Tag Archives: Once Upon a Time in Hollywood

Quentin Tarantino’s Long Oscar Con

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Warning: Spoilers loose here!

First, full disclosure: I love Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. I think it’s one of the best movies of the year, one of Tarantino’s finest in a career of fine films, and as fitting an homage to Los Angeles’ Golden Age of film as any ever rendered. And it’s getting too much praise.

Hollywood has been nominated for 10 Oscars, and has already collected 102 trophies over more than a dozen award ceremonies, including the Golden Globes and the BAFTAs.

Those plaudits for the films aren’t the problem. The problem is the praise heaped on supporting star Brad Pitt. He, like the film, has been showered in praise and gold plating, nabbing a Best Supporting Oscar nomination and taking home supporting acting statuettes from said Globes/BAFTAs. Should Pitt win the Oscar, his first order of business should be to thank Tarantino for pulling off the greatest heist since Ocean’s Eleven. In fact, classic films were part of the heist.Image result for pitt golden globe"

You see, Tarantino is this year’s Oscar’s darling for his love letter to 1960’s Hollywood, when the industry’s  ability to sell a concocted happiness was at its peak. Families were nuclear and daddies knew best. Kids didn’t swear, adults didn’t screw, and cowboys didn’t miss or bleed (unless they were bad). Killers met with unfettered justice — often dealt out by likes of Rick Dalton, Tarantino’s leading man in Hollywood.

Dalton is one of those Bonanza cowboys, at least on the outside. Steady. Steely. Sure-handed. Inside, though, he’s a wreck. He drinks too much, swears up a storm, has a nervous stutter, and is having trouble coming to terms with age and relevance.

Now consider Cliff Booth, Pitt’s likable, buff stunt double to DiCaprio’s Dalton in Hollywood. Cliff is an understated Missouri boy who, in the span of three hours, saves his buddy’s career, kicks Bruce Lee’s ass in a street fight and single-handedly prevents the Manson family murders. He is as stalwart a Hollywood hero as any produced 50 years ago. And like all good 60’s movie cowboys, his acting sucks.Image result for bruce lee cliff booth"

Like, really sucks. I challenge anyone who has seen the film: Name one scene in which Pitt is called upon to act. One scene in which he sheds a tear. Or loses his temper. Or becomes nervous, uncomfortable or caught unawares. He is Shane, mysterious, unflappable and Ivory pure.

This isn’t Pitt’s fault. He’s a solid actor (See Twelve Monkeys, Moneyball, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). It’s just he’s playing John Wayne without the temper, and is never asked to express anything approximating range. Tarantino must know: DiCaprio acted circles around Pitt, gaining weight, shedding tears, allowing insecurities to surface. But while Pitt won honors, DiCaprio had to settle for honorable mentions among the Globes and BAFTAs.Image result for twelve monkeys"

Not that anyone need shed a tear over Hollywood‘s fortunes. But if Pitt manages to pull off a win, and beat co-nominees Al Pacino, Anthony Hopkins, Joe Pesci and Tom Hanks, he should silently signal to Tarantino Sting-style, with a nod of the head and forefinger gently brushing his nose. Image result for the sting rub nose"

Because that’s a helluva take.

Lights! Camera! Play Button!

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Well, that changed everything.

In 2019, Netflix scored its first Oscar nomination for best picture. A year later, the streaming service is leading the field in total nominations.

Movies released by Netflix earned 24 nominations this year, nearly doubling its all-time total. Leading the way for the company this year are The Irishman and Marriage Story, which earned 10 and 6 nominations, respectively—including best picture nods for both. As Netflix’s impact on the world of cinema becomes increasingly undeniable, the younger and more diverse film academy is no longer shunning the streaming service as the old Hollywood guard tried to do.

In addition to its two best picture nominations, the haul from Netflix, which released its first feature in 2015, reached virtually every category, from acting (where it received seven nominations) to writing to visual effects.

Netflix’s 24 nominations were two more than Disney’s total, even when combining all of the nominations earned by Disney’s various studios into a single number. (Disney’s empire now includes 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight.)

Netflix
24 nominations
Disney
22
Sony
20
Universal
13
Warner Bros.
12

 

Counting its two best picture nominations, the haul from Netflix, which released its first feature in 2015, reached virtually every category, from acting (where it received seven nominations) to writing to visual effects.

Netflix’s 24 nominations were two more than Disney’s total, even when combining all of the nominations earned by Disney’s various studios into a single number. (Disney’s empire now includes 20th Century Fox and Fox Searchlight.)

Threatened by the implications of Netflix’s arrival on the film scene, the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—the industry professionals who vote on the Oscars—had resisted awarding the streaming service with nominations. Hollywood has not been pleased with Netflix’s decision to release most of its films to subscribers online the same day that they’re put in theaters, which challenges the century-old relationship between distributors and theater owners. Nor are they happy with the small number of theaters that Netflix does allow its movies to be screened in.

But now voters are clearly warming to the idea of internet flicks, and we are entering the third age of television; streaming.
Though film viewers might not be in movie theaters, more people are seeing these films than if they were given a traditional theatrical release. Director Martin Scorsese—as Hollywood as Hollywood gets—said that he wouldn’t have been able to make The Irishman with a traditional studio. The major studios were unwilling to take on the financial risk of the three-hour mob drama, the director said. The deep-pocketed Netflix, however, was more than game, since it didn’t have box office receipts to worry about.

Netflix has used those deep pockets to launch historically expensive Oscar campaigns, hoping to woo voters the old-school way, with lavish parties and elaborate advertisements. The result has been an annual increase in Oscar nominations for the streaming service:

Helping Netflix’s case is a voting pool that has grown more diverse in recent years, in reaction to controversies like #OscarsSoWhite. In 2016, after the second consecutive year of an all-white slate of acting nominees, the academy made a much-publicized effort to invite more women and minority members. These new members, many of whom hail from outside the United States, are probably Netflix users themselves and can understand the appeal of releasing a film to everyone in the world at the same time.

While it may have helped Netflix ingratiate itself among the Hollywood elite, the change in membership hasn’t adequately addressed the actual problem it was meant to correct. The acting nominations this year were still blatantly homogeneous. Nineteen of the 20 nominees were white. The only black nominee, Cynthia Erivo, was nominated for portraying the former slave and abolitionist, Harriet Tubman. As usual, all five directing nominees were men.

That’s another area where Netflix can help the industry improve. The service has championed Oscar-worthy films directed by diverse filmmakers or ones featuring diverse casts, like 2017’s Mudbound and this year’s dramedy, Dolemite Is My Name, starring Eddie Murphy. Dolemite Is My Name was not nominated for any Oscars, even though its costume designer, Ruth E. Carter, became the first black designer to win an Oscar in history last year.

Netflix’s record nominations total is only going to convince even more talented filmmakers that the streaming service is a smart place to take their films. A world in which a majority of nominated films are distributed by Netflix and other streaming services may not be so far off.

All the News That Fits a Title Sequence

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It must be Oscar time, because suddenly Hollywood’s credulity is in question. Again.

This is an old refrain the final months leading up to the Academy Awards, which are annually inundated with biopics and historical epics, all vying for statuettes. This year’s favorite accuracy arguments concern popes and the press. Clint Eastwood was pilloried for his attack on the media in his drama Richard Jewell, and Netflix’s Oscar hopeful The Two Popes earned the ridicule of some papal purists who considered the Fernando Meirelles film inaccurate and dumbed-down for commercial audience. (Full disclosure, I also railed about Jewell, though for personal reasons).Image result for the two popes

To my fellow film critics, I ask: Shouldn’t we be as diligent “truth squadding” movies the other eight months of the year? Either that, or accept Oscar fare as pure entertainment, as we do with, say, summer movies? To hold a film to a higher threshold of accuracy because of its release date is not only unfair to directors; it’s inaccurate for readers and viewers.

The truth is, in 15 years of movie reporting and reviewing, I have never interviewed a feature film director much concerned with getting the facts straight in any “based on a true story” (BOTS) film. Documentary film directors are a different lot (particularly Werner Herzog), though make no mistake: They edit footage with the same intention as their feature film counterparts — to tell a compelling story.Image result for werner herzog volcano

But from Chris Nolan (Dunkirk) to Martin Scorsese (Goodfellas) to Eastwood, details have always taken a backseat to drama. Without exception, directors promoting their BOTS films have told me that their jobs aren’t to teach history (if anything, studios consider that box office death). Instead, they say, their job is to accurately capture the tableau of emotions that spring from that history (directors love the word zeitgeist). Even Tom Hanks, who played the titular role in the much-maligned Somali pirate film Captain Phillips, told me he was drawn to the role because it captured the strains of living life at sea, not the subtleties.Image result for captain phillips

That “capture-the-essence” approach isn’t likely to change anytime soon, particularly given the success of two films this weekend at the Golden Globes, 1917 and Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood. In both cases, the directors  took on based-on-true stories, but with approaches starkly different from competing filmmakers.

In 1917, the fictional story of two World War I soldiers racing to prevent a suicide march, director Sam Mendes ended the movie with a postscript that said the film was dedicated to his grandfather, WWI vet Alfred Hubert Mendes, who told his family that story innumerable times.

Quentin Tarantino, who directed Once Upon a Time…in Hollywood, went even further. He loves to wreak havoc with historical accounts. In Inglorious Basterds, he ends the film with the heroes killing Hitler in an eruption of bullets and flames.

He did something similar in Hollywood, taking the real-life horror of the Charles Manson slayings and giving viewers the visceral ending they would have preferred (and get in most other straight-up features).

Their strategy worked like a Swiss watch. The Hollywood Foreign Press Association showered both movies in awards. 1917 won Golden Globe for best drama and director, while Hollywood took best comedy or musical and best screenplay for Tarantino. Popes, The Irishman and Jewell were all but forgotten.Image result for 1917 movie

Even holding a BOTS film’s feet to the fact-fire seems silly. What effective entertainment, on some level, isn’t based on a truth? Just as all music draws from notes that have been played before, so too are the reductive themes in film. Star Wars is essentially a father-son story. Casablanca is about love during wartime. You can’t copyright feelings.

Hollywood executives even go out of their way to point out a film’s factual failings — as long as it’s from another studio. Harvey Weinstein was renown for knocking the veracity of other studios’ BOTS movies. I can’t count how many publicists whispered under the breath when I asked about a competing biopic or historical portrait, ‘I hear it’s not a bad movie. Too bad it’s not true.’

So if Hollywood isn’t going to change its ways, perhaps we need to. Both Bohemian Rhapsody and Rocketma, for example, are rife with inaccuracies in portrayals of their subjects, Freddie Mercury and Elton John, respectively. But Rhapsody, which came out during Oscar season 2018, drew much more rigorous examination than Rocketman, released this summer. To scrutinize one but not the other implies one has accuracy issues, becoming in itself a journalistic inaccuracy. Image result for bohemian rhapsody rocketman

Perhaps the answer is to treat BOTS films the way we treat political rallies, which are eerily similar: both take liberties with facts to win favor with a largely dim-witted crowd that won’t bother to look up facts on their own.

So the job falls to us to watch “true stories” with a boulder-sized grain of salt and the assumption they will require some fact-checking. Who knows? It may even improve our film reviews, a sidebar comparing fact to fiction.

It’s time we decide whether we’re going to treat these films as reporters or audience members. We  need to regard BOTS films for what they really are: not a kiddie pool of facts, but a diving board into deeper knowledge. Hollywood films are just the divining rods.

Movie critics already have fallen out of the fact-finding business. Maybe it’s time we work some muscle memory.