Tag: story

Seven striking images by Africa’s new creative wave

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6 Girma Berta

Ethiopian photographer Girma Berta pictures ordinary people going about their daily lives. In some images, they are working, in others they are playing, and in a few it’s hard to tell what exactly they are doing. But more often than not, they look like they are on their way somewhere, which, according to Amoako, creates a universality to his images. “We’re all going somewhere,” she says. “There’s a sense of an epic tale, a hero’s journey with which the viewer can connect empathetically.”

In Berta’s award-winning series Moving Shadows I and II, the working-class citizens in his hometown Addis Ababa are photographed, cut out, and the isolated figures are placed against vibrant backgrounds. But more recently, the artist has been travelling the continent to find his subjects. One of his more recent series titled The Motion shows people in African capitals on bikes, their background seemingly manipulated to suggest fast movement. “My photography style is focused on capturing the unique energy and personality of people living in urban areas,” the artist says. “I’m particularly drawn to the vibrant atmosphere of big cities, where people from all walks of life come together in a bustling mix of cultures, sounds, and sights.

“Through my photographs, I seek to showcase the vibrancy and diversity of the African continent, emphasising the beauty and strength of its people and creating a space for creativity and positivity to thrive,” he adds. “In this way, my work aims to bring about meaningful change and to empower people to embrace a spirit of joy and self-expression.”

As We See It by Aida Amoako is published by Hachette.

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March 19, 2023
The American designers who were ignored

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“Charles himself really did say that it was an equal partnership and alliance,” says Desmarais. And one would like to think Ray’s involvement is now fully recognised, but as late as 2006 The New York Times Magazine was referring to the couple as “The Eames brothers”.

The 1960s and 70s saw second-wave feminists embrace pattern and decoration as a feminist strategy. This included Wendy Maruyama, one of the first women to enrol in a Master of Fine Arts Furniture Making Programme in the US. Maruyama, known for her innovative wooden furniture, has said of her early work that it was “about being empowered in what is traditionally a male-dominated field”.

“She introduced colour when furniture makers were still in this ‘reverence for wood’ period,” says Falino. “The guys were all about the wood and the grain, and she challenged that. She also inserted a kind of jauntiness and attitude into her process. Her work has a great physicality, a more sculptural presence. She achieved what the guys couldn’t. They were following the herd and she refused to do that.”

Maruyama, now in her 70s, is still going strong. “Her work more recently has engaged with broader issues relating to the environment and the treatment of animals. She’s certainly someone who has a very strong engagement through her practice,” says Desmarais.

Let’s hope that exhibitions such as Parall(elles) will bring greater recognition to all these phenomenal women. But Desmarais notes that although more attention has been given to designers such as Driscoll in recent years, “much more work remains to be done to bring the achievements of these women to light.”

And Falino says there is still work to be done around the position of contemporary female designers. Although many are now reaching the tops of their professions, “we all know, women are still not being paid the same as men. There is still a resentment you can find if you’re trying to make your way in a field like architecture which has a preponderance of men,” she says.

“In 125 years, if you think of the span of the show, we’ve come a long way. But do we have further to go? Absolutely.”

Parall(elles): A History of Women in Design is at the Montreal Museum of Fine Arts until 28 May 2023.

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March 17, 2023
The six ancient Norse myths that still resonate today

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3 Myth of the end

Ragnarök (the doom of the gods) is the Norse end of the world, clearly echoed in the Christian Armageddon. In Norse mythology, Ragnarök culminates in a final battle between gods and the demons and giants, ending in the death of the gods. The world ends in fire and ice.

It’s George RR Martin’s “Winter is Coming”. The saying in Game of Thrones is House Stark’s motto – it is situated in the North of Westeros and often hit hardest by cold winters – but is also a general warning that bad things are going to happen. And Ragnarök is also a popular theme in Scandinavian death metal or Viking Metal, which draws on Norse mythology.

In Ragnarök, the older generation of gods will be destroyed. “There is an inevitability to this,” writes Larrington in her book. “Even the warriors in Valhalla can’t defeat the cosmic forces. After this mythical end the world will rise again. But the question remains, will it be an improvement on the old?” In her retelling of the myth, Ragnarok: The End of the Gods, author AS Byatt decides that the world is not coming back, while for writer Neil Gaiman in his book Norse Mythology, there are echoes of Animal Farm. The new generation of gods repeat the same moves, and history repeats itself. Ragnarök is both in the future – and in the past.

4 Myth of the wanderer in search of wisdom

Odin, the father of Thor and creator of the Norse world, is also the god of war, poetry, runes, magic and the dead. But he is not all-knowing, and wanders both the human and divine worlds in search of wisdom. This comes at a price. When he reaches the Well of Urd, he is told that to sip the water of wisdom he must sacrifice an eye.

Odin the wanderer inspired JRR Tolkien’s Gandalf. He also lent his name to Wednesday, from the Old English “wōdnesdæg”, originally from “Woden” (Odin). In the Marvel universe, he is always portrayed with his right eye missing – a wise figure, with a blind spot.

“Odin shapes the way we think about continuing to learn, but at the same time he is seen as a patriarchal force who must ultimately step aside, and we see this dichotomy a lot in contemporary politics,” says Larrington. “At the end of the Norse world, a new generation of gods will come, with new, untested ideas. But there is a sense that these will prevail.”

5 Myths of masculinity

There is a paradox of masculinity in the Norse world. On the one hand, there is the blond-haired athletic Viking hero, adventuring, trading, writing poetry and carving runes, and on the other hand there is the raping, pillaging Berserker, destroying all in his wake.

Some reimaginings have even bestowed Vikings with an almost cuddly quality, as in the 20th-Century children’s books Noggin the Nog, or have parodied them, as in the Terry Jones film Eric the Viking. Probably the prevailing myth, though, is of a heroic, adventurous band of brothers confident of their place in the world.

But it’s a myth that is open to disturbing reinterpretations. “In the [mid]-19th Century, the figure of the adventurous Viking was used to underpin doctrines of Aryan superiority,” says Larrington. “Today the males exercising power over women have their own adoptees in far-right, white groups, who want women to ‘know their place’.” That’s not to dismiss the myth as irrelevant, Larrington argues. The figure of the Viking warrior has always represented a struggle and a need for balance: between heroic rage, personal honour, courage – and openness to love. And that conflict between the idea of traditional male values and men who inhabit a world of women resonates as much now as ever.

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March 16, 2023
How Shrinking perpetuates Hollywood’s most sexist cliché

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Why do male writers in TV, film and literature continue to engage in this trope? What does it tell us about the gender dynamics in fiction? And is there any hope on the horizon that it may be consigned to the creative dustbin?

Izzie Austin is a film writer doing a PhD that examines revenge in teen movies at Swinburne University, Australia. Before refining their subject, for a while they were looking into revenge films more generally and have therefore had to sit through a great many works that are guilty of indulging this sexist phenomenon, commonly known as “fridging”. “There are so many films where they just introduce a wife in one scene and then kill her immediately,” they say, citing the infamous Death Wish franchise, in which Charles Bronson becomes a vigilante after his wife is murdered, as particularly egregious. “It’s insulting to the female characters because their only function is how they make other characters feel and then it’s insulting to the male characters because they don’t actually get to feel anything new.”

The origins of “fridging”

It was in 1999 that comic-book writer Gail Simone first gave a name to the trope, coining the term “Women in Refrigerators syndrome” to refer to a trend she noticed in superhero stories for female characters being killed off to provide motivation for the male protagonists. The turn of phrase was inspired by a 1994 Green Lantern story, in which the Green Lantern discovers that his girlfriend has been killed and stuffed into a fridge and, as Austin puts it, “Dead wife make man sad; man process sad by doing violence”.

If this trope has only been given a name in the last few decades, it has been conspicuous through the whole history of storytelling. “These are narratives that extend way way back,” says Dr Miriam Kent, lecturer in film and media at the University of Leeds and author of Women in Marvel Films. A fairy tale like Sleeping Beauty, which dates back to the 16th Century, involves a comatose princess who must be rescued by a prince. These notions of female sublimation and male agency have always pervaded Western literature, and, in recent centuries, TV and film. In the 1970s, literature professor Joseph Campbell’s seminal book The Hero’s Journey set out the structure for a classic “quest narrative” which “generally involved a masculine hero and a princess”, says Kent, and his storytelling theory went on to inform films like Star Wars. “The idea is that these are structures that are so ingrained within Western cultures and Western societies that they’re almost unconscious,” she says.

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March 15, 2023
The ‘new Bayeux tapestries’ revealing hidden histories

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In their work, the Keiskamma artists consider all kinds of local experience, from climate change to HIV/Aids, and the struggle for racial justice and gender equality. Pride of place in the exhibition goes to the first chapter in the Keiskamma Art Project’s story: the Keiskamma Tapestry. Completed in 2003, it’s a landmark in community embroidery: one that preserves 300 years of Eastern Cape history across 120m of red-ochre hessian.

At the start we see San bushmen, whose silhouettes echo their depiction in their own ancient rock art. Everyday rural life and Xhosa culture is remembered alongside scenes of colonial invasion and atrocities committed by Dutch and British soldiers in the 18th and 19th Century Frontier Wars. Further down the tapestry, Nelson Mandela is burning his passbook in protest of the Sharpeville Massacre – sewn defiantly next to the “architect of apartheid” Hendrink Verwoerd. Images of torture and resistance, including the Soweto uprising, appear before we see hand-stitched ballot boxes from South Africa’s first democratic election in 1994.

“When we look back we’re sort of reinstating our history for the world to see who we are,” long-established Keiskamma artist Veronica Betani tells BBC Culture.

“The history of Hamburg is also the history of South Africa, with all of its unresolved colonial legacies and difficult epidemic histories,” says the exhibition’s co-curator Azu Nwagbogu. “The resilience and will of the people have been crafted into tapestries.”

The power of the process

When people come together to sew local history, they create a space that can be just as important as the end result. The Keiskamma Art Project began when free embroidery training workshops were opened by the Keiskamma Trust in 2002. Women were paid for everything sewn, numbers grew, and the Keiskamma studio became a hub for studying local history, sharing memories, and weaving those stories into tapestries. Today, Keiskamma arts are a vital source of local income, but visual artist and educator Nobukho Nqaba explains that Keiskamma artists also “share, stitch and write personal and collective trauma – experienced by a majority of black South Africans – as a way of healing.”

“We lost so many colleagues on the road,” says Betani. “Some years back I thought I was not going to make it because I was diagnosed with depression, and then epilepsy. After that, I found out that I’m HIV positive. All those things made me think ‘this is the end of the road’ but it was not. So, I’m the one rising and dying as the moon does.” The success of the Keiskamma Tapestry meant Betani and her colleagues embarked on other commemorative works that also feature in the retrospective, including the Keiskamma Guernica and the Keiskamma Altarpiece. Both reflect on the impact of HIV/Aids in Hamburg. Blankets from the Keiskamma Treatment Centre are appliquéd into the Guernica tapestry, while the Altarpiece sanctifies local grandmothers who cared for their families during the epidemic.

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March 14, 2023
John Wick: Chapter 4: ‘Soars above most action films’

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And in Paris, Wick has a meeting with the Marquis, the Eiffel Tower providing a picturesque backdrop. A big, climactic scene is set on the steps and in the shadow of Sacré-Coeur. The backdrops make the criminal underworld look like the subject of a glossy fashion-magazine photo shoot. There is nothing wrong with that, but it is a sign of a slender plot engineered to suit the settings.

The film echoes a central question from all the Wick films, though: is he a natural-born murderer? Or a good man underneath it all? “This is who you are,” the Marquis tells him. “A killer.” The question is pointedly unresolved here. Beneath the supersized action, the character hasn’t deepened over time. For an action series, that isn’t a flaw, but it is a missed opportunity.

The franchise is already growing in new directions. The Continental, a three-episode spin-off series coming this year on Peacock, is set in the 1970s and tells the origin story of Winston and his hotel. Production has finished on Ballerina, set between Wick 3 and 4, starring Ana de Armas as a dancing assassin. We don’t know if she kills en pointe, but we do know Reeves is in the film. Apparently, as long as the franchise keeps making money, one way or another John Wick will never die.

★★★★☆

John Wick: Chapter 4 is released on 24 March.

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March 13, 2023
Daisy Jones & the Six: A wild tale of rock ‘n’ roll excess

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There is a slight cognitive dissonance in the first few episodes of Daisy Jones & The Six, for when the band start to play, the viewer naturally expects to hear a familiar song, perhaps even a Fleetwood Mac number (there is a needle-drop of Rumours track Gold Dust Woman eventually used with poignancy in a pivotal moment towards the end of the series). But the repeated use of original songs like Regret Me and Look At Us Now (Honeycomb) mean that by the end of the series, the songs are seared into the viewer’s memory. Which, fortuitously, is a good tie in with the fact that band’s album, Aurora, was released on Atlantic Records, on the same day the first three episodes premiered.

Is it weird seeing a band you’ve imagined as a fictional construct then come into actual being? “It’s the coolest thing ever,” says Jenkins Reid. “I love mythologising a band, if I could do it 17 more times I would. I absolutely love it, it’s been the joy of my career to find this little pocket of storytelling. To now see that something I made up is now standing in front of me, I compare it to a 3D-printer that’s attached to my brain that’s now made it real. It’s incredibly, incredibly gratifying.”

Much of the credit for how authentic the band feels on screen can be handed to the actors, including Riley Keough as Daisy Jones, Sam Claflin as Billy, and Suki Waterhouse, Will Harrison, Josh Whitehouse and Sebastian Chacon on stage as their various bandmates. “Every sound you hear coming out of their mouth is all theirs,” Mendelsohn explains. “Riley put in an insane amount of work and training.” Despite Keough being Elvis’s grand-daughter, “she had never sung before,” he adds. “When we cast her [it was] simply because of her extraordinary talent.

“When Riley came into audition, it was a transformative moment for all of us for the series. She was our Daisy – there was not another actor that we considered. Once we had Riley, we needed someone who could be her equal, and when we met Sam, similar to Riley, we were blown away. He embodied Billy – soulful, powerful. When the two of them had a chemistry read, there was just electricity and we knew we had a really great match between them.”

The enforced downtime of the pandemic meant the actors had longer to train and hone their musical skills and voices, and the result is a band, that, to all intents and purposes, could have been that genre-defining, chart-topping outfit so enthrallingly imagined by Jenkins Reid on the page.

As the series concludes over the next couple of weeks, what remains to be seen is quite how high this semi-fictional-semi-real band can fly. Could the album Aurora hit the upper echelons of the charts, and might a stadium live tour even follow? When asked during the press launch of the series whether they would go on tour, the actors were coy. “We might,” said Keough, while Claflin said: “I hope so… I’d love to. It would be a huge bonus for us to have the opportunity to come together and play again in whatever capacity. We’ll do small venues, birthday parties, bar mitzvahs… whatever!”

The first six episodes of Daisy Jones & The Six are now available on Amazon Prime Video, and the final four episodes will be released on 17 and 24 March.

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March 13, 2023
Oscars 2023: ‘A slap in the face for Hollywood’

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At the end of the Oscars, the ceremony’s host, Jimmy Kimmel, strode into the wings and flipped a number one on to a board that read: “Number of Oscar Telecasts Without Incident”. It was only natural that Kimmel should make so many jokes about last year’s Incident, but even if you had somehow forgotten about Will Smith slapping and swearing at Chris Rock, that closing gag would have made sense. In recent years, the Oscars have often been debacles, whether that was because of the envelope mix-up in 2017 or the socially distanced gloom in 2021, but this time the event was slick and competent enough to convince you that the producers and directors actually knew what they were doing.

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Kimmel was relaxed and in control: he even finished by mentioning that he would be back on his talk show the following night, as if to suggest that this was just another evening’s work for him. No one made any embarrassing mispronunciations or gaffes. The introductory speeches weren’t too painful, and the jokes weren’t bad. The In Memoriam round-up was touching, with a well-judged, tearful introduction by John Travolta and a piano ballad performed by Lenny Kravitz. The dresses were sparkly, and the gold and silver art-deco stage decorations evoked the glamorous hotels and ocean liners of Hollywood’s golden age. Everything lulled you into imagining that the screw-ups of the past few years were just a bad dream.

It’s true that long stretches of the three-and-a-half-hour bash were boring and repetitive, but that’s almost always the case with awards ceremonies, and there were only a couple of obvious flaws. (The practice of starting the music before recipients have finished their acceptance speeches is as infuriating and insulting as ever.) And the winners in each category seemed to have been picked according to which one would provide the most warm and cosy feelings. They all seemed to be decent human beings who were grateful for their prizes while emphasising that film-making, like life, is a team effort. None of them appeared to be at risk of being cancelled. The director of An Irish Goodbye, which won best live action short film, used his allotted time to ask the audience to sing “Happy Birthday” to the film’s star, James Martin. And nobody slapped anyone. Even if you didn’t think the best man or woman won in every category, there weren’t many results that would have had a reasonable person throwing a shoe at the TV screen and yelling, “How dare they?”

That fuzzy feeling started with wins for Jamie Lee Curtis for best supporting actress and Ke Huy Quan for best supporting actor, both for their roles in Everything Everywhere All at Once. Admittedly, Angela Bassett didn’t look too pleased that she hadn’t been given the best supporting actress prize, but Curtis is a trooper who has kept working without much recognition, so most people could hardly object to her triumph. Quan, meanwhile, gave up on acting after his childhood roles in Indiana Jones & The Last Crusade and The Goonies, so his win was a celebration of second chances. (The emotional highlight of the ceremony came when he hugged Indiana Jones himself, Harrison Ford, when Everything Everywhere All at Once won best picture.) Another beloved star making a comeback was Brendan Fraser, who was named best actor for The Whale, after more than a decade when he was a long way off Hollywood’s A-list. It was tricky to work out what exactly his rambling speech was about, but he was clearly overwhelmed, as was everyone who had been thrilled by the “Brenaissance”. And Michelle Yeoh’s best actress prize, also for Everything Everywhere All at Once, was a celebration of her long career, a fillip to “ladies” who had been told they were “past your prime”, in her words, and a sign that Hollywood was finally ready to honour Asian and Asian-American talent. “To all the little girls and boys who look like me,” she said, “this is the beacon of hope.”

That was the central theme of the night. The big winner, with seven Oscars including best picture, best director and best original screenplay, was Everything Everywhere All at Once, a film that not only had an Asian-American co-director, Daniel Kwan, but was also all about an Asian immigrant family. (Well, that and universe-hopping supervillains, anyway.) But there was also Naatu Naatu from RRR, the first time a song from an Indian production had won the best original song Oscar: the composer, MM Keeravani, sang his acceptance speech to the tune of the Carpenters’ Top of the World. And the best documentary short film winner, The Elephant Whisperers, was Indian, too. What that meant was that while the ceremony seemed on one level to be a mellow, old-fashioned affair, with nothing much to be shocked or upset by, it was nonetheless radical in its own quiet way.

The absence of so many of Hollywood’s biggest names, Tom Cruise and James Cameron among them, hinted that the US film industry’s certainties are crumbling. The major, historic studios had to content themselves with a sound design award for Top Gun: Maverick, a visual effects award for Avatar: The Way of Water, and a costume design award for Black Panther: Wakanda Forever. It was an independent studio, A24, that was behind Everything Everywhere All at Once, a heady science-fiction martial-arts comedy that wouldn’t even have been nominated for an Oscar a decade ago. A24 was also behind The Whale. The evening’s other big winner, All Quiet on the Western Front, was a German production that was funded by Netflix, and that same streaming service bankrolled the winner of the animated feature Oscar, Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio. The whole evening could be read as Hollywood’s confession that it doesn’t make the best films any more – or, at least, the kind of films that win Oscars. So maybe Kimmel was wrong to joke that the telecast had passed without incident. It was a smooth, happy affair, but it was a slap in the face for Hollywood.

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March 13, 2023
The 100 greatest children’s books: Voting terms & conditions

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March 12, 2023
The Last of Us finale review: A knotty, violent ending

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Nonetheless, Joel wakes up in a dilapidated hospital, and is told the news by Firefly leader Marlene (Merle Dandridge): the Cordyceps fungus that has taken root inside Ellie’s brain holds the key to saving mankind, but there is no way to remove it without killing the host. As we’re shown in the opening flashback – starring the impressive Ashley Johnson, the original voice of Ellie, as the character’s mother – Marlene was there when Ellie was born. Which, no matter the size of the big picture, makes her decision to sedate Ellie without giving her a choice feel ruthlessly pragmatic. Yet that arguably pales in comparison to what comes next.

There is something about the brutal, nihilistic nature of post-apocalyptic fiction that makes it particularly susceptible to reactionary politics. These are cruel worlds where conservative values reign supreme; macho Wild West fantasies where only the strong and self-interested survive, and where men reclaim their place as gun-toting hunter-gatherers. Despite its ostensibly liberal politics – episode three’s tender gay love story being the prime example – The Last of Us has not exactly proved the exception to the rule (for that, you should seek out another HBO series, last year’s sublime Station Eleven). Although the scene where Joel rampages through the hospital, killing everyone as he goes – a man with his hands up in surrender, a relatively harmless surgeon, a pleading Marlene – before dooming the world to misery and death, does at least subvert the idea of the noble strongman.

Much like in the game, you start out rooting for Joel, because you want him to save Ellie, but the knotty nature of his choices (including lying to her about what happened), even if they are perfectly understandable, ultimately challenges your sense of right and wrong. It’s an ending about the difficulty of love at all costs, and what it means to find something to live for amid the ashes. The original voice actor of Joel, Troy Baker, once rationalised the character’s decision: “People have asked me, ‘why would Joel do that when he could have saved the world?’, and my answer to them is always this – he did, he did save the world. It’s just that the world was that girl, and that’s it.”

Still, it’s an act that will have consequences. This will no doubt become more obvious in the next series, an adaptation of The Last of Us: Part II, a sequel that explores how Joel’s actions, from another character’s perspective, are indefensibly selfish and obscene. It is a lengthy, meaty story about how there is no such thing as heroes and villains, how everyone is simply the protagonist in their own story. It is about as bold and interesting as sequels get.

In the meantime, we have the first series of The Last of Us. The show has become a staggering success. Ratings are high. Buzz abounds. Never in my wildest dreams did I imagine my mother would know what a Clicker is. It is, by far, the greatest video-game adaptation ever made, even if it falls short of truly great television. What was fresh and exciting in video games in 2013 can often feel derivative and well-worn in 2023 TV. But none of that matters much when the characters are this absorbing, the performances this strong. Joel’s choice might not have saved the world, but it has bought The Last of Us a long, shocking, harrowing future. We should be grateful to him for it.

★★★★☆

You can catch up with The Last of US on HBO Max in the US and NOW in the UK

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March 12, 2023
Nine Oscars red-carpet outfits once mocked – now iconic

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6 Nicole Kidman, 1997

At first glance, there doesn’t seem to be too much controversial about Nicole Kidman’s 1997 Christian Dior gown, a satin chartreuse-coloured couture creation by John Galliano, who had recently been appointed creative director for the design house. But it marked a landmark moment for the Oscars red carpet. “The dress was magnificent, but it was a polarising colour, and unfortunately for Nicole Kidman, this was the time where, thanks to Joan Rivers, the red-carpet critic was really rising,” says Mulhearn. Rivers, who had hosted E!’s pre-awards show since the mid-90s, called it “the ugliest dress I’ve ever seen”.

She didn’t stop there. “She literally put her finger down at her throat on TV, which was so outrageous in itself, but what it also did was terrify all the actresses on the red carpet, making them start to question their own taste and doubt their choices.”

No-one wanted to be Rivers’ next target, so stars increasingly started to rely on personal stylists to dress them. “That’s really when the commercialisation of the red carpet came to the fore,” says Mulhearn. “Then, except for a few exceptions, it turned into the boring parade of pretty dresses that we saw from 2002 to 2010.”

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March 10, 2023
Oscars 2023: 10 things you need to know

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(Image credit: Getty Images)

Ahead of the ceremony on Sunday night, BBC Culture film critics Nicholas Barber and Caryn James pick out the controversies and talking points from this year’s Academy Awards so far.

The Fabelmans (Credit: Universal Pictures)

1. Have the Oscars fallen out of love with Hollywood?

In 2022, cinema’s biggest hits were Top Gun: Maverick and Avatar: The Way of Water, two mega-budget sequels with mile-high brand names and billion-dollar box-office takings. Meanwhile, The Fabelmans is a love letter to cinema from Tinseltown’s most cherished director, Steven Spielberg. But even though all three films are nominated for best picture at the Oscars, none of them is tipped to win it. It’s strange that such major Hollywood prestige projects are being dismissed as also-rans already, but this year’s awards voters have shown a preference for quirky indie films. One favourite, Tár, is a three-hour examination of power structures within the classical music world. Another, The Banshees of Inisherin, is a gloomy fable about people sitting and grumbling in a rural pub. And the frontrunner for best picture is a crazy yet heartfelt, universe-hopping martial-arts fantasy, Everything Everywhere All at Once. (NB)

2. The slap and the show

Will Smith might be watching from home in sweatpants, but he hovers over this year’s Oscar show like a ghost, a year after he caused jaws to drop around the world when he slugged Chris Rock on stage. Rock brought the incident back into the news with his recent Netflix special, letting his anger loose in a surgically-precise 10-minute rant against Smith. The Academy, having banned Smith for a decade, has hired a crisis management team in case of any ugly new incidents. But maybe it will all be turned into comedy. Jimmy Kimmel, hosting for the third time, has already started. In a video spoof of Top Gun: Maverick, he is hired by Jon Hamm and Charles Parnell, as their characters from the movie, who are looking for “a host who is unslappable and unflappable”. Kimmel, easygoing and likeable, may be just the guy to defuse any tension. He was hosting and caught off guard in 2017 when La La Land was wrongly announced as the best picture winner instead of Moonlight. If there are mishaps this time, he told the Wall Street Journal, “The only plan I have is to make sure to get up there onstage quickly.” He’s too smart not to have a backup plan. (CJ)

Ke Huy Quan in Everything Everywhere All at Once (Credit: Alamy)

3. The comeback kids get their second act

Hollywood can’t resist comeback stories, and two of them are being told at this year’s Oscars. One of them concerns Brendan Fraser, who was once a Hollywood superstar, acclaimed for his roles both in art-house dramas (Crash, Gods and Monsters) and mainstream fare (The Mummy, George of the Jungle). He slipped off the A-list more than a decade ago amid a flood of personal problems, but now he’s having what his fans are calling a “Brenaissance”: he earnt a best actor nomination for playing a morbidly obese recluse in Darren Aronofsky’s The Whale.

Similarly, Ke Huy Quan, the former child star of The Goonies and Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, abandoned acting in the 1990s because there were so few roles for Asian-Americans, but he returned to the big screen in Everything Everywhere All at Once, for which he’s been nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar. (The Quanaissance, anyone?) Still, that doesn’t mean that both Fraser and Quan will win their respective awards. Quan is the favourite for best supporting actor, but for best actor, Fraser may well lose out to Austin Butler, who plays Elvis Presley in Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis. If there’s one thing that the Academy adores even more than a comeback, it’s an actor playing a singer in a showbiz biopic: just think of Rami Malek in Bohemian Rhapsody and Jamie Foxx in Ray. (NB)

The Woman King (Credit: Sony Pictures)

4. Directors so male

Five slots for best director nominees and none of them are women. Daniel Kwan, the Asian-American half of the team known as Daniels, with Daniel Scheinert, is all that stands between this category being Directors So White as well. The omission of any women or black directors was so conspicuous that Woman King director Gina Prince-Bythewood called it out on behalf of all her snubbed counterparts in a column for The Hollywood Reporter. The other nominees, Steven Spielberg, Todd Field, Martin McDonagh and Ruben Östlund, did fine work, but so did Prince-Bythewood, whose film was brilliantly directed, and Sarah Polley, whose Women Talking is nominated for best picture. In the end, Daniels will very likely get the Oscar for Everything, Everywhere All at Once. They won the top precursors, including the Bafta and the Directors Guild award, and deserve to win for such a spectacular, audacious yet moving and relatable film. But the nominations this year leave a lingering sense of sliding backwards. (CJ)

All Quiet on The Western Front (Credit: Reiner Bajo/Netflix)

5. All Quiet… is making noise

Once upon a time, films in the best international feature film category (ie, films not in the English language) would hardly ever turn up in the best picture category, too. But that has changed recently, thanks in part to the influence of Netflix. In the past five years, Roma, Parasite and Drive My Car have all been nominated in both categories, and this year, Germany’s All Quiet on The Western Front has pulled off the same feat. What that suggests is that All Quiet… will almost certainly go on to win best international feature film, just as Roma, Parasite and Drive My Car did. Not that everyone is getting behind Edward Berger’s World War One drama. German critics have condemned it for straying too far from the source novel by Erich Maria Remarque. Other commentators are frustrated that an Indian crowd-pleaser, RRR, wasn’t even nominated for best international feature film, but that’s because India didn’t submit it as the country’s official contender. At least the Oscar-nominated song from RRR, Naatu Naatu, will be performed at the ceremony. (NB)

Oscars 2023 best picture nominees

All Quiet on the Western Front
Avatar: The Way of Water
The Banshees of Inisherin
Elvis
Everything Everywhere All at Once
The Fabelmans
Tár
Top Gun: Maverick
Triangle of Sadness
Women Talking

Danielle Deadwyler in Till (Credit: Universal Pictures)

6. The Riseborough case

Danielle Deadwyler seemed sure to get a best actress nomination for her role as the grief-stricken mother in Till. Then Andrea Riseborough came along. Barely a week before voting for nominations closed, social media lit up with celebrities touting Riseborough’s role as an alcoholic (easy Oscar bait) in the teeny-tiny film To Leslie. Edward Norton, Gwyneth Paltrow, Jennifer Aniston and many others promoted her, some pasting in their tweets the same phrase calling To Leslie “a small film with a giant heart”, as friends of the director, Michael Morris, substituted their influence for studio campaign money. Awards analysts saw that two black contenders – Deadwyler, who called the film’s snub “misogynoir,” and Viola Davis in The Woman King – had been elbowed out, leaving the whiff of white privilege hanging over the category. The Academy investigated to see if there were campaign violations, and in the end announced that they would clarify rules for the future. The race itself comes down to Michelle Yeoh, the likely winner, or Cate Blanchett, once assumed to have the award sewn up for Tár. But nominations change careers, and Deadwyler was, as they say, robbed. (CJ)

Colin Farrell in The Banshees of Inisherin (Credit: Searchlight Pictures)

7. The Luck of the Irish

Martin McDonagh has now been nominated for three best original screenplay Oscars. He didn’t win for In Bruges in 2009 or for Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri in 2018, so the Academy might decide that it should be third time lucky for the writer-director’s latest film, The Banshees of Inisherin. Having said that, it looks more likely that the high-concept loopiness of Everything Everywhere All at Once will clinch the screenplay award for Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheiner. But it’s quite a year for Irish talent, either way. Four of the stars of The Banshees of Inisherin have been Oscar-nominated: Colin Farrell for best actor, Kerry Condon for best supporting actress, and both Brendan Gleeson and Barry Keoghan for best supporting actor. Another Irishman, Paul Mescal, is up for the best actor prize for his role in Charlotte Wells’ debut, Aftersun. If that weren’t enough, Colm Bairéad’s The Quiet Girl, in which the dialogue is in Irish, has secured the country’s first nomination for best international feature film. And Northern Ireland’s An Irish Goodbye is in the short film category. Some Irish eyes are bound to be smiling on Sunday night. (NB)

James Hong giving his SAG acceptance speech (Credit: Getty Images)

8. Banner year for Asian actors

Everything Everywhere All at Once almost single-handedly changed the landscape for Asian actors this awards season. When Michelle Yeoh accepted her Golden Globe, she said it was for “every little girl that looks like me”, a theme that has resounded ever since. A record four Asian actors – or actors with Asian heritage – have Oscar nominations his year, including Yeoh for best actress, her co-star Ke Huy Quan, who has yet to lose a major best supporting actor race, and Stephanie Hsu for supporting actress as their daughter in the film. Hong Chau is also nominated in the supporting category for The Whale. James Hong, the 94-year-old actor who played the grandfather in EEAAO, recalled the early days of his career in his SAG acceptance speech for best ensemble. Once, he said, Asian actors weren’t considered good enough, and white actors taped back their eyes to play those roles. “Look at us now!” he cheered. This year’s Oscars at least raise the hope of widening opportunities in the future. (CJ)

Oscars 2023 directing nominees

Martin McDonagh (The Banshees of Inisherin)
Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert (Everything Everywhere All at Once)
Steven Spielberg (The Fabelmans)
Todd Field (Tár)
Ruben Östlund (Triangle of Sadness)

Cate Blanchett in Tár (Credit: Universal Pictures)

9. A sticky situation for Tár

The two women most likely to win the best actress Oscar are Cate Blanchett for Tár and Michelle Yeoh for Everything Everywhere All at Once. But Blanchett has two Oscars already, so the Academy may be inclined to celebrate Yeoh instead. Besides, Tár has been, well, tarred by some controversy. Written and directed by Todd Field, the film is a complex portrait of an internationally renowned conductor who uses her pre-eminence to exploit other women. Marin Alsop, who also happens to be an internationally renowned conductor, took it personally. “I was offended,” she told The Sunday Times. “I was offended as a woman, I was offended as a conductor, I was offended as a lesbian. To have an opportunity to portray a woman in that role and to make her an abuser – for me that was heartbreaking.” Blanchett’s response: “It’s a meditation on power, and… I think that power is a corrupting force no matter what one’s gender is. I think it affects all of us.” (NB)

Alexei Navalny in Navalny (Credit: Warner Bros)

10. Politics, Russia and Ukraine

Navalny, the strong frontrunner for best documentary, premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in January 2022, but this portrait of the Russian resistance leader is timelier than ever, with Alexei Navalny in prison, isolated and in poor health, and more than a year after Vladimir Putin’s army invaded Ukraine. Last year, negotiations for Ukraine President Volodymyr Zelensky to appear in a video message at the Oscars came to nothing. Instead, there was a moment of silence in support of Ukraine and a plea for donations to help its war-torn people – the least pointed response possible. No word on any official mention of Ukraine at this year’s show, and the Academy has again refused to allow Zelensky to address the ceremony – but there may be the same blue ribbons some stars wore to the Baftas, supporting refugees. And there are sure to be political speeches, especially if Navalny wins, as it should. Navalny himself speaks directly to the camera and in one startling episode poses as a Russian government investigator on a phone call to a Putin operative, who admits the government’s plot to poison him. That scene alone might be enough to win an Oscar. (CJ)

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March 10, 2023
Why Miley Cyrus is the ultimate 21st-Century pop star

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During the same year, Cyrus returned to hip-hop-infused pop with She Is Coming, a well-received EP featuring collaborations with Wu-Tang Clan rapper Ghostface Killah, singer-rapper Swae Lee and drag icon RuPaul. Teaming with the latter for a sassy track called Cattitude underscored Cyrus’s status as an LGBTQ role model; in past interviews, she has identified as pansexual and a “queer woman”. “I love her [sexual] fluidity, her queerness and how she is always unapologetically herself,” says ABISHA. Cyrus has also shown her support for this community by launching The Happy Hippie Foundation, a nonprofit that aims “to rally young people to fight injustice facing homeless youth, LGBTQ youth and other vulnerable populations”. Then at the 2019 Glastonbury festival, Cyrus proved she could pull together the disparate strands of her career with a wildly entertaining set peppered with clever cover versions. “She treated that slot like a rock headline show and threw herself into covering everything from Metallica to the original Nine Inch Nails song that inspired her Black Mirror track On a Roll,” Hunt says.

Cyrus followed her triumphant Glastonbury performance by honing her rock chops on 2020’s retro-leaning Plastic Hearts album, for which she duetted with two icons of the genre: Joan Jett and Billy Idol. She also kept one foot in pop’s present by scoring a zingy hit single, Prisoner, with fellow contemporary hitmaker Dua Lipa. So, as she enters a new era with Endless Summer Vacation, fans already know to expect the unexpected. As Cyrus told us back in 2020, she is an artist who “can’t be tamed”.

Cyrus’s successful shapeshifting reflects not just her own musical versatility, but also the unusually fluid musical era that she is navigating. “Even just a couple of years ago, it might have been [seen as] a bit strange for a big star who is known for one style of music to put out something in another style. But these days, it’s pretty commonplace,” says McIntyre. Still, he also believes that Cyrus can ride the genre-blurring wave so confidently because she has developed a genuinely distinctive voice. “We recognise her way of writing, whether [she is singing] a rock song, pop song or something else,” he says. It would be a little pat to suggest that every pivot she makes can be explained by quoting See You Again’s famous lyric: “She’s just being Miley.” However, 16 years after she branched out from Hannah Montana, there is no denying that Cyrus has built a formidable identity as a true musical chameleon. Whatever lane she decides to drive down next, people will be paying attention.

Endless Summer Vacation is out now.

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March 9, 2023
Naatu Naatu: Will this song make Oscars history?

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Given its historically resonant and emotional storyline, RRR’s resounding success in India is hardly surprising. However, its popularity with global audiences – winning a place on several “best films of 2022” lists – is unprecedented. It has become the highest grossing Indian film ever in Japan, since its release in late October. The New Yorker, in an interview with the film’s director SS Rajamouli – who won best director at the New York Film Critics Circle Awards in January – described it as “[a] joyously over-the-top action-fantasy,” while Rolling Stone declared it the “best – and most revolutionary – blockbuster of 2022”.

The film owes its success, in no small part, to its musical centrepiece, which Variety called “a movie-music adrenaline blast”. Naatu Naatu made Indian cinema history by winning the Golden Globe for best original song in January, defeating major contenders like Rihanna, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga. With an Oscar nomination for best original song, and a slated performance at the Academy Awards ceremony this Sunday, interest in the song is at an all-time high.

Social media phenomenon

While viewers in India have been humming the words and dancing to the tune, do they think this is unique or extraordinary? Perhaps not. Anand Krishnamoorthi, a sound designer working on south Indian films, while calling this song “trippy and enjoyable,” tells BBC Culture; “As Indian moviegoers, we have definitely heard better, whereas for an audience not so familiar with our kind of films, it may be fresh.” But there is no doubt about its impact. As Reem Khokhar, an Indian writer who set herself a dance challenge for an entire year, tells BBC Culture; “There was a raw, frenetic energy that just exploded on-screen, I haven’t enjoyed watching a song so much in a long time.”

Krishnamoorthi is, however, delighted that an Indian song has been nominated for best song at the Oscars. This has only happened once before, when composer AR Rahman won for Jai Ho from Slumdog Millionaire (2009). But that film was not strictly Indian, having been directed by Danny Boyle, along with a mostly British crew.

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March 8, 2023
The power of Forbidden Notebook’s hidden diary entries

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Yet while she faded from view in Italy, there was one place where her popularity soared. Following the election of Mohammad Khatami as President in 1997, Iran was going through something of a literary revolution with the government relaxing censorship, resulting in many books that had not been allowed before being published or republished. Writer and historian Arash Azizi was a teenager in Iran in the early 2000s. “If you went into a coffee shop in Iran in those days everyone was talking about books. Literature was really seen as this powerful thing that can really change the world.”

Bahman Farzaneh, a highly regarded Iranian translator who has translated books from Spanish and Italian – including Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude – translated many of De Céspedes’ works. “When you have someone like Bahman Farzaneh translating a book, you buy it just for the translator. They have the role of a cultural mediator,” says Azizi. Several of De Céspedes’ books were published in Persian, but Azizi says the one that stood out was Forbidden Notebook. “It was one of the most identifiable books of that era. Without fail, friends from Iran that are my age, they all remember the book.”

He recalls it being especially popular among women – not only his peers, but women in their 30s, 40s and older. “I remember many of my female friends related to how the main character’s husband calls her ‘mamma’, which she found very frustrating. They too wanted to be known as more than mothers.”

The concept of a hidden diary, a space for recording thoughts that you weren’t allowed to share publicly, resonated for those living in a repressive society. “What I really loved personally was this confessional tone,” says Azizi. “This idea that you can reach a kind of emancipation by the power of words alone. For someone growing up in the repressive Islamic Republic, it was really powerful, because of all the things we couldn’t do. We did live this double life.”

Azizi is delighted more people will now discover the book. “I’m very excited that something that I grew up with can now be shared by my friends in the United States and around the world. The book is really a testament to that period of my youth, as well as a testament to the power of literature.”

So, why is De Céspedes being rediscovered now? “I think Ferrante has a lot to do with it,” says Goldstein, “Her popularity really led people to look for other Italian women writers.” Freudenheim says there’s been a resurgence of interest in women’s writing from the late 1940s to 60s in general – and De Céspedes is part of that. Pushkin is planning to publish two more books by De Céspedes over the next two years – Her Side of The Story (1949) and her debut novel Nessuno Torna Indietro (There’s No Turning Back).

“Literary rediscoveries are really exciting, full stop, but sometimes you can’t actually imagine very many people reading them, because they’re quite difficult or abstruse or dated in a way that doesn’t resonate,” says Freudenheim. “What’s so exciting to me about this novel is that it is just an incredibly readable book, which is heartbreaking at the same time and very moving. It’s a page-turner that has a lot to say. Everyone I know who has read it is struck by that.”

Forbidden Notebook by Alba de Céspedes (translated by Ann Goldstein) has just been reissued by Pushkin Press.

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March 7, 2023
Everything Everywhere All at Once: Surprise Oscars favourite

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Its year-long awards journey started out in small, indie fashion. The film premiered in March 2022 at South by Southwest, a perfect fit for that festival’s younger audience and Daniels’ kinetic style. Glowing reviews gave it artistic cachet, and word of mouth helped fuel its popularity. Soon the breadth of its appeal emerged. Drawing multigenerational and multicultural audiences, and with tropes from martial arts, satire and surrealism, it truly has something for everyone, all in one movie.

This story offers three generations viewers can identify with. And the film’s appeal to immigrant families of all ethnicities is strong. Opinion pieces have been written about its particular resonance for Asian identity, embracing the idea that the film’s fragmented world reflects real life. “To be an immigrant is to live in a fractured multiverse,” the Princeton professor Anne Anlin Cheng wrote in The Washington Post.

Look at the first scenes, and it’s clear that the film, loopy though it becomes, is built on a bedrock of frenetic domestic realism. In the apartment behind the laundromat the Wang family owns, Evelyn is harried, cooking, sorting through tax receipts, running out front to deal with customers. Her husband, Waymond (Quan), is more madcap, putting googly eyes on the laundry bags. But he also has divorce papers in his hands, the only way he thinks he can get his wife’s attention. Their daughter, Joy (Stephanie Hsu), visits with her girlfriend, but Evelyn doesn’t dare tell her own Old World father that her daughter is gay. Googly eyes aside, it’s just like life in all its hectic overload.

Weird but relatable

When Evelyn and Waymond visit the tax office, the tone changes, and a mix of genres widens the film’s allure for varied audiences. A Waymond from an alternate universe instructs Evelyn on how to jump from one dimension to another so she can save the world by stopping the force of evil. The film’s martial-arts action begins full force as security guards come after him and alt-Waymond swings his fanny pack as a weapon. Yeoh, who built her career as a star of martial arts movies, and Quan, who has worked as a stunt coordinator, leap and kick with the best of them. The comedy can be absurd and wildly funny but is also tethered to real fears. Jamie Lee Curtis makes the dreaded tax auditor a cartoonish yet ominous figure, with her dour expression and frumpy clothes. The performance earned her an Oscar nomination for supporting actress and, in another sign of the film’s momentum, the Screen Actors Guild award, which almost everyone assumed would go to Angela Bassett.

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March 6, 2023
Banshees and the Irish films breaking Oscars records

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“Our success is one hundred percent down to the fact there’s been very specific and focused investment in Irish language cinema for the last few years; several organisations came together to create an initiative called Cine4, and the whole idea of the scheme was to develop and produce Irish language films. I guess to date our own film is the most successful example of that,” he tells the BBC.

Other Irish language hits that have enjoyed success include a thriller set during the Irish famine, Arracht (2019), and Foscadh (2021), based on a Donal Ryan novel, which were also put forward as Irish nominees for best international feature.

The Oscar nomination of An Cailín Ciúin has given the Irish language a greater cultural platform, as shown by Mescal speaking it at Bafta. “It’s a monumental thing for the Irish language community,” says Bairéad.

“Less than two percent of people in Ireland speak Irish on a daily basis, so when something like this happens, it’s of enormous importance in every sense. On a personal level for myself and other Irish speakers, but also on a political level. Because a language like ours, it needs government support, it needs investment, it needs belief. And projects like this and moments like this are invaluable in that regard.”

Louise Ryan from Screen Ireland, the development agency for the Irish screen industry, believes that Ireland’s current soft power is repayment for a consistency of investment in Irish creative talent.

“It’s testament to taking risks on new talent, but you’ve also got to have the infrastructure, investing in production crews and studios as well as writers and directors. We’ve set up five talent academies and we’ve had stable government support over the last few years, including a Basic Income for the Arts scheme. We’re really seeing the results of all that.

“An Cailín Ciúin is also based upon a novel from a debut author, while Martin McDonagh originally came from the theatre, so we’re seeing crossover in the arts; it’s not just from film, and it makes for a creative hub so you’re seeing talent coming through in all directions,” she tells the BBC.

Whatever happens to the Irish nominees on Oscar night, there’s a sense of a bigger picture “back home” in Ireland, according to best supporting actor nominee Barry Keoghan, who thanked Ireland generally in his acceptance speech when he won a Bafta last month.

“It encourages the arts at home, and we are an island of storytelling, great actors and poets and writers. And it helps the industry massively at home and encourages people to send the scripts in and go for what they want to do.”

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March 5, 2023
The most ingenious recycled homes

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“Using reclaimed and recycled materials is a vital part of the circular economy that we need to establish if we are going to fight the climate crisis,” writes Craswell. Historically, the circular economy has been much talked about in the worlds of fashion and products, but increasingly interior designers and architects are getting in on the act. And their decisions can help eliminate waste by reusing buildings and their material components.

In Reclaimed, Craswell makes the point that “Architects and interior designers can tackle pollution through the choices they make. Architects have a responsibility… to divert useable materials from landfill. Interior designers can do even more,” as interiors often have a shorter lifespan than the building itself. She cites author Katie Treggiden, who researches the use of recycled waste in design. “She believes that building materials and interior finishes made from waste or ‘second-life materials’ are becoming more accepted – or sought after,” Craswell adds.

Pete Collard, curator of RIBA’s exhibition Long Life, Low Energy: Designing for a Circular Economy, backs this up. “When you’re reusing materials directly, there’s an obvious second-hand quality. It’s good to wear your language on your sleeve, presenting your history up front.” Collard believes that “using waste products found on site, which have an aesthetic of their own, means rethinking visual languages, away from pristine.”

Of course, repurposing materials from old buildings is nothing new. In Roman cities, pieces of stone were dragged from one part of town to another to form new buildings. And then in the Middle Ages, parts of timber structures found new homes. So the principles of the circular economy have deep roots. But things changed in the UK in the mid-Victorian era, when mass-produced house-building took off. And with the industrial revolution, the production of materials and furniture was scaled up, and people with money wanted to show off their wealth. “Buying brand new was the way to do that,” says Collard.

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March 3, 2023
The most shocking moment in Oscars history, 50 years on

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What is true, according to Littlefeather, is that she felt harassed and discriminated against for her speech for most of the rest of her life and career, saying she’d been effectively blacklisted by the entertainment industry. By the end of the 70s, after some small appearances in a handful of movies like Freebie & the Bean and a couple of Playboy spreads, any showbusiness career she might have had seems to have sputtered out. In June last year, the Academy issued Littlefeather a formal apology, and subsequently hosted “an evening of conversation, healing and celebration” with the activist only a month or so before she passed away aged 75 in October. Undoubtedly, the apology was long overdue.

A twist in the tale

Complicating matters further, Littlefeather’s own Yacqui and Apache background has been called into question over the years, most recently in this San Francisco Chronicle piece. If it is to be believed, there are deep-rooted racial and ethical issues attached to Littlefeather and her appearance on stage that evening. If Littlefeather was actually “Pretendian”, as those who falsely claim to be Native American are sometimes called, it may complicate the earnest righteousness of the gesture, and raise questions about how to judge Brando’s choice to use her as his mouthpiece.

However, the facts remain cloudy: the writer of the piece, Jacqueline Keeler, has been challenged on some of her fact-finding by Native American community members, making the identifying of Littlefeather’s heritage a murky proposition.

Adam Piron, the director of the indigenous programme at Sundance Institute, says: “For me, it’s a non-issue to some extent. Whether she was or wasn’t enrolled in the tribes she claimed, she clearly had a lot of acceptance from leaders in our community, who knew about these allegations. The thing that happened with Brando with the Oscars had such an estimable impact in the real world: you’re able to measure what she did in terms of [breaking] the [media] blackout [around Wounded Knee, where the US Justice Department banned journalists], and how that started to change actual policy and legislation around Native Americans because of visibility.”

Considering the text of Brando’s full statement, which Littlefeather was not allowed to read in full on the evening but was later shared with the press, it seems difficult not to see to the heart of the matter:

“It has not been my wish to offend or diminish the importance of those who are participating tonight,” Brando’s full statement said. “Perhaps at this moment, you are saying to yourself, what the hell has this got to do with the Academy Awards? […] the motion picture industry has been as responsible as any for degrading the Indian. When Indian children watch television and they watch films, and they see their race depicted as they are in films, their minds become injured in ways we can never know. If we are not our brother’s keeper, at least let us not be his executioner.”

Fundamentally, questions over Littlefeather’s precise heritage do not lessen the message she delivered – and by extension, Brando’s intention to bring awareness to the plight of Native Americans and to their years of insulting and outright racist representation on-screen.

“I think it’s up to indigenous people to decide how they feel about Littlefeather’s heritage,” says Piron. “But because of her actions and the platform Brando allowed this cause to have, there was a measurable impact. […] It was a part of a larger effort that set the stage for everything that was to follow – increased activism across indigenous communities, much more awareness from non-indigenous communities of what our rights were. And different federal policies around increased recognition of indigenous peoples’ sovereignty from a legal standpoint, whereas before, the idea of US policy was essentially going to be the termination of the identity of the Native American, so he would just be an American.”

Brando – a remarkable actor and a long-time supporter of civil rights, who took part in the 1963 March on Washington – undeniably had his heart in the right place, and in a very modern one, at that, in his invocation of children, cinema, and representation – and as Piron points out, what he and Littlefeather chose to do made a difference that many outside of the indigenous community may not realise. “It kind of flipped the dynamic of the media blackout and the erasure of what was going on. People were looking away, and this sort of forced people to go and look at it.”

It may be that the behaviour of a few hundred attendees of one of the most exclusive and renowned Hollywood events seems like the stuff of superficial celebrity gossip or tabloid fodder. But it’s clear that such Oscars furores often have more to say than first meets the eye.

It stands to reason, given how audiences are used to projecting values and traits onto film stars. So just as the Will Smith/Chris Rock incident sparked a discourse around racial dynamics, showbiz power, beauty standards, and the acceptability of violence, the Brando/Littlefeather incident has become a litmus test around celebrity activism, political divisiveness in the industry, and the real-world efficacy of making statements from such a platform. Over the years, awards controversies like this one have proved a reliable – if often out-of-left-field – bellwether for the most bruising and provocative subjects in our culture and society at large. Let’s hang on tight for Oscars 2023 and see if anything can top it.

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March 2, 2023
King Kong at 90: The greatest monster film ever made

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Nor would it work without the film’s iconic title character, who prompts a unique balance of fear and sympathy. From the moment he crashes into view in a primeval jungle, Kong is more obviously frightening than any other movie monster: with a height that varies between 18ft and 60ft, as the scene demands, he can squash the competition flat with one titanic foot stomp. But no other movie monster gets the viewer on his side so quickly. Within minutes, he is fighting for survival with a Tyrannosaurus rex and a Pteranodon, and he has the most understandable human motive for his behaviour: he’s got the hots for Fay Wray. More importantly, the film’s chief model-maker, animator and special effects specialist, Willis H O’Brien, invests him with far more personality and soul than Godzilla would ever have. Ticking off every trick in the pre-CGI book, O’Brien often puts real actors, matte paintings, miniatures, and stop-motion animation in the same frame with an ingenuity that still seems like wizardry.

King Kong isn’t just a great monster movie, though. It’s also one of Hollywood’s best films about Hollywood. In the last year, Jordan Peele’s Nope used monster-movie tropes to comment on the film industry, and Damien Chazelle’s Babylon revelled in the insanity of Tinseltown in the 1920s. Yet King Kong got there first, commenting on itself with a wit that seems positively postmodern, and condemning monomaniacal directors decades before their peers began to frown upon them.

Just to make Cooper’s preoccupations clear, the very first line of dialogue is, “Say, is this the moving-picture ship?” The ship in question, docked in New York, has been chartered by Carl Denham (Robert Armstrong), a director who specialises in documentaries remarkably like Cooper and Schoedsack’s. He is notoriously cavalier about his cast and crew’s safety: he sacked his last cameraman for abandoning his post just because a rhino was charging at him. His ambition now, he says, is “to make the greatest picture in the world, something no one has ever seen before”. And so, rather than introducing us to treasure hunters, explorers or zoologists, King Kong devotes its opening act to a director grumbling about audiences and critics. He’s prepared to travel for thousands of miles to capture some footage of a gigantic demonic beast he’s heard about, but, he complains, the public insists on films having “a pretty face” and “romance”.

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March 1, 2023