Oscar Night

The 2021 Academy Awards have come and gone. As always, some people get really excited by the Oscars, while others pay no attention at all. In recent years, the latter group seems to have been increasing and, I suspect, may perhaps have hit an all-time high this year. After all, most of us haven't set foot in a movie theater in over a year. At its best, Oscar Night is basically an exercise in elite Hollywood narcissism, minimally connected with the realities of ordinary Americans' lives solely because of the ultimate power of the box office, which at least reminds the people applauding themselves at the ceremony what actually sells with ordinary viewers. Take that away, and in a world in which fewer people than ever have actually seen the movies being lauded, what is left?

Add to that the fact that this has been an exceptionally hard and unhappy year for so many. So who wants to see so many movies entirely devoted to depressing topics, as so many of this year's nominees are?

In some years, I usually made an honest effort to make sure to see all the nominees for Best Picture (at least when there were still only five of them to see). This year, I saw fewer than usual, of which the expected (and actual) winner, Nomadland, was one. I concede that it has merit as a movie. It is the film's politics (or lack thereof) that bother me. (Cf. my earlier review of the film in February at https://rfrancocsp.blogspot.com/2021/02/nomadland-movie.html.)

Set against the background of the Great Recession and the hollowing out of the once great American working class, the film could have been - and really ought to have been - a powerful critique of what has happened to this country since 1980. Instead, the tragedy of elder poverty and the criminality of a political and economic system that has gleefully produced the tragedy  of elder poverty get lost in a haze of American individualism and a pseudo-libertarian, romanticized freedom of the open road.

As for the Oscar show itself, the introductions to the awards were often way too long, as were many of the acceptance routines, while there was less of the customary music and fewer excerpts from actual films - and, of course, lot of privileged elites' political posturing and virtue signaling. All in all, a tiresome night!