With the 2023 Oscar for Best Film for Everything everywhere all at once, in fact, the moment of embarrassment felt for others who are making a fool of themselves returns
What if the “wrong” film won the Oscar? In recent days on the hallofseries website they had, so to speak, guessed the forecast and outlined the repetition of a historical situation. With the 2023 Oscar for Best Film for Everything everywhere all at once, in fact, the moment of embarrassment felt for others who are making a fool of themselves (in German it is called fremdschamen) returns. In short, net of a dramaturgical, technical, stylistic superiority of at least five titles in nominations on the film of the The Daniels (The Fabelmans, Island Spirits, Tar, Elvis, All Quiet on the Western Front) let’s try to take a look at when in the past the winners were those who didn’t even deserve to be in the top five.
Moonlight Its La La Land (2017). Do you remember the year of the wrong envelope? Freudian slip, many said at the time. In fact, with the passage not so much of the months and years, but simply of a few weeks, the so-called “terraqueous globe” forgot the film with all its lacquered illumination Moonlight. The theft, complete with a wrong proclamation, was against La La Land directed by the rising star Damien Chazelle, still film of the year. But it must also be said that the director Barry Jenkinsrather incredulous in the face of such a prestigious victory that arrived with an equally fulminant surprise, immediately channeled another good film, but a super niche black one (If Beale street could talk in 2018) and subsequently closed the creative shop to devote himself to production and the usual chatter anti-Trump. At the time it was producing the A24, the same as EEAO.
Spotlight su Mad max: fury road e The revenant (2015). For heaven’s sake, we’re not here to belittle the cinema of civil commitment and the denunciation of the pedophilia of Catholic priests. Except that with a cool head, and here too after a few months, the film by Tom McCarthy, in a club of cinema lovers the industrial but classy one didn’t even have to end up there. The phantasmagorical, mad return of George Miller with its own Mad Max franchise and signature lone survival epic Inarritu they were so superior in abscissa and ordinate to Spotlight that they experienced a remarkable fredmschamen. Even poor McCarthy, instead of making the Oscar a stepping stone, got lost in the mists of Disney.
The King’s Speech on Inception and The Social Network (2010). In hindsight, the graves are full, but allow us: so be it! That Tom Hooper and his stuttering King George both managed to snatch the statuette from both the extractors of Christopher Nolan that epochal, obsessive and robotico Mark Zuckerberg Of David Fincher it remains one of those little yellow mysteries that not even the late Mrs. Fletcher can solve. Almost as if the power, the roar, the impact of the great work were seen as too invasive compared to an exasperating text-centrism. Here too the so-called “aggressiveness” of Harvey Weinstein in imposing his own product, but above all the Oscar became for poor Hooper a sort of strange curse that ran aground in 2019 when on the set of Cats almost half the crew didn’t call the unions due to our team’s excessive working needs.
Shakespeare in Love are Save Private Ryan e The thin red line (1998). Let’s stay close to Weinstein’s Miramax because this theft is written in blood in every Oscar history book in large letters. The #MeToo ogre organized a campaign of unprecedented aggression towards Academy members to ensure that the film directed by John Madden received even 7 Oscars out of 13 nominations (remind you of some more current proportion?). They folded a lot and in many, also because at the time Miramax meant culture and quality. At the expense of the handful of soldiers of Spielberg and the other military handful, more philosophising, from Malick.
Crash su Brokeback Mountain (2005). Here, in addition to the compositional, poetic, painful and resolute audacity of Ang Lee’s film, there is precisely the intrinsic weakness of a ramshackle, dull, very soon forgotten film like the one directed by Paul Haggis. A theft from immediate house arrest, also because Brokeback Mountain immediately became a film between fetishism and cult, iconic and melancholy, which leaves a greater mark than any construction woke at the table, elevating the all-encompassing feeling among cowboys to power Jake Gyllenhaal and the unforgettable Heath Ledger.
Gandhi on ET, Missing, Tootsie, The Verdict (1982). Going to dig well into the past of the Oscars emerge fremdschamen skeletons to scream. The paradigmatic case is that of 1982. Faced with the extraterrestrial blockbuster, as well as incredibly engaging and nonconformist of Steven Spielberg Sir Richard Attenborough’s anti-colonialist meatloaf is preferred. And as if that weren’t enough, some absolute masterpieces of cinema sail among the five: Sydney Pollack’s comedy with Dustin Hoffman en travesti; the spectacular pinnacle of Costa-Gavras’ denunciation cinema; and a crepuscular Paul Newman duped but honest lawyer in the moral pearl of Sidney Lumet.