Film culture focuses on chaos now, rather than excellence.
Back in 2009 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences decided to change the number of its Best Picture nominees from five to ten, departing from the tradition that had held for 65 years. It was a precursor to the proposal by the Democratic National Committee to make South Carolina the first primary, bumping the Iowa caucus out of its traditional position as the first electoral event in the Democratic presidential-nominating process. Quality of candidates no longer matters; the idea is to subtly reengineer the standards of choice.
Both changes seem unfathomable, but this year’s Oscar list of ten Best Picture nominees smacks of laughable desperation. None of 2022’s best films were among the nominations; in fact, the Academy managed to overlook the good-to-great films — Benediction; Father Stu; Ambulance; Marx Can Wait; Dead for a Dollar; Peaceful; Nitram; My Donkey, My Lover & I; Raymond & Ray; Lost Illusions; Petite Maman — yet picked ten nominees that were mostly mediocre.
The film industry deludes itself into thinking that the least it does — signified by the overpriced and preposterously promoted Avatar: The Way of Water — is the best it can do. It’s an exercise fitting for these chaotic times.
That least/best axiom holds true down the Academy’s list, films that lack the potentialities of great movies. These nominees are the result of a scavenger hunt conducted by the Academy’s 10,000 DIE (Diversity, Inclusion, Equity) members who seem to have lost moviegoing passion. They pay attention only to films touted by media that are committed to either box-office success or political trends.
Liberal politics have always dominated Oscar choices, a tendency that worsened in recent years as proved by such delusional Best Picture wins as 12 Years a Slave, Spotlight, Moonlight, The Shape of Water, Green Book, Parasite, Nomadland, and CODA. A good time could not be found in any of them; each one was a miserably obvious appeal to liberal sentimentality. Those titles read like a road map of cultural decline as Hollywood sank from providing uplifting entertainment to sermonizing anecdotes. They record the Obama-era shift in Hollywood and America toward national shame — an attempt at moral reparations, primarily to do with race, gender confusion, and, occasionally, pity for the disabled (sometimes represented by social groups that film-industry elites look down on as “underserved”).
This recent period may be the most dismaying, and audience-repellant, of Oscar history. The Hollywood/America apology theme became so self-degrading that voters could not commit themselves to Jane Campion’s media-favored but utterly repulsive Power of the Dog; the Academy opted for the insignificant CODA instead (at least it was directed by a woman).
So the 2022 nominees swing away from that low point toward films that appear to be inoffensive — what pundits like to call “anodyne.” But there’s nothing neutral about All Quiet on the Western Front, a rehashed World War I film that emphasizes grueling violence (without the spiritual dismay of Terence Davies’s Benediction or the social wit of David O. Russell’s Amsterdam, both superior WWI films). Avatar: The Way of Water may not provoke dissent but only because James Cameron’s politics are so buried beneath his tech-nerd inanity that the movie serves as distraction from the distraction of Ukraine.
Banshees of Inisherin is out of touch with compassion, mistaking tribal nihilism for edification. Elvis literally reduces a cultural icon to a gaudy cartoon. Everything Everywhere All at Once also distracts from Judeo-Christian tradition through video-game and graphic-art Gnosticism.
The Fabelmans combines family therapy with Hollywood egotism, letting careerism heals all wounds. Tár is its highbrow counterpart, teasing and celebrating the same personal crisis and class issues. Triangle of Sadness critiques class in a dull, Marxist way that is almost anodyne. Top Gun: Maverick pretends America First allegiance but lacks conviction and is hollow. Women Talking is the Academy’s outlier, a feminist screed that ineptly rehashes The Power of the Dog.
Think of these Oscar nominations as an industry caucus meant to persuade the culture that Hollywood, like Washington, D.C., is on a restorative path. It’s a mission to honor mediocrity. Get used to it.