A new Oscar frontrunner has emerged because, well, the Academy can't just announce, "Sorry, there were no worthy movies in 2024. We'll try again next year."
"The Searchers" received ZERO Academy Award nominations in 1956 and today is considered one of the greatest films of all time. Certainly, the Academy gets it right sometimes. "It Happened One Night" won every big award for 1935. And sometimes the Academy plays games like giving Jimmy Stewart Best Actor in 1940 for "The Philadelphia Story" largely due to the fact that they didn't give it to him for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" the year before. Cary Grant dominates "The Philadelphia Story" and Stewart is just a supporting actor. Grant never received a real Oscar for acting just a lifetime achievement at the end of his life. Not particularly just but Grant had a good life.
The Academy Awards are just a show, a boring, pretentious one at that.
"And sometimes the Academy plays games like giving Jimmy Stewart Best Actor in 1940 for "The Philadelphia Story" largely due to the fact that they didn't give it to him for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" the year before."
Similarly, Jeff Bridges won for "Crazy Hearts" because he didn't get nominated for "Big Lebowski."
In general, looking back, the actors who have won Oscars are the actors who deserve to be Oscar-winning actors, but very often they win not for the role they should have won for.
Very true. Duke Wayne had parts in at least twenty films better than his role in "True Grit." But he got it for "True Grit." I think Paul Newman won Best Actor in "The Verdict." He was much better in "Cool Hand Luke", "Hud", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "The Long, Hot Summer."
It's harder to do in sports, but Willie Stargell, a popular slugger, won a make-up MVP award at age 39 in 1979 based on "clubhouse leadership" for how he was denied superstardom in his 20s playing in Forbes Fields where his blasts kept turning into outs on the distant warning track and then just missed out on a couple of MVPs in his early 30s after the Pirates moved to the more reasonably configured 3 Rivers Stadium.
Movies don't have an official Hall of Fame like baseball does, so winning an Academy Award is the closest equivalent. There are lots of baseball Hall of Famers who never won an MVP award, so there's more pressure on Academy voters to give a fading great a consolation Oscar.
I thought Anora was really good. The plot issues you point to seem less like real issues and more like Steve Sailer slight autism about ethnic group details. Mikey Madison looking too Jewish to be Russian does not seem right to me -- there's a huge Asian-Jewish-Caucasian-Nordic stew in Russia that admits of a lot of looks. Trying to arrest connected Russian thugs for grand larceny...you can see where it might have some drawbacks. Etc. etc.
Anora felt to me like a very updated (and hence much more gritty/crass) version of those great Hollywood noir-ish romantic comedies with hardboiled guys and dames from the 30s and 40s.
Some other reasons Steve’s criticisms don’t fly for me -
The rich kid being a vapid idiot with at most some juvenile charm is a feature, not a bug here. This is crucial to Anora’s arc over the movie, in the beginning she attaches to him because they are both children and she is completely blinded by a fantasy of wealth and luxury, by the end she has grown up somewhat. Of course the viewer can see how shallow he is, that’s the point!
Russia gets its manpower in Ukraine almost entirely through volunteers incentivized by high pay (unlike Ukraine) so it’s quite realistic that a Russian man with access to options wouldn’t be serving there. The Ukraine issue in the plot is that a Russian oligarch couldn’t fly out to the US during the Ukraine war; either this oligarch family has fled Russia to live in London or wherever, as many did, or else the movie is taking place pre-2022
This movie is far better than Pretty Woman, it’s not about a prostitute fantasy, in this movie prostitution is used to tell a story about growing up and becoming more realistic
"Pretty Woman" is one of the most dishonest films of all time. Prostitution is an ugly profession full of drug-addicted women with low self-esteem enslaved by black pimps more than happy to beat the hell out of them when they come home with insufficient cash. Perhaps there are a few high-end prostitutes like the one who serviced that Morris character years ago but very few look like Julia Roberts.
I’ll never in my life understand why women love that movie. I couldn’t believe it when I started watching it with a girlfriend (who looked a great deal like Julia Roberts) back when it came out on video.
It was completely past any suspension of disbelief.
"The rich kid being a vapid idiot with at most some juvenile charm is a feature, not a bug here. This is crucial to Anora’s arc over the movie..."
But the problem is that it's obvious to the audience very early in this long movie that the kid is a zero. C'mon, Baker, keep us guessing past 15% of the way into your movie.
It's obvious that a lot of Oscar nominations and wins are about self-congratulations or to justify big risks/expenditures that weren't really worthwhile but need the stamp of approval so producers can try to justify the same thing on a future project - I feel like Titanic got all the awards it did because it involved an insane amount of money and effort and even if the end product was just so-so, the industry needed to make it look like a smashing success so future films that proposed outlandish production costs had a fighting chance of happening. And I guess that is also sort of justified when you consider the Lord of the Rings trilogy, since that followed and had insane costs and production detail.
However, I do wonder how much self-awareness there is in Hollywood that a lot of the output these days just isn't up to the level of the past and the Oscars in many respects are a participation trophy, the same way a coach gives the least awful player on their .500 rec team the MVP award. Surely a lot of insiders are content with the checks they are cashing but feel like maybe TV is more interesting and innovative in general?
I am not a voracious consumer of new movies but there are not many examples in recent years that I can think of that at the end I felt like I saw something truly creative. The Northman definitely fit that category, but other supposedly amazing movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once was outside the box a bit but really not that great.
I had just gotten diagnosed with cancer in December 1996 and I was driving, deeply depressed, along the coast in Baja California when I came upon a giant old-fashioned 4 smokestack steamship sitting on top of the cliff, not down in the water. "What the hell?"
Then I figured out it was James Cameron's set for "Titanic," about which I'd read articles about how much money he was risking.
Coming back that afternoon, the sight of Cameron's folly cheered me up. If Cameron could do something _that_ crazy, the least I could do was beat cancer.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was a sad parody of creativity. It was hyped to the stars, and turned out to be childishly shallow and -- worse -- boring.
It was an interesting concept but one the movie just couldn't really pull off. I thought the performances were generally pretty good as well with the exception of the actress who played the daughter - she was terrible. It was also 45 minutes too long, and that's a general problem with movies these days because the stories end up with tons of bloated dialogue or needless storylines to fill all that time up.
I did see All Quiet on the Western Front, Tar, Top Gun, and Elvis and that's also the order I would rank them. Of this year's nominees I have only seen Dune 2, which was decent but both of those movies are not quite what they could have been despite great sets and imagery.
Agreed; EEAAO had the potential to be a crazy cult classic mind-bender like Brazil or 12 Monkeys, but there was too much 21st-century Strongk Female Character/girl-bossing (especially the daughter, as you say). It was also highly indulgent of both Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Yeoh -- yes, they're both pretty good at acting, and their characters were not bad, but they were given too much rein to chew scenery, much like DeNiro and Pacino have been in some of their later movies.
I barely remember the last hour, because I was so sick of the same visual tricks being trotted out yet again. It went on and on and on . . . .
I liked Dune 2 -- I was a big fan of the book in my youth -- but it seemed to miss the badass spark it needed to be truly epic. The world-building and visuals were fine, and I thought Tim C was pretty good as Paul, who has that uncanny almost-witch-like quality. Rebecca Ferguson was also very good. The big letdown for me was the baddies, e.g. Christopher Walken was not very convincing as the emperor. Those climactic confrontational scenes at the end fell flat.
Instead of Pretty Woman, I would compare Anora to Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (unfavorably), which was better in every way. Especially fleshing out the backstory details.
However, I liked Anora. Typical reviews wanted to apply gangster tropes to the family instead of a fresher Oligarch trope. The family 'fixer' was an Orthodox Priest. The heroine was too entrepreneurial to be all that sympathetic. Her antics were only possible with the family influence based solely on money rather than force.
Not woke. No message. Pleasantly entertaining. It's got my vote.
I was confused about that too. Do they have Armenian priests in the Russian Orthodox church? Or do the Russian parents belong to an Armenian Church. If so, why?
So I asked an Armenian about that, and he said that the head Armenian fixer was not a priest, but had gotten dressed up in religious robes to participate in an Armenian Catholic baptism ceremony, either as the father of the child or, more likely, as the godfather.
I can see why the writer-director went with that obscure Armenian custom: it makes the baptism scene more colorful and directs the eye toward the new character who will become important in the movie.
But the confusion and misapprehensions that visual decision engenders (I'm pretty Armenian-adjacent, having been to an Armenian wedding but not a baptism, and I was baffled by what the scene implied about the head fixer for the rest of the movie) is the kind of problem that one line of script-doctoring can fix.
Because Sean Baker failed to fix the problem he causes, I kept thinking thoughts like, Father Kristos (or whatever his name was), should wear his priest robes into the courtroom to make his testimony look more trustworthy when he tries to get the Las Vegas wedding annulled.
I haven't seen "Something Wild" since 1986, but it seemed wonderful then.
Right, in "Something Wild" it's a big shock when you find out toward the end something about one of the characters that you didn't at all expect, but is perfectly plausible once it's revealed.
>It’s pretty good, but it would have had a hard time even getting a Best Picture nomination as recently as 2019
Anora would easily be at least middle of the pack for the 2019 movies (2020 Oscar year). 'Hollywood...', 'Parasite', and '1917' were better but after that it's a free for all.
Thanks for reminding me to see this movie. I like Mikey Madison. She was a show called "Better Things" which was produced by Louis CK for his friend Pamela Adlon and then became a non Louis CK show after his career was paused by hilarious events. Madison was really good on the show so it's nice to see her make the jump to possible Oscar winner. In addition to acting chops I think she pulls off what I call (until I can think of something better) 'hotness with deniability', that is a large number of people think she's hot while assuming everyone else thinks she's homely. Makes an actress more accessible.
Also showing what a dope I am at picking out race and ethnicity I assumed she was a bit oriental.
Valid points here, Steve. However, I believe this film deserves the best picture Oscar mainly for the Anora* character delivering the “Faggot ass bitch” line in an endearing way and not treating her like a monster.
Anecdotally, 2 woke coworkers said that line reluctantly made them chuckle. They seemed more upset at being tricked into liking a Russian goon character and the lack of virtue signaling on Ukraine.
"The Searchers" received ZERO Academy Award nominations in 1956 and today is considered one of the greatest films of all time. Certainly, the Academy gets it right sometimes. "It Happened One Night" won every big award for 1935. And sometimes the Academy plays games like giving Jimmy Stewart Best Actor in 1940 for "The Philadelphia Story" largely due to the fact that they didn't give it to him for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" the year before. Cary Grant dominates "The Philadelphia Story" and Stewart is just a supporting actor. Grant never received a real Oscar for acting just a lifetime achievement at the end of his life. Not particularly just but Grant had a good life.
The Academy Awards are just a show, a boring, pretentious one at that.
"And sometimes the Academy plays games like giving Jimmy Stewart Best Actor in 1940 for "The Philadelphia Story" largely due to the fact that they didn't give it to him for "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington" the year before."
Similarly, Jeff Bridges won for "Crazy Hearts" because he didn't get nominated for "Big Lebowski."
In general, looking back, the actors who have won Oscars are the actors who deserve to be Oscar-winning actors, but very often they win not for the role they should have won for.
Very true. Duke Wayne had parts in at least twenty films better than his role in "True Grit." But he got it for "True Grit." I think Paul Newman won Best Actor in "The Verdict." He was much better in "Cool Hand Luke", "Hud", "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" and "The Long, Hot Summer."
It's harder to do in sports, but Willie Stargell, a popular slugger, won a make-up MVP award at age 39 in 1979 based on "clubhouse leadership" for how he was denied superstardom in his 20s playing in Forbes Fields where his blasts kept turning into outs on the distant warning track and then just missed out on a couple of MVPs in his early 30s after the Pirates moved to the more reasonably configured 3 Rivers Stadium.
Movies don't have an official Hall of Fame like baseball does, so winning an Academy Award is the closest equivalent. There are lots of baseball Hall of Famers who never won an MVP award, so there's more pressure on Academy voters to give a fading great a consolation Oscar.
When it comes to the Academy Awards, there's nothing I care less about. Hollywood went off the rails in the 60s and never got back on.
I thought Anora was really good. The plot issues you point to seem less like real issues and more like Steve Sailer slight autism about ethnic group details. Mikey Madison looking too Jewish to be Russian does not seem right to me -- there's a huge Asian-Jewish-Caucasian-Nordic stew in Russia that admits of a lot of looks. Trying to arrest connected Russian thugs for grand larceny...you can see where it might have some drawbacks. Etc. etc.
Anora felt to me like a very updated (and hence much more gritty/crass) version of those great Hollywood noir-ish romantic comedies with hardboiled guys and dames from the 30s and 40s.
Some other reasons Steve’s criticisms don’t fly for me -
The rich kid being a vapid idiot with at most some juvenile charm is a feature, not a bug here. This is crucial to Anora’s arc over the movie, in the beginning she attaches to him because they are both children and she is completely blinded by a fantasy of wealth and luxury, by the end she has grown up somewhat. Of course the viewer can see how shallow he is, that’s the point!
Russia gets its manpower in Ukraine almost entirely through volunteers incentivized by high pay (unlike Ukraine) so it’s quite realistic that a Russian man with access to options wouldn’t be serving there. The Ukraine issue in the plot is that a Russian oligarch couldn’t fly out to the US during the Ukraine war; either this oligarch family has fled Russia to live in London or wherever, as many did, or else the movie is taking place pre-2022
This movie is far better than Pretty Woman, it’s not about a prostitute fantasy, in this movie prostitution is used to tell a story about growing up and becoming more realistic
Of course Russia prefers volunteer fighters. They are the aggressors. The Ukrainians are fighting for their existence. Slight difference.
"Pretty Woman" is one of the most dishonest films of all time. Prostitution is an ugly profession full of drug-addicted women with low self-esteem enslaved by black pimps more than happy to beat the hell out of them when they come home with insufficient cash. Perhaps there are a few high-end prostitutes like the one who serviced that Morris character years ago but very few look like Julia Roberts.
I’ll never in my life understand why women love that movie. I couldn’t believe it when I started watching it with a girlfriend (who looked a great deal like Julia Roberts) back when it came out on video.
It was completely past any suspension of disbelief.
"The rich kid being a vapid idiot with at most some juvenile charm is a feature, not a bug here. This is crucial to Anora’s arc over the movie..."
But the problem is that it's obvious to the audience very early in this long movie that the kid is a zero. C'mon, Baker, keep us guessing past 15% of the way into your movie.
It's obvious that a lot of Oscar nominations and wins are about self-congratulations or to justify big risks/expenditures that weren't really worthwhile but need the stamp of approval so producers can try to justify the same thing on a future project - I feel like Titanic got all the awards it did because it involved an insane amount of money and effort and even if the end product was just so-so, the industry needed to make it look like a smashing success so future films that proposed outlandish production costs had a fighting chance of happening. And I guess that is also sort of justified when you consider the Lord of the Rings trilogy, since that followed and had insane costs and production detail.
However, I do wonder how much self-awareness there is in Hollywood that a lot of the output these days just isn't up to the level of the past and the Oscars in many respects are a participation trophy, the same way a coach gives the least awful player on their .500 rec team the MVP award. Surely a lot of insiders are content with the checks they are cashing but feel like maybe TV is more interesting and innovative in general?
I am not a voracious consumer of new movies but there are not many examples in recent years that I can think of that at the end I felt like I saw something truly creative. The Northman definitely fit that category, but other supposedly amazing movies like Everything Everywhere All At Once was outside the box a bit but really not that great.
I had just gotten diagnosed with cancer in December 1996 and I was driving, deeply depressed, along the coast in Baja California when I came upon a giant old-fashioned 4 smokestack steamship sitting on top of the cliff, not down in the water. "What the hell?"
Then I figured out it was James Cameron's set for "Titanic," about which I'd read articles about how much money he was risking.
Coming back that afternoon, the sight of Cameron's folly cheered me up. If Cameron could do something _that_ crazy, the least I could do was beat cancer.
You sure did. Thirty extra years! And counting.
Everything Everywhere All At Once was a sad parody of creativity. It was hyped to the stars, and turned out to be childishly shallow and -- worse -- boring.
It was an interesting concept but one the movie just couldn't really pull off. I thought the performances were generally pretty good as well with the exception of the actress who played the daughter - she was terrible. It was also 45 minutes too long, and that's a general problem with movies these days because the stories end up with tons of bloated dialogue or needless storylines to fill all that time up.
I did see All Quiet on the Western Front, Tar, Top Gun, and Elvis and that's also the order I would rank them. Of this year's nominees I have only seen Dune 2, which was decent but both of those movies are not quite what they could have been despite great sets and imagery.
Agreed; EEAAO had the potential to be a crazy cult classic mind-bender like Brazil or 12 Monkeys, but there was too much 21st-century Strongk Female Character/girl-bossing (especially the daughter, as you say). It was also highly indulgent of both Jamie Lee Curtis and Michelle Yeoh -- yes, they're both pretty good at acting, and their characters were not bad, but they were given too much rein to chew scenery, much like DeNiro and Pacino have been in some of their later movies.
I barely remember the last hour, because I was so sick of the same visual tricks being trotted out yet again. It went on and on and on . . . .
I liked Dune 2 -- I was a big fan of the book in my youth -- but it seemed to miss the badass spark it needed to be truly epic. The world-building and visuals were fine, and I thought Tim C was pretty good as Paul, who has that uncanny almost-witch-like quality. Rebecca Ferguson was also very good. The big letdown for me was the baddies, e.g. Christopher Walken was not very convincing as the emperor. Those climactic confrontational scenes at the end fell flat.
First the Oscars became irrelevant to most of the public, then the whole movie industry. Did they need the competition for awards to thrive?
How many "young" women believe they can live the Pretty Woman/Lauren Sanchez fantasy regardless of how slutty they act?
Instead of Pretty Woman, I would compare Anora to Jonathan Demme's Something Wild (unfavorably), which was better in every way. Especially fleshing out the backstory details.
However, I liked Anora. Typical reviews wanted to apply gangster tropes to the family instead of a fresher Oligarch trope. The family 'fixer' was an Orthodox Priest. The heroine was too entrepreneurial to be all that sympathetic. Her antics were only possible with the family influence based solely on money rather than force.
Not woke. No message. Pleasantly entertaining. It's got my vote.
"The family 'fixer' was an Orthodox Priest."
I was confused about that too. Do they have Armenian priests in the Russian Orthodox church? Or do the Russian parents belong to an Armenian Church. If so, why?
So I asked an Armenian about that, and he said that the head Armenian fixer was not a priest, but had gotten dressed up in religious robes to participate in an Armenian Catholic baptism ceremony, either as the father of the child or, more likely, as the godfather.
I can see why the writer-director went with that obscure Armenian custom: it makes the baptism scene more colorful and directs the eye toward the new character who will become important in the movie.
But the confusion and misapprehensions that visual decision engenders (I'm pretty Armenian-adjacent, having been to an Armenian wedding but not a baptism, and I was baffled by what the scene implied about the head fixer for the rest of the movie) is the kind of problem that one line of script-doctoring can fix.
Because Sean Baker failed to fix the problem he causes, I kept thinking thoughts like, Father Kristos (or whatever his name was), should wear his priest robes into the courtroom to make his testimony look more trustworthy when he tries to get the Las Vegas wedding annulled.
I haven't seen "Something Wild" since 1986, but it seemed wonderful then.
Right, in "Something Wild" it's a big shock when you find out toward the end something about one of the characters that you didn't at all expect, but is perfectly plausible once it's revealed.
Steve has a connection with Anora. A small part was played by Ivy Wolk, who was also a Red Scare guest.
Mikey Madison was also Susan Atkins in Steve fave Once Upon a Time in Hollywood
MOLYBDENUM!
Say it slowly and it’s not that difficult to spell.
I kept imagining lines that Billy Wilder might write for Judy Holliday and George Sanders:
Stripper: "Molly... B... Denim? What's that?"
Rich Scion: "The world's most tedious metal."
>It’s pretty good, but it would have had a hard time even getting a Best Picture nomination as recently as 2019
Anora would easily be at least middle of the pack for the 2019 movies (2020 Oscar year). 'Hollywood...', 'Parasite', and '1917' were better but after that it's a free for all.
Thanks for reminding me to see this movie. I like Mikey Madison. She was a show called "Better Things" which was produced by Louis CK for his friend Pamela Adlon and then became a non Louis CK show after his career was paused by hilarious events. Madison was really good on the show so it's nice to see her make the jump to possible Oscar winner. In addition to acting chops I think she pulls off what I call (until I can think of something better) 'hotness with deniability', that is a large number of people think she's hot while assuming everyone else thinks she's homely. Makes an actress more accessible.
Also showing what a dope I am at picking out race and ethnicity I assumed she was a bit oriental.
"Also showing what a dope I am at picking out race and ethnicity I assumed she was a bit oriental."
Did the 'both her parents are psychologists' change your mind? What, are you some kind of hateful stereotyper?
ha- nah Steve said she was all Jew and her wikipedia agrees.
Valid points here, Steve. However, I believe this film deserves the best picture Oscar mainly for the Anora* character delivering the “Faggot ass bitch” line in an endearing way and not treating her like a monster.
Anecdotally, 2 woke coworkers said that line reluctantly made them chuckle. They seemed more upset at being tricked into liking a Russian goon character and the lack of virtue signaling on Ukraine.