Tag: Academy Awards

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

CODA

Ruby (Emilia Jones), the only hearing member of her family, navigates the world not only for herself as a shy teen, but for her brother (Daniel Durant) and parents (Troy Kotsur, Marlee Matlin), whom their hearing community has neglected.

If you want your movie to win an award at a film festival, make sure I don’t see it. When the winner of the jury award is announced at Indie Memphis, it’s inevitably the one I missed. Now, I’ve been bitten twice by the same movie — or maybe I failed the same movie twice.

CODA premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2021, when the pandemic forced the event to go virtual. I watched two dozen features at that fest, but when CODA sold early to Apple TV for a record $25 million, I figured I would have plenty of chances to see it, so it fell to the bottom of my priority list. Naturally, it went on to sweep the jury prizes. When it was released last August, it languished in my streaming playlist for months until it was buried under an avalanche of Oscar screeners. The night of the Academy Awards, I realized I still hadn’t seen it, so naturally, it won Best Picture, Best Adapted Screenplay, and Troy Kotsur won Best Supporting Actor, becoming only the second deaf actor in history to win an Oscar.

Now, writer/director Sian Heder is enjoying a theatrical victory lap, and I finally caught up with CODA. The story, which was based on the French-Belgian film La Famille Bélier, revolves around Ruby Rossi (Emilia Jones), a high school senior living in Gloucester, Massachusetts, with her father Frank (Troy Kotsur), mother Jackie (Marlee Matlin), and older brother Leo (Daniel Durant). Like many families living in the seaside town, the Rossis depend on their fishing boat to make a living. Unlike the other fisherfolk, the Rossis are deaf — all except Ruby, who, since childhood, has translated between her family and the hearing world.

As she works on the boat, Ruby sings along with the radio, unbeknownst to her family. A painfully shy outcast at school, Ruby surprises her best friend Gertie (Amy Forsyth) when she signs up for choir instead of film club (“otherwise known as ‘put your backpack down and smoke a bowl’”). Her first audition is a disaster, but choir master Bernardo (Eugenio Derbez) hears potential in her voice. Bernardo is an alumni of the prestigious Berklee School of Music in nearby Boston, and he thinks Ruby has what it takes to get accepted, providing she works hard. One motivating factor for Ruby is Miles (Ferdia Walsh-Peelo), a cute boy she is assigned to duet with in the upcoming school concert.

Meanwhile, the family’s fishing business is in crisis. Market prices are low, and regulations to protect the fisheries are hitting the trawlers with new expenses. Frank comes up with a scheme to create a co-op and increase the anglers’ profits by cutting out the middleman. But that will require communicating and cooperating with hearing folks, and after years of abuse and neglect, the Rossis have grown insular and distrustful. They need Ruby’s experience and charm to navigate the new business environment.

Ruby is trapped in a no-win situation. If she pursues the dream her parents can’t understand by leaving for music school, the family will falter. But if she passes up her opportunity to go to Berklee, she could end up embittered and wasted in this small town.

CODA is a classic story of intergenerational conflict spiced up with a culture clash narrative between the deaf and hearing communities. The execution is nearly flawless. The core cast is terrific, particularly the chemistry between Kotsur and Matlin (who happens to be the other deaf actor who has won an Oscar, for 1986’s Children of a Lesser God). Jones pulls off an extremely difficult role, in which she both has to sing and use ASL like a native signer. The characterization of the Rossis as authentically rough and rude working class people instead of saintly martyrs to their disability feels like a big leap forward in representation. This story is told from their perspective, and the hearing world are the outsiders. The disconnect between the two worlds is driven home in a masterful sequence at the school concert, where Ruby’s triumphal performance plays in silence, as the family tries to suss out how she’s doing by watching the faces of the audience.

This plucky indie’s well-deserved Oscar wins have been overshadowed by the televised bad behavior of rich movie stars. Since the Academy Awards have been increasingly seen as a way for the wider public to discover quality films that might otherwise get lost in the cultural shuffle, that’s a shame. I slept on CODA for too long. Don’t be like me.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Craig Brewer’s Coming 2 America Earns Oscar Nomination

Eddie Murphy stars in COMING 2 AMERICA Photo: Quantrell D. Colbert © 2020 Paramount Pictures

The nominations for the 94th annual Academy Awards were announced this morning. Jane Campion’s Western The Power of the Dog leads the list with 12 nods, including Best Picture, Best Director, and acting nominations for Benedict Cumberbatch, Kirsten Dunst, Jesse Plemons, and Kodi Smit-McPhee.

Coming 2 America, the sequel to Eddie Murphy’s beloved 1988 star vehicle, earned a nomination for Mike Marino, Stacey Morris, and Carla Farmer’s work in Makeup and Hairstyling. The film was directed by Memphian Craig Brewer. Upon its release in January, 2021, Coming 2 America became became Amazon Studios biggest hit to date. You can read the story behind its making in this Memphis Flyer cover story.

Coming 2 America will compete in the Hair and Makeup category against Disney’s Cruella, Denis Villaneuve’s sci-fi epic Dune, the Jessica Chastain-led biopic The Eyes of Tammy Faye, and Ridley Scott’s melodrama House of Gucci. Brewer’s 2005 film Hustle & Flow earned a Best Original Song Academy Award for Three Six Mafia’s “It’s Hard Out Here for a Pimp,” and a Best Actor nomination for star Terrance Howard.

Best Picture nominees also included Dune, which earned a total of 10 nominations. Kenneth Brannaugh’s period drama Belfast was nominated in both Best Picture and Best Director categories, as well as Best Supporting Actress for Judi Dench and Supporting Actor for Ciarán Hinds. Adam McKay’s climate change satire Don’t Look Up, another Best Picture nominee, was also listed for Best Original Score, Best Original Screenplay, and Best Film Editing. Will Smith earned a Best Actor nominee for sports flick and Best Picture nominee King Richard. Paul Thomas Anderson’s 70’s rom-com Licorice Pizza received both Best Picture and Best Director noms, as did Ryuske Hamaguchi’s meditative Drive My Car, which was also Japan’s entry in the Best International Feature category. Steven Spielberg’s re-adaptation of West Side Story made him the first person to be nominated for Best Director in six different decades, while Ariana DeBose was nominated for Best Supporting Actress for her role as Anita. Gueillermo del Toro’s carnival noir Nightmare Alley, and Sundance hit CODA rounded out the Best Picture nods.

Elsewhere, Flee, Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s story of an Afghan refugee named Amin Nawabi, made history as the first film to ever earn nominations in the Best Documentary, Best Animated, and Best International Feature categories.

The Academy Awards ceremony will be broadcast on March 27, 2022. You can see the full list of nominees at the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences website.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

Honeyland

The Oscars are not an international film festival. They’re very local.”

That’s what director Bong Joon Ho said to Vulture when he was asked about Parasite becoming the first Korean film to be nominated for Best Picture. It’s funny because it’s true. Hollywood has been called a “mill town,” and the Academy Awards are basically just an annual industry banquet with an incredible PR team. The awards are usually settled by voters who are either too busy to see enough films to make a meaningful decision or hopelessly out of touch with the zeitgeist or both. Controversy is guaranteed — this is a feature, not a bug.

Originally, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences didn’t even consider films made outside of the United States. After giving out honorary awards for several years to films like Bicycle Thieves and Rashomon, the first Best Foreign Language Film was Federico Fellini’s La Strada in 1957.

One reason non-Hollywood films have always been an afterthought at the Oscars is because non-English films with subtitles have traditionally been a hard sell in America. But as the country becomes more diverse, that has been changing. These days, Malco Theaters regularly devotes screens to Bollywood movies. As I write this, the Telugu film Disco Raja is playing at the Majestic. The mainline Hollywood studios have become more and more dependent on foreign box office, which might be another incentive for the Academy to open up internationally. The subtitled Roma won Best Foreign Language Film and earned a Best Director award for Alfonso Cuarón in 2018, but a subtitled film has still never won Best Picture. Parasite, which I think is the best film from a pretty good year, has a chance to make history.

Another subtitled nominee has a chance to make history this year. Best Foreign Language Film got a long-overdue name change to Best International Feature Film, and Honeyland is nominated for both that honor and for Best Documentary. It’s no surprise the film has resonated. It’s a humane and fascinating story told with nuance and compassion for all of its subjects by directors Tamara Kotevska and Ljubomir Stefanov.

The project reportedly began life as a short film about efforts to preserve the area around the River Bregalnica in North Macedonia, until the directors met Hatidze Muratova. She is a beekeeper living with her 85-year-old mother in some of the roughest and most remote terrain in Europe. When we first meet her, Muratova is climbing along a treacherous mountain ridge to get to a rocky outcrop where a hive of bees has taken shelter. She takes a honeycomb and gently coaxes bees into her handmade, conical hive. She sings to the bees as she works, giving the impression that she’s not so much robbing the hive as she is recruiting workers.

Hatidze Muratova tends her hives in Honeyland.

Muratova’s world is timeless, idyllic, and lonely. She and her mother are the last two inhabitants of an abandoned village. Her beehives are tucked into nooks and crevices in crumbling stone walls that look like they could be 100 — or 1,000 — years old. Her golden rule is to never take more than half of the honey from any one hive, to ensure the bees have plenty to eat for themselves. Although she frequently works without protective equipment, we never see her get stung by a bee.

The natural rhythms of Muratova’s life are interrupted by the arrival of a family of itinerant farmers — Hussein Sam and his wife and seven children. They arrive in a caravan of cattle, trailers, and tractors, filling the silent hills with noise. At first, Muratova is happy to have new people to talk to. The Sams clearly have their hands full, and she’s got the farmer’s instinct for cooperation. But when Sam decides to take up beekeeping, conflict becomes inevitable. The contrast between his boxy, mass-produced hives and her handmade, organic hives becomes the film’s central visual metaphor. Muratova patiently tries to explain the sustainable, traditional beekeeping methods developed over thousands of years, but Sam has hungry mouths to feed and a pushy client who wants to move as much product as possible.

There are no good guys and bad guys here, just struggling people responding to incentives. Honeyland is cinéma vérité, which means there’s no voice-over and no talking head interviews. But there is more character and story in the film’s 87 minutes than in most $100 million blockbusters. As Bong Joon Ho said in his Golden Globe acceptance speech, “Once you overcome the one-inch-tall barrier of subtitles, you will be introduced to so many more amazing films.”

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Ida, Academy Award Winning Polish Film, Screens In Memphis

As a part of the Memphis In May Festival’s salute to Poland, Indie Memphis is presenting a film a week by Polish directors at Studio On The Square. 

Agata Trzebuchowska in Ida

The first film, screening tonight, is the 2015 Academy Award Winner for Best Foreign Language Film, Ida. Directed by Pawel Pawlikowski. Ida, stars Agata Trzebuchowska as Ida, a young orphan about to take her vows as a nun in 1961, who finds out her ancestors are actually Jewish. She embarks on a trip across communist Poland to find her family, who went into hiding from the Nazis during the war. The film has earned wide acclaim from not only the Academy, but also such notoriously tough audiences as The New Yorker’s David Denby, who called it a “compact masterpiece” and said he was “thrown into a state of awe.”

You can purchase advance tickets at the Indie Memphis website for tonight’s 7 PM screening at Studio On The Square. 

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

They Wuz Robbed! The 2015 Oscar Nominees Revealed

It’s time for the annual ritual of complaining about the Oscar nominations, and I’m here to help. Or at least, throw fuel on the fire.

The Grand Budapest Hotel

2014 was a great year for movies. The two frontrunners, Birdman and Boyhood, both of which have nine nominations, are great movies, but to my mind, the Best Picture category is wide open. The Grand Budapest Hotel and Selma are both equal to the two frontrunners, and since Clint Eastwood has been an increasingly inexplicable perineal Oscar favorite in the twenty-first century, American Sniper could be a surprise winner. If you held a gun to my head, I would probably go with The Grand Budapest Hotel as best picture from the choices given, but I would be happy with any of the top four.

[jump]

Boyhood

To me, the Best Director category is clear: Richard Linklater’s Boyhood is an unprecedented directorial achievement. Movies can be derailed by tiny choices early in the production, and since Linklater’s Boyhood shoot stretched over 12 years, he had plenty of opportunity to mess up, but turned instead a perfect movie. The biggest omission from the Best Director category is Ava DuVernay for Selma, which is just inexcusable, especially when Bennett Miller is nominated for the mediocre morass that is Foxcatcher.

Eddie Redmayne as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything

The Best Actor category also has two inexcusable snubs: First is John Lithgow’s career high performance in Ira Sach’s Love Is Strange. I think Love Is Strange should have been in the running for all of the top-line awards, but Lithgow, Alfred Molina, and Marissa Tormei’s performances in the film were simply unequalled this year. The second, and perhaps more glaring, snub is David Oyelowo, who is exceptional in a really difficult role as Martin Luther King, Jr. in Selma. Steve Carrel’s name recognition got him a nomination, but his performance in Foxcatcher is a one-note disappointment. Among the nominees, I’ll take Eddie Remayne’s perfectly calibrated, physically demanding turn as Stephen Hawking in The Theory Of Everything.

Reese Witherspoon in Wild

Without Tormei in the Leading Actress category, it’s going to come down to between Reese Witherspoon in Wild and Rosamund Pike in Gone Girl. Both are fine performances, but I’ll have to go with the empathetic naturalism of Witherspoon.

Michael Keaton and Ed Norton in Birdman

My knee-jerk pick in the Actor in a Supporting Role is Ethan Hawke in Boyhood, but all of the nominees seem strong. Mark Ruffalo was the best thing about Foxcatcher, and if you watched the trailers for Whiplash, J.K. Simmons seemed like the lead actor, so he’s got a good shot. And don’t count out Ed Norton if a Birdman wave builds.

Patricia Arquette in Boyhood

Suporting Actress, however, should be a runaway for Patricia Arquette, who lays it all out there in Boyhood. Emma Stone greatly exceeded my expectations for her in Birdman, but this is Arquette’s trophy.

Inherent Vice

The screenplay categories are also pretty clear for me. Original Screenplay should go to The Grand Budapest Hotel, which is as tight and original piece of screenwriting as Wes Anderson has ever done. My Adapted Screenplay pick is Inherent Vice for pulling off the seemingly impossible task of adapting Thomas Pynchon’s prose. But it probably won’t win, because it has divided audiences so much, so this category is wide open. I wouldn’t be surprised if American Sniper got it, because the book it was based on has been extremely popular. I was surprised that Gone Girl didn’t get nominated, but the category is admittedly pretty stacked.

Guardians Of The Galaxy

I was stunned to see The Lego Movie snubbed in the Animated Feature category, but directors Phil Lord and Christopher Miller should console themselves by rolling around in their giant piles of money. In the Editing category, Boyhood is the clear winner for the effortlessly clear and inventive way it strung together 12 years of one boy’s life. The visual effects category, however, is wide open. My pick is the photorealistic Dawn Of The Planet Of The Apes, but Guardians of the Galaxy and Interstellar are both very strong contenders, and Magneto lifting RFK Stadium with his mind in X-Men: Days Of Future Past is among the year’s indelible images.

In sum, the Oscars have given us lots of stuff to argue about this year—which is pretty much their function, right? 

Categories
We Recommend We Recommend

Bill Courtney Booksigning

”You must absolutely be beside yourself,” said the reporter to the man on the red carpet. “How will the movie winning the Oscar change your life?”

“It won’t,” answered the man. “Tomorrow, they’re going to roll the red carpet up and next year, another great movie will come out, and I’ll be an afterthought.”

The man being interviewed was Bill Courtney. The movie about his coaching the Manassas High School football team in Memphis was Undefeated, which won the Academy Award for Best Documentary Feature in 2012. And an “afterthought” Courtney may be in some quarters. Don’t tell that, though, to the inspired audiences who hear Courtney on the speaking circuit. And don’t tell that to readers of Against the Grain (Weinstein Books), Courtney’s book of life lessons (co-written with author and journalist Michael Arkush), which Courtney will be signing at the Booksellers at Laurelwood on Saturday.

The book draws from Courtney’s own life; the lives of the students he coached; the lives of his workforce at Classic American Hardwoods (the local lumber company Courtney owns); and the lives of fellow Memphians, including Dr. Scott Morris, Jim Strickland, Fred Smith, and Jacqueline Smith. The book’s subtitle covers the territory: “A Coach’s Wisdom on Character, Faith, Family, and Love.”

Courtney covers his coaching philosophy in just a few words too. Never mind the standard X’s and O’s. Courtney “starts with believing that players win games and coaches win players.” And elsewhere in Against the Grain: “I didn’t coach football. I coached kids who played football.”

And no, winning isn’t the only thing, according to Coach Courtney. There’s something to be said too for commitment, civility, perseverance, personal responsibility, and dignity. Grace, too, and forgiveness when times get tough, on or off the field.