The Screenplay’s the Thing

by Glen Weldon

Welcome! It was the week Rihanna shone bright like a diamond. And it was the week we learned that one of the internet’s favorite interpreters of her work will return to his day job (spinning webs of any size, catching thieves just like flies, etc.) a fourth time. And it was the week one of our last classic, old-school, honest-to-God movie stars embarked upon her final fantastic voyage. Let’s get to it.

The Screenplay’s the Thing

For most of my life, I didn’t pay attention to the Oscars.

Or at least, I didn’t pay attention to the Big Six categories – best picture, best actor/actress, supporting actor/actress and director.

In my defense, those categories never paid much attention to me.

Growing up, the Motion Picture Academy tended to honor movies and performances that left me cold. So many bloated historical epics, with their bonnets and bustles and bushy mustaches. Endless box-checking biopics. Year after year of mainstream, moralistic tales about scrappy individuals lifting themselves up by their bootstraps. And I lost count of the sheer number of actors who slapped on prosthetics or feigned a disability so as to deliver a tidy uplift to people of my parents’ generation and older.

It’s not that the Oscars outright ignored the films I personally gravitated toward – the smaller, weirder, defiantly idiosyncratic movies that would just as soon discomfit an audience as delight it. It’s just that the Academy was careful to keep such films at arms’ length.

Oscar statues on display at the Time Warner Center in New York City/Getty Images

Oh, it would acknowledge these movies – but it would assiduously relegate them to the screenplay categories.

So every year I’d watch the ceremony dutifully but passively, only really digging in once the writing categories were announced. I thought of them as, somehow, mine.

So I’d sit there, year after year, and wave my little rah-rah pennant for “my” movies like The Grifters, and A Fish Called Wanda and Sex, Lies and Videotape and Do the Right Thing and A Simple Plan and Ghost World and Adaptation and In the Loop and Boogie Nights and The Usual Suspects and Heavenly Creatures and Being John Malkovich and In Bruges and many others like them – films that had not received a nomination for best picture from the Academy fuddy-duddies, yet had managed to eke out a writing nod. (All of the films I just listed received studio distribution and found a sizable audience, so it’s not like any of them were particularly transgressive or experimental. But they weren’t the usual anodyne Oscar fare, and that was enough for me.)

But then, something happened. Maybe it was the year The Silence of the Lambs took home best picture. That felt new – here was a grisly genre thriller earning the most mainstream prize in all of popular culture. Or maybe it was the year Fargo – a dark dissection of American greed and violence – earned its best picture nomination. (It didn’t win – that was The English Patient’s year, yawn – but it did take home the original screenplay award.)

Suddenly, the old formula was breaking down. Weird movies I loved now had an honest, if long, shot at the big prize. My favorite directors, who’d spent years languishing in the screenplay categories – the Coens and Paul Thomas Anderson and Charlie Kaufman and Peter Jackson and Alfonso Cuarón and Spike Lee – started getting invited up to the adults’ table.

The reason why isn’t complicated: People my age were now entering the Academy and voting according to our shared, slightly more eclectic (and less bustle-oriented) tastes.

Intellectually, I knew this phenomenon was occurring. And so I’d get my hopes up, year after year. But then the Academy kept turning around to throw best picture to predictably uplifting and ultra-traditional choices like The King’s Speech or Green Book and I’d think: Not yet.

But then, this year.

The Daniels’ deeply, deeply bizarre Everything Everywhere All at Once is maybe my favorite movie of last year, with its frenetic, insistent, bagels-and-butt-plugs take on family and love and nothing less than the meaning of life itself. It’s arguably the single weirdest movie to ever receive a best picture nomination – and yet it did. And it’s widely considered a favorite to win. And its 11 nominations make it the most honored film of this year’s Oscar ceremony. The weird is now normal, the offbeat is now mainstream.

I can’t believe it. I mean that literally – I don’t trust the online buzz pitching it as the front-runner. I’m standing ready for the Academy to let me down again, as they have so many times before.

Because we can’t pretend this hoary institution has turned some definitive collective corner. They’re still keeping great, idiosyncratic films like Can You Ever Forgive Me?, The Lobster, Knives Out and Ex Machina out of the main awards while tossing them writing noms as consolation, just as they always have.

But come Oscar night, I’ll be home, watching the ceremony – and not just for a couple of categories. I’ll watch start to finish, with a stiff drink in one hand and an Everything bagel in the other, hoping against hope that a 95-year-old organization can perform a bait-and-switch – which is to say, can turn up its nose at the usual Oscar bait and sit down to a rich, satisfying meal of bagels and hot dog fingers.

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We Recommend

Cunk on Earth is a Netflix series produced by Black Mirror’s Charlie Brooker. It stars comedian Diane Morgan as the confident yet clueless TV host Philomena Cunk. The series satirizes nature and historical documentary series, with Morgan’s presenter blathering on about important moments in human development and witlessly interviewing actual experts, most of whom are in on the joke. These expert segments are great, but my favorite bits of the show are the stretches where Cunk’s getting her Attenborough on and pompously pontificating about the nature of Man. As she strolls along a windswept beach or through the ruins of some ancient civilization, she dryly delivers monologues packed to the gills with very, very dumb jokes, without ever giving the game away.

Much has been written and said about the passing of Burt Bacharach. By the time I was six or seven, the man’s music had already become a staple of the “Easy Listening” radio station my parents played on every car ride. I’m not proud to say that for years I associated “Raindrops Keep Fallin’ on my Head” and his other hits with low-level carsickness and the odor of my mother’s Winston-Salems. It took a concerted effort on my part, once I reached my twenties, to disentangle those associations and appreciate his work. The news of his death triggered another association, too: A series of TV ads for vermouth that he did with his then-wife Angie Dickinson. The reason I can still quote them in their entirety is how much they fascinated a very young me – everything about them seemed adult and self-possessed and mysteriously unconcerned with anything having to do with kids. The way they fit into their clothes. The way the two of them traded off being the one who makes the sales pitch, commercial to commercial. The blasé way Bacharach tosses off the jingle, like he’s composing it on the fly. The way it looks like they decided to throw a party and the theme is turtlenecks. The way they look at each other at the end of the ad and whisper, “yeah.” I remember thinking, as a kid: This is sex. This is that sex thing everyone talks about. And I wasn’t entirely wrong.

We’ve already discussed how I’m angling for the terrific 1973 mystery film The Last of Sheila to attain a kind of cultural currency in this, the year of its 50th anniversary. Sadly, the passing of Raquel Welch supplies a fresh news peg to urge you, yet again, to check it out. It’s one of her most grounded, nuanced performances and she blends effortlessly into the film’s ensemble cast.

What We Did This Week

Jason Segel in Shrinking/Apple TV+

Stephen, Gene Demby and Kiana Fitzgerald (along with producer Mike and editor Jess) stayed up until the wee small ones on Sunday night to recap the Super Bowl – the game, the ads and the diva.

On Tuesday, with Titanic returning to theaters for its 25th anniversary, we encored our discussion of the film with Aisha, Linda, Chris Klimek and Roxana Hadadi.

On Wednesday, Linda, Chloe Veltman and Ronald Young, Jr. had a healthy range of reactions to Apple TV+’s Shrinking.

Also on Wednesday, my review of Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania went live.

On Thursday we shared our pal Andrew Limbong’s NPR Life Kit episode on how to be a better movie watcher. He gets some great advice from some folks who’ll be familiar to you.

And on Friday, I got granular with Joelle Monique, Daisy Rosario and Mallory Yu about Ant-Man and the Wasp: Quantumania, plus What’s Making Us Happy.

What's Making Us Happy

Every week on the show, we talk about some other things out in the world that have been giving us joy lately. Here they are:

Joelle Monique: The podcast Scriptnotes
Daisy Rosario: Hysterical by Elissa Bassist
Mallory Yu: His Dark Materials on HBO
Glen: The Oscar-nominated documentary short Haulout

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