OT: Oscar Weekend, 2023

I haven't watched SNL much in the last few years but i made a point recently of tracking down (Game of Thrones, Last of Us, The Mandalorian) Pedro Pascal's ep from back in February. Its first skit, The Big Hollywood Quiz show hosted by Bowen Yang hit pretty hard. It's up on youtube if you're in the US:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6q2G9QePGoI
If you're outside the US then:
https://www.metatube.com/en/videos/521798/SNL-The-Big-Hollywood-Quiz/
should get it for you.

The skit makes a whole bunch of related points but one of its final ones scored with me I have to admit: Movies over the last few years, and at least since 2019 and Parasite/Portrait of a Lady on Fire/Once Upon a Time in Hollywood haven't stuck with people, even with people who diligently watch a lot of crticially acclaimed stuff. Something about the fragmentated/isolated viewership now means I'm not remembering stuff the way I once would have.

The Whale picked up Makeup/Hair and Brendan Fraser for Actor. Top Gun 2 got Sound and Avatar 2 got FX and Black Panther 2 got Costume and Women Talking got Adapted Screenplay for Sarah Polley. But what we might call the establishment awards-season-bait films got *nothing*: Tar 0/6, Fabelmans 0/7, Banshees 0/9, Elvis 0/8, Cannes-winning Triangle of Sadness 0/3. That's a lotta goose-eggs...

EEAAO and All Quiet got all the (non-Doc, non-short film) rest (7 and 4 wins respectively).

In sum, Acad. voters definitely in my view felt free to in part indulge their love for Sarah Polley's overall career, giving her the gong.

Polley first drew attention as the young actress who was the blind-siding key to Atom Egoyan's two '90s masterpieces of hauntingness, Exotica (1994) and The Sweet Hereafter (1997). Polley has fairly small roles in both but you come out of each thinking about and haunted by her character. Polley had large parts in a bunch of good not great films after that including Go (1999) and The Claim (2000). I remember thinking that The Claim might have been a harsh turning point for her. Polley is a pretty blonde but when cast as Natassia Kinski's daughter and contrasted with Milla Jovovich throughout the film she stuck out. She looked like (as my girlfriend at the time noted) 'a Plain Jane', and not a movie star. She was a smart cookie tho' and started making well-received short films around this time. In 2006 she wrote (adapted) and directed her debut feature, Away From Her w/ Julie Christie in heartbreaking decline with Alzheimers. It was excellent and got an Actress nom for Christie and a screenplay nom for Polley. Her subsequent films Take This Waltz and Stories We Tell were also critical faves. In sum, leading up to Women Talking, whose name alone tells you might be a statement/Testament film, Polley had become an important figure especially for women, one who, like, say, Allen or Wes Anderson or PTA, can attract top flight actors to work for cheap on her deep, broadly women-centric projects.

Having finally seen Women Talking I can report that it is indeed a Testament film. While the story is based on a real horrific incident in Bolivia in 2009, the film's goals are abstract. Polley (following the novel she adapts) relocates the case to North America and leaves most of the details of the actual crimes (and the criminals themselves) offstage and quite hazy... the better to make claims that the plights and choices of the women in the film are structurally similar to the plights and choices of women everywhere. It's a hard watch in a number of different ways - not least because all the characters are radically information-poor Mennonite refugees from the modern world who are mostly given to bristling, quasi-Biblical speechifying rather than ordinary dialogue. Women Talking may in fact be the most radical, polemical, anti-entertaining film to ever win a Screenplay Oscar. (It's a bit like if Medium Cool or Herzog's Heart of Glass or Jeanne Dielman or maybe one of Godard's more mysteriously political films, say Two or Three things I Know About Her or Tout va bien had won a s/play Oscar.)

In some ways, Sarah Polley winning an Oscar for Women Talking feels of a piece with Jeanne Dielman (1975) winning the Sight and Sound Poll last year. Women Talking is similarly a film most people are never going to see, and a significant proportion of those who try to watch it are going to give up early on it. Women Talking is also inevitably going to be a film that more people are going to *want* to have seen then actually want to see it (cf. Twain's definition of a 'classic' as a book that no one wants to read but everyone wants to have read!)

This year's Adapted Screenplay went to Sarah Polley for Women Talking (over a mixed bag of competitors: Top Gun Maverick weirdly considered an adpatation of the first Top Gun - What?;

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WHAT? How about an "original screenplay based on an original screenplay?"

BTW, back in 1998 BEFORE Van Sant's Psycho came out, some film magazine wrote an article with the title (paraphrased) "Can Van Sant's Psycho win all the Oscars that Alfred Hitchcock's original did not?". The idea -- again with the movie not being seen yet, is that since it was being filmed from Joe Stefano's original ADAPTED 1960 screenplay of Robert Bloch's 1959 novel, and had BERNARD HERRMANN's orginal score, and even would be using most of ALFRED HITCHCOCK's directorial shot selections and compositions -- why not get some nominations and wins for Screenplay, Score, and Director...maybe even Picture? (Vince Vaughn and Anne Heche were unknown quanities for the acting awards.)

Well, of course, Van Sant's Psycho came out and NO...no nominations, let alone wins. But it COULD have been fun- and justifiable -- for Stefano and Herrman to win outright(Herrmann posthumosly) and quite an homage if Van Sant could win FOR Hitchcock the Oscar Hitchcock never won -- for directing Psycho.

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Living, an inferior English language remake of a Kurosawa masterpiece, Ikiru - no thank you;

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I like Bill Nighy the star, but that's another "unassailable classic." That said, I think Nighy beat Tom Hanks to a remake of that .

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All Quiet - an OK 3rd attempt to film the underlying novel that provoked controversy in Germany and elsewhere for changing and leaving out crucial parts of the noble while inventing silliness - that's a 'No';

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Yeah with that one I was "why?" ....AGAIN? And yet it won a few.

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