1055 minutes

So here’s the thing,

A few years ago, I saw a screening of the 1954 Judy Garland/James Mason version of A Star Is Born. And I thought the film, a story of a drunk Hollywood star on the decline who meets a young talented woman and helps her start her career only to see her stardom eclipse his, was great. Then last year, when the buzz around the new Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga version started, I decided it would be an interesting exercise to actually sit down and watch all of the previous Star Is Borns to prepare for the new version. And it is genuinely fascinating to see how this one story grows and changes over time, reflecting changes in cultural tastes and in societal views, while remaining recognisably the same.

In the original 1937 film with Janet Gaynor and Frederic March (and which I understand bears heavy similarity to 1932’s What Price Hollywood?), the core plot is established, and it’s surprising how largely untouched that plotting goes throughout the different versions. The main difference is the absence of music, which is a big issue – instead she’s just an actor, and we’re supposed to believe that Norman Maine sees her star appeal and talent as an actress based solely on her serving at a party, which doesn’t play very believably (and which seems even more of a contrivance when you remember that the film actually makes a joke out of her trying to serve people in a way that shows her acting skills). The 1954 remake with Judy Garland and James Mason introduced music to the story, which was the thing that revolutionised these films; it may be hard to see someone’s acting ability or star appeal from watching them serve food, but anyone who hears Judy Garland sing would instantly know she has genuine talent even if she is an unknown. With this film, she’s still an film star, but since this is the period of big-budget Hollywood musicals, that’s the type of film she makes, and this becomes a vehicle to include song-and-dance sequences from all of the films she makes. But other than that, the film is pretty damned close to the original; it seemed to me that many scenes in the '54 would play out with near-identical dialogue as in the '37. By the 70s the era of major movie musicals is over, and so the 1976 version with Barbra Streisand and Kris Kristofferson adopts the idea of her being a recording star instead, an approach that gives the story sufficient flexibility that it can change with the time and styles; I’d be shocked if any future Star Is Borns return to a Hollywood movie star setting. But while the 1976 version may have arrived at the ultmate form of the story, it is a flawed film – it is better than its poor reputation, but it is easily the least of the films.

And now we have the 2018 version with Bradley Cooper and Lady Gaga. There was a lot of buzz around the film, and for a long time it was widely viewed as the frontrunner for the Best Picture Oscar; that buzz died down, and at this point it seems certain that it will be one of the Best Picture nominees that come up short.

[Comments on the 2018 A Star Is Born, and the seven other Best Picture nominees – Roma, The Favourite, Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Vice, Green Book, and Bohemian Rhapsody – after the jump] 

The fact is, regardless of its success in winning an Oscar, the new A Star Is Born still a fantastic film – it’s my second-favourite of the four versions of this story (it falls short of the Garland, but beats the Gaynor and the Streisand). One of the things that makes the movie so impressive is how far its two main stars are pushed out of their comfort zone. Bradley Cooper has long been established as a strong charismatic star, but here he’s called on to perform as an experienced singer, and he absolutely convinces as someone who is so comfortable singing in front of an audience, and who has spent his lifetime effectively destroying himself in pursuit of that experience. Meanwhile, Lady Gaga is a great singer, someone who absolutely deserves to be listed with legends like Garland and Steisand, but she’s pretty inexperienced as an actor, and so I was stunned by just how beautifully natural her performance was, expertly navigating the tough emotional highs and lows of the character. She also does well in modulating her performance in the concert scenes; as someone who has been performing for 10 or 15 years, working on stage must feel like a comfortable space, but she manages to drop that experience and give newcomer Ally a genuine sense of being overwhelmed, a level of inexperience and imprecision that seemed natural for someone being thrust into a situation she’s unprepared for.

In addition to starring, Bradley Cooper co-wrote and directed the movie, and he does very well. Looking first at the screenplay, the thing that leapt out to me was how much more prominent Jackson Maine was when compared to his counterparts in the earlier films. And I liked that as a choice. In the earlier films, the story really does belong to the woman – which is why no-one will ever talk about “the Star Is Born with James Mason”; it’s always “the Judy Garland version.” The screenplay here redresses that balance a bit; it’s now not her story, it’s their story. And I liked that, partly because it brought a bit more depth to his character. The Maine character has tended to be somewhat two-dimensional; he’s a drunk and self-destructive just because he’s a drunk and self-destructive in the story. But here we understand more about his struggles, how these issues have affected him throughout his life, and I liked that the film gives him hearing issues, which might genuinely feel like a career-ending challenge that would exacerbate his problems and bring extra weight to his character’s ending.  I was glad that the film was able to bring more depth to the Jackson character without ever diminishing the Ally character.

I was also extremely impressed with Bradley Cooper’s work as a director. Tackling a project like A Star Is Born must be a major challenge for a first-time director – between the heightened emotion of the melodrama, the intimate tenderness of the love story, and the challenges of staging the musical sequences, there’s a lot to handle – but you never would have guessed it was directed by someone without decades of experience. He demonstrates an absolute confidence and a clarity of vision in navigating the story’s tonal shifts, and I’m genuinely excited to see what Bradley Cooper does next as a director.

The only thing I don’t really care for is the way they dealt with the ending of the film, especially in comparison to the other versions – and with this, I have to get into spoilers, so if you don’t know about how this story ends, just skip ahead to the next movie.

[SPOILERS]
So I really found myself struggling with how the film deals with the death of Jackson Maine. In the first two films, after hearing about the impact he’s having on Vicki, Norman Maine walks off into the ocean and drowns. I’ve always thought that this was a concession to the Hayes Code (which imposed a lot of moral restrictions at the time and would never have allowed a suicide to be portrayed); we can understand that he committed suicide, but it’s never stated outright, and there’s just enough ambiguity that we can pretend it might be a genuine accident. The death of John Howard in the ’76 version is one of the least successful parts of the film; they don’t really give him that clear motivation for killing himself other than the fact that Esther decides not to go on tour, and when he dies in a car crash it plays as a genuine case of reckless driving rather than a deliberate act.  I have read that the 2018 version was originally going to end with the drowning death, but they changed it so that for the first time it plays as an unambiguous suicide, without any possibility of being an accident. Perhaps that choice was just made because they felt that “walking into the ocean” was too melodramatic or unrealistic – suicide by drowning seems pretty rare, whereas the death they do go with is something that sadly happens every day – but the end result was that I felt that his death was a much crueller action, and the film didn’t seem to really grapple with this. See, the earlier films aren’t only ambiguous as suicides for the audience, but also for the characters – Vicki can easily accept that Norman drowned by accident, Esther can believe that John crashed his car by mistake – but in the new film Ally knows that he committed suicide, will understand that he did it out of a misguided attempt to get out of her way, and no advice from Jackson’s brother that it was Jack’s fault will make that easier. So while in the other films the death of the Maine character feels like something that will obviously cause intense grief but that Vicki or Esther can move on from because she would feel “it was an accident, nothing I can do”, here she has to carry the additional burden of knowing that her husband killed himself for her. And how do you move on from that? I don’t know that the film really grapples with that issue. Instead we just see her moving on as in any of the other versions. And that doesn’t work for me.
[SPOILERS END]

Still, it’s a fantastic film. I’m glad that it prompted me to watch the other versions of the story, and I’m glad that the 2018 version lives up to the standard set by the other films. And now I’m looking forward to the time in a couple of decades when we get a new version of this story.

Accepted wisdom seems to be that the likely winner will be Roma, the new film from Alfonso Cuarón. If it does win, I believe (unless there's a film I'm missing) it would be the first ever foreign-language movie to win the Best Picture Oscar, which is quite an achievement. And Roma really would deserve it. The film focuses on Cleo, a young woman working as a servant for a middle-class family in Mexico City in the early 70s, and we watch as her experiences allow her to grow from a timid and meek figure to a woman of great determination and inner strength. Cuarón has talked about how he wanted to make a film that was inspired by his childhood; it's an impulse that a lot of filmmakers have, and the results can often feel self-indulgent, but Cuarón avoids this pitfall by not focusing on the children that would represent himself, but by telling a story that is inspired by the life of the maid who worked (and I think may still work) for his family, and who it's clear he has a great deal of love for. It's an approach that gives him a degree of distance from the film's subject matter but still allows him to incorporate his own memories into the film.

I absolutely adored the way Cuarón chose to shoot the movie. I don't believe there's a single close-up shot in the entire movie (at least, not of a character; there are plenty of brief close-ups of objects in the film), instead he typically frames his images in either a long shot or occasionally a medium shot, and then he just has the action play out in front of the camera, only ever cutting to a new shot if it's strictly necessary. It's a brilliant idea for this film, because it deliberately keeps the audience at a distance. We never feel that we're really close to the characters, not even Cleo, or that we've participated in the film's events. Instead we feel like passive observers seeing the film's events without ever intervening. It's reflective of the idea that this film is based on real events that Cuarón observed, but more significantly it reflects the idea that this film is about a servant who is always present but never who is never fully part of the family.

The other thing I really love about the shooting style is how it allows you to focus on the interaction between the characters. It's very rare for the film to have a shot where there is only one character on screen; instead almost every shot is an opportunity to watch a number of people engaging with each other. And this means that, rather than cutting from character to character, the audience is allowed to sit and watch how everyone responds to whatever is happening, whatever is being said. It also gives a wonderful sense of the place and the space that the characters exist in, both in terms of the physical environment and the social space. If the film had been shot traditionally with lots of close-ups edited together, you might lose the sense of distance in which Cleo exists in relation to the family. But here you find yourself sitting and watching the scene play out, and so you see that the family is watching TV sitting on the sofa while Cleo kneels down next to them to enjoy the show, or that the family is sitting on a bench eating ice creams while Cleo stands a pace away, part of the group but distinctly different. It's a wonderfully subtle way of visually illustrating the character dynamics, and it illustrates what has been lost as modern cinema has increasingly relied on the close-up and cuts between single character shots for storytelling.

The other big advantage of this filming style is that it lessens the intrusiveness of one of Alfonso Cuarón's filming quirks. Cuarón has long had a love for filming major set pieces in a single extended take, but often it can often be distracting, and even spoil a surprise for the audience by telling them that something major is about to happen. Witness, for example, the long take in the car in Children of Men, where the camera is moving all around the car in a way that feels absolutely artificial, and so we can recognise that something major is going to happen long before the attack actually occurs, simply because the early parts of that scene would not be shot in that way unless something big was about to happen. Roma has a lot of moments where small character moments erupt unexpectedly into major set pieces – the new year party that turns into a forest fire, the shopping visit that suddenly turns into a violent riot, or the trip to the beach that suddenly turns into a dramatic rescue. These are big dramatic moments, and these scenes are shot in a single take, but because the entire film is shot with this patient observational approach and these scenes don't immediately deviate from that style, the audience is never alerted to the fact that there's about to be a major set piece until it appears. But when they come, these set pieces are incredible, with a size and a scale to the spectacle that is heightened by the way they contrast with the small intimate drama playing out in front. Most dramatic has to be the climactic water rescue at the end of the film, and I genuinely can't comprehend how they made that scene, not only in terms of finding a way to shoot it, but also how they could create that scene in a way that keeps all of the participants safe and alive. And that's the advantage of shooting this kind of sequence with a long take; when a scene is cut and edited, it can be very easy to question just how much this scene was created in the editing suite, but because the scene was shot in a single take without cuts, it suddenly feels more real, we are instantly aware of just how dangerous and scary this really is, and it heightens the impact of the moment. Certainly the beach scene would be the single most memorable scene that I've seen this year; I don't think anything else comes close.

I appreciated how, while the film is filled with the nostalgia of someone looking back on the years of their childhood, it remains clear-eyed about what life was like in Mexico in the 1970s. I don't really know Mexican history, but it's clear that it was a period of intense political unrest. There's a moment where the adults hear about a planned protest, and one of the character's immediate response is to express a hope that perhaps the police won't beat the protesters this time; it's horrifying to realise that that is the first thing people in that place would think about when they hear about people protesting the government. There's also a scene where we watch the protest being put down, not by legitimate police (who don't seem to be present) but by a gang of youths who are trained to operate and suppress outside of the law, and again it's shocking to realise the scale of operation to prepare this gang of thugs that are accountable to no-one.

The film is being released by Netflix, which I'm conflicted by. I'm glad that Netflix has allowed limited cinema screenings of this film, something they have previously been resistant to allow with their exclusive films, and so I had the joy of watching the film on the big screen. And it's a film that really rewards big screen viewing, as the filming style of long extended takes allows the cinema audience to really focus on examining every detail on screen as the shot plays out. The sound design of the film is also fantastic, and that's something you can really miss out on in home viewing. But its cinema release has been very limited – there's only one cinema in Wellington that was able to show it – and so only a small minority of the audience will be able to see it on the big screen; most people watching the film will be seeing it at home. But the good thing about Netflix releasing this film is that it does makes the film so easily accessible. A black-and-white foreign language film is never going to be a blockbuster, but Netflix has really put a lot of effort into making the film be part of the cultural conversation, and as a result a lot of people have probably watched the film that might never have seen it. And if the film does win the Oscar, hopefully even more people will be prompted to watch and enjoy the movie. And I'm glad about that.

My favourite of the nominees is easily Yorgos Lanthimos' period Regal comedy The Favourite, which is based on the true story of the eccentric Queen Anne, her closest advisor (and, according to the film, secret lover) Sarah Churchill, and the efforts of Churchill's cousin Abigail to take over as court favourite.

I find Lanthimos to be a fascinating director who, at least in the films I've seen, favours a distinctive performance style. He directs his actors in a way that elicits a stilted, awkward, emotionless performance (the AV Club summarised his style as having characters "talk like aliens who’ve only recently memorized a basic phrasebook of human expressions") that can often be at odds with the material they're working with. It hasn't always been successful for me (I think I'm the only person who didn't feel The Lobster worked), but it's always fascinating to watch, and when you connect with the style (as I did particularly with The Killing of a Sacred Deer), it can be disarmingly effective. What's surprising about The Favourite is that Lanthimos completely abandons that style. It's still intensely stylised, but rather than being uncomfortable and affected, here Lanthimos directs his actors to be big, to have all of the emotions.

It's possible that this change in style is motivated at least in part by the script. With the exception of his very first film, Lanthimos has been involved in writing all of his films, which may mean that he was writing towards way he would direct his actors. But in The Favourite, he's working with a script that was written by Deborah Davis and Tony McNamara, and which did not have Lanthimos' involvement. And so he finds himself working with a script that is big and filthy and hilarious, and that he might not have written in that way, and so it seems possible that this difference prompted Lanthimos to adjust the performances he was demanding.

The result is a film that is bold and bright and disarmingly kinky. Usually with these types of Regal costume dramas there's a standard approach to the way these stories are told. And there are many great films that have been made in that style, so I am not attempting to criticise movies that adopt a more conventional approach to these dramas. But that is not what The Favourite is doing. Now, it's not going to the other extreme either – other than one amusingly over-the-top dance sequence, there's never any point where the film seems to be taking an anachronistic approach to its storytelling in the style of films like A Knight's Tale or Moulin Rouge. Instead the film rides the middle line quite expertly, giving us a film that is modern in its sensibilities while telling a very traditional story. It reminds me quite a bit of Amadeus, adopting an up-to-date storytelling style to ensure the audience never feels distanced from the reality of the characters or the fact that these are real people with genuine emotions.

The result is a film that may be about people at court, but it is never courtly. It's unambiguously and gleefully lustful (including a moment where the Queen refers to having someone's tongue inside her that drew audible gasps from the audience I was with), it's joyously profane (I've never seen a film more free in its use of the c-word), it's a film that abandons a pristine approach in favour of one that is fleshy and mucky (characters constantly find themselves covered constantly find themselves covered in mud or shit, and there are prolonged scenes of characters tending to the Queen's gout-inflamed legs), and it is constantly, reliably, laugh-out-loud funny throughout its running time.

The performances are all without exception stellar. There’s a problem for a film like this when campaigning for the acting Oscars, because among the three main characters there is no clear lead or supporting actress. You could legitimately argue that all three are lead characters, or that each of the three is individually supporting the other two. In order to minimise the risk of the actors splitting the votes, they've positioned Olivia Colman as Queen Anne as the lead of the film, while Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone as Sarah and Abigail were nominated as supporting. It's perhaps not the split that I would agree with – if I had to make the call I would have said that Queen Anne was the supporting role while the other two are really the leads of the film – but it's a marginal call. The Queen's journey (from taking her closest confidante for granted to understanding the value of having someone who can be fearlessly honest and frank with her) is definitely there, but it's not as compelling a character arc compared to the other two. However, as an experienced comic actor playing a character defined by her unusual, impulsive, childish behaviour, Olivia Colman does carry much of the comedic weight of this comedy film. And at the same time, she also has to marry this character with the most tragic of burdens – we're constantly aware of the heartbreak that comes with being a queen whose sole purpose in being is to give birth to an heir to the throne but who has suffered the loss of 17 children. The fact that Colman can bring all these elements together into a character who feels consistent and believable is truly impressive.

The other two main characters have much clearer and stronger journeys through the film – Sarah's bluntness leading to complacency and comfort in her position and her desperation to try to retain her power when challenged, or Abigail's grasping onto the Queen in determination to make a place for herself only to find she may not be happy where she ends up – which really makes them the true leads of the film. And Rachel Weisz and Emma Stone give fantastic performances in these roles, with a real spark developing between the two whenever they come into conflict. Whether they're nominated as lead or supporting actresses, all three give genuinely brilliant Oscar-worthy performances that are always a delight to watch.

It says a lot about the film that the only criticism I would give against the film is in the choice of lenses used to capture the film. I'm not really someone who can speak knowledgeably about camera lenses – other people can look at a film image and comment on the focal length of the lens, I cannot – but here it's impossible not to notice. Lanthimos make a choice to shoot a significant part of the film with an extreme fisheye lens that noticeably and distractingly distorts the image, and in those moments it took me out of the film simply because I was suddenly thinking about the way the film was shot and not what was happening in those moments. I can imagine reasons why Lanthimos may have made that choice – perhaps he's trying to comment on the way that behaviour in the court is warped by the demands of the insecure queen – but it was an unfortunate choice that ultimately didn't work for me. But that's a minor quibble in an otherwise wonderful film.

I do find the nomination of Black Panther frustrating. It’s not that I think it’s a bad film – I really enjoyed the film. But even at the time of release, I was bothered by the hyperbole that surrounded the film – people praising it as being the best superhero film ever (it’s definitely not), or the greatest movie Marvel ever made (with hindsight, it’s not even the best Marvel movie released in 2018). It’s a very good film, and in the list of movies in the Marvel cinematic universe it’s definitely upper-tier. And I realise that it’s a landmark for representation of groups that up to now have perhaps not been able to see themselves in the biggest popular movies being made today. But even the best Marvel movie doesn’t deserve a best picture nomination. Now, if the Oscars had gone ahead with its proposed category of Best Popular Film (admittedly an idea I was opposed to and was glad to see dropped) then Black Panther would have been a perfect nominee. But the notion that this film was somehow a highpoint of filmmaking in 2018 is absurd.

Let’s go back ten years, when the films of 2008 were eligible for Oscars.  The films nominated that year included The Reader or The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, films the world has forgotten even exist. That year also saw the release of the first Iron Man film, which started the MCU, and more significantly it saw the release of The Dark Knight, a film that is genuinely great and that has continued to have a place in the cultural landscape that far exceeds anything that the Oscars considered to be the best of the year. (It’s commonly believed that the failure to nominate The Dark Knight for Best Picture motivated the decision the next year to expand the number of nominees, in an attempt to create space for such popular films to be nominated.) Ten years on, we finally have the nomination of a big superhero blockbuster.

The problem is that Black Panther isn’t The Dark Knight. It’s a good Marvel film – and I'm being sincere in saying that; I’m a big fan of the MCU and think what they have done in creating and developing a single universe filled with interlocking pieces is fascinating. But I simply have difficulty seeing that any Marvel movie could be considered one of the best movies of the year – the achievements of Marvel Studios are impressive in the totality of the world they created, not in any particular film. One of the most notable things about Marvel’s film output is that everything sits within a certain quality band – the worst of the films (say, Thor: The Dark World or Iron Man 2) are still fine and watchable, while the best of the films (say, The Avengers or Captain America: The Winter Soldier) are very good but not great. Black Panther is at that top end of Marvel films, but it’s not exceptional. There’s a kind of sameness to all of the Marvel films, which means that I struggle to find things to talk about in this film that distinguish it from any of the other MCU films. I do believe that the reason Black Panther has gained this nomination is because it’s about a black superhero, most of the cast is black, it’s from a black director, it’s a film that absolutely embraces black and African culture, it did a achieve a real level of cultural significance, and the Oscars have seized on this as an opportunity to address both the OscarsSoWhite controversy from a few years ago, as well as the snub of The Dark Knight.

What the film does do really well is have a strong villain. Villains have tended to be the weakpoint of the MCU movies; other than Loki, for much of the series the villains have simply been forgettable. (Incidentally, that’s a problem that has extended all the way up to the series’ big bad Thanos – Avengers: Infinity War eventually overcame the issue, but only by making a movie in which he was effectively the main character.) Playing Killmonger, Michael B Jordan gives the character a genuine weight and sympathetic tone. He’s someone who is angry at the injustices he sees, about the way that black people are oppressed, he’s angry with his cousin T'Challa (the real identity of Black Panther) who he sees as isolating his immensely resource-rich nation when they should be using those resources to liberate black people everywhere, and his understandable rage has grown over time into an uncontrollable hatred that fuels his every actions. In a film series filled with villains whose actions seem to be prompted by “I’m the bad guy, and this is what bad guys do in these movies”, it’s compelling to have a character whose behaviour is motivated by a genuine worldview that you can understand and even sympathise with a little bit. It’s unfortunate that the strength of many of the supporting characters, whether the villainous Killmonger or Black Panther’s allies like Shuri or Okoye, wind up overpowering Chadwick Boseman as the titular hero, who winds up feeling somewhat bland. With the previous Marvel movies, the weakness of the villains didn’t really matter because the central characters were always compelling; that’s not the case here, with T’Challa to me feeling like an empty character around whom things are done.

Now, a lot of people have spoken about how important it was to them personally to finally see a person of colour as a superhero. That’s great; I’m very happy for those people who could see a superhero they could identify with, especially since it’s in a film that is genuinely good. And it was great to see a film with so many talented black actors working together on a film, rather than having to fight to play the one black character in a film; you’re reminded just how many fantastic black actors we have that are underused. (I personally was surprised by how excited I was to see Isaach De Bankolé in a small role as the River Tribe Elder – I hadn’t realised just how much I enjoy his work until he appeared on screen.) And while it’s not surprising that the film did well, since at this point Marvel have established a reliable reputation that will make any film a massive success, it’s still good that we have this as evidence that having a predominantly black cast does not stop people from going to see a film. (See also Crazy Rich Asians as similar proof for a predominantly Asian cast.)  But I continue to struggle with the idea that these wider cultural considerations, as important as they are, mean the film is deserving of an Oscar nomination. Because if you just look at the film itself, I simply don’t think it reaches that level of excellence that we should expect from a Best Picture nominee.

Now, BlacKkKlansman is definitely a film that stands up as a worthy Oscar nominee. The new film from Spike Lee, the film focuses tells the story of Ron Stallworth, the first African-American police officer in Colorado Springs. One day, he sees a newspaper ad for his local branch of the KKK, decides to call them pretending to be white, and joins the Klan – only to realise that he mistakenly gave his real name.  So Ron continues to be this new Klan recruit over the telephone, eventually even having regular extended conversations with the head of the KKK himself, Grand Wizard David Duke, while he enlists fellow detective Flip Zimmerman to pretend to be him in person.

The film declares at the start that “Dis joint is based upon some fo’ real, fo’ real sh*t”, which may just be Spike Lee being Spike Lee, but which did feel as though he might be trying to create some distance between this film and the usual bald assertion that this is “a true story”. Certainly when you read about the actual events, it seems that the film deviates quite a bit from what really happened – the true events took place seven years later than presented, the real police officer that played Stallworth in person wasn’t Jewish, the second half plotline about a planned bombing didn’t happen, and there have been some who have suggested that Stallworth’s motivations weren’t quite as pure as presented here and that at times he was actually working against the black community. Certainly watching the film I felt it was probably not as truthful as it was presenting itself, and when I read about the real events found that the parts that rang false were usually the moments invented for the screen.

But I didn’t really care, because it’s such a good film. Spike Lee can be a frustrating director, with an output that is wildly variable, but he is a talented artist and at his best is one of the finest directors working today. (The fact that this is the first time he’s been Oscar-nominated as a director, and only the third of his films to receive any nominations at all, is just wrong.) Here he constructs a thriller that is intense with suspense, and it’s such an enjoyable cinematic experience that it makes his inevitable preachiness much easier to absorb. I really enjoyed John David Washington’s work as Ron; there’s a particular way he plays his delight in fooling these people that doesn’t just feel like “I’m smarter than these guys”, but that feels relieved that he's getting away with it given the genuine threat these people present if they ever realise what’s happening. It’s arguably a slight failing of the movie that, in a film about the threat posed by white supremacists, the one person who is most at risk is the white guy (since the black guy is safely held away from the racists behind a telephone line), but that is an unavoidable quirk of this story. As the white guy constantly at risk of being discovered and killed, Adam Driver continues to be one of the most fascinating actors working today. While the real life cop may not have been Jewish, I like the choice to add that element to the film’s character, as it brings an interesting thematic element to the story – it makes him part of a minority that is hated by many people, but because he is white it has made it easier for him to distance himself from that minority status, and it’s exciting to watch Driver play with his character’s growing understanding that he has as much at stake from defeating the Klan as Ron does.

One thing I found interesting is the way the film frequently focuses on the power of cinema to create lasting images that fuel us and reflect American history. The film opens with the famous crane shot from Gone With The Wind, with Scarlett walking through the mass of dying members of the Confederate Army, before cutting to Alec Baldwin playing a 1950s white supremacist recording a PSA while images showing the threat of the black man are projected on his face. The use of Gone With The Wind works well, with Scarlett being confronted with the failure of those who fought for the right to oppress black people as symbolic of people nostalgic for a bygone era of white dominance, but the Baldwin sequence is less successful, with Baldwin coming across more as a fool struggling to deliver his speech than a credible threat. Later on there’s a sequence of Stallworth walking with his girlfriend while discussing the portrayals of modern African-American culture in blaxploitation movies, a sequence that works quite well (even if Spike Lee intrusively draws attention to the scene by showing onscreen the posters of the movies being discussed). But by far the best scene of the film comes when we see the Klan members getting worked up and excited while watching The Birth of a Nation (the film that famously played a key role in inspiring the Klan to reform) while the movie crosscuts to Harry Belafonte, himself famed for his efforts in fighting for civil rights, playing an older man remembering the lynching of Jesse Washington (a true incident that took place the year after The Birth of a Nation was released). It is an expertly constructed sequence, in which we are confronted both with hateful racist images from that famed movie while being reminded of the genuine suffering and horrors that were experienced by people as a consequence. (It’s also worth noting that The Birth of a Nation was revolutionary for its use of crosscutting, Spike Lee now using that film’s own techniques to condemn it.)

I am a bit bothered by how simple the film almost seems to make the issues of racism. The members of the Klan aren’t presented as especially bright, to the point where it seems like David Duke is the leader mainly because he’s the only one who can coherently string a sentence together. It does undercut the menace of your bad guys when they are presented as being so stupid; you almost feel that their main threat comes not from their actual plans but from the unintended consequences when they inevitably mess up. I was also surprised that Spike Lee of all people would let the police off easily in this time of Black Lives Matter and frequent claims about cops killing black people – the film basically presents this one cop who is cartoonishly racist, and while other members of the police force may tolerate his actions, it’s pretty much all resolved once they are able to get rid of this one bad cop. It seemed surprisingly simple to fix that problem. Still, I liked the film was willing to address the complicated place of the police when it comes to the black population, with extended scenes where Ron and his girlfriend Patrice debate whether it’s right for him as a black man to even be working as a police officer.

Despite my issues with the film, I overall really was impressed by the movie – until the end.  Here’s the thing: the film is not a subtle work. It may be set in the 70s, but the film is unambiguously made to speak about issues affecting black people today. The dialogue is frequently on-the-nose in dialogue that makes sense for the 70s, but that are clearly being reflected through a 2018 lens. (Witness, for example, David Duke’s assertion that “it’s time for America to show its greatness again.”) And I’m fine with that being the approach that is taken – half the reason you tell a true story like this is because you think some aspect of it will speak to a modern audience in some way. But it’s still sufficiently non-specifically-2018 that audiences in 10, 20, 50, 100 years can watch the film and filter that dialogue through the issues affecting black people in their time. And if that was all the film did, then the film might have been able to have lasting cultural impact. Until the final moments of the film, when Spike Lee decides to include actual footage of the riots that erupted after the 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, including the death of counter-protestor Heather Heyer. I can understand Lee’s desire to make absolutely clear what he’s talking about, but it’s not like the rest of the film is at all ambiguous, and it diminishes the lasting impact of the film. Suddenly this film, which could be about the way black people are treated in America in any era, becomes only about the rise of the alt-right under Trump. And so, in 10 years’ time, people will watch that ending, and many may feel comfortable thinking “we’re good now because Trump isn’t president and we don’t have literal Nazis marching down the street”, rather than reflecting on whether the wider issues the film addresses may still be relevant.

Probably the film that I'm most annoyed to see nominated is Adam McKay's Vice, a film based on the life story of former vice-president Dick Cheney. The fundamental problem with Vice can be seen in the scene that plays mid-credits. Earlier in the film we had a scene involving a focus group, and in this mid-credits scene we revisit that group, but this time one of the group's members, a Trump supporter, complains that the problem with the film we've just watched is that it has a liberal bias. Another group member defends the film by insisting that it's all facts, and there's no bias in facts. This prompts the Trump supporter to attack the other group member. There's no doubt that the film is on the side of the person insisting on the factual basis of the film – on-screen text at the start of the film declares that the film is factual, at least to the degree that we can know the facts given Cheney's secretive nature – so the film is pretty unambiguously declaring itself immune from criticism of bias simply because it's factual, and thus true. The thing is, that's not how it works. Regardless of whether the big picture facts of Cheney's actions are accurately presented here (and I have no reason to believe that a film is being dishonest in the way it's presenting his actions), a person can be judged not only on the basis of their actual actions but also on the motivations and character that lie behind them. And it's in the presentation of Dick Cheney's character that we see a fundamental dishonesty come into the film. Here's an example: it may be entirely factual that Dick Cheney greatly expanded the power of the presidency through his use of the unitary executive theory, but it is a character choice to have him cackle like a Bond villain the first time he hears the term, before he even knows what it means. And that's the approach the film takes throughout its entire runtime – never any subtlety or genuine interest in understanding the character, just a view of him as the worst thing that ever happened to the American presidency (at least before the current incumbent). And it’s annoyingly cynical – there’s a moment where Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld burst into laughter at the notion that they might actually believe in something, which is just a blatant dismissal of the man; whatever you think of his worldview, I have no doubt that he has a genuine perspective about the way the world works and how it should work, but this film seems to simply believe his sole interest is the acquisition of power.

And the frustrating thing is that there's a perfect template for how it should have been done. As Tyler Smith of the wonderful Battleship Pretension (my favourite podcast) has noted, Oliver Stone's film Nixon was surprisingly sympathetic to the former president. Yes, Richard Nixon did some terrible things that were corrupt and wrong and history has judged him fairly for those actions, but as I remember it Nixon seemed interested in looking beyond those actions to understand the person, understand what it was that motivated him and that drove him to do these things. And this was coming from Oliver Stone, one of our most prominent left-wing political filmmakers; even he managed to approach the hated Nixon with a genuine interest in who the man was. (I never saw W, Stone's film about George W Bush, but I understand it had a similar approach in its portrayal of that president.) Now compare this to the way Adam McKay looks at Dick Cheney in Vice, and you see a stark difference in approach. There's a fundamental lack of curiosity or desire to understand the man in Vice, and so the character just feels like a one-dimensional monster. It makes sense that Christian Bale in accepting the Golden Globe for this film would thank Satan for his inspiration, because that's how completely evil the man is presented. The only time the film seems to see him as anything less than monstrous is in his relationship with his daughter Mary – who he loves even though she’s a lesbian – but any sympathies generated by that relationship are eventually destroyed when Cheney gives his blessing to his other daughter Liz to speak against gay mariage.  The film is so focused in its view of this hateful man that at one point it even actively compares him and his wife to the villainous Lord and Lady Macbeth in a scene that has the characters talking in mock-Shakespearean dialogue.

And this brings me to my other big problem with the movie. I was rather impressed by Adam McKay's earlier film, The Big Short, about the 2007 financial crisis. One of the challenges that that earlier film had was that, in order to tell the story, the audience had to understand what a subprime mortgage or a collateralised debt obligation is, and that's not something that most people know. And so McKay adopted an approach where he would regularly break the fourth wall and present humorous sequences that would give the audience sufficient explanation to understand the film while preserving its entertainment value. And that style worked well in that film. But he continues with that approach here, even though there's no real need for it because there's nothing so complicated in the story that the audience needs that kind of dumbed-down explainer. And so he just breaks the fourth wall for no reason, with moments like the mock-Shakespearean dialogue or the moment where the end credits roll mid film as the film pretends that Cheney retired and never became vice-president. (They apparently even filmed a musical scene, but at least had the good taste to cut that moment.) But these fourth wall breaking scenes are sufficiently infrequent that they never feel part of the film's style and, because they don't fulfill any explanatory purpose, when they do occur they just feel snarky and smug. This film feels as though it was nominated solely because Hollywood hates Bush, it hates Cheney, but most importantly that hates Trump, and this was a film that the Oscar voters liked just because the film told them they are right in their views and that allowed them to express those views.

Then there's Green Book, which approaches the issue of racism in the American South in the 1960s with all the sensitivity and care that you would expect from the man who directed and co-wrote Dumb and Dumber. In 1962, the black pianist Don Shirley went on a tour with his trio of the Deep South; needing a driver, he employs a hot-headed Italian bouncer called Tony Vallelonga. And together the two of them learn to look beyond each other's differences to find common ground and understand each other's essential humanity and gain insight into who they are as individuals and blah blah blah blah blah.

The main problem with the film probably stems from the fact that it was co-written by Vallelonga's son Nick, and it's much more a story told from Tony's point of view. This means that, in this story about the horrors of racism, the main character is a white man whose experiences of racism are observed rather than experienced. This is the type of film where we learn about what it was like to be a black man needing accommodation by watching Tony walk to the balcony of his nice hotel room and literally looking down to see the balcony of the rundown neighbouring hotel where Don Shirley sits alone. We never actually sit with Shirley in his hotel room and experience it from his point of view, because we're not telling his story. The film does play very much as though it's a piece of family mythologising, where Nick Vallelonga is just trying to capture his parents on film. In this context, I couldn't help noticing that, despite the film's insistence that Tony and Don remained friends until the end of their lives, the film ends with two individual photos of the elderly Tony and Don rather than a single photo showing the two together, as you might have expected had the two had a lifelong friendship. I could be wrong, but I couldn't help suspecting that the friendship and the relationship was probably more significant for Tony rather than for Don.

Now, I will give the film a little credit for being willing to acknowledge Tony's genuine racism. In the first few minutes of the film, there's a scene where Tony throws out two glasses after two black workmen drink water out of them. (Never have two drinking glasses been filmed with such menace.) That's some serious racism. But at the same time, the film seems to want to excuse Tony and say that these attitudes are not his fault. Immediately before that moment, we see Tony waking up to find pretty much every male in his extended family in his lounge, which they freely admit is because they're there to ensure Tony's wife isn't raped by the black workmen. So it's not really Tony's fault that he's racist, because that's the environment he's in. After that scene ends, he seems to immediately overcome his extreme racist attitudes, and instead most of his racism seems to be born out of an assumption that all black people are the same, with Tony expressing incredulity that Don doesn't love the music of Little Richard or that he has never eaten fried chicken.

It is also a road movie, which is a genre that often doesn't really work for me, largely because the genre naturally tends to be structured around a series of incidents rather than feeling like a coherent story in and of itself. This film doesn't really overcome that problem. With only a few exceptions, the film never seems have any memory about the scenes that came before. Every incident stands alone, serving only the purpose of being another example of the racist attitudes of the Deep South. Witness, for instance, the scene where Tony discovers that Don is about to be arrested for having sex with a white man at a pool, and Tony has to bribe the police officers to keep Don free. Once the scene is over, we get one moment where Tony basically says that he's fine with Don being gay, and then the film seems to completely forget about Don's sexuality, because we've moved past that scene. But that's emblematic of the film having zero interest in Don as a character.

The film itself is fine; there's nothing particularly distinctive about the quality of the filmmaking. It really is a movie that is relying on the negligible quality of its story rather than on trying to make anything interesting as a movie. And the performances are a mixed bag. Mahershala Ali as always is fantastic, and plays Don as a man of intelligence and charm, a strong will, and an almost infinite patience for the impulsive idiot he finds himself travelling with. It's always nice to see Linda Cardellini working, and it's nice that a Hollywood film gave Viggo Mortensen a middle-aged wife, even if she is still 17 years younger than him. But as for Viggo, I did not care for his performance at all. It's a frustratingly broad performance, with him adopting an accent that is intrusive and distracting. He's not helped by poor script writing that almost seems to overplay his characteristics in order to highlight the impact that Don had on him. Witness the scenes where Tony writes a letter to his wife, writing a letter that seems more like a 5-year-old writing to his parents from camp than an adult writing to his wife, just so that Don can help him to find ways to express his feelings. Tony is a broad character in the script, and Viggo Mortensen does nothing to diminish the impact of this writing.

The film draws its title from The Negro Motorist Green Book, a guidebook that used to provide information on hotels and restaurants in the south that were friendly to travelling black people, so they could plan their holidays around places where it would be safe for them to stay. I heard about the Green Book a couple of years ago in episode 88 of The Memory Palace podcast, and the existence of this book is a fascinating piece of American history and a symbol of just how hard it was to be black in America until very recently. (I strongly recommend that podcast episode.) And so I like that the film is hopefully letting more people know about the book and the history around it; that doesn't change the fact that it's a very poor movie.

Then there's the entirely unjustified nomination of Bohemian Rhapsody, the biopic about Freddie Mercury and the band Queen. Here's the thing: the film is phenomenally successful (in fact, it is apparently the highest grossing biopic in cinema history). And I completely understand why: it is a movie about Queen, it has a massive number of Queen songs playing through the film, and Queen has one of the greatest, deepest, most crowd-pleasing songbooks of any band ever, so of course people will love it.

The thing is, they shouldn't love it. Bohemian Rhapsody is not a good film. It's a middling, cliche-ridden film that is devoid of any artistry or inspiration. The film goes to great efforts to tell the audience what great innovators Queen were, how they were never content to sit still or replicate what they just did, how they were always trying to push to find new ideas, and then it pays tribute to these genius inventive musicians by making a movie that is pat and smugly satisfied with itself for carefully following the formula long established by pretty much every music biopic ever made. It's not a film that has anything to say about Freddie Mercury or the band, it's not a film that has any point of view, it's just a film that is satisfied with saying "here's what happened", even if the events portrayed on-screen bear no resemblance to what actually happened. Freddie Mercury's Wikipedia entry offers more insight into who he was than this film does.

A big part of the problem with the film is that it just lacks any focus. It tries to include a full 15 years, from 1970 to 1985 (and technically even includes events from outside that time frame, since Mercury actually got his AIDS diagnosis two years after Live Aid), which is a lot to put in a single film. Then the film also doesn't know exactly who it's about – it's mostly about Freddie Mercury, but sometimes it's about the band itself. Look at the scene where Brian May develops the idea for "We Will Rock You", a scene in which Freddie Mercury is so irrelevant that he just wanders in at the end asking his bandmates what's up – if the film is about Freddie Mercury, then that scene serves no purpose to the story being told and should have been the first thing cut. But they can't cut the scene because the film still thinks it might be about the entire band (even though the other band members exist in the film largely as a name and a face), and because they definitely don't want to lose "We Will Rock You".

This is one of those biopics where everything that the characters are known for just occurs. So we watch Freddie Mercury's disastrous first performance with the band as he struggles with an uncooperative microphone stand, until he discovers by accident he can just use it as a stick microphone – just to explain why Freddie used a stick microphone. This is the type of film where Freddie Mercury can lie on a bed underneath a piano, reach out and play the piano from the underside, and improvise the introductory piano tune to "Bohemian Rhapsody" note-perfect, pausing simply to comment that the tune he just made up has promise. Look, everyone knows that in a two-or-so hour biopic you need to make changes to streamline the story, but does it have to feel so contrived? Perhaps if the film had more focus and stopped trying to be about everything then less streamlining would be needed and the film might be more convincing.

But the biopic clichés don't stop there. There are the constant montages of the band performing, that seem motivated primarily out of a desire to find a way to work another Queen song onto the soundtrack. There's the record executive who fails to have the vision to see what Queen would become. There's the constant hard partying and drug taking (although interestingly the band members who are still alive and who are producers on the film were incredibly responsible family men who didn't buy into the rock-and-roll party lifestyle). There's the band breaking up over unresolved tensions, and there's the inevitable reunion as they decide to put their differences aside. There's even the climactic moment where everything seems like it’s about to fail (Bob Geldof worries that Live Aid has been a flop because no-one is donating money) until our main characters arrive to save everything (Queen start performing and instantly the phone lines are running off the hook).*

* [EDIT, 24/2/2019 - After posting this, a friend pointed out that Bob Geldof actually acknowledged that Queen did spark a rush of donations at Live Aid, so that is seemingly true. But so much of the rest of the film was actual contrivance that it becomes impossible to recognise truth if it looks just as improbable as the fictional. Perhaps, if the film had been a little more truthful in the way it portrayed the other events in the film, then I would have believed it when it included an improbable truth.
Actually, knowing that it's true explains a lot, and is emblematic of the film's problems. Whether or not Life Aid succeeds doesn't actually matter to the film as that's not what the film is about (it would be like, if the film had ended on another concert rather than Live Aid, worrying about whether the concert would be profitable), but if Bob Geldof said that Queen saved Live Aid then we need to squeeze that detail into the climax of the film just because that's the thing that happened, regardless of how relevant it actually is to the actual story being told.]

Then there are all the weird creative decisions that simply do not belong in this film. What is with the decision to put quotes from negative reviews of "Bohemian Rhapsody" on screen to show that the song was rejected initially? That's not part of the filmmaking style of the film, there’s no other point where reviews appear on screen, it only happens in this one scene, and so it feels intrusive. But more than that, it's pointless – the film does nothing to follow up on the bad reviews, it never has a scene where the reviews cause the band to worry that they went too far, there's never a moment where the tide shifts for the song. It's just there to throw in a chance to laugh at people who didn't immediately recognise the greatness we now accept, but it serves no wider role in the film. If you were watching the film knowing nothing about Queen, you would be convinced that the song was a hated flop, because that's what the film tells you about the song, and then you would wonder why they started Live Aid with their worst song.

And what is with casting Mike Myers as a record executive just so that he can rant about how kids today aren't going to want to drive around in their cars banging their heads to "Bohemian Rhapsody" (geddit)? It's a line that only makes sense because of that casting – no real record executive is ever going to care about how people listen to a song; the only thing they'll worry about is whether people will want to buy the song, so that's what the executive would be talking about. Instead the man all but winks to us to remind us that he made Wayne's World, a movie in which guys drove around in their cars banging their heads to "Bohemian Rhapsody", in the kind of meta self-referential moment that simply does not belong in any movie that is trying to tell a story seriously.

It looks like Rami Malek may be frontrunner to win the Best Actor Oscar on Monday, and I can understand that choice. As someone who watches Mr Robot, I'm used to seeing Malek as someone who is quiet, insular; it seems weird to watch him play Freddie Mercury, someone who had an uncontrollable charisma and charm, but he pulls it off. Did I finish the film feeling that he helped me have a clear understanding of Freddie Mercury was? No, of course not, because the film is only interested in what he did, not who he was. But I did finish feeling that I had just watched Freddie Mercury do stuff, that's all the film wanted Malek to do, and he did it extremely well.

The film culminates in a 15 minute segment where we basically watch a recreation of the band performing in Live Aid. And in some ways it feels almost churlish to complain about that; after all, why would you complain about having the chance to listen to some legendary songs? But the film's story is over the moment Mercury walks on stage; everything else after that moment is nothing dramatically. You want to end with Live Aid so that you have a big joyous moment to end the film? I can understand that impulse. But you achieve that same purpose just by ending with the band performing "Bohemian Rhapsody", and if really necessary throwing in "We Are the Champions" to end. But having four songs is really just over-egging the pudding, and relying on the greatness of Queen to leave the audience happy, rather than relying on the filmmaking to elicit a response. Now, perhaps I should give the filmmakers credit for restraint since they actually cut two songs out of the Live Aid setlist, but instead I'm just annoyed they lacked the courage of their convictions. If you make the choice to stop the film dead just to enjoy the music, I could almost respect that, but then they really needed to commit to the idea of doing so. Cutting two songs out of the performance is a halfway house that satisfies neither the audience looking for some dramatic purpose in the last 15 minutes of the film, nor those who just want to enjoy Queen's performance of "Crazy Little Thing Called Love" or "We Will Rock You". (Indeed the loss of "We Will Rock You" is particularly puzzling, since the film goes to such effort establishing the audience interactivity of the stomp-stomp-clap in that song that you fully expect it to be paid off during Live Aid, and then it's not there.) Ultimately, the film's ending is dramatically dead air, and 15 minutes is a lot of time to waste in a 134 minute film, time that could have been used to bring a bit more depth to the characters. But since this film isn't actually interested in the characters, that time would have been wasted, so why not extend the Live Aid sequence.

Look, people really enjoy Queen, as do I. It's insane how many great songs they wrote. And it's fantastic to hear those songs again (especially if you saw it in a cinema with a big cinema sound system.) But that doesn't make this a movie; it makes it an extended music video. And that doesn't deserve to be in the running for an Oscar.

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Looking at the list of nominees, and seeing the number of films that really do not deserve a nomination, I find myself reflecting on the great films that deserve recognition as one of the best films of the year, but that for whatever reason the Academy chose not to nominate.
* My favourite film of the year is First Reformed, a fantastic film about a church pastor undergoing a crisis of faith over our responsibility to care for God’s creation – Paul Schrader’s screenplay is nominated, so people in the Academy clearly saw it and know it’s great, and yet the film itself is not nominated.
* The Oscars had previously nominated Debra Granik’s Winter’s Bone, so I had hoped they would recognise her even-more-brilliant Leave No Trace, about a PTSD-afflicted father raising his daughter in the woods and her being torn between her father and her growing desire to find her own place in the world.
* I loved You Were Never Really Here, about a traumatised man hired to rescue a kidnapped girl from sex slavery – it’s basically Taken but with compelling character nuance and subtle storytelling from Lynne Ramsay, a director who really deserves greater acknowledgement.
* If they wanted to nominate a black superhero film, rather than Black Panther, they should have nominated the remarkable Spiderman: Into the Spider-verse, a film about a half-African-American half-Puerto-Rican superhero that is genuinely fantastic and manages to be breathlessly inventive with the superhero movie format and with the possibilities of animation itself without sacrificing the emotional reality of its central character.
* Or if you want to recognise more black artists, what about Sorry to Bother You – a satire that I fundamentally disagree with ideologically, and that admittedly is something of a confused mess (it feels like director Boots Riley tried to get his every idea into the film in case this would be his only movie), but that is also surprising and challenging and funny and entertaining and that addresses the exploitation of black people in modern society.
* I would love to have seen Widows be nominated, a wonderful, nuanced, exciting thriller centred around four brilliant, strong female performances that also has a lot of say about politics and class in America.
* I wasn’t expecting First Man to be nominated after it didn’t hit at the box office, but it was an insightful, focused, thoughtful, and moving character-centric biopic in exactly the way Bohemian Rhapsody is not.
* Similarly, I realise it was never going to be nominated even before it was a box office bomb in the US, but Annihilation was a genuinely brilliant and emotional film that shows the highs that science-fiction can achieve, and it should not be forgotten.
* I couldn’t help noticing that, of the five Best Director nominations, there is one film has no Picture nomination (something that used to happen a lot, but has only happened once since the number of Picture nominations expanded) – I would never expect them to give a Best Picture nomination to Cold War (we’re not going to have two foreign language nominees for Best Picture), but Cold War is an excellent film and much better than many of the nominees.
* And then there are films I sadly haven’t been able to see yet but want to – films like If Beale St Could Talk or Eighth Grade, both films that have been repeatedly mentioned by many people whose opinions I trust as deserving nominees.
I feel that there is a genuine wealth of excellent films that could have appeared in the Best Picture category, and yet fully half of the nominees are undeserving, dull, even outright bad movies. And that is frustrating. Hopefully the Academy does better next year.

(And finally, here’s an interesting fact – of the eight nominees, seven have a running length between 130 and 135 minutes long (and of these, two run for 134 minutes and three run for 135 minutes). Only The Favourite, at 120 minutes, falls outside this standard running time. I realise it’s quite common for Best Picture nominees to have that “just over two hours” length, but this year the pattern seems almost absurdly strong. Was the sole criteria for nominees their run time? That would certainly explain some of these nominations.)