There’s nothing in the papers but submarines this week but I’ve got nothing to add, apart from my pleasure at watching Paul Keating at his abrasive best at the National Press Club. One suddenly remembers what politics used to be like…
After confessing my forebodings that the 2023 Academy Awards would contain some terrible clangers, I underestimated just how terrible those decisions might be. To give seven Oscars to Everything, Everywhere, All at Once makes a mockery of the – already shaky – idea that these awards represent the pinnacle of achievement in the cinema. According to the members of the Academy, Daniels Kwan and Scheinert, were not only the Best Directors; they made the best Picture, wrote the Best Original Screenplay, and had the Best Editing. Michelle Yeoh was the Best Actress and Ke Huy Kwan and Jamie Lee Curtis, the Best Supporting Actors.
I can only describe this as rubbish. For me, the two superior films of the year were Tár and The Fabelmans, neither of which scored a single Oscar. I cannot accept that Michelle Yeoh’s performance as a Chinese immigrant mum in California was in any way superior to Cate Blanchett’s virtuoso title role in Tár, or Michelle Williams’s nuanced performance as Mimi in The Fabelmans. The editing of Everything, Everywhere’ was a perpetual jump-cut, while the Daniels should have finished way down the list as directors and scriptwriters.
I can’t see how anyone could honestly contend the Daniels are better directors than Steven Spielberg or Todd Field, or better scriptwriters than anybody else on the short-list! Better than Tony Kushner or Todd Field?
What’s most staggering for me is the number of people who are falling over themselves to say what a brilliant film Everything, Everywhere’ is! It suggests they haven’t seen many films, and never laid eyes on a Hong Kong action farce. I know people who loathe the movie with a passion, but I saw it as merely a silly mash-up of several film genres, held together with a very thin glue of sentimentality. The plot seems to have been created in a blender.
So what was the big appeal? The metaverse nonsense? More likely, the chance to give all those awards to an American film with Asian characters, in line with another dreary outbreak of identity politics. In fact, Michelle Yeoh was the only genuine Asian in the film. For Asia, Parasite remains the breakthrough par excellence. It’s a film with real moral force and devastating black humour. In comparison, Everything, Everywhere’ is a vaguely entertaining, shapeless B-movie.
What incentive is there to produce quality films when the highest awards are thrown away on second-rate fare like Everything, Everywhere’? If the cinema is in trouble today, it’s because both audiences and the industry seem to have lost the memory of what constitutes a great film and are increasingy content to get excited over shallow novelties. It’s not just the cinema but the visual arts too that have become fatally obsessed with who the artists are, rather than the quality of their achievements – as if ethnicity or gender were an indisputable badge of excellence.
As you already know by now, I find this state of affairs to be seriously depressing, because it represents the antithesis of critical thinking. When mindless celebration of identity supplants any attempt at meaningful analysis, we are in a world in which belief takes the place of reason. It may seem a very cool, caring & sharing world in which we evince a new respect for people’s differences, but it’s also a place of wild intolerance for the ‘wrong’ kind of people. It’s a place in which history is scorned and judged irrelevant to current preoccupations. It’s a place that thrives on pronouncements, not arguments. It’s a place that rewards strident opportunists and punishes non-conformists even more virulently than we did in the bad old days before we became so PC – and so proudly ignorant.
The art column is in the United Arab Emirates this week, for the 16th installment of Art Dubai, which was a real eye-opener – not the biggest and most glamorous art fair, but one of the most original, with an excellent group of artists represented, many of them previously unfamiliar to me. As for Dubai itself, it feels like a mirage in the desert, albeit a mirage hemmed in by skyscrapers.
The movie being reviewed is Living, which features a career-defining performance by Bill Nighy, as a man who discovers life only as he faces death. It’s another film that could and should have made a splash at the Academy Awards, if the industry actually rewarded high achievement rather than low gimmickry.