Oscar Nominations 2023: 5 of 9

The rest of the movies that got Oscar nominations all got only one nomination. Some of these will be hidden gems (usually the International Feature nominees), and some of these will be completely abominable (usually the Original Song and Makeup & Hairstyling nominees), but I still watch them all. This post only has three films because the next post will have five:

The Color Purple

1 nomination

• Supporting Actress: Danielle Brooks

Director: Blitz Bazawule

Cast: Fantasia Barrino, Taraji P. Henson, Brooks, Colman Domingo, Corey Hawkins, Phylicia Pearl Mpasi, Halle Bailey, Ciara, H.E.R., David Alan Grier, Deon Cole, Jon Batiste, Louis Gossett Jr.

I very nearly hated this. An entire fifth of my second book is about the novel–movie–musical adaptations of The Color Purple, so I had high hopes for what this movie could have been. It's nearly a complete failure, I think. You can read my objections to the new movie's complete removal of the musical's spiritual themes here, but my real objection is that this new movie is not a film adaptation of the stage musical. It is a musical adaptation of the 1985 movie. And that is just a bad choice all around. Now, listen, Danielle Brooks is obviously a highlight of this new movie that no one needed. She gets nominated for the role Oprah Winfrey was nominated for in 1986. It's hard to be mad at Brooks getting praised; who doesn't love Danielle Brooks? (She played the same role on Broadway and was nominated for a Tony there.) But this isn't winning anything, and it's the biggest missed opportunity of a film this year.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #69 out of 75

El Conde

1 nomination

• Cinematography: Edward Lachman (Carol, Far from Heaven)

Director: Pablo Larraín

Cast: Jaime Vadell, Gloria Münchmeyer, Alfredo Castro, Paula Luchsinger, Stella Gonet, Catalina Guerra, Amparo Noguera, Antonia Zegers, Marcial Tagle, Diego Muñoz, Clemente Rodríguez, Rosario Zamora

Pablo Larraín reimagines the Chilean dictator and war criminal Augusto Pinochet as a centuries-old vampire who faked his death in 2006 but is living on, feeding on the hearts of Chileans whenever he needs a boost. This is completely outrageous. "El Conde" is "The Count", which, apparently, Pinochet called himself, but it is also, of course, Dracula. El Conde is disgusting, satirical fun. I’ve never seen a world leader skewered in quite this way. This is a brazen, shocking comedy that loathes its central figure, but the film manages to enjoy itself, and consequently we do too, as it describes Pinochet’s many, many crimes against humanity. It's gorgeously shot by Todd Haynes' usual cinematographer (Lachman did not do May December). I am not sure how I feel about Larraín, though, honestly. I'm not sure what he's doing. I don't understand these projects of his. Spencer, Jackie, El Club, El Conde: What's going on?

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #33 out of 75

Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny

1 nomination

• Original Score: John Williams (The Fabelmans, Star Wars: Episode IX – the Rise of Skywalker, Star Wars: Episode VIII – the Last Jedi, Star Wars: Episode VII – the Force Awakens, The Book Thief, Lincoln, War Horse, The Adventures of Tintin, Munich, Memoirs of a Geisha, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, Catch Me If You Can, Artificial Intelligence: A.I., Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone, The Patriot, Angela's Ashes, Saving Private Ryan, Amistad, Sleepers, Nixon, Sabrina, Schindler's List, JFK, Home Alone, Born on the Fourth of July, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, The Accidental Tourist, Empire of the Sun, The Witches of Eastwick, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, The River, Return of the Jedi, E.T.: the Extra-Terrestrial, Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Empire Strikes Back, Superman, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Jaws, The Towering Inferno, Tom Sawyer, Cinderella Liberty, Images, The Poseidon Adventure, Fiddler on the Roof, The Reivers, Goodbye, Mr. Chips, Valley of the Dolls)

Director: James Mangold

Cast: Harrison Ford,  Phoebe Waller-Bridge, Mads Mikkelsen, Boyd Holbrook, Olivier Richters, Ethann Isidore, Toby Jones, Antonio Banderas, Karen Allen, John Rhys-Davies, Shaunette Renée Wilson, Thomas Kretschmann, Martin McDougall, Alaa Safi

Why did they even bother with this trash? I mean, I guess I hope Jez Butterworth and Mads Mikkelsen got paid well? This was so fucking stupid. And also I want to say that I do not enjoy this colonial trope where our “heroes” descend on some non-American city like Syracuse or Tangiers and then wreck a whole bunch of shit and steal people’s motorbikes so that they can chase bad guys. This is basically a staple of the James Bond movies and the Mission: Impossible movies, but I just don’t understand how I’m supposed to stop thinking about the random newly married couple whose car just got stolen before their honeymoon while Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Harrison Ford drive off in their honeymoon vehicle. Like, I know I’m supposed to be focusing on whatever McGuffin the script has provided, but that is not where my brain goes. This was nominated because the Music Branch is corrupt and ridiculous and they nominate John Williams every single year he has a score out. Mind you, three of the four previous Indiana Jones movies were also nominated for best "original" score, and they have found a way to nominate him for the most recent three Star Wars films as well. It's just so ridiculous when they could have finally given Joe Hisaishi a nomination for The Boy and the Heron or honored Michael Giacchino's gorgeous work on Society of the Snow. But no; the Music Branch is over here nominating John Williams for his fifty-fourth Oscar for a terrible fifth movie in a tired franchise. What a snooze.

Will win: N/A

Could win: N/A

My rating: #67 out of 75

More posts coming soon:

1. Oppenheimer, Poor Things, Killers of the Flower Moon, Barbie, Maestro

2. Anatomy of a Fall, The Zone of Interest, The Holdovers, American Fiction

3. Napoleon, Past Lives, Nyad, Society of the Snow

4. Mission: Impossible – Dead Reckoning, The Creator, Rustin, May December

6. Animated Features

7. Godzilla Minus One, Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3, Golda, American Symphony, Flamin' Hot

8. Animated Short Films

9. Perfect Days, The Teachers' Lounge, Io Capitano

New Color Purple Same as the Old Color Purple

When The Color Purple uses the songs from the musical it works very well. The best sequences are easily “Miss Celie’s Pants”, “Push da Button”, and “Hell No”. Which makes one wonder why they didn’t use more of this music. So much of Blitz Bazawule’s movie musical is not musical! Why? I just don’t get it. The whole thing just works so much better when the performers are singing. 

The real kicker for me, though, was that this film reused so much of Spielberg’s movie (the dumb food-burning humor when Shug arrives, the invented subplot about Shug having a minister father, the near complete erasure of Shug and Celie’s love affair) instead of the far-superior (and closer to the novel) libretto from the musical. Ugh. Well, I’ve written a whole book chapter on this in Love Is Love Is Love, and this version of The Color Purple is much more like Spielberg’s version than Walker’s version or the stage show. And that’s too bad.

Here's a little section from Love Is Love Is Love, so you know what I mean when I tell you how annoyed I was at this movie:

* * *

The concept of god [is] central to The Color Purple. Celie still begins her letters “Dear God,” and the Bible and Heaven make regular appearances. The shift for Celie begins in letter 73, more than halfway through the novel, after she has discovered that Nettie is still alive, that her father was lynched, and that the man she thought was her father is her stepfather. Celie and Shug talk about God, but they have very different ideas about it. Their conversation is far reaching and fascinating. Celie says that “the God I been praying and writing to is a man. And act just like all the other mens I know. Trifling, forgetful and lowdown,” but Shug argues that Celie’s god is not only a male god but specifically white and male:

If you wait to find God in church, Celie, she say, that’s who is bound to show up, cause that’s where he live. […] Cause that’s the one that’s in the white folks’ white bible.

Shug! I say. God wrote the bible, white folks had nothing to do with it.

How come he look just like them, then? she say. […] How come the bible just like everything else they make, all about them doing one thing and another, and all the colored folks doing is gitting cursed?

I never thought bout that. 

It is important to note here that Shug’s critique is one that marks this god as specifically racialized, gendered, and aged by the white people who created him in their image. 

Shug’s personal theory about god is the one that Celie finally adopts, although it takes her a long time to arrive at this position – she struggles with it through several letters. In letter 73, though, Shug tells Celie that “God is inside you and inside everybody else. You come into the world with God. But only them that search for it inside find it. […] God ain’t a he or a she, but a It. […] I believe God is everything, say Shug. Everything that is or ever was or ever will be. And when you can feel that, and be happy to feel that, you’ve found it.”  It is in this same letter that Shug says the memorable phrase from which the book’s title is taken, that “it pisses God off if you walk by the color purple in a field somewhere and don’t notice it.” 

Even more, Shug’s theory of god is one deeply inflected by an ethos of sexual freedom and an emphasis on sexual pleasure. Shug understands desire and sex to be invented by her god, and she says that “God love all them feelings. That’s some of the best stuff God did. And when you know God loves ’em you enjoys ’em a lot more. You can just relax, go with everything that’s going, and praise God by liking what you like.”  Shug’s sexual ethic here emphasizes a free sexual choice that, significantly, doesn’t emphasize a specific sexuality as much as it insists on sexual freedom and sexual pleasure – “go with everything that’s going,” Shug says, and “lik[e] what you like.”

At the same time as her long talk with Shug, Celie stops writing letters to her god, writing instead to her sister Nettie, from whom she has been separated for the many years of the novel. Nettie has gone to Africa as a Christian missionary to a fictional ethnic group called the Olinka, but after their time in Africa, she and her husband Samuel come to see God in the same way that Celie does, as a spirit not tied to a particular image. Celie writes to Nettie until the moving final letter of novel. By this time, Nettie and Celie’s children have returned to Georgia and they have all been reunited, and so instead of writing to her sister, Celie addresses her final letter in this way: “Dear God. Dear stars, dear trees, dear sky, dear peoples. Dear Everything. Dear God. / Thank you for bringing my sister Nettie and our children home.”  Celie has come to believe in a god that is everywhere and everything rather than a white patriarch who punishes sexual pleasure and demands obedience, and she is grateful.

* * *

This is as gay as this new movie gets.

All of this – and to my mind these are the central themes of the novel – is cut in Spielberg's film. I go on in the book to detail the changes made for the film and for the musical. Celie and Shug don't even have this conversation about god in the 1985 movie. What's so wonderful about the musical is that it restores this conversation and does so musically with Shug's gorgeous song "The Color Purple". The musical also restores the beautiful sexual relationship that the women have, another thing that was cut for Spielberg's movie.

Well the new Blitz Bazawule movie cuts the conversation yet again (cutting Shug's song, of course), and it cuts the sexual relationship too, for good measure. The musical version did so much work to get back to the themes of the novel from the botched 1985 movie adaptation. The new movie adaptation takes us right back to 1985.