All Over But The Shouting: 2021 Oscars Wrap-up Part I

For an Oscars season and Academy Awards ceremony as strange and eventful as we just experienced, it felt necessary to break the wrap-up into parts. In Part I, we will cover the actual award winners and their speeches. In Part II, we will talk about the ceremony itself. And, for Part III, the controversy around the Will Smith-Chris Rock altercation.

Forgive me for being a little off my game on Oscars night. I think any of us who care about this organization and these awards – however silly and uncool it may be to admit that right now – probably was going through something inexplicable for the final hour of the show and the rest of the night. It is understandable. But, Last Cinema Standing exists to celebrate the art of film, and it felt that night like the art got short shrift. So, today, I want to talk about the winners, the speeches, and all these wonderful films.

Sian Heder’s CODA, purchased by Apple TV+ for $25 million at the Sundance Film Festival last year, won Best Picture. Heder also won for her adapted screenplay, and Troy Kotsur won Supporting Actor for the film. CODA is a lovely little film whose victory made a lot of history – first Sundance premiere to win it all, third Best Picture ever directed by a woman, and most importantly, first film from a streaming service to win the Academy’s top award.

I liked CODA a lot and recommend it to everyone, but there is a case to be made this Oscars triumph is probably the worst thing that could happen to it. The things we will discuss in Parts II and III of this series notwithstanding, the Academy Awards are a marker of quality for many people. They confer importance and imply a certain thematic heft, and not all films hold up under that weight. Green Book is a recent example that comes to mind, and CODA is miles better than Green Book.

It is ultimately a feel-good film, and these are definitely feel-bad times. No one can begrudge the Academy choosing a movie that made voters feel good for a couple of hours amid the events unfolding all around us. But, fair or not, the sober light of day and the slow passage of time are likely to cast a harsher shadow on this film because it carries a Best Picture badge.

Kotsur’s speech was probably the best of the night, especially with the context that last year’s Supporting Actress winner, Yuh-jung Youn, stood by his side, holding his Oscar statue so he could sign with both hands. The speech was smart, funny, heartfelt, and emblematic of all the reasons Academy voters felt compelled to vote for Kotsur and the film.

All four acting categories went to the expected winners: Will Smith for Actor, Jessica Chastain for Actress, Kotsur for Supporting Actor, and Ariana DeBose for Supporting Actress. Chastain’s speech was rambling and odd, but this moment has been a long time coming for her and she can be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by it. I might have preferred Olivia Colman or Penélope Cruz, but that’s me voting with my head and not my heart. The heart says it was great to see Chastain holding an Academy Award.

DeBose’s history-making win was an early emotional moment in the show, as she acknowledged her queerness, shared her experience as a woman of color, and gave encouragement to people living in fear of putting their true selves out into the world. In a nice moment, she tipped her cap to Rita Moreno, who previously won the award for playing the same character.

Kenneth Branagh won his first career Oscar with an Original Screenplay win for Belfast. This is fine, and Belfast is a good movie, but it really makes you wonder if Paul Thomas Anderson is ever going to get up on that stage. He couldn’t get there for There Will Be Blood, an indisputable modern masterpiece. Phantom Thread and Licorice Pizza didn’t do it. What will it have to look like for PTA to clear this final hurdle?

Anderson was not the only person or company unable to clear the final hurdle, however. Netflix once again came up short of the top prize it so desperately desires as The Power of the Dog went an almost unheard-of 1-for-12. Jane Campion won Best Director, becoming just the third woman ever to win that award. This is the first time since 1967 that a film has won Best Director and nothing else – Mike Nichols and The Graduate managed to pull this same trick that year. Why did The Power of the Dog lose so many awards? I think it comes back to what we talked about – admiration vs. love. Voters just didn’t love it, and they rewarded the one person most responsible for their admiration, the director.

Dune won just about everything below the line, missing only Makeup and Hairstyling (which went to The Eyes of Tammy Faye) and Costume Design (which went to Cruella). I tried to get too clever in my predictions and outthought myself in Editing and Production Design. Voters clearly just checked the box next to Dune everywhere it made sense. As we said before, the road is now paved for Dune Part II – whenever it comes out – to sweep the Oscars in a fashion not seen since Slumdog Millionaire or The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.

We correctly predicted Drive My Car in International Feature, Encanto in Animated Feature, and Summer of Soul in Documentary Feature, which taken together, means Flee was shut out. Hopefully, more people will discover that film in the years to come and its stature will only grow. We will get to Drive My Car director Ryûsuke Hamaguchi’s speech in the next installment, when we talk about the show itself, but I felt bad for Amhir “Questlove” Thompson, who won his Documentary award in the immediate aftermath of the Will Smith-Chris Rock incident.

That is a terrible spot to be forced into. Summer of Soul was one of the best movies of any kind last year, and Questlove has been passionate about keeping the focus on the story and the people of Harlem and the wrongly forgotten events chronicled in his film. Then, to have the crowning moment of the film’s run spoiled by something completely unrelated, it’s just a bummer. Questlove’s speech was humble, gracious, and endearing, but of all the winners Sunday night, he most deserved better.

Billie Eilish and Finneas won Best Original Song for their No Time to Die title track, proving that the modern Academy just can’t stop awarding James Bond songs. At least this is not as bad as when voters awarded Sam Smith’s truly awful Spectre song, “Writing’s on the Wall.” Mostly, I am disappointed Lin-Manuel Miranda missed out on his EGOT yet again, but he will absolutely have other chances.

I missed all three of the shorts categories. Star power basically always helps because people tend to vote for their friends or, failing that, people they recognize. So, it is unsurprising that The Queen of Basketball won Best Documentary Short, produced as it is by NBA stars Stephen Curry and Shaquille O’Neal. Director Ben Proudfoot was nominated in the same category last year for the superior A Concerto Is a Conversation, but at 31 years old, he is clearly a talented filmmaker who is likely to be competing in the feature categories someday if he so chooses.

On the same “star power drives votes” note, Oscar-nominated actor Riz Ahmed won for his live action short The Long Goodbye, which is powerful and shocking but also a little underdeveloped. Definitely check out his related feature-length film, Mogul Mowgli, which is excellent but probably was hurt by comparisons to the previous year’s The Sound of Metal. Much as I love Ahmed and am pleased to see him with an Academy Award, I would have picked the devastating Take and Run or the good-hearted On My Mind.

Overall, it is hard to take issue with any of the winners. There is nothing egregious here in the way of My Octopus Teacher or “Writing’s on the Wall.” Unfortunately, there was nothing terribly exciting either. Most everything went as predicted, and that is problematic in its own way. To some degree, the cumulative blandness of the winners paved the way for the Will Smith-Chris Rock incident to dominate the conversation. There was just nothing else to talk about with this show, so rightly or wrongly, that stepped in to fill the void.

Next time: Part II – Can the show be fixed?

Countdown to the Oscars: Best Documentary Feature

The Last Cinema Standing Countdown to the Oscars is your guide to the Academy Awards. We will cover each of the categories in depth, talk about history and what the award truly means, and predict some winners. Check back all month as we make our way to the big show, one category (each as important as the next) at a time.

Best Documentary Feature

The nominees are:

Ascension

Attica

Flee

Summer of Soul

Writing with Fire

A wrongly overlooked music festival. A tale of bravery and survival against the backdrop of war. An in-depth accounting of one of the darkest chapters of modern American policing. A meditation on the illusion of upward mobility. A tribute to resilience in the face of overwhelming odds. Often, there is a through line guiding the nominees in the Documentary Feature category. This year, that through line is simply that they are all great films.

An eclectic slate of nominees highlights a magnificent year for documentary film, in general. The quality of the films not nominated this year – including The First Wave, The Rescue, Faya Dayi and Procession – is evidence of the strength of this group. I have no strong argument against any of the four films I have seen – Writing with First was unavailable to me at the time of this writing – which is a lovely change of pace after one of the worst winners in the history of the category last year. But, let’s not talk about that again.

Summer of Soul – Questlove is an Oscar-nominated filmmaker. That’s pretty cool to think about. It makes a certain amount of sense. The Grammy-winning The Roots musician is a polymath and an artistic soul. There was never any reason to doubt he could make a great documentary, but what he has produced with Summer of Soul transcends the genre. It is simply a great, great film.

Intercutting new interviews with long-lost archival footage of the 1969 Harlem Cultural Festival, Questlove (né Amhir Thompson) creates a stunning portrait of a movement and a moment. The film is a celebration of black excellence, as well as a critique of the media forces that kept this excellence hidden for so long. The film’s very existence forces us to question why it took one year to get a Woodstock documentary and more than 50 to get this picture. Every element of the filmmaking is superb, and on top of all of that, the music is just so damn good.

Flee – The presence of Jonas Poher Rasmussen’s animated feature in this category is evidence of how far the documentary branch has come over the years. It is not a perfect branch by any means – the 1994 omission of Hoop Dreams will always loom large over its history, as well as countless other inexplicable snubs – but it was only 33 years ago that The Thin Blue Line was disqualified from competition for relying too much on reenactments. Keep in mind, that film literally saved a man’s life.

Now, we get Flee, a film whose great strength lies in its use of animation to reenact a private history to which we could never otherwise gain access. Though set three decades ago, the story of a family of refugees escaping war and persecution remains sadly relevant, and their struggle to reach a new land remains disappointingly reflective of too many families’ struggles today. Through the life of one man, we gain a greater appreciation for the lives of many, which is what the best documentaries accomplish. This is rightfully among the best.

Attica – I admit to ignorance of the details of the Attica Prison Uprising prior to watching this film. Like many people, I suspect, my memory of its importance comes mostly from Al Pacino’s invocation of the prison during a pivotal moment in Dog Day Afternoon. With this film, director Stanley Nelson takes 50 years of history and makes it feel like a vital piece of the conversation of today.

The filmmaker uses modern-day interviews with several of the former prisoners who participated in the uprising to give context to news footage and archival video of the incident. The slow burn of tension in the standoff and negotiations builds to a harrowing climax when the government forcibly retakes the prison, resulting in the deaths of 33 mostly black and latino inmates and 10 prison employees. All but four were killed by police gunfire. If you have watched any news in the past 50 years, you know what happened to the officers who used excessive force to slay nearly 40 people. Not a thing.

Ascension – A truly fascinating piece of reportage, first-time feature director Jessica Kingdon’s film is a damning indictment of the Chinese Dream, which bears a striking resemblance to the “dream” of another nation that thinks itself all powerful. Kingdon eschews typical narrative structure, instead opting for a series of vignettes to depict the many facets of the Chinese economy. 

At times, the film is shocking in the sheer scope of certain operations within the nation, but where it truly shines is in its patience to linger on the details of life in the Chinese system. Factory work is a combination of mind-numbing repetitiveness and breakneck speed. The business world is all fake pleasantries and shiny facades. Service with a smile comes with the caveat that only certain teeth should be shown in that smile. And, on and on.

Writing with Fire – I intend to watch this film before the show but feel safe in projecting it as running fourth or fifth in the category, given it was the most surprising nominee of the bunch. The first Indian feature to be nominated for Best Documentary, Sushmit Ghosh’s and Rintu Thomas’ film captures the day-to-day lives of the women who run the Khabar Lahariya news agency. I look forward to watching the film, which will debut on PBS the day after the Academy Awards ceremony.

The final analysis

The Documentary category has been home to some great features among the nominees over the years, but recently, I have found the winners less than inspiring. Icarus was a fine winner in 2017, though it beat out the far superior Faces Places. I remain in the minority with serious reservations about 2018’s Free Solo, while American Factory is interesting but not transcendent in the way of Honeyland or The Edge of Democracy, which it beat in 2019. Did I mention already that last year’s My Octopus Teacher is one of the worst winners in the history of the award?

The last truly great film to win this award came in 2016, when Ezra Edelman’s O.J.: Made in America took home the prize. I named that film the second-best of the decade, and I stand by that. I bring up all this history to say every one of this year’s nominees that I have seen is better than every previous winner going back to Edelman’s film. So, no matter what wins, a great film will be rewarded.

Summer of Soul is the frontrunner, having won most of the significant critics awards leading up the Oscars and being generally beloved. Music documentaries tend to do very well in this category with recent winners such as 20 Feet from Stardom and Searching for Sugar Man, as well as the aforementioned Woodstock in 1970. 

It is conceivable that the triple-nominated Flee will find enough support to snatch a victory here, but it seems more likely it will go 0-for-3, which is a shame for such a great piece of work. The sneaky pick would be Attica, for which Nelson actually did beat Questlove for the Directors Guild Award for achievement in documentary. The subject matter is right in the Academy’s wheelhouse, and Nelson is a modern master of the historical documentary format who certainly deserves to be rewarded by his peers.

Anything could happen Sunday, and anything would be deserving, which is a refreshing change of pace. Based on all the buzz and its box office popularity, I am going with Summer of Soul (...Or, When the Revolution Could Not Be Televised), but if it lands another way, we cannot say we will be surprised.

Will win: Summer of Soul

Should win: Summer of Soul

Should have been here: The First Wave

Next time: Best Original Screenplay