3/12/24
Newsletter #570
The Crack of Dawn
I gave up watching the Oscars years ago, even though I like movies and movie stars. The Oscars always were a clever, self-congratulatory form of free advertising, and I always understood that, but I did sincerely feel like they were at least trying to give awards to the best films of the year. And for the first 60 years or so, they frequently bestowed their awards on the films that actually were the best films of that year, like Casablanca, On the Waterfront, Marty, The Bridge on the River Kwai, Lawrence of Arabia. You know, movies like that – honestly excellent. However, since they no longer make movies like that anymore, the academy has had to find other reasons to give their awards, and I find these reasons untenable. Worse still, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences thinks that they stand for something, which they’ve encapsulated in their D.E.I. rules. Oscars are no longer given for quality or talent; they’re given for political correctness, miscasting for the sake of quotas, and basically towing the line for a bunch of yo-yos in a fancy building in Beverly Hills who give an award. Oscars don’t mean anything other than if you win one it may increase your sales.
But you can’t avoid hearing about them. This year the odds-on favorite was Oppenheimer, and gosh darn if it didn’t win. I’m certainly glad I didn’t sit through a three-and-a-half hour show to find out the obvious. And it’s not like I hate the guy, but one look at Jimmy Kimmel’s face made me turn it off. Now, I admit that regarding some things, like movies, for example, I don’t see the same way as most folks. For instance, I can’t stand any of Christopher Nolan’s movies – every single one of them seems like refried shit to me. Therefore, I was in no hurry to see Oppenheimer. But I found myself on a seven-and-a-half-hour flight to Amsterdam, and there the film was, so what the hell. I watched the first hour and it seemed like pure masturbatory rubbish. It was just a bunch of visual horseshit, like some experimental short film from the 1960s. Maybe it got a lot better in its next two hours – I certainly hope so – but I wasn’t going to waste my time finding out, at a time when all I had was time to waste.
Having heard several positive reviews of American Fiction, I got this crazy idea out of nowhere that maybe this would be a year of a dark horse winner, since it has happened before. Back in 1969 nobody thought Midnight Cowboy would win Best Picture, but it did. Maybe American Fiction was really good and would come from behind and sweep the awards. So I watched it right before the Oscars.
For the first act – and the Oscar-winning adapted screenplay is well aware of the three-act structure – I was pleasantly surprised. This film seemed to be a brightly- written, well played domestic drama, with occasional, but regular, funny moments, about a believable, intelligent, middleclass black family living normal lives and facing the realistic issues of living normal lives, but being kind of witty about it. Swell. I liked the characters, the actors, the setting, and the feel of the drama. But being a writer (though it’s not necessary to expect this), what happens at the end of act one that will motivate the rest of this story for another hour? This thing I am referring to is called “the plot.”
It must be the double entendre of the word, but this is one of the very few instances when the rarely used old word hoary is worthy of pulling out, regarding clichés. Hoary simply means old or gray-haired, but it sounds insulting combined with cliché. “The writer fell back on a hoary old cliché.” Hoary is actually redundant with old, but I think it makes the writer seem like a whore for using a cliché. Using a cliche is cop-out, but it’s not the worst thing in the world. In the case of American Fiction, the hoary old cliché is the writer pretending to be someone else. Being a fan of old movies, I was immediately put in mind of Hi, Nellie (1934), where Paul Muni is a newspaper writer assigned the “Ask Nellie” column, which was like Dear Abby, and he has to pretend that he's a woman. Or the woman writer, ala Georges Sand, passing for a man, or white passing for black, it doesn’t matter, it’s a clichéd turn in the road of drama. This is not a condemnation. A cliché is still a perfectly functional tool in the dramatic workbox, it’s just not original.
In American Fiction the overly intelligent writer/professor (Jeffrey Wright), who has published several overly intelligent books – modern adaptions of ancient Greek dramas – with very few sales, decides to sell out. He writes about the clichéd, gritty, dirty life in the crime-ridden streets among the pushers, pimps and hos. Even though there is already a character, a pretty, young, smart, black female author who is doing exactly the same thing. Anyway, to back it up, he must now pretend to be a tough guy, which he is reticent to do. La, la, la.
But there is another level – a meta-level, if you will – regarding how the stupid, white, purveyors of these black stereotypes: portrayed as stereotyped, overly white agents and publishers, and apparently the readers, too, are the ones really at fault. The problem isn’t with the professor selling out his integrity, it’s with those stupid greedy assholes out there buying his books and perpetuating a stereotype. But is this really a problem now? Anyway, the professor’s book is, improbably, a wild success, the movie rights are immediately sold for $4 million, and now he’s wealthy. Personally, I was lost. What are they saying? Are they saying, that pretending you’re not intelligent, writing in Ebonics, and naming your book Fuck will make you $4 million dollars? Then everybody should do it, right? Selling out is the way to go. But somehow, it’s not really his responsibility — it’s the shallow white people’s fault that the deep black man must sell out their integrity. The professor didn’t want to sell out, and looks tortured having done it, but — hello — he still did it. If it’s not him, then the fault must lie with the readers who didn’t buy his intelligent books, and those stupid millions of readers of all colors who bought his awful book, the one he doesn’t like, but made him rich.
The movie doesn’t mean anything. I didn’t read the book, but the screenplay doesn’t know where it’s going or why. There’s no point to these shenanigans. In a meta-sorta way, the film ends three times, none of which is even slightly satisfactory because none of them confront his problem – he’s a sell-out, why should he get the girl next door?
However, it was obviously satisfactory enough to win an Oscar.
Finally, someone who shares my opinion on the Oppenheimer movie. I was starting to think I was the only one who didn't like it.