEEPLY fucking relatable, which, I gotta say, is not a great feeling. I don't know if it's because it's in black and white, or because it's just SO British, but it blows my damn mind that this was just six years before Midnight Cowboy, how the fuck did the same man make both of these movies, it's like they exist in completely different UNIVERSES.
Darling (1965): Two hours of very pretty people being very awful and unsympathetic. Struggled to find much of a point, here. Yeah, Julie Christie was very good, but just... why? Also, it really pisses me off how attractive I find Dirk Bogarde when he always plays such punk ass busters.
Honky Tonk Freeway (1981): This appears to be a British comedy where the entire joke is how awful and ridiculous Americans are? I guess I can see why it was such a notorious box office bomb! Still, I really do like the notion of a road trip movie that's more about the road than the trip, and would really like to see a better take on it at some point.
35 Rhums (2008): Now THIS was interesting. Sweet and sad and just really lovely. Got under my skin with the first few long, lingering train shots and never let up. Also, it's really nice to see a movie with a mostly black cast coming from somewhere that isn't either America or Africa.
La Grande Illusion (1937): THE THEME IS NOW JAILBREAKS. Fuck, this was so good. A lot of times I'm left underwhelmed by these all-time classic films, but there's just so much to unpack here, I loved it. And it's still somehow so quiet and mellow even with all the different things it's got going on (at least aside from the actual jailbreak scene, THAT SCORE, GAH). Everyone on all sides is sympathetic but no one is completely good, either (the moment when the lone black prisoner tries to show them his drawings and they all just ignore him and move on with the scene was a GUT PUNCH and it's SO UNDERSTATED). I cried TWICE (all throughout de Boeldieu's last stand, parkouring around with his li'l flute, then again right at the end when Maréchal and Rosenthal get away), FUCK YOU FOREVER RENOIR.
Escape from New York (1981): And then I watched some total trash and loved it just as much, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, THAT'S ENOUGH JAILBREAK ACTION FOR NOW. God, what a stacked cast this ridiculous movie has, it's so dumb and great. Also, once you notice how much Kurt Russell's luxurious locks constantly bounce around whenever he moves, it's all you can see.
Sparrows Can't Sing (1963): Holy fuck, in order to be charitable, I'm just going to assume everyone in this movie was directed to be as ridiculously annoying as possible, christ.
Fire Over England (1937): All the sweeping historical drama and star power of a grand epic, crammed into community theatre costumes and 90 minutes. HELL YES. IT EVEN HAD A SWASHBUCKLING JAILBREAK, SORT OF.
Perfect Understanding (1933): Sort of a middling romantic comedy kind of deal, where cheating is fine if you're a guy, but worth it for the fucking COCKTAIL REGATTA. THEY DOWN A BUNCH OF DRINKS AND THEN RACE SPEEDBOATS, PERIODICALLY STOPPING TO DRINK SOME MORE. IT ENDS BADLY. SHOCKING, I KNOW.
War Requiem (1989): Spoiler alert: Sean Bean dies. CRAZY, RIGHT? Anyway, I was so unprepared for this. It's like a World War I... opera... thing? Not... entirely sure how I feel about it, but I couldn't look away for the duration. Also, the plot of Perfect Understanding involves a woman being legally forced to remain with her husband if it can be proved that she cheated on him, the world before no-fault divorces is such a strange, foreign-seeming one in all of these old movies, and to go from seeing Laurence Olivier in that straight to seeing him being pushed in a wheelchair by Tilda Swinton was just... man, the past is SO MUCH CLOSER than it feels, you know?
Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (1974): Oof. This was alright and kinda fun, right up until one of the leads decides the best way to deal with his girlfriend not putting out is to rape her? And the whole thing is played for laughs? As she screams and begs him to stop so loud the neighbours can hear and laugh along? At which point the movie pretty much lost me entirely. It was written and directed by a woman, which certainly makes the intention behind the scene a little more interesting to wonder about, but not enough to offset how fucking gross it was. Which is a bit of a shame, since parts of it were pretty good (those hectic, panic-inducing kitchen scenes and one character's absolutely AMAZING laugh, mostly).
Bad Boys for Life (2020): THIS MOVIE WAS SO MUCH BETTER THAN IT NEEDED TO BE, WHAT THE FUCK. I loved how hard it leaned into how fucking old these guys are now, while still hitting all the action beats! PUT ON YOUR DAMN GLASSES, MARCUS. I loved all the little AMMO babies! Reggie and Betty out here showing the rest of the Riverdale kids that fun supporting roles in larger ensembles are way better than being the leads in shitty teen romances and/or Jesus movies! I loved just how many manly tears there are in this movie OH MY GOD ALL THESE GUYS ARE CRYING LIKE ALL THE FUCKING TIME, WHAT THE FUCK. It's just all so... heartfelt! MARCUS DYING MIKE'S BEARD FOR HIM WHILE HE'S IN HIS COMA, COME ON. And it's just so COLOURFUL, all the Miami night scenes feel like they take place in the near future or something. I had so much fun with this, what even. My only real gripe is that I'm going to need some serious #JusticeForCap realness if they're seriously going to try to bring murderson into the crew for the next one.
The 92nd Academy Awards: AND THEN EVERYTHING TURNED OUT BETTER THAN EXPECTED. Wowee. After some seriously dismaying nominations, this wound up being my favourite Oscars ceremony in recent memory by a fairly wide margin. It fucking opened with Janelle Monae as Mr. Rogers, I was DOOMED from the get-go. Not quite sure how I feel about them including Midsommar/Us/Dolemite costumes in that opening number after not, you know, actually nominating them for anything, but I guess it's better than just continuing to pretend they don't exist? Smacked a little of the same vibe as all the jokes about the lack of diversity in the nominees, like, if nothing ever changes, it's not really funny, is it? WHATEVER, the actual winners turned out pretty aces in the end! Last year was a lot of broadly satisfying wins offset by a fair few really shitty, underwhelming ones; this year it doesn't feel like there's ANYTHING in here tainting the good stuff. Even the movies I wasn't so hot on, like Joker and Little Women, took the things they were locks for and NOTHING else. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is still my favourite of the nominees, and while I certainly would have liked to see screenplay/best picture wins for it, Bong's Big Night is a FAR more interesting narrative, and I loved watching it unfold. All my pet favs went home with more than one award (proud of you, Ford v Ferrari!) and overall, it was just a very satisfying night. Plus RANDOM FUCKING EMINEM??? JUST DOING HIS OSCAR-WINNING SONG 18 YEARS LATERS WITH NO INTRODUCTION OR CONTEXT GIVEN??? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT. I LOVED IT. SO FUCKING WEIRD. The song performances were fun (how often do they get all five sung by the actual people who sung them in the movie???), and I really liked the way they took the most awkward part of the hostless format (having celebrities come out just to... introduce a celebrity who will present the next award) and did something neat with it (having all the baby up-and-coming actors introduce the established stars!). The most boring part of the night was the acting winners remaining in lockstep with the rest of awards season, but since the writing was on the wall for all four, you really can't call it a disappointment. And it's WILD to me that The Irishman, which was SUCH the favourite heading into awards season, wound up being the only BP nominee to go home completely empty-handed. Just never picked up the momentum it needed! By the end of it, Pesci was about the only shot they had, and one old man could never defeat the PittDernPhoenixZellweger katamari that's been rolling through all of the other awards shows. To conclude, the suckiest part about the discourse surrounding the lack of diversity in the nominees means that genuinely cool pieces of representation kind of get sidelined in the narrative? Like, it's cool as shit that both screenplay winners went to non-white writers this year, but by all means, whine about the white lady getting snubbed some more. Yeah, one of the white male directing nominees was almost comically undeserving of the nod, and that sucks and is worth calling out, but also, a woman just beat out two Newmans for best score for the same damn movie! Score is a NOTORIOUSLY mostly-male field, that is a HUGE, excellent win that deserves to be celebrated! Maybe part of the problem is how fucking self-congratulatory the Academy can be with that stuff, like SEE SEXISM IS OVER ACTUALLY, having the three lady 'superheroes' give the award with the first female conductor leading the band for that was REAL over-the-top yuck stuff (especially since they were all SO very white (does Gal Gadot count as white? I'm never sure), like this shit doesn't exist in a vacuum guys, it's not all a zero sum game), idk! idk. What I DO know is that I had a lot of fun, and if this winds up being the last Oscars before they start really ruining them in a futile quest to bring ratings back up in a world where fewer and fewer people even have cable, then it was a hell of a great show to end on.
Anyway, after a week of fairly mild winter temperatures, we've shot back up to zero-degree gorgeousness. Our planet is burning up and I'm going to enjoy as much of the horror show as possible on my way down with the ship, yee-fucking-haw.
This weeks has gotta be the week I take care of summer trip stuff, I keep procrastinating, and I can't do that forever! It's just been so long since I've travelled ANYWHERE, I think I might be nervous? Just gotta buckle down and book.
Maybe I'll do that after I update this! Which means I should try to keep this short and get straight to the movie spoiler zone!
Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): I swear I like this movie more every time I watch it! It's a hot mess where the whole is not as great as the sum of its parts, but the parts are all so good!! From that ridiculously comic book-y opening and all the fun little quippy asides that I've really missed over the last few years on down, I just... REALLY love this movie. Hawkeye gets both a fun personality and a secret family! The sheer elegance of the Mjolnir party scene that's nothing but characters shooting the shit for a really long time and then having it later do double duty as shorthand to let us know we can trust Vision! Cap's 'dance hall as war zone' vision! Even the nonsense Thor sideplot works SO much better in retrospect, now that we have the proper context for it as opposed to it just being 'vague table-setting future movie stuff I guess'. I could go on about all the shit I love in this movie for a really long time!!!
And then I had a little John Schlesinger marathon! Four movies, all new to me!
A Kind of Loving (1962): Hmm, I suppose miserable, toxic heterosexuality is a kind of loving, yes. It's just not a very interesting one. Very standard 'asshole marries the girl he knocks up even though he's over her and everyone is sad forever' stuff, here.
Billy Liar (1963): So the protagonist here is DEEPLY fucking annoying and also a total piece of shit. He's also DEEPLY fucking relatable, which, I gotta say, is not a great feeling. I don't know if it's because it's in black and white, or because it's just SO British, but it blows my damn mind that this was just six years before Midnight Cowboy, how the fuck did the same man make both of these movies, it's like they exist in completely different UNIVERSES.
Darling (1965): Two hours of very pretty people being very awful and unsympathetic. Struggled to find much of a point, here. Yeah, Julie Christie was very good, but just... why? Also, it really pisses me off how attractive I find Dirk Bogarde when he always plays such punk ass busters.
Honky Tonk Freeway (1981): This appears to be a British comedy where the entire joke is how awful and ridiculous Americans are? I guess I can see why it was such a notorious box office bomb! Still, I really do like the notion of a road trip movie that's more about the road than the trip, and would really like to see a better take on it at some point.
35 Rhums (2008): Now THIS was interesting. Sweet and sad and just really lovely. Got under my skin with the first few long, lingering train shots and never let up. Also, it's really nice to see a movie with a mostly black cast coming from somewhere that isn't either America or Africa.
La Grande Illusion (1937): THE THEME IS NOW JAILBREAKS. Fuck, this was so good. A lot of times I'm left underwhelmed by these all-time classic films, but there's just so much to unpack here, I loved it. And it's still somehow so quiet and mellow even with all the different things it's got going on (at least aside from the actual jailbreak scene, THAT SCORE, GAH). Everyone on all sides is sympathetic but no one is completely good, either (the moment when the lone black prisoner tries to show them his drawings and they all just ignore him and move on with the scene was a GUT PUNCH and it's SO UNDERSTATED). I cried TWICE (all throughout de Boeldieu's last stand, parkouring around with his li'l flute, then again right at the end when Maréchal and Rosenthal get away), FUCK YOU FOREVER RENOIR.
Escape from New York (1981): And then I watched some total trash and loved it just as much, I CONTAIN MULTITUDES, THAT'S ENOUGH JAILBREAK ACTION FOR NOW. God, what a stacked cast this ridiculous movie has, it's so dumb and great. Also, once you notice how much Kurt Russell's luxurious locks constantly bounce around whenever he moves, it's all you can see.
Sparrows Can't Sing (1963): Holy fuck, in order to be charitable, I'm just going to assume everyone in this movie was directed to be as ridiculously annoying as possible, christ.
Fire Over England (1937): All the sweeping historical drama and star power of a grand epic, crammed into community theatre costumes and 90 minutes. HELL YES. IT EVEN HAD A SWASHBUCKLING JAILBREAK, SORT OF.
Perfect Understanding (1933): Sort of a middling romantic comedy kind of deal, where cheating is fine if you're a guy, but worth it for the fucking COCKTAIL REGATTA. THEY DOWN A BUNCH OF DRINKS AND THEN RACE SPEEDBOATS, PERIODICALLY STOPPING TO DRINK SOME MORE. IT ENDS BADLY. SHOCKING, I KNOW.
War Requiem (1989): Spoiler alert: Sean Bean dies. CRAZY, RIGHT? Anyway, I was so unprepared for this. It's like a World War I... opera... thing? Not... entirely sure how I feel about it, but I couldn't look away for the duration. Also, the plot of Perfect Understanding involves a woman being legally forced to remain with her husband if it can be proved that she cheated on him, the world before no-fault divorces is such a strange, foreign-seeming one in all of these old movies, and to go from seeing Laurence Olivier in that straight to seeing him being pushed in a wheelchair by Tilda Swinton was just... man, the past is SO MUCH CLOSER than it feels, you know?
Tutto a posto e niente in ordine (1974): Oof. This was alright and kinda fun, right up until one of the leads decides the best way to deal with his girlfriend not putting out is to rape her? And the whole thing is played for laughs? As she screams and begs him to stop so loud the neighbours can hear and laugh along? At which point the movie pretty much lost me entirely. It was written and directed by a woman, which certainly makes the intention behind the scene a little more interesting to wonder about, but not enough to offset how fucking gross it was. Which is a bit of a shame, since parts of it were pretty good (those hectic, panic-inducing kitchen scenes and one character's absolutely AMAZING laugh, mostly).
Bad Boys for Life (2020): THIS MOVIE WAS SO MUCH BETTER THAN IT NEEDED TO BE, WHAT THE FUCK. I loved how hard it leaned into how fucking old these guys are now, while still hitting all the action beats! PUT ON YOUR DAMN GLASSES, MARCUS. I loved all the little AMMO babies! Reggie and Betty out here showing the rest of the Riverdale kids that fun supporting roles in larger ensembles are way better than being the leads in shitty teen romances and/or Jesus movies! I loved just how many manly tears there are in this movie OH MY GOD ALL THESE GUYS ARE CRYING LIKE ALL THE FUCKING TIME, WHAT THE FUCK. It's just all so... heartfelt! MARCUS DYING MIKE'S BEARD FOR HIM WHILE HE'S IN HIS COMA, COME ON. And it's just so COLOURFUL, all the Miami night scenes feel like they take place in the near future or something. I had so much fun with this, what even. My only real gripe is that I'm going to need some serious #JusticeForCap realness if they're seriously going to try to bring murderson into the crew for the next one.
The 92nd Academy Awards: AND THEN EVERYTHING TURNED OUT BETTER THAN EXPECTED. Wowee. After some seriously dismaying nominations, this wound up being my favourite Oscars ceremony in recent memory by a fairly wide margin. It fucking opened with Janelle Monae as Mr. Rogers, I was DOOMED from the get-go. Not quite sure how I feel about them including Midsommar/Us/Dolemite costumes in that opening number after not, you know, actually nominating them for anything, but I guess it's better than just continuing to pretend they don't exist? Smacked a little of the same vibe as all the jokes about the lack of diversity in the nominees, like, if nothing ever changes, it's not really funny, is it? WHATEVER, the actual winners turned out pretty aces in the end! Last year was a lot of broadly satisfying wins offset by a fair few really shitty, underwhelming ones; this year it doesn't feel like there's ANYTHING in here tainting the good stuff. Even the movies I wasn't so hot on, like Joker and Little Women, took the things they were locks for and NOTHING else. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood is still my favourite of the nominees, and while I certainly would have liked to see screenplay/best picture wins for it, Bong's Big Night is a FAR more interesting narrative, and I loved watching it unfold. All my pet favs went home with more than one award (proud of you, Ford v Ferrari!) and overall, it was just a very satisfying night. Plus RANDOM FUCKING EMINEM??? JUST DOING HIS OSCAR-WINNING SONG 18 YEARS LATERS WITH NO INTRODUCTION OR CONTEXT GIVEN??? WHAT THE HELL WAS THAT. I LOVED IT. SO FUCKING WEIRD. The song performances were fun (how often do they get all five sung by the actual people who sung them in the movie???), and I really liked the way they took the most awkward part of the hostless format (having celebrities come out just to... introduce a celebrity who will present the next award) and did something neat with it (having all the baby up-and-coming actors introduce the established stars!). The most boring part of the night was the acting winners remaining in lockstep with the rest of awards season, but since the writing was on the wall for all four, you really can't call it a disappointment. And it's WILD to me that The Irishman, which was SUCH the favourite heading into awards season, wound up being the only BP nominee to go home completely empty-handed. Just never picked up the momentum it needed! By the end of it, Pesci was about the only shot they had, and one old man could never defeat the PittDernPhoenixZellweger katamari that's been rolling through all of the other awards shows. To conclude, the suckiest part about the discourse surrounding the lack of diversity in the nominees means that genuinely cool pieces of representation kind of get sidelined in the narrative? Like, it's cool as shit that both screenplay winners went to non-white writers this year, but by all means, whine about the white lady getting snubbed some more. Yeah, one of the white male directing nominees was almost comically undeserving of the nod, and that sucks and is worth calling out, but also, a woman just beat out two Newmans for best score for the same damn movie! Score is a NOTORIOUSLY mostly-male field, that is a HUGE, excellent win that deserves to be celebrated! Maybe part of the problem is how fucking self-congratulatory the Academy can be with that stuff, like SEE SEXISM IS OVER ACTUALLY, having the three lady 'superheroes' give the award with the first female conductor leading the band for that was REAL over-the-top yuck stuff (especially since they were all SO very white (does Gal Gadot count as white? I'm never sure), like this shit doesn't exist in a vacuum guys, it's not all a zero sum game), idk! idk. What I DO know is that I had a lot of fun, and if this winds up being the last Oscars before they start really ruining them in a futile quest to bring ratings back up in a world where fewer and fewer people even have cable, then it was a hell of a great show to end on.
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To conclude, the suckiest part about the discourse surrounding the lack of diversity in the nominees means that genuinely cool pieces of representation kind of get sidelined in the narrative? THIS. Is also how I felt about all the digs about all the male director nominees, when it was a big deal for Bong to get nominated! And wasn't that famous bit with Natalie Portman saying "And the male nominees are" the year that Del Toro and Peele were up? Yeesh. People really like to fixate on that one white lady. >_>
ANYWAY, yeah, that was the most fun I've found the Oscars to be in a WHILE, probably due in no small part to Oscars party chat, and even if I didn't agree with all the wins (or, really, the nominations), it was nice to have nothing that actively pissed me off, for a change.
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THEY REALLY DO.
My biggest beef with the actual awards this year pretty much came solely from the nominations (seriously, what the fuck is Joker doing in most of these damn categories), the actual awards turned out so much finer than I expected! Yeah, not all of these would be my picks, but there are no egregious Green Book wins or Bohemian Rhapsody sweeps to 'yeah, but' all the really cool wins this time around, it's SO NICE.
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