Hey Subscriber First Name,
I hope you’re well, and not going through a bout of Omicron like we are (all fine, just under the weather). It’s meant more tv than usual though, so I’m playing movie critic this week.

We sat through about an hour’s worth of the last Oscars ceremony—tuning out well before «The Incident» (which I won’t get into). When I got up the next morning and heard Coda had won Best Picture, my only thought was «oh, good for them ». Them being the cast, Troy Kotsur (the first deaf male to win Best Supporting Actor), and Apple, now flying high on the buzz from three awards. But we hadn’t seen the movie, so I didn’t have much of an opinion. We’d seen Power of the Dog, however, so I wasn’t surprised Jane Campion had snatched Best Director. I didn’t love the film, but I was fascinated the whole way through and sometimes that’s enough. Cumberbatch is incredible, the mood is mesmerizing. 

Over the past week, we caught up a bit: we watched Dune and Coda. Ok, deep breath, here I go: Coda is… sweet? But wow.

I’m trying really hard not to be a film snob here. I don’t think I am: I love Marvel flicks and Pixar, and I’m even partial to a campy disaster movie once in a while. Best Picture, however, should be a cinema of extremes and grandeur in my mind; of fervour, darkness or elevation, pushing against some sort of boundary. It doesn’t always need to be serious, or Art with a capital A—this is a category that’s given us Lawrence of Arabia, The Godfather, and… The Sound of Music. But The Sound of Music was still a spectacle, and it lives on to this day. Kramer vs Kramer, another winner, is a story on a much more intimate scale, but Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman are sublime. Best Picture should make us gasp, on some level.

All of this to say that I sat through Coda with growing dismay, and a lot of eye rolling. I kept waiting for a spark, something I wouldn’t see coming a mile away, and I never did. I didn’t catch a single frame, or hear a single line of text, that rose above the level of a movie of the week. It’s filmed and scored and edited like a movie of the week—every twist, smirk, tear, or fight as predictable as the next. Sure, the film did manage to pull at my heartstrings towards the end (I’m not a robot), but it was almost Pavlovian. I half-expected the movie to end on a still frame. Spoiler alert: it doesn’t. Thank goodness.

Look, I think it’s an ok film. And it’s wonderful in terms of representation, which is certainly a boundary worthy of being challenged. But for Coda to become the first streaming Best Picture recipient? Man. It may be time to seriously rethink these awards. I’m calling this a Shakespeare in Love year—I never understood that one either.

As for Dune? Breathtaking. Slow as the book is slow, but I was never bored. The film almost felt like a snapshot of my brain at times, a perfect rendition of Frank Herbert’s world. And really: how cool is it to have a reached a point where thopters look real?

Roger Ebert, signing off ;)