Psycho. #22
Sometimes, there's a man
Are you getting excited for awards season?
Muuuuuuuum! Mum!! I’m being trolled online, by vicious internet trolls! Oh but wait — a horrible thought occurs to me. No. Surely not. But… god… imagine if this question was sent in in earnest? Suppose for a blood-chilling minute that there is a sweet-natured, happy-go-lucky person out there — presumably a very recent reader of my column — who has sincerely sent in a question cheerfully asking me if I am actually looking forward to awards season. An innocent Winnie-the-Pooh with a Letterboxd account who is, for some reason, in the dying embers of hell-year 2024, getting excited for two Brits to square off against three Americans in the Best Actor race next year.
I can’t bear it.
Having said that, the slim possibility that somebody asked this question and meant it would make my job a hell of a lot easier here, as I could simply sigh: “No of course not”, and enumerate the reasons why. It’s the irony-pilled troll I have to worry about: that person wants a veritable MC Escher staircase of a response from me — flights of irony, vitriol and scorn, running vertiginously into one another above a great dark hallway in which Jimmy Fallon or Kimmel is busy rehearsing a bit where he gets RaMell Ross’s name wrong on purpose. Can I do it? Can such a thing be done?
Perhaps a little trip back in time is in order. I used to love the Oscars. I would read all about them in my precious big book of cinema — this was before the internet; all I had to play with were sticks and mud; Charlemagne was still Emperor back then, and boiled sweets were 10 for a florin — and memorised some of the names and victories, mostly for films I hadn’t seen or even heard of. One weekend when I was staying at a friend’s house his older sister, who had been studying Howard’s End at school, came in chatting to a pal about Emma Thompson’s victory the night before. I sniffed in the air something new to be interested in: actresses receiving awards for emotionally bare performances. By the next year I was firmly on board, and had managed to see two of the contenders in the best actress race — Thompson, again, for The Remains of the Day; and Holly Hunter in The Piano. I was Team Thompson, and my girl got spanked by the Piano ladies. This was fun!
I kind of kept an eye on the ceremony over the next few years, and as I grew up I sometimes got led towards good stuff. I particularly remember Laura Linney’s clip, the year she was nominated for Best Actress for You Can Count On Me. It was so clearly a storming performance, allying a kind of modern wit with deep candour, screen presence, and an impressive resourcefulness of means — you could tell all that from just ten seconds. This was around the time that I started realising that I could create my own tastes; that my particular era of film was a continuation of film history. In these years my favourite actors kept popping up in films by Paul Thomas Anderson and Todd Solondz; I felt like I was in the swim of my own time and place, being aware of who Steve Buscemi was, unlike my parents!
And yet, as a cinephile, there always comes a time when you must abandon the awards — when all of it starts to feel like so much frippery. In part, for me, that came from reflecting that John Goodman, after giving inarguably the greatest supporting performance by an actor in history, in The Big Lebowski — this is simply a fact — went home with jack shit for his efforts that year. Not even nominated. He has never been nominated. John Goodman’s treatment at the hands of the Academy Awards is the argument from suffering writ large: can a loving God possibly exist, who would allow evil and misery in His world? Could an awards body ever be just and good, when it did nothing but spurn the best our world has to offer?
The Academy Awards have almost never given the top prize to the best film to have been made that year, and have instead frequently bestowed that award on the worst film to have been made that year. They are — and not in a shy or subtle way — propaganda for American empire: closely related to the American war machine, and taking care to vehicle soft power for America’s increasingly imperilled status as the cultural and political hegemon of our times. These things — like John Goodman’s performance in The Big Lebowski being the greatest supporting actor performance of all time — are well-documented facts. To get involved in the rigmarole of the Oscars is to keep the American factory running.
I feel like a lot of people know this, and yet we all know how impossible it is to actually step away from the Oscars and all the dreary awards shows that exist in its wake, which all hand out prizes to the same five mediocrities, which nobody could possibly remember two years down the line. (Quick: for 50,000 dollars, name the film starring Bill Nighy that got a bunch of nominations two years ago, the one where he plays a boring old twat who learns to love life or whatever. You can’t, can you? I am waving 50,000 dollars in your face but you can’t remember the name of the film. I can’t remember it either. I will have to set fire to the money.) None of us can quite ignore the whole farrago, in part because the noise is so deafening, and in part because it makes you a real stick-in-the-mud to be focused, instead, on studiously watching the films of Barbara Hammer at the ICA. On one hand: being committed, right and virtuous about cinema as an art form. On the other hand: cheering for a reference to Björk’s swan dress and having an opinion on The Slap. We’ve all made our bed.
A thought: maybe the thing that’s most depressing about Awards Season — more depressing even than the fact that it has no artistic discernment or code of honour, hopping idiotically from Green Book to Anatomy of a Fall to Hillbilly Elegy — is that it coincides almost exactly with the Great British Winter (September to March). As we freeze in our badly built houses and curse our sodden island, America makes our lives worse by pretending that Everything Everywhere All At Once is worth watching even if you’re above the age of 12. Perhaps if we saw sunshine in that time the insult would be easier to bear?
So no, I’m not excited about Awards Season! As with my own mortality, I cannot avoid it; but unlike my own mortality, I am entreated to enjoy it. Unlike my mortality (I have a feeling I will get run over by a car) it will never be funny. Wait, I’m sorry, I take it back, Ariana DeBose’s BAFTA rap was good. God it was good in fact! Perhaps life is worth living after all! I wonder who’ll win best actress!
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