Leonardo DiCaprio in the movie “Killers of the Flower Moon” Author: Melinda Sue Gordon
There is a lot of spectacle and tradition in Hollywood these days. years, and one cherished custom manifested itself especially clearly. As the Best Picture race heats up, there's always a backlash against one or more of the frontrunners as public opinion wanes. It's as much a part of the Oscars as moaning about the presenter or watching the «In Memoriam» section of a titanic figure who has somehow been forgotten.
Usually the search turns up a couple of films that attract some ridicule — think about 2018's Green Book winner accused of spreading a cozy white savior story, or the close-but-not La La Land statue rejected like a saucer. a bauble with eyes that got jazz completely wrong in 2016.
But even in Oscar backlash season, things have been particularly volatile this time around. In fact, this may be the first time we've had a clean sweep: all 10 of this year's Best Picture contenders felt the wrath of critics, audiences, people who haven't seen the film but aren't watching it. love the idea of this, or all three. Let the hatred begin — justified or not:
The Maestro is accused of having a “Jewish face” and being boring
The maestro was the first to fail. This drew a lot of criticism from people who felt that Bradley Cooper's portrayal of Jewish composer Leonard Bernstein — and in particular the large prosthetic nose Cooper wore for the role — was inappropriate. Cooper himself insisted on the need.
«I thought, 'Maybe we don't need to do this,'» Cooper told CBS Mornings. “But it's all about balance, and, you know, my lips are completely different from Lenny's and my chin. So we had it, and it didn't look right [without the prosthesis].»
Bernstein's children didn't mind: «Bradley decided to wear makeup to enhance his likeness, and we're okay with that. We're also sure our father would be fine with it too,» they said at the time, but «Maestro» makeup artist Kazu Hiro apologized for any dissatisfaction.
«I didn't expect this to happen,» he said at the Venice Film Festival last year. “I'm sorry if I hurt some people's feelings. My goal, like Bradley's, was to portray Lenny as authentically as possible.»
Cooper was also criticized (perhaps unfairly) for appearing too needy on the campaign trail and having an unconvincing “loser face.” » and for crying on television over the loss of Leonard Bernstein — a man he never met.
@moviemaniacs
Bradley Cooper choking on Leonard Bernstein
♬ original sound — Movie Maniacs < p>And an even more minor, additional reaction was caused by Cooper's policy of not having chairs on set. “There are no chairs on set; I've always hated chairs and I feel like your energy drops as soon as you sit in a chair,” the director and star said during a Variety roundtable. “So apple crates are a good way to sit.”
As the Oscars approach, another criticism has been raised: Maestro is just a little boring, and you notice that the acting is good because there's not much else to notice about it. “I could barely get through it,” tweeted movie star Meghan McCain.
Of course, the unrelenting focus on Bernstein's sex life — and the decision to cut short Bernstein's 15-year career as if it were, as the New Yorker put it, «yada-yada» — and bisexuality struck many critics as if they had done a disservice a man whose accomplishments were interesting enough in their own right.
Japan doesn't think Barbenheimer is funny
Christopher Nolan has long been an ultra-chairless advocate, and his Oppenheimer has generated a few backlashes of its own. India's Information Commissioner Uday Mahurkar called Cillian Murphy's summary of the Bhagavad Gita in a sex scene with Florence Pugh «a scathing attack on Hinduism,» and in India and the Middle East, Pugh's naked body was digitally covered with a dress.
The film grossed billions of dollars at the box office thanks in part to the social media phenomenon «Barbenheimer»: the fact that it and Greta Gerwig's extremely pink, extremely bouncy Barbie were slated for release on the same day prompted funny memes. But in Japan, where some 200,000 people died as a result of the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in August 1945, Barbenheimer wasn't so funny. When the official Barbie Movie X account posted a fan-made image of Barbie in front of a nuclear fireball with the caption, “This is going to be a summer to remember,” he had to apologize.
In an attempt to get Americans to understand why Japan finds Barbenheimer offensive, Japanese Twitter began making jokes about 9/11, completely failing to understand that Americans love jokes about 9/11. pic.twitter.com/6F5FOf5aTR
— Nick |ニック (@NickFromTokyo) August 1, 2023
“We find the response to this fan movement from the official US account for the Barbie movie to be extremely unfortunate,” the post said. “We take this very seriously and ask US headquarters to take appropriate action. We apologize to those who were offended by these thoughtless actions.» Oppenheimer will finally be released in Japan in March.
The film has also come under attack from the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament for its «tasteful and artfully presented» depiction of the aftermath of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and also for generally keeping silent about the suffering of the Japanese people. Of course, none of this stopped Oppenheimer from becoming the undisputed frontrunner at Oscar night.
Barbie is too big for her own good
Barbie, by the way, has received a predictable backlash from the manosphere for mocking the patriarchy: boastful right-winger Ben Shapiro has moved enough to rant about it in a 43-minute YouTube review before setting Barbie dolls on fire with a lighter. “I felt like men could take it,” co-writer Noah Baumbach told 60 Minutes. «I mean, come on.»
Gerwig added: “This is no more misanthropic than Aristophanes’ Lysistrata was misanthropic. When you say it out loud, it doesn't feel like a burn. This will teach them!”
Margot Robbie and Greta Gerwig, star and director of Barbie. Photo: Getty
Blats about Barbie being a misandrist didn't hurt its box office performance, as it became the highest-grossing film of 2023, taking in $1.4 billion at theaters. But now it's becoming something of an obstacle in the Oscar race: Over the past 20 years, the Academy has tended not to shower the garlands on films that made a ton of money. Barbie would become the highest-grossing Best Picture winner since 2003's The Lord of the Rings with $1.2 billion, and it also served as something of a cumulative pat on the back for Peter Jackson and others. And underneath this is the feeling that, despite her critique of patriarchy, Barbie's overall vibe is too much of an optimistic popcorn meal for the Academy to truly love her.
The poor things aren't as feminist as they think.There has also been controversy over the feminist bent of the film Bad Things, in which Emma Stone played the reanimated corpse of a young woman traveling the world. In i, Isolde Walters called it «one of the most misogynistic films I've seen in years» and wondered how much of Stone's character Bella was a male fantasy. She lamented that «a woman's journey from childhood innocence to worldly maturity was essentially one of simple sex.» And there's a lot of sex in «Poor Little Things,» which has left some viewers squeamish, given that Bella is given the brain of a newborn baby.
«If it helps,» Stone told the Times, «as someone who played it and produced it, I didn't see her as a child in any of those scenes.»
The Anatomy of a Fall Becomes a Diplomatic Incident
Reaction to Anatomy of a Fall focused less on the film itself (a gripping legal thriller in which a wife is suspected of pushing her husband out of a window) and more on suspicions of political gamesmanship on the part of French filmmakers. When the film won the Palme d'Or at Cannes, its director Justine Trieu took the opportunity to attack the «neoliberal» French government for its handling of pension protests, which she said were «shockingly rejected and suppressed» and also for his behavior. «commodification of culture». Following its Oscar nomination, Anatomy of a Fall was snubbed in favor of The Taste of Things as the French entry for best international film, and Triet shared an Instagram post in which another user called The Taste of Things «boring/annoying.» My God.
Anatomy of a fall Zone of interest evades the harsh truth
Other candidates were criticized quite harshly. While «Zone of Interest» was praised for its depiction of the horrors of Auschwitz and the everyday brutality required to maintain it, Richard Brody of the New Yorker called it «an extreme form of Holokic.»
Director Jonathan Glaser's film, which follows SS officer Rudolf Höss and his family outside the camp walls, he wrote, «also shies away from depicting the horrors of the real-life Höss character and, as a result, trivializes them.» .
Flower Moon Killers are too white
The feeling that it is almost impossible for a film to truly reveal the scale and depth of the terrible events that lie at its core also affects Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. He is nominated for 10 Academy Awards, and his portrayal of American Indian life was hailed by Osage Chief Standing Bear as having «restored trust.» But it still drew criticism from Native American audiences for the way Scorsese chose to frame the story and the level of violence displayed in the killings. Actor and member of the Iroquois Nation Devery Jacobs concluded that he believed «these very real people were given honor or dignity in the horrific portrayal of their deaths.»
Christopher Cote, the film's Osage consultant, had mixed feelings about Killers of the Flower Moon: on the one hand, it was a good representation of Osage culture; on the other hand, as he told the Hollywood Reporter, the film «wasn't made for the Osage audience, it was made for everyone, not for the Osage.» What he objected to most was how cute Leo DiCaprio's Ernest Burkhart looked in the film.
Lily Gladstone in the film «The Number Killers» Flower Moon Posted by Melinda Sue Gordon
“They kind of give him this conscience and kind of show him that there is love,” Kot told the Hollywood Reporter. “But when someone is plotting to kill your entire family, that is not love. This is not love, this is just beyond violence.”
Lily Gladstone, up for best actress for her role as Molly Burkhart, sympathized. “Chris and I had exactly this conversation in his living room,” she said. “Marty is a titan, but he is no more than history. Although he is its main shaper. Such is the complicated nature of such stories.”
Some viewers were skeptical about how important the relationship between DiCaprio's Burkhart and Robert De Niro's William Hale was in the story's ostensible story of brutality inflicted on American Indians, and felt it crowded them out of their own story.
The remains are based on caricatures
The Leftovers has also received significant criticism: its director, Alexander Payne, was accused of sexual misconduct by Rose McGowan in 2020 (an allegation he denied), and it also attracted some criticism from some viewers who felt that the character Yes' Joy Randolph's Vine, Mary, traded in the «mammy» archetype — a black woman who was unfailingly cheerful in her servitude — which made them uncomfortable.
THE REMAINS ARE OK. Some things will remain the same, but overall I think we can do better. But I'll really enjoy seeing the backlash about the overall lack of subversion of the Mommy archetype and the implications of this ending.
— Alex Jackson (@Dr_Wokelstein) November 25, 2023 Past Lives is simply too good.
Even Past Lives, a very sweet and gentle drama about the relationship of two longtime lovers who stay in touch even though that their lives separate them between the South. Korea and New York received some backlash. It's an accessible, touching portrait of a tender love that endures despite all odds—and its sheer straightforwardness has made some people feel like it might push other, dumber, more complex films out of the way. Despite the skill of its creation and the beauty of its execution, its absolute harmlessness offends some.
In this sense, it has its own honor, which is awarded to one candidate for the best film of the year: the year of a good film , which is reviled by filmmakers for being too mediocre.
At the time of writing, only American fiction has managed to escape any resistance. But there is still time.
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