The Oscar ceremony comes preceded by so many galas during the so-called “awards season” that it is difficult to be surprised when the moment of truth arrives. So much so that only the musical number of Ryan Gosling's Ken or the innate grace of Robert Downey Jr. managed to add a bit of epic and nerve to the boredom that took the stage by storm. The only Oscar that caused astonishment was the most contested one according to the polls, that of best actress. It ended up in the hands of Emma Stone for poor creatures, that snatched from Lily Gladstone the award that would have compensated for the unjustifiable void towards Martin Scorsese's film The Moon Killers.
The long history of ignoring the New York filmmaker dates back to Taxi Driver and runs through his entire career. Not only that: Stone's bombastic histrionics in Yorgos Lanthimos' film have an overly technical sheen compared to the mysterious stoicism with which Gladstone builds a character who says everything with the least. Incidentally, the complex route to the screen of Native Americans would also have been recognized, a path inaugurated more than a century ago, when Minnie Provost played alongside Roscoe Fatty Arbuckle the comedy of Mack Sennett Fatty and Minnie He-Haw (1914).
The great protagonist of the night was Christopher Nolan and the triumph of his intense and grandiose conception of cinema in a time of enormous uncertainties. Recognition for the Londoner, a firm defender of the movie theater and the texture of celluloid over digital, came thanks to the dark epic of Oppenheimer, about the father of the atomic bomb—Oppie to his friends—which narrates the rise and fall of a physicist tormented by the monstrous dimension of his creation, someone who went from God to pariah under the clutches of McCarthyism.
The new king of blockbuster de auteur is a filmmaker capable of arousing mixed feelings but who cannot be denied his ability to be at the same time mainstream and cult. The solemn and enveloping Oppenheimer does not reach the height of his best films (The Dark Knight, Interstellar) but it has the merit of knowing how to turn such an arduous and complex issue into a film that has achieved a refreshing communion between critics and the public.
Oppenheimer, As Nolan himself recalled at the gala, it is founded on firm documentary ground: the biography of almost a thousand pages and three decades of work. American Prometheus; the triumph and tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer, by Kai Bird and Martin Sherwin. This important support has allowed Nolan to swim in safe waters when approaching the life of such a deeply contradictory and elusive character. The filmmaker's main interest is to convey to the viewer the moral dilemma of a man who was unable to digest the consequences of his sinister invention but who also did not know how to curb his own ego while creating it. The director was less interested in the horror of the bomb than in the diabolical game of the Washington hawks who dropped it on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
At this point, it seems undeniable that Nolan knows how to extract gold from his performers. Betting on Irish actor Cillian Murphy, an old accomplice of the filmmaker, was risky, but Murphy's Oscar confirms the success of his decision. The ambiguous fragility of the actor, his strangely wild eyes, have taken over a historical character who in a fatal way speaks to us from a present that became especially evident thanks to the Oscar for the documentary. 20 days in Mariupol and the speech against “dehumanization” given by another Briton, Jonathan Glazer, when collecting his Oscar for best international film for The area of interest. “We are here as men who refuse to let our Judaism and the Holocaust be kidnapped by an occupation that has led so many innocent people into conflict,” said Glazer, who read a text that brought the German actress Sandra Hüller to tears. of the year, they reward whoever they award. Justine Triet's achievement with Anatomy of a fall (best original screenplay) and Glazer's (international sound and film) demonstrate the unstoppable decentralization of Hollywood and the rise of peripheral voices.
Hüller's crying was only comparable to that of Paul Giamatti (the unforgettable protagonist of Those who stay) before her co-star Da'Vine Joy Randolph's self-improvement speech for her Oscar for Best Supporting Actress. It happened at the start of a gala in which the most modest cinema found an echo in an unexpected ally: the director and screenwriter of American Fiction, Cord Jefferson, who, with the Oscar for best adapted screenplay in hand, recalled that the generational change Hollywood will never catch on until smaller, cheaper films come back.
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