Psycho. #63

Do you hear the Oscar buzz yet?

Earlier this evening I saw a clip of the young actor Timothée Chalamet (who is still only 29??!?!?!!) sounding like a complete wazzock on a Zoom marketing call with various sincere-looking execs from A24. Timmy is currently appearing in a very American-looking film called… oh man, what’s it called? I only saw the clip tonight, not two hours ago, and it’s already gone sailing right out of my bonce. Here are my guesses before googling it: “Mickey Malice”; “Punk Pie Blues”; “Wow-Wow Folderol”; “The Art of Doing It Proper Good”; “Slammin’ Steve”; “All the F**ks We Didn’t Give”; “James Chance Elders III: Knock ‘Em Out Cold.”

OK yeah I’ve googled it now and it was “Marty Supreme”. I just thought that was what you call it when Scorsese soundtracks a slow-mo machine-gun sequence to Baby Love!!

Anyway, Chalamet plays a table tennis player in this film by one of the Safdies, and in the videocall with A24 he talks about wanting to really knock spectators out and make this film THE event of the year, or something. Having watched this video of Chalamet – who I do think is a pretty handy and ambitious actor – I then looked up Marty Supreme on Letterboxd. There, I’m afraid to say, I found not one, not two, but SEVERAL “reviews” of the film in which users expressed the hope or expectation that Chalamet would get the Oscar for his performance. 

This, I must say, I find entirely tragic. It is cringeworthy. It is so fucking uncool. Of course, on top of that there’s the added nuisance that it tells us very little about the film itself; there is no discussion of Chalamet’s performance in the film, what exactly it is he’s doing. I don’t expect too much from Letterboxd users, don’t get me wrong – I know the site is more for logging films, and playing around, and discovering recommendations etc. But I was interested to see how “this should get the Oscar” always comes at the expense of really thinking about or discussing cinema. It’s a shortcut. My mother has a friend who talks like this, about films she’s seen and books she’s read, never stopping to discuss them for even a second and not letting you get a word in either. “Oh I tell you what I LOVED recently, it was just brilliant, Young Mungo. So brilliant. And the new Claire Keegan, do you know her? It was fantastic. And we saw The Brutalist at the cinema didn’t we, oh you’ve got to see The Brutalist. And the Bob Dylan film. The other thing I loved, was… have you read Milkman?” 

This sort of thing isn’t discussion, and it’s barely discourse; it’s a great wash, a barely mediated accumulation of stuff, where the dominant idea is to avoid having to reflect on things, but instead to get the thing seen, make sure you’ve caught the winner; and the prizes both advise you what to put in front of your eyes and tell you that it is – and you can be sure of this – ‘good’. 

I just don’t think I ever let my brain wander to whether something I liked will do well at the Oscars. Perhaps when I first saw Cate Blanchett deliver her powerhouse performance in the lead role of Tár, maybe then I considered that I expected her in some way to “nab some silverware” – but far more likely is that I texted my friends, hot with excitement, about how perfectly delicious I found Blanchett’s acting; how grotesque and lyrical, powerful, elegant, and physically demanding; what a challenge she had taken up with this part that must carry a whole film of outsized motions along with it. 

That instinct, to hedge your own opinion against the odds of something winning a prize, feels fairly insane to me, and of course – this is so obvious I can hardly bear to say it, year after year – it does a disservice to films. 

But! Thrillingly – I am happy to say that I really haven’t heard the Oscar buzz all that much this year. Perhaps that just shows me to be at a remove from contemporary film discourse; or perhaps the Oscar buzz hasn’t really begun, much, for anything. But I feel like in past years we already had a few frontrunners for prizes by now? All I’ve heard is a bit of awards chatter about One Battle After Another – fair enough, but the film, like all PTA movies, will do perfectly well for itself in the annals of cinema without the blessing of the same academy that recently heaped praise on Everything Everywhere All At Once. The Oscars need Paul Thomas Anderson more than he needs them. 

Aside from that, what even is “in the conversation”? Some seem to fancy Hamnet, the new film by Chloé Zhao, adapted from Maggie O’Farrell’s book. Good for everyone involved, I’m happy for them, but after sitting through the insufferable Nomadland five years ago I’m not particularly minded to extend Zhao much slack, and rather fear what she could do when unleashed on an emotionally acute story. And three people I trust have told me it’s ghastly. Let’s all reconvene here and discuss it in five months, when it has won Best Actress, Best Screenplay and Best Cinematography.

What else is in the running? Sinners maybe? Here are my thoughts on Sinners: it was fine. I had a decent time in the cinema. There end my thoughts on Sinners. Perhaps a “foreign film” or two will be brought in to raise the standards a bit, as in past years. It Was Just An Accident, the Jafar Panahi film, is a really beautiful fable from a director at the height of his powers. I find Panahi’s knack for storytelling so energising these days, and I marvel at the sureness and subtlety of his touch. I don’t know if this new film is particularly more brilliant than 3 Faces (2018) or No Bears (2022), both of which I found riveting, and original, laser-focused and daring; but like those two films this new one finds Panahi laying out a story whose reach gradually expands over the course of the movie, ultimately developing a quite staggering power by the end. I think for those reasons he would deserve to be rewarded – but he’s already won the Palme d’Or, so it really wouldn’t matter if he didn’t get nominated outside of the foreign language category.

I’ve just looked up a few blogs by some virgins who deal in this kind of crap, and it seems Jennifer Lawrence is in the running for her performance in Lynne Ramsay’s Die My Love. I think the film is a complete misfire, and while Lawrence is quite interesting and audacious in the role I don’t know if she ultimately manages to create a character out of the admittedly sketchy outlines she was handed.

It seems my film of the year, Olivier Laxe’s perfectly astounding Sirāt, has been submitted by Spain to represent it at the Oscars this year. Again, I’ll be happy if it wins, but this is the sort of film that doesn’t win major awards, because it is too intelligent, too wayward and individual; and it doesn’t need awards, because the extraordinary alchemy of its creation, the miraculousness of its means, are already reward enough. This film is towering and mysterious, baffling, sprawling; it depicts characters with consummate ease and shows them coming up against inhospitable nature with a cool but compassionate eye – what on earth does such a film need with one of these gold guys?

The buzz has just not really got going, and I fancy that it’s struggling to get started. I’m happy with that being the case. Here is something you could do this year instead of destroying your own humanity by watching all ten nominees for Best Picture, which could very well include Wicked Part 2: Bigger, Greener and Uncut: anything else, and really, I mean that; cinema isn’t so important, so in need of saving, and your time on earth is precious. Far better to watch, say, Taxi Zum Klo (Frank Ripploh, 1980) or go for a beautiful walk with a dog you love or someone you fancy, or read five chapters of your book uninterrupted or watch The Terence Davies Trilogy (1980) or Meshes of the Afternoon (Maya Deren, Alexander Hackenschmied, 1943) or Soleil O (Med Hondo, 1967) or go to a protest march or babysit a child for your friends. Do you see what I’m saying? Forgetting the ‘buzz’, drowning it out with our own humming, let us devise floating pantheons of our own, which don’t neglect specificity or occlude critical thought; which are in touch with the political; which aren’t imposed on us by America, a diseased country that has totally abdicated any right to dictate terms to the rest of the world. Go out! Get that hum going! Your own hum!

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