RUSHING TO BAD MOVIE JUDGMENT

National Review

 

Rushing to Bad Movie Judgment

By ARMOND WHITE

January 19, 2024 6:30 AM

 

The politics of awards season turn critics into lobbyists.

 

So far, awards season resembles a traffic pile-up of bad films, vain actors, and clueless showfolk seeking attention while on the road to the Oscars. And it’s a caravan of the same contenders — Killers of the Flower Moon, Oppenheimer, Past Lives, Poor Things, American Fiction, The Holdovers, The Zone of Interest, Barbie — not good movies, but publicist-driven hype machines.

 

Gridlock started before we had reached the middle of December when countless awards groups and mainstream publications got a headstart announcing prizes and “Ten Best” lists. What was the rush?

 

The year wasn’t over, and in fact major films (Rebel Moon, The Iron Claw, The Crime Is Mine, Wonka) had not been shown to the press. That means film journalists had adjudicated the year prematurely, the same way TV networks now call elections results — before all the facts are in.

 

This resemblance between culture and politics is not insignificant. Those traditions reveal the way we live and think as awards season nears its climax, with the announcement of Oscar nominations next week.

 

Few people understand the connection, especially when film culture operates as a harbinger of our political actions. Alternate-reality award shows are about political grandstanding, not excellence.

 

We need to clarify the difference between art and politics. American Fiction’s lame humor helps gatekeepers pretend they don’t confuse taste with intelligence. The adaptation of Percival Everett’s literary satire reduces it to a dumbed-down sitcom. American Fiction won the Audience Prize at the Toronto Film Festival because attendees rewarded themselves for recognizing its racial-identity theme and its jokes about publishing-industry practices that have been ruined by social-justice pandering no matter how obtuse the satire. This was the initial stage of awards-season conformity, using sheer numbers to discourage — censor — diversity of opinion. Weak minds are coerced in such unsubtle ways.

 

Is film reviewing political? All the “Ten Best” lists that extol Past Lives prove the case, even though laudatory reviewers avoided mentioning the film’s globalist intentions and sentiments. It is indeed political when the U.S. paper of record praises the politics of such films as Past Lives and Power of the Dog and Killers of the Flower Moon while brainwashing readers to believe that such reviews are not ideological.

 

Post–Siskel & Ebert, reviewers and awards-givers don’t know how to discuss political substance in movies. Critical thinking has been reduced to like or dislike, closing off discussion. It turns film reviewers into lobbyists, the term “lobbyist” implying bought-and-paid-for preference. Too many filmgoers see themselves as cheerleaders for particular filmmakers, studios, or comic-book franchises.

 

Here begins the traffic jam of eligible films — movies that gained more attention than actual affection, admiration, or esteem. Voter-lobbyists, pressured by the various forms of payola, kowtow to the media presence of blockbusters, trusting specious “popularity” over films that might actually affect them personally.

 

Even the oldest of the merit-based institutions has been politicized by this deranged habit. According to The Wrap, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences (the Oscars) has adopted a “ranked-choice system,” the biased counting method loved by Democratic Party strategists.

 

Artistic and emotional achievements such as John Wick 4, Rebel Moon, All of Us Strangers, The Taste of Things, and Asteroid City lose out to the superficiality of Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, and The Zone of Interest and the inscrutable nothingness of Barbie and Poor Things. Cinema aesthetics are lost when most movies (purportedly to be watched in theaters) are actually television — protracted, repetitious narration per Netflix, Amazon, and Apple. And not much worth looking at. Such a medium no longer esteems the vision, kineticism, and imagination of Chad Stahelski, Zack Snyder, Andrew Haigh, Tran Ahn Hung, and Wes Anderson. Movies become a platform for reckless political demagogues: Christopher Nolan’s enigmatic hand-wringing; Greta Gerwig’s underdeveloped ideological immaturity; and Scorsese’s broken cinephilia and lack of historical focus, a Bidenesque form of anti-American dementia shared by most critics.

 

Movies once saturated the culture, especially when the Oscars were bestowed long after films were widely distributed and deep into the following year’s spring. This allowed for maximal reflection by the public. Today’s rush to judgment goes against the way films used to settle into the culture and enrich it: Brotherly combat in John Wick 4 between Keanu Reeves and Donnie Yen dynamized the Marlon Brando–Rod Steiger confrontation in On the Waterfront. The maternal battle between Rebel Moon’s Nemesis (Bae Doona) and Harmada (Jena Malone) elevated and distilled the “You bitch!” moment in Aliens. The child-parent emotional fusion in All of Us Strangers intensified the generational contrasts of The Godfather, Part II. Deep sympathies between artists-chefs-lovers Benoît Magimel and Juliette Binoche in The Taste of Things spiritualize the loyalties of Casablanca. Recalling bygone personal ambitions, Asteroid City matched social identity to post–World War II national myths since darkened in No Country for Old Men. No such echoes ring in this year’s noisy traffic jam.

 

Awards season deprives us of true cultural appreciation by highlighting films for their undeserved, soon-forgotten, injudicious acclaim. Never vote in haste.