By Louis Kruger
Opinions fly (or fall) with the weight of appraisal at the Pulp Film Society’s annual discussion of this year’s Oscar nominees. Why was Sinners nominated for 16 Oscars, the most ever? Does Timothée Chalamet deserve his first win? Is Jacob Elordi really that good-looking? (Probably.)
Tiger Surmon, curator for the Pulp Film Society, is of the opinion that Best Actor shouldn’t go to Chalamet – “Leonardo DiCaprio in that movie [One Battle After Another] is better than Chalamet.” He’d love to see Ethan Hawke in Blue Moon take the award – “He’s the actor who most distorted himself for his role” – although he believes the Dune star might take from “hype”. Another Pulp Executive, Ammara Mohamed, says, “I think everything he [Chalamet] does is kind of mediocre […]. He presents them [his characters] the same way.”
Ryan Coogler’s Sinners made history by becoming the film with the most Oscar nominations ever. A Pulp Member, Aligi Boni (who has proudly watched all of the Best Picture nominations), says, “Everyone adores this movie and I agree – super tight direction combined with some of my favourite pieces of music of the year. If you aren’t watching Sinners right now then you’re just not taking your time on this earth seriously.” The film received a similarly favourable review in Die Matie late last year.
The film that’s got everyone crying in theatres, Hamnet, received eight Academy Award nominations. This is more than director Chloé Zhao’s milestone movie Nomadland, which, in 2020, made her the first woman of colour to win Best Picture as a producer, as well as the first to win Best Director. Hamnet’s lead, Jessie Buckley, is also a favourite for the Best Actress award, competing with the likes of Emma Stone in Bugonia and Rose Byrne in the evocatively titled, If I had Legs I’d Kick You.
The overwhelming consensus at the discussion seemed to be that Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another should take the Best Picture prize. Surmon says, “it is obviously the most technically accomplished [of the nominees].” Boni asserts, “The best movie of the year and it’s not even close – the type of movie you watch and realise how young the medium of film is and makes you crave the innovative imagination it could offer in the future.”
The reception of the F1 movie has been lukewarm. Jan-Christiaan Jacobs, an avid Formula 1 watcher who attended the meeting, laments, “The movie is a massive platform […]. A great use of this platform would be to promote women in Formula 1 more, to reflect the effort being put in.” As for the movie itself, he calls it “a lackluster effort at making a movie, too concerned with promoting the sport and not enough with telling a story”.
An article like this one supposes, of course, that the Oscars are worth talking about in the first place. Zi Goldstuck, ex-chairperson of the Pulp Film Society, argues, “[There is a] lack of diversity of the awards across all categories. Women and people of colour in the industry often go ignored or undervalued […] If we know the award is likely going to a white man anyway, why should we watch and be disappointed, rather than supporting more diverse awards?”
Surmon, an ardent defender of “cinema”, warns against treating “the quality of a film as […] a discussion of how many awards it’s won.” He says, “The films which are nominated […] are all films which are already successful in some way.” Both these trends lead us to overlook great, sometimes arguably much better movies (he mentions Jafar Panahi’s It Was Just an Accident and Kelly Reichardt’s The Mastermind), in favour of those which have been more commercially successful. He also encourages paying attention to other major awards, like the Palme d’Or given at the Cannes Film Festival, considered by many the highest honour in international cinema.
But as Boni reminds, “The Oscars, above all other award ceremonies, are baked into our cultural fabric and lexicon.” Despite their sometimes “cynical, self-congratulatory nature”, the awards still manage to “platform new creatives and interesting projects that would have otherwise struggled to catch eyes without its involvement”. (A notable example in recent years is Parasite.) Somewhat paradoxically, then, it might be the case that it’s important to keep talking about the Oscars, at least until people stop caring about them.
