There is a hum in the ether about many recent Oscar movies not being up to snuff. Barry Diller declared the Oscars over. For a long time now, as I’ve written about again and again, there has been a separation of Church and State – with the film industry going one way and the Oscars going another. This was made abundantly clear to me over a decade ago when I was having dinner with a group of upper-middleclass highly progressive moms (one was an NPR reporter) and we were talking about movies. They said they only went once or twice a year at most. We were talking about the Oscars — they said Avatar was going to win.
The year was 2009. I told them, feminists all, that the first film directed by a woman was at last going to win Best Picture and Best Director and that it was making history. What’s the movie, they asked? The Hurt Locker, I said. It was obvious they had not seen it nor had they even heard of it. That shouldn’t have been that surprising, considering the film only made around $15 million at the box office.
The Oscar narrative that year, as we all remember, was a David vs. Goliath story of a divorced couple. He made the highest grossing film(s) of all time. She made one of the lowest grossing, yet she won the Oscar.
For the Academy, and the culture that surrounds it, this was history made. Barbra Streisand was asked to hand out the Best Picture prize because she had been the one female director many believed had been overlooked, shunned, ignored as women had tried for so long to bust up the boys club that was the Best Director race.
Even back then, though, Best Director meant something. It wasn’t a way to patch up history of its many holes. Nor was it a pat on the back for having made a technical “spectacular spectacular.” The director was still the King of Hollywood.
Right around the time of the 1970s there was a major shift in the demographics of Hollywood, and the focus. Where the producer had been the central figure for decades, credited for bringing together all the elements for the hits that drove the Oscars, suddenly the director rose to prominence with the film school rebels and new wave “mavericks.” The 1970s is still thought of as the best and most interesting era for the Oscars because the films were often so dark and profitable at the same time.
Over at Hollywood Elsewhere, Jeff Wells posted a Facebook status update that criticized The Banshees of Inisherin in what I think of as a flat read of the year’s most exceptionally written film:
Amy Holden Jones is a screenwriter who has been kicking around Hollywood for decades. What I thought was funny about this update was her description of The Banshees of Inisherin. I guess if your only experience of this film is the plot synopsis, that is how you would describe it. Granted, this film — like, say Triangle of Sadness and The Menu — are movies that aren’t really deep-down about what they appear to be about on the surface. They’re parables. They are simple stories that are signify something much bigger and more profound.
I get that solving a movie like a puzzle is sometimes a frustrating way to watch a movie for many people. The polar opposite of this is Top Gun Maverick, a film I also adore. It isn’t a parable at all. In fact, if you go looking for one you’re going to be like Julianne Moore in The Big Lebowski trying to deconstruct a porn film.
The thing is, people didn’t use to complain about what got nominated for Best Picture because what got nominated were films everyone knew about. Let’s take one of my favorite years for film and the Oscars – 1972. Here are the top ten box office films that year from the-numbers:
And here are the Best Picture contenders for that year:
The Godfather
Cabaret
Deliverance
The Emigrants
Sounder
The 1970s, like today, was concerned with addressing important aspects of intersectionality, as you can see by the wide array of films on offer at the theater. Sure, it’s mostly white dudes behind the camera but look what these five movies are about. One is an epic rise and fall and rise of an immigrant and his family, one is LGBTQIA-focused-ish, one is a violent collision of urban and rural cultures, one is the Black experience, and one is a foreign language film from Sweden.
It’s kind of funny how similar it is to what resonates now but for different reasons. What Amy Holden Jones is lamenting isn’t the movie Banshees itself — it’s the isolated experience of the people who choose the movies, aka all of us.
Hardly anyone went to see The Banshees of Inisherin in theaters because it didn’t carve through culture the way, say, The Godfather or Deliverance did. Just for fun I revisited Deliverance the other day to see what I thought of it now. So if Jones thinks a guy cutting off his fingers and a donkey choking on them and dying is dark, wait until she gets a load of this movie.
Deliverance is a stunning, resonant film that is just as disturbing today as it was back in 1972. But if you described the plot of Deliverance plainly — four guys go on a river rafting adventure and get raped by some hillbillies you’d never really understand why Deliverance was a great film. You’d get the horror of it, who wouldn’t, but there is so much more to the movie — and the book — than that. It’s what people remember most, what they joke about to relieve the tension, but James Dickey didn’t write that story and John Boorman didn’t direct it to make a crude movie about — well — not to put too fine on it, back door action in the forest.
Audiences went to see Deliverance because it blew their minds. And people were talking about it. It also had peak Burt Reynolds as the golden god with glistening biceps which no doubt drew in many. Put it this way, though, there was little chance Reynolds was gonna be the Ned Beatty in that scenario.
Today’s rigid, puritanical generation of “social justice warriors” would describe Deliverance as a commentary on “toxic masculinity.” It would be seen it as a kind of critique or condemnation of it. But really, it’s the opposite. It’s about the disconnect between Man and Nature.
To really understand Deliverance, though, is to understand 1972, just like to really understand The Banshees of Inisherin or even Top Gun Maverick (speaking of masculinity) is to understand 2023. I have never believed you could separate Oscar nominees or winners from the time in which they’re born. They are time capsules that ideally take us back to who we were once and what we believed.
So much was happening in 1972. It was a pivotal year in many respects because then, like now, the pendulum was starting to shift. Nixon won in a landslide that year, winning every state except Massachusetts. And true, he had ratf*cked the election to run against the one guy he knew he could beat, but still there was definitely something HAPPENING.
Culture was moving in one direction and politics in another. Our country was about to become much more conservative, more individualistic and that would be reflected in 1980 when Ronald Reagan won. I was a kid in the 1970s. I remember what the growing divide between the Americana of the 1950s and the wilding days of the 1960s.
But so much happened at the end of the 1960s – the assassinations of RFK and Martin Luther King, Jr. The Manson murders in 1969. Kent State in 1970 where four students were shot for protesting the Vietnam war. The Academy was evolving too. They were living through a generational shift where older Conservatives like Bob Hope, Jimmy Stewart, and Barbara Stanwyck were making room for new upstarts, like Jack Nicholson, Dustin Hoffman, and Jane Fonda.
The Left had the culture and the Right had the money and the government. That is why the movies of the 1970s were so great. Artists had something to say that resonated with millions. Of course, not everyone liked Deliverance. Many in the South thought it was a stereotype of mountain people and that it painted a negative image of the South overall.
My favorite kinds of movies are the ones with no musical score — and rely on the quiet, on the place the film is set. This works well with thrillers or horror films especially: Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds, the Coens’ No Country for Old Men and it works really well in Deliverance. There are bits and pieces of music here or there but the scenes of suspense are silent except for the sounds of the wild.
When I watch Deliverance now what I see is palpable fear and panic that no doubt was a low hum in the minds of men back then, especially coming out of a losing a war and an election like the one in 1972.
Things wouldn’t get better either, because then came Watergate and the fall of a president, then came Jimmy Carter, another fall of a president and finally — relief, with Reagan, for many in the country who were sick of being broke, living in their vans, and were ready to get jobs, buy homes and become successful.
That generation — the boomers — are now aging out. We’re watching their last gasp in the presidency now. We’re watching in Hollywood too. The generation that made movies like The Godfather and Deliverance are but a distant memory now, an echo of the past.
Great art, great writing survives generational shifts. That’s why Deliverance is every bit a resonant work of art today as it was in 1972. It remains as haunting as ever, especially the brilliant ending, with Jon Voight terrified to go to sleep, with his arm around his wife, wondering what might be lurking out there in the dark.
It’s true that Brendan Gleeson’s Colm Doherty threatens to cut off his fingers if Colin Farrell’s Pádraic Súilleabháin won’t leave him alone on the island of Inisherin, and Colm makes good on his promise. And it’s true no one seems to “have a job,” but if you were paying attention to the movie you know that they were working on a kind of barter system — selling their milk, working the land, scraping by. The donkey does eat the fingers thinking they are carrots and chokes on them. It’s an accidental death that Pádraic blames on Colm. The pointlessness of all of it is a reminder of the stupid things all of us fight about and eventually kill each other over — as the Irish Civil War rages on the mainland
Colm chops off his fingers to illustrate that anguish and frustration he has of being stuck on an island with a guy who won’t stop talking to him about mundane things. He wants to create high art, to be remembered yet as a man he fails because he doesn’t understand that basic human kindness, to others and to animals, matters more.
This film, and Todd Field’s TAR are ruminations on some of the same questions: What matters more – whether we are good people and treat each other well or whether we create great art? TAR, of course, speaks to our current moment of younger generations judging past behavior and destroying art and artists in the process. One interpretation seems to say art doesn’t matter at all, if the artist’s behavior can’t be respected. The only thing that matters is whether we were pure from birth and never made any mistakes.
Another recent example of this is the witch-burning of Armie Hammer. A great and rare piece of journalism tells the actual story of what happened to Hammer, meaning, almost none of what he was accused of actually happened. Sure, his alleged sexual behavior seems shocking when described flatly and plainly, but it was his personal business. Those who now see themselves as judge and jury of our past behaviors and our human frailty based on their own set of criteria — new rules the suddenly invented that everyone is now forced to adhere to — are not people who would ever understand or appreciate a movie like Deliverance.
What seems “over” according to Amy Holden Jones, Barry Diller, and a good many others is what movies used to offer us and that is a communal experience. We were turned on by what we watched at the movies, especially the most provocative ones, and we felt free and eager to talk about it. Hollywood can’t survive if it no longer cares about or recognizes the other half of the country. If they want to be anything like what they once were, it’s time for all of us to practice less judgment, more humanity, and find a way to have shared stories again.
That is what makes Top Gun Maverick such a rare bird at any time but especially now. It is the one movie that everyone likes. I’ve never seen a movie have such a high audience ranking across the board, among every quadrant. That movie gives me hope. The Banshees of Inisherin is one of the best movies of the year and would still be a Best Picture nominee even if there were only five. So would Top Gun Maverick. The problem for the Oscars is that they’re trying not to offend anyone and that means they can’t please everyone.
If they shrink the Best Picture nominees back down to five, then perhaps they can begin the work of building up a falling empire. Best Picture can’t be all things to all people but it can be all the best things to most people. That’s the part that needs fixing.