ICYMI: My Writing About the Oscars
I was asked by the good people at MXDWN Movies to live-blog this year’s Oscars. Starting at 7:30pm EST until the ceremony's end in April 2032, I will be sharing information and opinions about the nominees and winners on their website.
Before the ceremony begins, I’d like to share some of the things I’ve written over the last month on the history of the awards and some of this year’s nominees.
Cruella’s Cruella is Never Cruel — And Never Truly Camp
When Cruella unleashed its wrath upon American multiplexes last May, many were quick to label the film an instant camp classic. The live-action prequel to Disney's animated One Hundred and One Dalmatians was the first movie I saw in theaters after getting vaccinated against COVID-19, and I enjoyed its nonsensical tone and the respective performances of the Emmas (Stone and Thompson) as Estella Miller/Cruella de Vil and her employer-turned-rival, The Baroness.
But after the novelty of returning to the theater wore off, my feelings towards Cruella tempered. It's not so much true camp, I realized, as campy tropes thinly layered over the mass-market demands of a $100-million Disney film.
Read more at TheWeek.
The Oscars Have Always Been Like This
Every year in anticipation of the Oscars, there is a fresh wave of think pieces decrying the supposed irrelevance of the awards ceremony and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences itself. These articles all follow a very similar pattern: the Oscars used to be an important event that rewarded the best films of the year. Then, at some point in history, the tastes of the Academy diverged from that of the public, and they dug their own grave, either by ignoring popular films or overlooking groundbreaking ones.
This narrative is convenient, but its presentation usually contains some amount of inaccuracy and historical revisionism. What gets lost in these conversations about the Oscars are the Academy and Hollywood’s histories more broadly. We take it for granted that certain trends exist but pay no specific attention to how they emerged and have developed over the last century. In a time when most people’s understanding of popular media starts in the 1980s, it is increasingly important to discuss these issues and keep this history alive. It is not possible to perform a meaningful analysis of the current (and plentiful) issues with the Academy without it.
Read more at MXDWN Movies.
Why We Tell the Story: Being the Ricardos, Marie Antoinette, and Presentism in Popular Cinema
When Sofia Coppola’s third feature film, Marie Antoinette, premiered at the Cannes Film Festival in 2006, the response was loudly and infamously negative. Although some enjoyed the fanciful, candy-colored take on the life and death of the young Queen of France, French critics and festival-goers booed the film. In their reviews, Marie Antoinette’s detractors mostly pointed to the same parts of the film as the reasons they hated it so much—the period-inaccurate elements, emphasis on extravagant styling over explicit political commentary, and the use of Marie Antoinette (Kirsten Dunst) as a stand-in for Coppola herself.
The latter resulted in some particularly scathing passages in Dana Stevens and Rex Reed’s reviews. Stevens called Coppola “the Veruca Salt of American filmmakers,” stating that “her path to success has been cushioned, not only by her place in the Coppola family but by her own savvy image-management,” while Reed denounced the film as “the hysterical work of a grown woman on hallucinogens, playing with 18th century Barbie dolls of spun-sugar wigs.” The perception of her work as self-absorbed, frivolous, and materialistic is partly because of the privileges she was born into as a member of the Coppola dynasty and her status as the United States’ most high-profile female director of the 2000s.
Read more at MXDWN Movies.