I don't get upset about things like Academy Award nominations and Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductees.
I like the Rock and Roll HOF as a travel destination; it's a diverting museum and I'm fascinated by its new interactive Garage where you can play (or try to play) some high quality instruments. But it's a club where the members get picked by a handful of self-appointed pickers, who have as their main interest driving more tourists through turnstiles than accurately telling the story of what they call rock 'n' roll. If you're getting all exercised because somebody who is "pop" is getting in before someone "more authentic," your naïveté is showing.
I still believe the HOF is an oxymoronic institution and that anyone who actually wants to be in it should be disqualified as being insufficiently unregenerate and punk.
Furthermore, so long as I'm about biting the fingers that spread the crumbs about, let me say the Oscars are basically a Movie Biz Chamber of Commerce banquet writ large: rich people giving each other statues and fawning over the "important" work "the industry" does. I'd rather watch a good movie than an awards show, and I resent the fact that, as someone who writes about film and culture, I'm supposed to have strong opinions about who should get a statue and for what.
I never remember Best Picture winners from year to year. For me, 2018 was the year of Roma, Shoplifters and First Reform. (I had completely forgotten about Green Book until I Googled "Best Picture 2019.")
I've got nothing against Green Book (except that it seemed ham-handed and cartoonish). It has a right to exist and you needn't apologize or explain yourself if it's your favorite movie.
And I don't have anything against the arrangement of would-be works of art into hierarchies of preference; it's very interesting to see what the favorite movies (or songs or books) of a particular person might be at any given time. But those lists always tell us more about the individual than the works they rank. Quentin Tarantino picked The Irishman, Doctor Sleep and Crawl as his favorite movies of 2019. ( I have not seen Crawl, Alexandre Aja's horror film about a Florida man and his daughter who, along with their dog, are hunted by alligators after becoming trapped in their home during a Category 5 hurricane.)
It's something Tarantino put out for public consumption. It might or might not have been a well thought-out list--a journalist asked him if he could name his favorite films of the year during a junket for Once Upon a Time... in Hollywood. Tarantino's answer is certainly performative; he understood when he gave it that it was likely to garner some attention, and it may or may not reflect his true opinion. But what it does tell us is that he's OK with being regarded as someone who really got into Crawl.
I understand this; when I make my lists (which I take no more seriously than anyone else's) of the year's best films I usually have one or two choices that may take some people aback. In 2018, I wanted people to know about Skate Kitchen and Blaze; in 2017 my Crawl was Stephen Cone's Princess Cyd. In 2016, it was Anna Rose Holmer's The Fits.
I stand by all these films; they all deserve to be thought of as movies of the first rank. Most people who seek them out will like them. But could I have replaced them on my list with better-known films? Generally there are three or four films in any give year that are better than everything else I saw that year (and I don't see everything) and maybe 20 or 30 others in a second group that I admire. Then there are films that might have sporadically engaged me, and then a bunch of mediocre ones, a few genuinely bad ones and thousands I managed not to see.
All that said, the list of this year's Best Picture nominees (which I have just looked up) don't distress me; I don't dislike any of the nine movies the voters chose, and Bong Joon Ho's Parasite is the best film I saw last year. The Irishman, Once Upon a Time ... in Hollywood, Marriage Story and Little Women are all movies I tremendously enjoyed. The others were in my second group: my major problem with 1917 is that it would have played much better in a theater than it did on my home system.
Ford v. Ferrari and Jo Jo Rabbit are a lot of fun; and while I found Todd Phillips' Joker problematic--it is superficially derivative of Taxi Driver and The King of Comedy but lacks Scorsese's humanism--Joaquin Phoenix's performance is terrific. While it's not clear that acting at the extremes of human experience is any more difficult than acting within the parameters of normal behavior (and I suspect it is not), Phoenix convinced viewers of his character's brokenness to the point that I worried about the actor. (I remember worrying that Heath Ledger hurt himself when he played the same character--or is it the same character?--in 2008's The Dark Knight. )
There are at least 20 other films that could have filled these spots. But then, I don't care much about the Oscars. At most they represent a night of diversion. I'm mildly interested in the show itself; other people's reactions to the Oscars can be fun.
Which is the point. I'm rooting for the story, for the silly and the absurd. The Oscars--the awards, the hype--they have very little to do with me. I don't know anyone who actually thinks awards vouchsafe quality.
Hollywood's problem is not that so few woman and people of color are honored at the annual company picnic; it's that there are still relatively few opportunities for women and people of color to make a living when they have to compete against white men. It's the same problem they have in the rest of society.
And the way to address it is at the grassroots level; we need to give all artists the chance to pursue work. Selfishly, the more closer we come to making the world a meritocracy, the better movies, books, songs, poems and heart surgeons we get.
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Philip Martin is a columnist and critic for the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette. Email him at pmartin@arkansasonline.com and read his blog at blooddirtandangels.com.
Editorial on 01/21/2020