Ignored facts
still exist
| This article sums it up well for me. From the NYT. I'm going to miss the movie industry since I've loved movies all my life. (I bolded the text below since the bolded text pretty well sums it up.) quote: WASHINGTON – People are talking about the Oscars this year.
Namely, how they will not look. Many people don’t even realize the show, once a breathless American institution, is Sunday.
Movie stars no longer exist. The films were swallowed up by television and streaming. The theaters are on life support; even the ArcLight on Sunset Boulevard, one of the most beloved movie palaces in a city full of moviegoers, couldn’t be saved.
Eternal Declaration of Norma Desmond – “It is the pictures that have become small!” – never seemed more true.
Sex, glamor, excitement and mystery are relics of a bygone era. Hollywood is now focused on worthy, relevant, socially conscious, and gloomy values.
As one of my Hollywood writer friends said after watching “Nomadland”: “It wasn’t entertainment. It was Frances McDormand having explosive diarrhea in a plastic bucket on a van.
Not a crop of films that make you reach the Junior Mints.
In this grim Oscar season, it’s pathetic that the show’s producers had to send attendees a memorandum reminding them to dress up. No pajamas or sweatshirts, please.
“They’re over – who cares about the Oscars?” said André Leon Talley, author of “The Chiffon Trenches”.
Steven Soderbergh, one of the producers of the show, which will be split between Dolby Theater and Union Station, defended the decision to curb Zooming, telling the Los Angeles Times: “This is not a webinar.”
Brooks Barnes, a Hollywood reporter for the New York Times, put it this way: “The Oscars forgot about their main job – selling Hollywood to the world, being a big, big ad for the Dream Factory, the kind that makes financiers. open their wallets and the aspiring actresses get a feel for when they might be able to stand on this stage and deliver their acceptance speech.
Soderbergh is trying to reset and drag the show back to when it wasn’t a drag, but it might be too late.
Surveys show that low percentages of people who watch films have seen, or even heard of, nominated films. (A whopping 15 percent are even aware of what a “Mank” is.)
There are a lot of changes in Hollywood that are exciting as the content and talent is finally starting to reflect what the country looks like and what it lives in, stories that weren’t decided by the foul bunch of replicating white guys. .
Regina King presented her statuette to the Oscars for her role in “If Beale Street Could Talk”, backstage at the last Oscars in person, in 2019.Credit…Frazer Harrison / Getty Images
This year, nine of the 20 acting appointments went to people of color. Two women were nominated for Best Director and Chloe Zhao is one of the favorites to win for “Nomadland,” which would only make her the second female winner in 93 years of ceremony.
But you still need a happy audience. What Hollywood forgets, at its peril, is that it’s entertainment business, and he must find a way to marry his past storytelling chops with the exciting new forces of his future.
Bill Maher argued on his show that we could use more escape in this year of plague and uproar.
“I don’t have to leave the theater whistling, but would it kill you every once in a while to make a movie that doesn’t make me want to take a bath with the toaster?” He said, adding, “The academy nominations were like, ‘Watch what great movies we make.’ Now they say, “Look at what we are good people”. It is not about entertainment, but about suffering, especially yours. “
Leon Wieseltier, editor-in-chief of the literary journal Liberties, agrees that Hollywood has “swapped game and complexity and surprise and depth for virtue.”
Ron Brownstein, who wrote the entertaining new book “Rock Me on the Water”, takes a more optimistic view. He thinks the current turmoil in our culture echoes the early 1970s, which culminated in a golden age for Hollywood, with classics like “Nashville”, “Chinatown” and “Five Easy Pieces”.
There were films by Robert Altman and Arthur Penn that swirled with ideas emerging from stormy social movements.
Later in the decade, there was a reaction from young directors like George Lucas and Steven Spielberg who were less interested in criticizing culture than in entertaining audiences; they wanted the audience to applaud the heroes and hiss at the villains – or sharks.
“Their goal was to rock and exalt, not to demolish the myths created by Hollywood,” said Brownstein.
Lucas said in a speech at the time that he did “American Graffiti” that he did it because “I decided it was time to make a movie where people felt better when they came out. of the theater than entering it. It had become depressing to go there. At the movie theater.”
With streaming, Brownstein said, filmmakers can make more personal stories because movies don’t have to be tent stakes with explosions and special effects, and they “don’t have to be. to make $ 400 million to make a profit ”. But these stories are often less universal, more restricted.
Brownstein sees the same tension now, as it did then, between filmmakers offering critical portraits of the country and people who think it’s a drop.
“The dominant impulse of filmmakers now,” he concluded, “is to show you stories and truths that Hollywood has obscured.”
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