The Official TWC Oscars Preview Post: 2020

It’s that time of year again, folks, and I’m back with something to prove after going a lowly 3 for 7 on my predictions last year (I had to check the tape on this one – still can’t believe that ratings for the awards show itself actually went up last year).  I’m looking to reattain the 5/7 glory of 2018 on another lucky number 7 predictions, and I’ve seen the same fraction of Best Picture nominees that I did that year as of this writing (I’m 5 for 9, and it looks like I was 5 for 8 last year on that front – seems like 5 critically lauded movies a year is all I can really stomach), so anything is possible.  For the curious, those movies are: Joker, Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood, Marriage Story, The Irishman, and Parasite.  In my past few reviews, which have featured The Irishman and Marriage Story, I’ve made my opinions on my personal hierarchy of these movies somewhat clear, so I’ll refrain from saying it again here, other than to say go Parasite!  Now, on with the baseless speculation you all presumably came here for.

When does the Joker-Irishman crossover drop?

Brad Pitt will win Best Supporting Actor for his performance as Cliff Booth in Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood.  This is definitely the lowest-hanging fruit as far as my predictions go, given that Brad Pitt won the Golden Globe and the SAG award in that category, so it’s the one I’m leading off with to try to get into some kind of rhythm.  Furthermore, it’s also the award that I think Once Upon a Time…In Hollywood most deserves to win, besides maybe Best Production Design (seriously, Quentin Tarantino has to be one of Hollywood’s most overrated directors, and he’s maybe Hollywood’s most overrated writer, but I digress).  With the votes on The Irishman in this category likely being split between Joe Pesci and Al Pacino, the path to a win for Pitt is fairly clear, unlike Leo‘s path for Best Actor, which is littered with standouts like Joaquin Phoenix and Adam Driver.  Which brings me to my next, much hotter take…

Brad Pitt stoically fighting off other Best Supporting Actor contenders.

Adam Driver will pull off a surprise Best Actor win for his work in Marriage Story.  Ever since writing about this movie last week, I’ve been thinking about what I said about how Joaquin Phoenix still probably deserves the win over Driver in spite of Kylo Ren’s great performance in Noah Baumbach‘s divorce movie, and I think I’m here to go back on that statement.  It’s potentially (definitely) wishful thinking, but I’m hopeful that the Academy will realize on Oscar night how overrated Joker is as a whole, and also realize how much Marriage Story caters to California-based audiences and critics (I talked about this last week as well), and while Joaquin Phoenix doesn’t necessarily deserve to suffer due to any of those things, he’ll probably be just fine with his SAG award and his multiple Golden Globes.

Adam Driver closing the door on ScarJo’s Oscar hopes.  Or opening the door to his maybe?

Conversely, Scarlett Johansson will be blanked in both female acting categories.  Being nominated for both Best Actress (Marriage Story) and Best Supporting Actress (Jojo Rabbit), is a big win for Johansson, as I imagine she may be currently struggling to extricate herself from the Marvel machine (this year’s upcoming Black Widow suggests otherwise), but she’s faced with stiff competition in each category.  The Academy’s inexplicable love for biopics is poised to rear its ugly head with further recognition of Renee Zellweger‘s work in Judy, which is nominated for little else, and which won her the Golden Globe for Best Actress earlier this year.  Somewhat less understandable to me, especially considering that I haven’t seen Judy and therefore probably shouldn’t knock it so much, is Laura Dern‘s near-universal praise for her turn as a sleazy divorce attorney in Marriage Story, but then again, I haven’t seen Jojo Rabbit either, so I really don’t have much of an idea of how Johansson’s work would stack up.

I haven’t seen this one yet, and I know this caption is supposed to be about ScarJo, but I’m really here to say I love Sam Rockwell.

Knives Out will win Best Original Screenplay.  Not much to say about this, other than that it’s probably wishful thinking of a similar brand to my last prediction, but it’s a hill I’m willing to die on.  I’d be fine with Parasite or Marriage Story winning this category as well – they’re both cleverly and and realistically-written stories dripping with originality – but the indulgence of Tarantino’s script simply shouldn’t be rewarded (it will be).  Read about my love affair with Rian Johnson‘s whodunit – which manifested in the form of three theater viewings in the span of a week’s time – here.  It’s the only film besides Parasite (also nominated in this category, and the winner of the WGA’s Best Original Screenplay award) that’s nominated for anything that I saw multiple times, and for good reason.

CSI KFC?

Steve Zaillian’s adapted screenplay for The Irishman will win over Greta Gerwig’s for Little Women, because the Academy has an aversion to even nominating women for awards.  Disregarding the fact that The Irishman features a script almost equally as indulgent as Tarantino’s, and is probably close to double the length, my frustration with it is that it’s a movie that we’ve all seen before.  You could probably say the same for Gerwig‘s creation – after all, I’ve just learned via Google that Little Women has been adapted for the screen a whopping seven times – but based on what I’ve heard about Little Women (I haven’t seen it – yet) and based on the sourness of my experience with the slog that was The Irishman, I’d rather her win for something unoriginal than Zaillian, if only because she was snubbed for Best Director.  Which again gracefully transitions me into my next prediction…

When you head out to go clubbing with the girls only to ultimately realize that it’s 1868.

Parasite is going to surprise a lot of people.  This Korean film, which I talked about here, is nominated for Best Picture, Best Director, Best Foreign Language Film, Best Production Design, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing.  It pains me to say I think it’s a long shot for Best Picture, but don’t be shocked (I wouldn’t be) if it picks up some of the other lesser statuettes, including but not limited to Best Director, over the likes of Academy darlings Martin Scorsese and Quentin Tarantino (not to mention Sam Mendes, who won the Golden Globe for his work on 1917).  Parasite only won Best Foreign Language Film at the Golden Globes, but I expect/want this under-the-radar pick to fare better on the ninth, leading people to ask what the heck that movie is.  And yes, this prediction is purposefully open-ended – gotta pad the stats for next year.

You know how you sleep in matching silk pajamas in a house almost entirely made of glass because you’re super rich? Me too.

Roger Deakins will win Best Cinematography for his work on 1917.  If there’s one thing I’ve heard about 1917, it’s that it looks like it was filmed in one shot, which can be gimmicky for sure but certainly paid off for 2014’s Birdman.  As it stands, there are also few cinematographers more due for accolades than the oft-overlooked Deakins, who was nominated a whopping 13 times (for a number of little projects like The Shawshank Redemption, Skyfall, No Country for Old Men, and Prisoners, to name a few) before finally winning his first Oscar last year for Blade Runner 2049.

Still haven’t seen this one yet – might be a weekend project.

There you have it folks!  Now for the fun part: sitting back and waiting for the big reveal of how wrong I am.  Tune in next week for either an actual movie review or a sidebar about Super Bowl trailerfest (like this one from last year) – I haven’t decided yet.

Joker Review

After a few weeks of buffering (what I’ve taken to calling the practice of spending weeks-long stretches of Tuesdays with Cory posts discussing old streams and retrospectives), we finally have some live ones on tap: next week I’ll be talking about El Camino, which just dropped on Netflix last week, and the week after that I’ll be talking about my experience with Midsommar (alright, fine, that one’s not particularly new, but it just hit the rental cycle last week and so I’m calling it new-ish at least) in honor of the approaching Halloween holiday.  This week, though, I’m going to break down a recent release that I actually made a pilgrimage to my local theater to see: Joker.  The latest comic book adaptation to add to the massive pile is clearly one that’s unique in its approach to its ubiquitous and notorious titular subject, and with director Todd Phillips (The Hangover, Due Date) making some real waves in the past few weeks about how humor apparently isn’t OK anymore (LOL) along with Joker‘s apparent resonance with TIFF crowds a while back, this feels like the one I should tackle first.

Murray Franklin: seemingly an amalgam of all late-night talk show hosts, played by Robert De Niro and designed (I think) to embody societal vanity.

What you need to know: visually, Joker is at least fine, and perhaps even beautiful at times, though it spends a lot of its money shots on slow-motion interpretive dance sequences and nauseating displays of varying intensity.  Tonally, it’s black as night, awkward, unsettling, and at its height, disturbing.  To say the least, it’s not a movie you’ll leave the theater feeling remotely good after watching, and that’s 100% by design.  The pacing is slow, with gruesome and visceral (though also effective) moments of violence shaking you awake after long stretches in which not a lot of non-depressing action happens.  Humor-wise, Joker has its moments, as you’d possibly expect from a movie titled as such, but for the most part any attempts at getting a laugh are purposefully hard to watch.  There’s also definitely an American Psycho-like quality to almost everything; that is to say, the film’s protagonist, an anti-hero by all accounts if you could even get away with calling him a hero of any kind, is clearly guilty of heinous crimes throughout and conveys as much through appearing visibly guilty and troubled at essentially all times – yet no one sees him.  As you can perhaps imagine, this is more than likely in keeping with the film’s theme (as was the case in American Psycho), and is given a voice with a line at around the midpoint of the movie (“people are starting to notice”).

Yikes.

Because ironically, I’d say that Joker isn’t primarily about the Joker at all, nor is it about the origin of a character that’s typically depicted as something of a criminal savant – it’s about the various troubles of today’s society and its treatment (or non-treatment, to perhaps put it more aptly) of people with mental illnesses and, more generally, people who are left feeling disenfranchised by life itself.  As much as Todd Phillips doesn’t seem to want to admit it, it’s also a film that possesses at least an undertone of political-mindedness, if only to say that as a governed populace we all need to do better than not acknowledging major issues that are very clearly there.  Giving a stark face to these issues is Joaquin Phoenix, who indeed gives what might be considered the performance of a lifetime as the crown prince of crime, finding a way to bring a fresh perspective to the character in his collaboration with Phillips that’s worthy of Oscar consideration to say the least, if even just for the laugh, which is a chillingly stifled mix of mirth and pain while possessing the high pitch that often serves as the character’s calling card.  He’s menacing for sure, though not remotely as cagey or cerebral as any of the past renditions of the Joker, and for that he gets docked a few points, but I’m willing to cut Phoenix some slack as he also clearly starved himself for the role to get himself to a point that’s physically hard to look at.  Mostly, I just hope he’s OK.

How does Arthur Fleck get so trim? Why, gun Pilates of course.

My main problem with Joker is that it features elements that go back on its own pervasive promise to be different.  It takes what often seem like great pains to separate itself from the DCEU label (refraining to even show the logo until after the end credits), and instead of taking the customary approach of framing the Joker as the criminal mastermind that he typically is, if even in a budding state, it instead portrays him as someone who kind of falls ass-backwards into notoriety and becomes a criminal and revolutionary symbol more or less on accident (I don’t agree with this depiction one iota, as to me the Joker is the yin to Batman’s world’s-greatest-detective yang, and that’s what makes him great, but that’s a whole other ball of wax).  This is what makes Joker‘s attempts to worm its way back into Batman territory – featuring the death of the Waynes at the end (in a totally non-canonical way, I’ll add) being the prime example – jarring.  It’s one of a few stumbles relating to the insistence of involving the Waynes that sticks out, with the other being a subplot about Arthur Fleck potentially being a Wayne himself –  this winds up frustrating in its conclusion and also raises a lot of dubious questions about plausibility – namely, why would Penny Fleck ever regain custody of that child?  Perhaps, though, seeming systemic flaws like these – and like a clearly sick man being refused medications because of funding cuts – are what Joker aims to highlight.

Get ready for a lot of this – slow motion hand-wavy “dancing.”

There are other plotting conundrums besides these, and all in all Joker ends up with a story that doesn’t feel particularly tight, gracefully featuring an ambiguous ending that more than likely signals no sequel, and no return of this rendition of the character to any future DCEU flicks.  What Joker is in its sole outing is a mix of shots of Phoenix slow dancing with himself, shots of Phoenix running wildly between places and doing a lot of arm-flailing, shots of someone on the ground being literally kicked while they’re down (maybe be a little more subtle with your metaphors, Mr. Phillips), shots of Phoenix emptying a fridge and climbing into it for what seems like no reason, and shots of Phoenix interacting mildly with Zazie Beetz in a predictable delusion and an overall vignette that makes you wonder why such an up-and-coming actress would take the part.  And sure, watching Arthur Fleck’s attempts to be seen in the world – be it through gut-wrenchingly awful stand-up comedy or incendiary and graphic violence – is usually compelling, but it’s hard for me to claim that the dramatic work of the film’s lead actor has Joker in anything above second gear for the majority.

Me when I go grocery shopping and see that Lunchables are on sale.

And so, as great as Phoenix is in the title role, and as artistic as Joker can occasionally be, the late Heath Ledger still holds the surely-coveted title of Tuesdays with Cory’s Best Joker, and The Dark Knight still holds the title of Best Batman Movie.  At bare minimum, Phillips’ creation deserves credit for being different in a genre that Martin Scorsese recently described as a theme park (if this movie is a theme park, it’s certainly not one I’d ever want to go to, but then again I’m not really a fan of theme parks in general), and his work admirably makes use of a comic book character and a comic book label to get a whole lot of asses into seats to see a movie that takes on challenging themes that people would likely otherwise never see, but at the end of the day Joker lacks much substance outside of an empty insistence (albeit maybe true) that the world is as dark a place as ever.  While it’s no doubt a daring film and an occasionally powerful character study, I think it’s as simple in this case as saying that Joker just wasn’t for me, and at the very least it also seems to be a movie that fancies itself more highbrow than it actually is.