#Oscars discourse

[goldfyshie927]

Absolutely baffled that people are comparing the Barbie movie not getting certain awards show noms as like an example of modern feminist issues. Sometimes movies are fun but not good enough for an award and that’s not an example of anything??? If Barbie is the pinnacle of feminism for you… I hate to break it to you but you’re stuck about 10 years behind the curve in understanding what feminism is really all about at this point. Please expand your a) understanding of feminism and b) movie watching views. There are plenty of amazing movies out there beyond Barbie, I promise. And plenty of resources to get you up to speed on feminism today.

[burningvelvet]

[phanchester]

happy birthday @amazingphil! 🎀🌸💗

[ingravinoveritas]

Jumping off of comments on this post from @cloud-based-and-rainpilled about that interviewer calling David's outfit "camp" and the British press in general, because you just unlocked a memory in me of the movie Velvet Goldmine.

It's about two rock stars in the 1970s glam rock era (played by Jonathan Rhys Meyers and Ewan McGregor), and the British press is shown using the word camp to describe them in one sequence, and the parallels to the press describing Michael and David after the NTAs are making me scream:

(Also worth noting is that JRM's character is married to a woman and also unapologetically androgynous/bisexual and very much having sex with/in love with EM's character at the same time...)

So yes, you are not at all off the mark with the British press being Like That, because Velvet Goldmine came out in the late '90s, is set in 1984, and has flashbacks to the '70s, and yet here we are in the present day still seeing that same attitude. Truly astonishing...

[jack-kellys]

so i am gonna talk abt the delanceys. and i don’t want that to make you scroll away at the speed of light. i want to talk about them in a broader sense, view them in a broader sense, in the way that we talk about jack and his existential need to leave where he is for the west- and, further, going into analysis, like how “the west” in america in the 1890s is a capitalist venture that is sold to jack as this idea of a new home, a better way to live, something that he needs, when the real home is new york with his chosen family and where no one needs to call him “son”.

i think what matters most in the world of the delanceys, and what puts them into a nuanced political stance as well as a personal one, is their father, the striking trolley worker.

i think it’s fair to assume that as a striking worker demanding better wages, as a union member, he deserves those wages. it’s good that he’s striking, that he’s demanding what he’s owed and doing so with his fellow workers. strikers are the right people to support especially based on the historical context of the trolley strike.

but this guy is… an asshole. he dumped these two children into the refuge and left them there to rot, presumably. there’s a possibility he didn’t know about how abusive snyder is, sure, but he knew it was a detention center and that’s not… where u put ur kids when u care abt them lmao.

so this man is a striking trolley worker who doesn’t give a shit about his own children. he’s an underpaid union member who deserves his dues but also lets his two sons suffer for years alone in a children’s jail. he fights the system to his benefit while submitting his two kids into a different one. the dichotomy is important here- it’s essential to the foil the delanceys are for the newsies.

the delanceys are strike breakers. strike breakers are, obviously, paid under the table to disperse union-led strikes and protests to uphold a system that benefits the rich- who of course will always benefit from underpaid work. the delanceys take money from this upheld system when they get the opportunity and beat strikers bloody who don't get to benefit from this system like they do. because they do benefit from that elitist system, since they are choosing to make money off of it outside of their usual job. right.

but within those strikers is their father. the father who left them to rot, who let wiesel scrape them out of that jail and enlist them at a dead-end newspaper gig. so the brothers hate this father, this striker, this piece of family. and this father is making all this noise with these other people- these people who support their father as his coworkers and fellow union members, and the delancey brothers' leave that strike with their fists red with more blood than solely their father's, since they're angry and good at it and the money is hefty.

and their childhood is semi-revenged, but at what ethical cost? they've served broken bones to plenty of workers just trying to fight for their fair pay- something that the delanceys can relate to, by the way, since it isn't like their wages are too stellar for how many hours they're forced to put in. but they put down these people--innocent sans their father--because they have the opportunity. opportunity for them is bringing others down, and when they have the choice, they take it. gladly. "it's honest work" is shrugged off and believed. "i take care of the guy who takes care of me" is snide. uk costuming has them wearing nicer work coats over their newsie-like attire, concealing their similarities and choosing to align themselves more with the elite, since that's...the only protection they can turn to besides each other. the elite gets them extra pay, and keeps them one rung above the newsies to sneer down at them from. they fight via using the system, since systems are all they've ever been apart of, and when they see one that might benefit them for once, they latch onto it.

and, of course, they're strike breaking again, with adult men and their uncle at their side, against their personal foils- the newsies.

the newsies either don't have family like the delanceys, or frequently have to be apart from theirs. lots of them don't have a sibling they can return to daily, or any at all. most don't have parents or family members. or homes to go back to after work. the system they are stuck in is one that does not work for them unless they make it work, making their own numbers and cash by gambling how many papers they can sell in a day to earn every cent back and then some. creating a system within a system--whereas the delanceys mold themselves into one that exists, again, to the elite's benefit--to survive.

and then, the newsies and their chosen family of brothers choose to revolt against their system in an attempt to dismantle it, or at the very least negotiate it.

and the delanceys' reaction to this, to another strike, to a group of kids going against their system (of which would benefit oscar and morris to join, tbh, unless they don't classify as "working kids" of the city, perhaps putting them at around 18 years old...)?

disdain and more snide comments! "not that i'm complaining, my skull busting arm could use a day of rest" "you working, or trespassing?/what's your pleasure?" and putting pressure on scabs to keep with the system- specifically more with uksies, oscar and morris are sort of dusting tommy boy off and whispering to him. trying to split apart the family the newsies have made with each other. and then ofc they beat the actual shit out of the newsies and in uk they have bats they are full on swinging, whole shoulder into it. you did not uphold this system, and it will destroy you for it.

and it nearly does, because then jack scabs, right? and oscar and morris are in pulitzer's office as the man talks jack through the deal, through the cash. as he must've to oscar and morris earlier that week about strike breaking the newsies. and all three of them all have these nearly matching bruises and cuts on their faces.

and then all three of them go to the cellar, the lowest floor of the elite. together the three of them are in this location with this context. two strikebreakers and a scab. taking the elite's money for their benefit, be it in a moment of fear, resignation, or greed. all the oldest kids in the play, the three who've seen the scars and rips and tears in this world more than any of the others. and for like twenty seconds of stage time jack oscar and morris are the same brand. until of course oscar and morris punch into jack's gut--since they're only "given discretion to handle him as they see fit" if he misbehaves, which jack hasn't, so they punch where people won't see/check--and remind him that he's still below them (literally shoving him to the floor ofc), that they're still closer to the elite.

and yeah, they are, because later, jack again refuses the system, and tosses the money back on the table after rebelling against his terms. in true foil fashion, once jack recognizes that his actions align that which he needs to destroy, he renounces them, while the delanceys remain on the other side of the coin they share with jack.

the delanceys, as a storytelling device, right, are meant to represent what the newsies could fall to, seen with the three initial scabs and then jack in act ii. they are this constant threat of sort of equal size to the newsies through the whole show, always kinda lurking. always being a possibility to become if the newsies ever forget what they fight for and against.

also, jack is....kind of.... like their dad, in their perspective. he's parental with the newsies, he leads them, guides them, and protects them, as well as constantly getting the better of the delanceys. why should someone like a father get to fight the system again? not on their fucking watch.

i think it's pretty clear that oscar and morris are meant to represent corruption on the small scale, thematically, while pulitzer is corruption at the top- since it all trickles down. and i think it's really important that this motif is consistently upheld within the brothers, since it sort of alters the message of the show to at least drastically change that abt them. they are the nearest branch of corruption to the newsies guys. that is so fucking cool

[rubyvroom]

Oppenheimer certainly is a movie

So I did see this and to its credit I am giving it some thought afterwards. There is a movie inside this movie that is actually pretty good; however, some Decisions were made that obscure this fact.

It is ultimately a Great Man film, and it stood a chance to do an interesting variation on the Great Man film where the Great Man is also the villain of the film. It actually feints at this in ways that I think are extremely interesting, but undermines it structurally in a way I think is detrimental to the film regardless of my opinions on its subject.

The ending, for example, is where Christopher Nolan just cannot help putting in a clever "oh the irony" moment to leave you wow'ed, but it is so transparently doing this that it makes you look back in annoyance at the previous 3 hours.

This invented conversation between Einstein and Oppenheimer that Nolan had to conceal from us earlier in the film to bring back at the last minute so that the viewer can think, oh wow! Of course that conversation was not what Strauss imagined it was at all, he was as a paranoid narcissist assuming they were talking about him rather than reciting the theme of the film out loud for us! It was all a misunderstanding! How tragic!

But why do that? Other than the wow, what is this accomplishing? What is this investigation/hearing structure that we spend much of the run-time of the film in accomplishing? It gives the film a structure that allows us to jump around in time, but what did we get out of this other than last minute reveals? Why did he make it this way?

Well, this is the way to have a film about J Robert Oppeheimer with a villian who is not J Robert Oppenheimer.

So you have Strauss in that role, and honestly, he is played so magnetically by Robert Downey Jr that it almost works. You basically go with it for 2 hours and 50 minutes or so. Because unlike the protagonist of this film he has agency. He is making decisions. He has convictions that he will explain and demonstrate. He's the character making the film go, more or less.

Oppenheimer does none of those things. He is a passive player in his own story. Which is a Decision in this movie, and a big one. Especially if you look through all the contradictions to actual history.

In this movie Oppenheimer really doesn't wrestle with any moral quandries, he does not make difficult choices. The Manhattan Project is a task he is uniquely suited to, as he is to nothing else, as though he is forged for this and only this purpose. Oppenheimer is less an archer than an arrow loosed at the target of the Trinity Tests and left there quivering ever after. It's an inevitability. He does it because it's what he does, what he was always going to do. As a main character he's not so different from the Tenet protagonist in this way. Just like Tenet, this movie is a clockwork propelling the Great Man where he needs to be.

The film absolves Oppenheimer in this way, treating him as swept along by the forces of history rather than making moral decisions. And hell, maybe that's how it actually happened - humans frequently blunder into moral quagmires without planning to. We avoid thinking about the inconvenient truths and wrestling with cognitive dissonance all the time. On top of that, Oppenheimer himself gets a special dispensation for being a Scientist, with zippy quantum physics imagery flashing in his head all the time. How can we expect him to focus on the real world implications of his fancy science? (Except real world logistics is actually the thing he is accomplished in, as we see in the whole section where he designs the Los Alamos project. He didn't actually discover the principals of the bomb, or design the bomb himself. He's not Einstein. He's not even Niels Bohr. He's a project manager. An extremely good one! But let's ignore that, the movie wants us to think flashy Science Visions when we think of Oppie, so okay.) Anyway, we try with a few briefly shown newspaper covers to assign a motive to the man's drive. His Jewish identity gets some lip service, without much conviction or, y'know, actual onscreen depiction. The Nazis are a distant abstraction, less immediate than the lurking communists at every corner. Watch out for the commies, Oppie! They're the ones actually on his street corner, while Nazis are literally represented as a couple headlines. Obviously none of those things really matter. In the end he builds the bomb because he can, because he can do it faster than anyone else and pretty much instantaneously upon realizing it's possible he is mentally committed to the task. It is his destiny and his terrible duty. It has to be him. He is a homing missile. A bomb.

THAT movie is interesting, actually.

I find that part of the movie weirdly compelling, and if they had leaned into that angle I feel like it could have been a great film? If they had only mentioned a few more similar incidents to the cyanide apple, played out his violent tendencies, and contrasted to a genuine love of science -- and what exactly does he love about it, really? -- where does that get us? How does power use people like that? What does it do with them afterwards?

But most of this movie is not that.

Most of this movie is Oppenheimer being unfairly persecuted for being friends with communists, which is presented as an example of scientist as a naive babe in the woods rather than the savvy political operator he actually was in real life. And if you are not pearl-clutching at the thought of talking to commies, this entire plot thread feels incredibly overblown. It's so much of that three hours, you guys. So much. Oppie can't get his security clearance, Oppie is losing his security clearance, wow that's so unfair, and any sense of urgency of what he actually needs this clearance FOR ten years after the war is really underbaked. And honestly whenever they jettison that theme and cover literally anything else, the film comes back to life again -- the Los Alamos/Trinity section in the middle is gripping, his Girlfriend 1 and Girlfriend 2 show actual signs of life in the brief crumbs of onscreen time they are given -- but it's so vastly outnumbered by the time spent in board rooms and congressional hearings.

The purpose of which? The real thesis of this movie, which is that J Robert Oppenheimer was ultimately too naive to understand that the bomb he was making would be used to bomb somebody.

And the nation, represented by Robert Downey Jr (lol) is happy to discard him afterwards. Like I get that's the theme we're working with here. But the movie is none too interested in looking more closely at the why and the how of that discard; Oppenheimer's actual actions after the war are largely elided, as are Strauss's. No context. Oppenheimer's actual political convictions are murky. That would give him agency, you see, and the movie wants a passive martyr (and uses that word incessantly to boot). So our villian is Strauss, an ambitious and vindictive man, in opposition to our pure scientist Oppenheimer, who spent most of his career in Washington while, somehow, lacking any ambition or political opinions at all.

Really, did we need this movie? Yes, it's nice to have adult films with people talking and not punching. The craft is there. It's well made and well-acted, to varying degrees. I like looking at Cillian Murphy's face, and Nolan leans on that smartly. It's most vital sequence (the trinity test) is very good, and so is the scene where he hallucinates the cheering audience after the Hiroshima bombing melting in a radioactive flash.

But honestly? When your key sequence was mic-dropped by David Lynch six years ago, did we need this? What for? Can we have a real discussion now about Hiroshima and Nagasaki? That's the one real utility of this film and one we really have not seen come to fruition. Imagine a version of this film where that conversation between Einstein and Oppenheimer is not a gotcha but a catalyst for a real, raw and jaw-dropping look at how the world was warped by The Bomb. I guess for that we have to go to someone like David Lynch, and not Christopher Nolan.

[jacketpotatoo]

Barbie Oscar discourse is making my headache.

it’s disingenuous to say that Greta and Margot and Barbie were Actually Shit and it’s also indicative of how audiences view comedy as a low brow artform that shouldn’t be held alongside Serious Drama

it’s ALSO disingenuous to say that their lack of nominations is because critics missed the point of the movie because they nominated Ryan Gosling and his song. Yknow, his song *criticising* the patriarchy, written by a woman, Greta Gerwig.

it is ESPECIALLY disingenuous when Barbie scored 8 nominations overall, most of which in categories that they were deserving of! The production design, etc. yeah, absolutely deserved. It *is* getting its flowers. So many deserving films aren’t at all.

Not to mention the fact that the Leading Actress and Best Director category is stacked. Not to mention the fact that most people complaining haven’t even seen the other entries and are using that as a Gotcha. Yes I do think the ‘only one woman is nominated for best director’ pattern is stupid and that Celine Song also deserves a nomination. Which brings me to the fact that Past Lives was absolutely robbed in other categories.

It’s annoying that the defeatist ‘awards hate barbie and therefore women, wow feminism is dead’ discourse is so so stark because Lily Gladstone’s nomination is SO deserved and her inevitable win will be too. Supporting Actress is a category for women, the “why did KEN get nominated and not Barbie” discourse is just stupid.

[palalabu]

The twinks singing jolene is definitely not in my bingo card

Is the song even age appropriate for these babies??

[enigmaticvariation]

oscars drama is always embarrassing but today especially because why are people acting like greta gerwig and margo robbie are the only women to ever exist within the film industry and ignoring and throwing the women who got nominated over them under the bus? and of course not a single person is talking about greta lee and celine song being snubbed for past lives (a better film in my opinion,) I wonder why... 😒

[robotpussy]

they should have never made that stupid Barbie movie

[chaikachi]

oopsies! i accidentally deleted the last anon while trying to answer it but it was something along the lines of

stop co-opting songs from the canon couple, it's weird

I assume you're talking about this post, and to that I say I can't 'co-opt' from canon couples because RG is a canon couple, you silly goose!! Just like BB and Renora who were the other two ships focused on in that scene!

We start with the sister reunion:

Then we get friends/teammates reunion:

Then big focus on the bumbleby reunion:

Then the tease to renora:

and then big focus on rosegarden!

Which, if you remember, is a direct parallel to one of their earlier scenes back in v5, just reversed!

Also, I did some googling and can't find crwby anywhere mentioning that Treasure is only about one specific pairing. So until they come forward and clarify, it is up to interpretation! Hope you have a good day and are looking forward to the RG reunion hug as much as I am!! 🤗💕

[emostudent]

i'm sorry, i thought Barbie was a movie about BARBIE, why the fuck are we focusing more on Ken than on Barbie?

[burninlovebutler]

my boy, my boy 💗 i am so proud of you 💗 and i know Elvis & Lisa Marie are too 💗

of course i am disappointed at the oscar’s loss BUT at the end of the day, we still won in so many other ways & areas - we’ve come a long way & it’s been quite a journey & there is SO MUCH to celebrate outside of one award - our boy & this movie was winning awards left & right all season

golden globes & baftas are HUGE win’s especially for this stage in his career plus awards are bullshit anyway i never cared or paid attention to them until now

one award does not dictate or null the success, impact & love this movie has cultivated

art in any form is subjective

to paraphrase my other fav boy, Harry Styles’ grammy speech:

“I think on nights like tonight it’s important for us to remember there is no such thing as ‘best’ in music art. I don’t think any of us sit in the studio on set making decisions on what is going to get us one of these [awards],”

and Jon Batiste’s speech:

"I believe this to my core, there is no best musician, best artist, best dancer, best actor - the creative arts are subjective and they reach people at a point in their lives when they need it most. It's like a song or an album is made and it's almost like it has a radar to find the person when they need it the most."

and the movie, austin & elvis certainly found us when we needed it the most - i whole heartedly believe that 💗

it might be the end of an era, but there is a new beginning on the horizon & i can’t wait to be there with you all 🌅💕

i know that i will look back at this time with such happiness & fondness, i’ve made such great friends & memories - i cherish it all

i won all of you guys & that’s a pretty fucking good win in my book 💗

i love y’all so much 💗

-mel xx

[the-in-between-honey]

God gives her toughest battles (Carlos Sainz fan) to her strongest soldiers (eldest daughters).

[homoqueerjewhobbit]

You all know, there was still a woman nominated for best director this year, right?

[valyrfia]

KIKA AND LILY GIVE ME A CHAAANNCCCEEE GIVE ME A CHANCE!! I CAN DRIVE! NOT WELL BUT I CAN TRUST ME PLEASE GIVE ME A CHAAANNNCCESE!! OP your thoughts are SO VALID i need Pierre and Oscar to wife them up soon lest I shoot my shot

Kika and Lily I can show you the world (lesbianism) if you just let me.