The Groffscars ("Oscars") of 2021


This year was a pretty good crop of movies. It's the first year I can recall in which I actually enjoyed all of those nominated for Best Picture (except The Sound of Metal, which is still on my watchlist). Mank was a disappointment but still an enjoyable homage to Citizen Kane. Minari and Nomadland were well-done slices of life's bitterness and sweetness. Judas and the Black Messiah was a riveting political drama that I hope woke people up to the absolute treachery by the FBI against black power and civil rights activists in the 60s and 70s. And Ma Rainey was a dazzling, fast backstage drama.


But my favorite historical picture this year was The Trial of the Chicago 7. I could be biased, having gone to high school with one of the titular seven actors, but I don't think I am. It was a drama both fun and enraging with performances that bounce off the wall, especially Jeremy Strong and Sacha Baron Cohen. The gagging of Bobby Seale was shocking and another historical wake-up call. Aaron Sorkin's direction got Aaron Sorkin's dialogue to click. Chicago 7 takes third place.


Second on my list is The Father. I saw this the day after rewatching Fellini's 8 1/2 with a helping of California cannabis, and for much of the film it felt like a continuing blend of fact and fiction. It had a touch of whimsy; not the way we're used to seeing dementia, but perhaps a more accurate way to get inside the head of someone who is absolutely convinced what he experiences is real and puzzled when it is inconsistent. Adapting theater to the screen has its pitfalls, but the sadness and the fantasy blend together seamlessly through the lucid camerawork. Both Hopkins and Colman give deeply affecting performances.


But for my top pick Promising Young Woman takes the gold. When I saw it (back in September I believe), I doubted anything else would top it, and I was right. A movie this bold—stylistically, narratively, and dramatically—does not come along often. It's hard to comment on it without giving any spoilers, but I can say this: the pop-candy soundtrack and set design set the table deliciously, and the director Emerald Fennell takes advantage of the set-up ingeniously. Carey Mulligan's performance could easily have been monotonous and flat, but somehow she shows many colors in a way I can't quite put my finger on. Bo Burnham is a charming and disarming love-interest. It's a rarely vivacious and provocative movie that puts it head-and-shoulders above the rest.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

What I Learned from a Year Spent Studying How to Get Policymakers to Use Evidence

Image
Source: http://cognitive-edge.com/blog/on-evidence/ The past year I was a senior research analyst at Northwestern University's Global Poverty Research Lab on a study of evidence-based policy. Specifically, our goal was to work on a question often on researchers' minds: how can I get my ideas acted upon? To do this, I dug through a number of bodies of evidence on how science influences policy. One area I looked at is what is called "implementation science" in medicine, which looks at how to get doctors, nurses, and hospital administrators to adopt evidence-based practice. Another was a series of papers by social scientist Carol Weiss and her students on how policymakers in government agencies claim to use evidence. There is also a small literature on how to implement evidence-based policy in public schools, and a little work on policymaker numeracy. I've included a bibliography below that should be helpful for anyone interested in this topic. Most of my yea...
Read more

How Much Do Wild Animals Suffer? A Foundational Result on the Question is Wrong.

Image
NOTE: I would like to clarify that the post below and the published paper show that a result from 1995 does not hold, but they do NOT make the case for the 1995 model being correct. There are many reasons the models in both papers are likely to be deeply flawed: path dependency, dynamic ecosystems, philosophical problems with the definition of suffering and enjoyment, and so on. The primary point here is to treat the 1995 result and other work on wild animal suffering with caution. In 1995, Yew-Kwang Ng wrote a groundbreaking paper, "Towards welfare biology: Evolutionary economics of animal consciousness and suffering"  that explored the novel question of the wellbeing of wild animals as distinct from the conservation of species. As perceptive as it was innovative, the paper proposed a number of axioms about evolution and consciousness to study which animals are sentient, what their experiences are, and what might be done about it. Among the many results in the paper wa...
Read more

We're Here, We're Queer, Get Used to It: A Lesson the Animal Rights Movement Could Learn

Image
This fall, I've been listening in on a course I always intended to take as an undergraduate, U.S. Gay and Lesbian History by George Chauncey, and I've had to pinch myself for the last week or two as I read my way through Sexual Politics, Sexual Communities  by John D'Emilio to remind myself that I'm not reading about the animal rights movement. The debate is so similar to, and the rhetoric so evocative of, the modern animal rights movement that it's impossible for someone in this movement to miss. So I've decided I should share some of the most interesting parallels in the book with a wider audience. The book covers the early (pre-Stonewall) movement for gay and lesbian rights, particularly centering around the Mattachine Society and the Daughters of Bilitis, two 1950s groups. The movement was known as the homophile movement in those decades. I don't think many of these examples are that biased by D'Emilio's own perspective, as the previous book...
Read more