When you’re wrong, you’re wrong. And at this time a year ago, I was tediously … monotonously … yawningly wrong when I said the Oscars have “a big, boring problem.”
That, of course, was before “The Slap Heard ‘Round the World.” And it was Anything But Boring.
The 2022 Oscars drew 16.6 million viewers, up 58 percent from 2021’s record-low audience of 10.5 million. So maybe all that was missing from the broadcast was an annual random act of testosterone-fueled violence.
But here’s the thing: The Academy Awards, or let’s say the film industry in general, most definitely does have a problem: The movies they are putting out right now just aren’t all that good. Or at least, not good enough. That there isn’t a single obvious front-runner to take home the Best Picture statue tonight reflects the overall ambivalence of the film year.
I won’t spend this entire essay tearing down the very fine candidates in the 10-picture field. But every last one of them has at least one significant drawback. Like, say:
• “Elvis”: Tom Hanks’ Dutch accent.
• “The Fablemans”: It’s not only schmaltz, it’s ordinary schmaltz. No one not named Spielberg gets this self-indulgent film green-lit by any studio. No one.
• “The Banshees of Inisherin”: Love me my McDonagh, but this finger-lickin’ little fable only has enough legs for a compelling 10-minute campfire story.
• “Tár”: By making the monster a lesbian, it gave Harvey Weinstein a pass.
• “Everything Everywhere All at Once”: The bagel. I’ll say it again: The bagel.
• “Women Talking”: What is there to even talk about? Get the hell out of there already!
• “Triangle of Sadness”: Have you seen it? It’s really kind of revolting.
• “All Quiet on the Western Front”: Hands-down the best film of the year. I just have no idea why they remade it now.
• “Top Gun: Maverick”: The obligatory annual Best Picture slot cynically reserved for a lowbrow guilty-pleasure fan favorite should have gone to “80 for Brady.”
• “Avatar: The Way of Water”: I’m just going to admit it: I didn’t see this one. Truth is, I’d rather see “Titanic” again than any “Avatar” movie. (Sarcasm alert: I don’t ever want to see “Titanic” again.) But maybe this second obligatory lowbrow guilty-pleasure fan favorite slot should have gone to “Sonic the Hedgehog 2.”
'Women Talking.'
While the Oscars are more fun to watch when we have no idea what is going to happen (so tonight should be a blast), the film year revealed a head-scratching post-pandemic listlessness in the movie industry. We’ve all heard the heroic stories of coming out of the shutdown. But that wasn’t about the courageousness of the titles, which were all in the works before the world ended. It was about just getting films made.
Now we’re starting to see what stories our film visionaries are wanting to tell coming more fully out of the pandemic. And it’s baffling. The shutdown was both a wake-up call and a call to action to every creative person in any artistic medium: What you do can be taken away. So come back hungry. Come back at your uncompromising best. Tell the stories that have to be told before it is too late. There is not enough time left to be ordinary. Look at what is happening in our world and respond to it. Help us make sense of it.
To that, I say, thank God for documentarians. Because the best films of the year (and my favorites are listed at the bottom of this essay) were largely documentaries.
Yes, we saw a few important narrative films last year responding to the Harvey Weinstein scandal – notably “Women Talking” and “She Said.” But what of racial justice? Hollywood was dong a better job focusing our attention on police brutality and other social inequities before the pandemic than it put out in 2022.
One of the best films of the year by any measure was “Till,” which looked back at the reprehensible violence done to a 14-year-old Black boy in Mississippi back in 1955. It scored 96 percent on Rotten Tomatoes from those of us who bothered to see it – but it earned only $9 million at the box office. Audiences rejected the substance and importance of “Till” for “The Bob's Burgers Movie” (which earned $32 million). Not to mention: The top four comic-book movies of the year combined to reap $1.2 billion in the U.S. alone.
Remember "If Beale Street Could Talk," "Sorry to Bother You," "Monsters and Men," "Blindspotting," “Get Out” "Judas and the Black Messiah," "Queen & Slim," "The Hate U Give" and many others? All filmed before the pandemic. It's as if the entire genre disappeared last year.
“Nope” and the “Black Panther” movies are important and unprecedented films, but they do not fully absolve film studios of their responsibility to communicate with America about what is happening in our country in just about the only neutral forum we have left – the movie theater.
Instead, what we saw emerge in 2022 was a mind-boggling redundancy of stories that no one ever needed to see again. While the world was grappling with mass shootings, police brutality, the ongoing pandemic, the continuing rise of white supremacy, the collapse of critical thinking, an assault on teaching true history in our schools, Hollywood gave us a confounding and repetitive series of dark class comedies that ostensibly satirize and skewer the decadence of privileged, oblivious and necessarily unpleasant rich white people. (And in doing so, they actually glorified them – see Edward Norton’s vapid tech billionaire and his guests in “The Glass Onion.”)
Here are just a few others: “Babylon,” “Triangle of Sadness,” “Don’t Worry Darling,” “The Menu” and “The Forgiven.”
Let’s play a game: Here are some of the terms that were used to describe those films last year. If you can match the description with the film, you win. But the trick is, these descriptors pretty much apply to every one of them: “Outrageous excess” … “unbridled decadence and depravity” … “the pretentiousness of the super-rich” … “exudes wealth and wretchedness” … “bored, amoral and cruel.”
Really? The best we can do in 2022 is to show us how privileged white people indulge in exorbitant, expensive excess and avoid responsibility? Not exactly a new, novel or urgent theme for these times. Is making fun of the super-rich for our amusement even a worthy spectator sport anymore? Aren’t we supposed to be lifting up writers and characters whose stories have not been told before? Instead, we spent 2022 indulging in mind-numbing escape or replicating “The Great Gatsby” in six different forms. Wasn’t the post-George Floyd national awakening supposed to make people like these disappear?
At least Best Picture nominee “Triangle of Sadness” is fearless in its commitment to making all of that mean something … if you can make it through all the vomiting. This English-language Swedish film is a long and difficult slog, yet it somehow brings out the best work of Woody Harrelson’s life.
The film is a viciously overstated class comedy that starts on a doomed yacht and ends on an island where “Survivor” meets “Lord of the Flies.” It is, with depraved effectiveness, a rabid swipe at the obscenely affluent – both old money and new. Which, like all of those other like-minded films, does deliver its own cathartic pleasures.
But enough. Time to turn the camera away from all of them – and onto people we haven’t met a thousand times before.
My 10 favorite films of the year
Listed in order and without comment (except to point out that four of these 10 films are documentaries – because it was a hell of a year for documentaries):
1. “All Quiet on the Western Front”
2. “Till”
3. “The Whale”
4. “The Woman King”
5. “She Said”
6. “The Grab” (documentary)
7. “Marcel the Shell with Shoes On”
8. “All the Beauty and the Bloodshed” (documentary)
9. “Fire of Love” (documentary)
10. “Hallelujah: Leonard Cohen, a Journey, a Song” (documentary)
11. Bonus: “Everything Everywhere All at Once”