The Oscars: This Means War, or at least it should.

The 2020 Oscar nominations were released yesterday, and well over some 48 hours later I am sick and tired, I am disgusted, and I am baffled, but mostly angry. I should explain the anger, or rather I want to. I am angry because I don't see this year's nominations as merely casual indifference, or woeful ignorance, but as a purposeful declaration of a social warfare of sorts. That may sound dramatic, and maybe it is, but I also dont believe there is much evidence to support much else considering what we've read and seen from many in the industry since April Reign started #Oscarssowhite. To be sure the Oscar's are just an old flabby over inflated pageant institution, but also it is an institution. An Institution invested in dictating canon. Sure we will always remember great films, but oscar noms and winners keep alive a tradition in storytelling that prioritizes white males as the inherent signifiers of greatness, of talent, of truth, and of purity in America cinema, and it is beyond clear to me that certain people from within the industry are tired of hearing from those outside their hegemony about the importance of different voices and more varied perspectives. You're not going to convince me that ( especially in this entertainment economy currently making its bones off the still mostly unpaid brand publicity offered by social media and its hashtags, fan castings, and memeification) that the academy board was unaware of the swell of disappointment and frustration hurled at their award season peers over their head-scratching omissions of the verifiably well received films, performances, and technical accomplishments of women and people of color this year. Especially when at least a couple of the films they declared worthy (Tarantino's Once Upon a Time, and Todd Phillips Joker) were as polarizing amongst the critical mass as they were. Especially while films like Lulu Wang's “The Farewell” , Greta Gerwig's Little Women, or Lorene Scarfaria's “Hustlers" received near universal praise and adulation. Critical praise should not be an isolated barometer, but in light of the wide crevice between these films it should count quite a bit. The Terry Gilliam's of the world are more than a few, and voices like his have been heard from the ranks of Oscar’s ranks very recently.

Todd Phillips “Joker” was the clear winner in this years oscar nods, despite being a polarizing film amongst critics upon its release

It could be said this may be a by- product of the academy's recent push to allow for films with more of a popular standing with mainstream audiences, but then while “Little Women”, and “The Farewell” never reached mainstream audiences (for a multitude of reasons that include distribution and marketing) why not the 150 million plus/over its 20 million budget “Hustlers”? The head of Bafta derided the lack of opportunity in the industry to defend the negligence of that institution. Hmm…you mean that institution who denied Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman their entire careers, and this year helped shut out Lupita Nyong'o, who gave arguably the performance of the year in Jordan Peele's “Us” - a film that didn’t quite receive the reception of his now seminal “Get Out”, but still far outpaced both Tarantino'sand Phillips films in critical regard, and wasn't far behind Once Upon a Time in Box office (especially when set against budget)? This is about several kinds of biases and prejudices. This was a clap back, or at least a stern stubborn affirmation of the previously held position of the last 100 or more years of cinema. Why else would one of their institutional peers hire someone of the constitution of the very non-asked for Ricky Gervais (whom mind you I somewhat like). Could be there was no one else…could be ratings, but neither of those are anymore solid than the possibility that Gervais was a representation of the animus of those tired of apologizing for what they feel are minor infractions, for being artist, for being taste makers, and as Terry Gilliam, and so many others have put it, for being white. There were too many categories, too many folk as close to objectively better than the chosen nominees, and that's before you get to the “like-clockwork” arrival of obvious miscues like the various Uncut Gems snubs. No actor, no director, no best picture nod(s) for a film that obviously made both an academic and social imprint on this year beyond most of the films they chose. The Oscars have long had a prestige bias, and that too is also coded, but the original language is so forgotten, so dated , so archaic that even its most ardent disciples don't ’t know what prestige is or means. Uncut Gems lack of nods is a case of a general lack of imagination and inspiration by the academy, and shows its age, but still mostly this feels like a pretty blatant repudiation of people of color, of women, of certain genres, and bias against certain types of performances, and stories. It's important to understand these things ( gender, genre, and racial bias) intertwine and intersect. Long held conscious and unconscious prejudices against various members of different sexual orientations, genders, and peoples are part and parcel of the biases against certain genres. Horror having a genuinely observable narrative obsession with femininity and empowerment, as well as masculine objection, rejection, and objectification around and about their bodies as postulated by folk like Laura Mulvey and Carol Clover, and also being arguably the most disrespected genre by both the gatekeepers of prestige and the Academy, cannot be reasonably construed as merely coincidence. Science Fiction, and action films have had a history of incorporating marginalized people throughout their cast and as leads in the narrative, long before drama which mostly insisted that if marginalized folk be presented it was in work or stories specific to their identity and not much else. Funny enough these same people who had no problem basing casting and story choices purely on rigid assumptions and definitions of identity take issue with the idea of identity politics based purely on identity. Whether Queen aliens, black oracle’s, sexual succubuses, slasher victims, psycho powered teenagers, over pressured asain males, possessed little girls, beleaguered wives or mothers, or women who dare object to motherhood, stories about women, gays, black folk, and people of color unencumbered by white male intruders, be they audience, characters, or directors have rarely been seen as worthy of the supposedly academic sensibilities of the academy as those made by white men, though the uber men villains of comic book films have (though both have thus far been iterations of the Joker ). The socially acceptable prejudices in white audiences towards black storytellers of color as to which depictions of what kind of black folks lead to nominations and wins are narrow, and many times guided by white hands with few exceptions. Slaves and struggling depictions of black folk will earn rave reviews, and most likely awards, but ultimately happy, or just average stories about everyday black folk less so. Dating back to Justin Lin and “Better Luck Tomorrow”, Mira Nair and The Namesake, all the way to LuLu Wang and The Farewell, and even to some extent the better received Parasite (Academy-wise) asain stories have been largely ignored , and same for many kinds of stories about Latinos, and worser still Native Americans. To blame the obvious industry wide problem of lack of opportunities is incomplete, lazy, and an insult to almost any filmgoers intelligence. Lack of opportunities doesn't explain why Bafta has famously excluded both Denzel Washington and Morgan Freeman their entire careers. Lack of opportunities doesn't explain why “Kasi Lemmons's” American gothic classic Eve's Bayou was wholesale ignored in 1997. Why Julie Dash's Daughters of the Dust received a similar ghosting, or why Smoke Signals, or American Me, or the Joy Luck Club received none of the kind of wide eyed adulation so many mediocre white entries like The King's Speech, Amistad, The Last Samurai, or Crash received. This is because the lack of opportunities are interwoven with the covert and overt lack of respect for storytelling outside the white hegemonic institutional paradigm, and tellers that do not regard the sensitivity of white viewers or allow them a pathway to ownership of the lens of perspective. It’s why “ Driving Miss Daisy", “The Help”, “The Three Billboard's of Ebbing”, and “The Green Book” can consistently do so well during awards season, and why “Widows”, “If Beale Street Could Talk,” “Dolemite is My Name”, “Queen and Slim”, “The Farewell”, “The Handmaiden” “Hustlers”, and more struggle so mightily, or receive various iterations of consolation prizes.

Lupita nyong'O's performance in Jordan peele's “us” bears many aesthetic similarities in choices and effect (though spiritually and conceptually it’s better imo) as Joaquin PhoeniX's joker, but received none of his acclaim come awards season.

There are most certainly prejudices beyond identity. Clear biases have existed for years towards action films since their inception into the mainstream production values of film. Mission Impossible: Fallout should have been an Oscar nominee last year, and any argument to the opposite will inevitably lead back to some version of an argument regarding low/high art, and prestige. For much of the same reason if I had my way so too should John Wick 3 be nominated as best picture this year, and I remain firmly convinced that films like Die Hard, or even Top Gun should've been best picture nominees in their day. Raucous comedies like Coming to America, CaddyShack, Friday, or the 40 year old Virgin are far too important to the American lexicon and popular culture, never mind being brilliant to have been ignored. Science Fiction films like Alien, The Road Warrior, Minority Report, and The Matrix are more than just their technical achievements, they were astonishingly directed, shot, acted films that offered far more than many of their dramatic contemporaries did to the culture and gravity of cinema. Most certainly Horror films like The Shining, The Babadook and Hereditary at the very least gave us legendary characters and performances the likes of which have rarely been seen in any genre, and yet none of them bore their performers any fruit come Oscar time. What is this, but the most extreme kind of prejudice?

1980's “The Shining featured two of the most harrowing and memorable performances of th 20th century, neither was nominated by the academy.

I’m not wholly on board with the dismissal of the entire institution (In as far as the idea of a celebration of the years best contributions to the medium) because I believe a ceremonious pathway to film canonization that allows a mass audience to be introduced to films they may have missed or been obstructed from seeing is both entertaining and important. The alternative way to answer in my opinion such a clear response to outrage culture as to lionize a movie in the Joker (who in many not so subtle ways acted as it’s own response to outrage culture and the subsequent imagined repudiation of white men) , is continued outrage followed by action the likes of April Reigns #Oscarssowhite . White supremacy in all its forms including artistic tends to count on apathy, and eventual exhaustion, so my definitely not solitary solution is continued outrage. Continued suggested and actual boycotts, less viewing of that show, and even more outrage after . The Oscar's needs to bust its whole ass on the uphill ice rink it created. If viewers and especially social media personalities hate watch and rebuke it online, nothing is gained, they got what they wanted. The ratings need to be an unmitigated disaster, the kind that gets folk removed. I remember ( before I was booted from Twitter) observing a detestable and rather lame occurence of men commenting under beautiful women's pics anything and everything but anything about them. It was ridiculous there, but here it would be welcome to anyone invested in change. Folks who move cinema online should talk about anything and everything but the Oscars on that night. The Oscars should not trend on that night. It should be as if it did ’t exist on one of entertainment's most important outlets. We need outrage that doesn't stop after the ceremony, outrage that begins at Sundance and Cannes. Outrage and action that acts as a collective Samuel L Jackson screaming “I dare you, I double dog dare you to disnclude us again!” Then in the words of my man “Kuiil” from “The Mandalorian” we will “Have Spoken". No one has to do this, and I get it if no one does, because hell there’s a lot of shit in the world and we could use some good old fashioned pageantry, but I be damned if it’s not exactly what the Academy has earned. Earned after years of giving its laurels to racists films, sexist men, and gross depictions of those different from their members, and especially most egregiously after suggesting Casey Aflac gave a better performance in Sad Manchester White people by the Sea than Denzel Washington on Spinal Tap “11” in “Fences" (Sorry I had to get that off my chest)

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 28: THE BROOD

“MOMMIE DEAREST”

The covert and overt fear over motherhood are part of what lies at the core of the horror in David Cronenberg’s “The Brood”. The power (both physically and mentally) inherent in motherhood, and given over by a patriarchal society in which men are conditioned to believe that the job of rearing children is largely that of a woman's - never mind the unconscious fear of a woman who can create children independent of a man - are seated in the foundation of both the biological and psychological horror on display.  That Cronenberg wrote this film while still grappling with still raw emotions over a rough divorce is also germane, and an alternative reading of Cronenberg’s film finds it an “emotionally realistic horror movie about the collateral damage of divorce “ something I wholly agree with, while adding that considering the narrative allegiances he forms with the characters (especially Frank Carveth) and subconscious fears apparent in the writing it is apparent with whom Cronenberg most wants the audience to side with, or at least whose side he’s on. It's in the visual representation of a child almost literally bring clawed at and torn by the children of a Mother’s Rage. And in the recycling of a time honored tradition of men that holds that women often use children as bartering chips to keep a man in their life. As well as the subtle if not overt demonization of a woman (Frank’s wife Nola) who is being held prisoner in a cabin with every form of contact with the outside world regulated,  or restricted by the combined efforts of her husband and the veritable Dr Frankenstein of this wellness center Hal Raglan while he performs a very ethically questionable form of therapy on her.  But this is the terror of the film, the horror in the film again, in my opinion is rooted in Motherhood.

Since the film never seeks to acknowledge in any meaningful way the mothers own connection to her child, the horror she might feel being isolated by this mad therapist, or simply who she is beyond her trauma, and illness then in many ways she becomes not so much different than the Xenomorph queen in James Cameron’s “Aliens”. As a matter of fact she is referred to as the “Queen Bee” by a disgruntled former resident of the institute. Devoid of any real character development she is simply queen of a hive. Walled off from the world not only the fictional setting, but even from us the audience. She is the avatar of a complex combination of the inferiority, abandonment , and impotency linked with motherhood and pregnancy independent of male interference, and translated as horror.

End of The Brood

We are meant to be repulsed as Frank is - and that repulsion stems not only from the physically grotesque nature of the birth, or her almost ravenous licking of the blood off her child, but on a deeper level from this womans asexual ability to reproduce. I do not mean all of this to be a repudiation of the film (The Brood is a classic in my opinion, and not all good horror possesses messages good messaging), but rather to examine what is at the root of my own and (I suspect others) horror in this film, and in this scene which is one of the most memorable in Horror if you have seen it. What Cronenberg accomplishes here can and will be looked at as either subversive, or complaint in upholding horrors tradition of torturing, reducing, and (though maybe not in this case) objectifying its women. For me it is mostly the latter which in some strange way cements the horror of the scene and the film as effectively repulsive in more ways than one.

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 20: JOHN CARPENTER'S THE THING

“A STRANGER AMONGST US”

I'd like to start on a quick tangent that I loved how (for lack of a better word) diverse John Carpenter films were in the 80s.  I don't know if they were representationally correct.- Though it is my opinion they were the best by far of the time,  and truthfully ahead of their time -  but in truth, a lot of John carpenter's characters were just in general stock characters, even the leads.  It's not like Roddy Piper in "They live" was some paragon of character construction. He like so many of Carpenter's characters were functions of moving his philosophy forward,  and usually two dimensional avatars.  But whether in Halloween,  or They live, or Big trouble in little China, or Prince of Darkness, Carpenter always involved other cultures, and he gave them characters that weren't steeped in stereotypes from the era. And I am telling you, if you didn't grow up in that era, its just hard to convey to you just how a huge a deal it was watching Asian,  and African American characters be not only integral to the story but make it out ALIVE!!! - was in and of itself. 

Now to the scene at hand.  I mean this is just excellent setup, design,  and execution for teasing an outcome, and constructing a surprise.  Tension in an incubator,  and it burns hot enough to convince you to move your hands.  You have all these men trapped in one single room in a sort of “Monsters are due on Maple Street” type story that is The Thing in the first place.   And I love Carpenter's decision to get rid of any music. In this scene, you didn't need it at all.  In fact it's more effective that all you hear is the bellowing of the wind outside, which is a wonderful, nice additional effect, something I think reminds us of our earliest associations of wind with something wicked this way coming,  and the low whisper of the gas emanating from the flame thrower. 

Then you have this almost clue like elimination of whodunit. Cut aways from the business end of the flame thrower heating up the small rod -now acting as the jury for these men - to their anxiety ridden facial expressions.  We the audience actively trying to convince ourselves of who the monster is now that we know it is in the room.  Its fairly simple,  yet by playing on what we expect, on our desire to find out before the reveal  ( so as to relieve our own tension) Carpenter is able to elicit a genuine shock that I think begins with the line " I thought you'd feel that way Gary,  you were the only one who could've got to that blood, we'll do you last"    Automatically,  I think for a couple of minutes at least...We, the audience think we're safe.  It has been teased to us that there is a wait coming,  we've been given a misdirection, and then all of a sudden, just like that, it's PALMER!!!. 

Now celebrating it's 35th Anniversary, John Carpenter's The Thing (copyright Universal Pictures, 1982) has at least one memorable sequence that is simple to the point of elegance. The group's reluctant leader R.J.

Just like that I'm as out of my seat as Palmer himself,  as the alien life form springs forth from his body.  Possession is naturally a primal fear and scary enough on its own but it doesn't even end there, because now we must watch in dread, our cinematic empathy tying us to the rest of these men who are literally stuck on a chair next to this guy as he transforms into this monstrosity helpless to do anything about it,  and the actors sell the hell out of the terror.   When I tell you it's one of the most terrifying things i've seen on screen, I MEAN IT.   I've seen Carpenters version a million times, and I'm never not surprised when the canister hits the ground, and Palmer goes berserk, it's as hard to time as Bryson Tiller's last "Don't" in his hit song Don't.  And (especially if i've had enough time between viewings ) I'm never not terrified at the idea of being strapped to the thing as it jirates and convulses out of its host.  The acting is outstanding,  especially by the triumvirate of Kurt Russell,  Keith David,  and Donald Moffat,  - who has one of my favorite line deliveries in the movie "I know you gentleman have been through a lot,  but when you find the time,  I'd rather not spend the rest of this winter TIED TO THIS FUCKING COUCH!!! " It's an amazing combination of a genuine connection with the terror,  relief, and exasperation with the whole entire situation,  and I just don't know that I can think of any actor who could've delivered it better.  As good as maybe, but not better. And I get it, and we get it, it's part of just what makes it one of the most memorable scenes that I can think of when it comes to horror, and every time I think of the thing, I first think of this scene, because of the acting,  because it's grotesque, because it is absolutely terrifying,  because it builds its tension so well, because its surprising and shocking and all the things that I think culminate to make a great scene in the genre. 

31 DAYS OF HORROR SCENES THAT STICK. DAY 13: RAVENOUS

“BONE APÉTITE”

If I could spend at least twice a day posting about Antonia bird’s Ravenous without annoying everyone to death, I most assuredly would. I’m really quite unsure as to why her film isn’t talked about in the same way that we talk about maybe a Kathryn Bigelow’s Near Dark, or Sam Raimi's Evil Dead as audacious breakout features. From its offbeat score, to its offbeat off kilter performances to its subject matter, ravenous is truly a unique movie..one of a kind if ever there was one. This scene in the cave is not only my favorite in the film, but is central to what makes this film such a wonderfully world apart film. Robert Carlyle’s uncanny, hair raisingly insane performance, the palpable fear in Jeremy Davies young soldier…that peculiar, unsettling score, the shocking discovery.

this tantrum is from Ravenous...if you could call it a tantrum

It’s representative of all the things that set this film apart from others. In tone, in the beats, and predictability as to exactly where this film is going to go. Antonia bird – in the best way possible – does what I think a lot of provocative filmmakers don’t do well, which is she told a story that provokes you without pretense. And while you will be able to discover new things with each new viewing of this film, you don’t have to watch it a million times to figure out what the hell is going on. Bird delivered a brutal, bloody, character study of cowardice, and power. A film plays with and blends genres, genres that I think are difficult to coalesce and still make a cohesive film. Horror, comedy, a supernatural, psychological thriller, that integrates themes of man versus nature, man vs man, nihilism, survival instinct, and power but doesn’t really set up camp in any of them. It’s beautifully directed, well shot, gripping, and superbly acted from top to bottom. With a pulse dropping score their ratchets up the stakes with every scene. I highly recommend it this Halloween, and again recommend knowing as little as possible going in if you haven’t seen it. Fix your bib, and prepare yourself for a delectable horror feast.