We Have to Talk: It's Giving Season
(Awards) Season's Greetings!
Welcome to We Have to Talk, a fortnightly newsletter in which Sam and George exchange their most pressing and ridiculous reflections on pop culture. Subscribe to get a hot mess of tepid takes directly into your inbox, twice a month.
This week, the boys consider the fun and frustration of awards season, make the case for a twink takeover of the Academy, and decry the time a latex-drenched Gary Oldman snatched Timothee Chalamet’s Oscar.
Hello, Sam! Change is afoot as we drag our sorry husks towards the end of another year. I have finished life as a civil servant, and was excited to feel free and light and unshackled from the confines of working for the current awful government. Instead, I fell ill shortly after my last day, and have spent most of my first week of unemployment schlepping about my cold house like a Victorian ghost. Not for much longer, though: I’m off to New Zealand for the holiday break, where I’m excited to breathe clean air and touch some grass. I’ll be back in January - no doubt in full health - to start a new role in the university sector.
One silver lining to being both sick and unemployed is the full use of my attention span, which is currently being spent on the gay Olympics: awards season. Now we’re in December, both the US and UK have started handing out early gongs; the Gotham Awards kicked things off in New York with some interesting choices, recognising Past Lives as best feature, Anatomy of a Fall for best international feature, and awarding Lily Gladstone (Killers of the Flower Moon) and Charles Melton (May December) for their performances. Over here, All of Us Strangers swept the British Independent Film Awards, though Andrew Scott missed out on best lead performance - which instead went to Mia McKenna-Bruce for How to Have Sex, an exciting nod for a powerhouse performance in a slighter smaller film.
What do you make of how things have kicked off with awards season, Sam? Which pictures and performers are you rooting for, and were you pleased with how the BIFAs and Gothams played out?
SJ: I’m slow off the mark this year, George. I have not yet logged my 10,000 hours of analysing the precursors on the dark corners of the Gold Derby forums, and have an unusually spotty knowledge of the front runners in the race this year thanks to a half-hearted LFF. Will that change? Probably not; I have no plans to subject myself to either Maestro or Ferrari. But thankfully, I have your recently launched awards newsletter over on Letterboxd to get me up to speed. Reader, if you want George in your inbox four more times a month - and honestly, who wouldn't - then I highly recommend you go subscribe. (Note from George: do this by following Letterboxd’s Awards HQ from your account! It’s confusing.)
The BIFA awards made some great picks, and like many younger internet dwellers, I have been happy to see Charles Melton building momentum with his Gotham and honouree Critics Choice award; not just because going from Riverdale to Best Supporting Actor in one year would be a come-up for the ages, but because the performance is is so unexpected from a hunky male star, and because the men’s categories are notoriously tough for deserving young actors. *Cue the Kill Bill Siren as I recall the elderly actors branch sidelining Chalamet to hoist Gary Oldman under a mound of Silicon to victory*. The women’s categories love to award an ingénue, and I feel now’s the time for a twink takeover of the academy. Though, Downey certainly did worthy work in Oppenheimer, and I hope all the Past Lives love boils over into a nom for Teo Yoo.
On the Lead Actress side I have not yet seen Poor Things, but will be spitefully withholding all support for Emma Stone after her turn in La La Land somehow beat both Natalie Portman in Jackie and Isabelle Hupper in Elle to the statue in 2017. It’s time for reparations! Lead Actress should therefore be Gladstone’s to lose even if Killers of the Flower Moon didn’t give her as much to do as it should have. Portman was also great in May December and seems to have momentum, but to me it was Moore in support who had the strongest showing from that film. And I’m praying Rosamund Pike can sneak in a nom for her riotous turn in Saltburn. She might just do it; her performance seems to be the only thing about that film which people can agree on.
I can’t bring myself to care about Best Picture because it’s always the stupidest race with the dumbest outcome, where narrative dominates everything. So with that, I will share my support for The Zone of Interest and May December and hope they can nab international and screenplay noms respectively.
But of course, the entire race - and possibly the industry - will change once Amy Adam finally drops Night Bitch. Where’s your head at with awards this season George?
G: You bring up so many injustices, Sam - the year Gary Oldman won for playing a plastic war criminal was not just a crime against Timothee Chalamet’s transcendent work in Call Me By Your Name, but also against Daniel Kaluuya for Get Out and Daniel Day Lewis for Phantom Thread. I also will not forgive Alison Janney winning an Oscar for saying “fuck” a lot in I, Tonya, over Laurie Metcalf inventing mothers in Lady Bird.
I have seen Poor Things, and I have mixed feelings - Emma Stone is outstanding in it, but I’m not sure it’s the best from this year. It’s bombastic at times, and perhaps more immediately gratifying due to the comedy and joy she commands over 140 minutes, which I worry voters will turn to out of ease. I feel Lily Gladstone was stronger overall; I agree that she felt sidelined in Killers of the Flower Moon, but when she was on screen, I was mesmerised by the subtlety of her performance, and how beautifully she was able to communicate the overwhelming exhaustion of Mollie Burkhart’s grief.
I also think it’s worth entertaining the historical narrative here - that it would be the first acting Oscar win for an indigenous person, not counting Wes Studi’s Academy Honourary Award in 2019. Loathe as I am to sound like a megaphone for Tumblr-era representation politics, I do wonder if it’s worth playing that game, when so much of awards season is literally about representation - who gets to make televised speeches, who gets to say the thank-yous, who gets to be seen. When it works, it works - I’ll never forget Viola Davis’s rousing speech for Fences in 2017 making Emma Stone’s (bless her) sound like she’d won an academic award at high school.
As for Amy Adams: I hope beyond hope that Night Bitch is the project that rescues her from her Naomi Wattsification. If anyone can do it, Marielle Heller can!
S: I generally agree that it is worth playing this game to an extent during awards season but I also think everyone kind of winds up coming out a loser; we all have to pretend Everything Everywhere All At Once is a great film for five months while Jamie Lee Curtis makes off with a questionably-sourced Oscar. And, fundamentally, it takes away from the win: Lily Gladstone has done more than strong enough work in Flower Moon and other films like Kelly Reichardt’s Certain Women to earn the award on her own merits.
My general view is our democracy might be in a slightly healthier place if we didn’t hear quite so much from actors about politics; they are sort of ground zero for the idea that it’s not what you say but how you say it that matters. And it’s always a little jarring when political arguments about social justice get bound up in PR campaigns designed to net a trophy and some box office. Though of course, there are intelligent actors with interesting things to say, and my argument is probably better directed at our general lack of public intellectuals.
Anyway, George; as the cold winter nights draw in I find myself in a reflective mood on the year that was. So tell me, what was on your Spotify Wrapped?
G: You make a sound point, Sam, and I think the industry backs you up: Gladstone won best actress last week at the Gotham Awards, but interestingly not for Flower Moon - rather for The Unknown Country, a much smaller indie drama which looks fantastic. I think it’s a strong indication that Gladstone will get the recognition she deserves this season, as she should have immediately after Certain Women.
As for my Spotify Wrapped: nothing was on it, because I remain one of the quietly elegant users of Apple Music. My top artist over there was Caroline Polachek, of course, but my most-played song was actually a sugar-rush banger from the Swedish pop singer Dagny titled ‘Heartbreak in the Making’. I couldn’t think of a more fitting phrase for how it feels to root for anyone during awards season: the Gary Oldmans always end up winning anyway.
S: Some great artists there. My Spotify Wrapped will be remaining a closely guarded state secret for the foreseeable, but they can release it when I’m dead! Anyway, see you next time for the inaugural year-in-review Talkie Awards!
From the Drafts:
Some silly goose behaviour I witnessed from a celebrity last week: During a virtual junket for The Tourist S2, Jamie Dornan was constructing a tower of coke cans on the table in front of him as he answered journalist questions. They’re just like us! (G)
Ridley Scott’s Napoleon is truly a film only a Brit would make; half war film, half sex farce, and wholly derisive of Napoleon and his dislike of the English. There would have been bodies in the aisles if it played at Cannes. (S)
Julianne Moore sighted in the flesh at Graham Norton’s show wearing a sparkly skirt and elegant cashmere sweater! (S)
I somehow nearly made it through the whole newsletter without dropping that I was at the British Independent Film Awards. I have very little tea to report, apart from that of all people, George MacKay had a queue of people asking him for photos at the afterparty. And apparently he now has two kids. (G)
The Week that Was:
Sam is watching: The Lost Boys, the director of which George spoke with in a fantastic interview over on i-D. I loved its examination of how we find comfort in unfreedom. And ‘Lunar Halo’ by Cloud Gate Dance Company at Sadler’s Wells, which was the most intricate contemporary dance performance I’ve seen; simmering and grotesque.
George is reading: The Last Colony by Philippe Sands, the story of Britain’s annexation of the Chagos Islands in the 1960s, the forced removal of its population, and the Chagossians’ fight to return. It’s powerful and moving, and exposes the violent extent to which Britain is (still!) illegally clinging to the remnants of its empire.
Sam is listening to: Obsidian by Naomi Sharon. The album Sade would release in 2023, if they were still active.
George went and saw: The House of Bernarda Alba at the National Theatre, incredible. I think I now understand the formula for writing powerful theatrical dramas: just make sure there’s a matriarch and loads of repressed daughters.