I was talking to a friend who said he'd somehow managed to be completely ignorant of Reggie Young, the great Nashville session guitar player who died at the age of 82 last week.
"I heard this report on NPR," he said, "and I was just blown away by the records this guy played on."
That's right, I answered. The signature riffs on Elvis Presley's "Suspicious Minds" and Dusty Springfield's "Son of a Preacher Man." The sitar intro on B.J. Thomas' "Hooked on a Feeling." He was one of those Nashville Cats, mostly anonymous session players who rivaled the L.A.-based Wrecking Crew in terms of hit record ubiquity.
"So how is this guy not in the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame?"
Well, it's called the Hall of Fame. Not the Hall of Exceptional Quality or the Hall of Under-appreciated Excellence. Obscure folks don't get voted into halls of fame. No matter how good they are at what they do or how much delight they manufacture.
That's not fair, but the world isn't predicated on fairness.
Which brings us to the nominations for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences annual awards that were announced last week.
Since I'm a film critic, I get asked a lot about the Oscars. I don't mind the attention or the suggestion that I might have something interesting to say about the awards. The films that the members of the Academy nominate for Oscars have something to tell us about who we are as a society, about what we value and how we perceive ourselves. It's not a waste of time to consider what it means that movies like Black Panther, BlacKkKlansman, Roma, et al., receive best picture nominations.
Especially if we delve into this sort of analysis with the understanding that the Oscars have far more to do with perceived prestige than genuine quality. That's not to say that there aren't instances when good movies get nominated--all might qualify as "good" by some criteria--only that there's absolutely no reason to expect excellent art to be honored at an industry promotional event.
The Oscars are fine. I just don't take them too seriously.
I don't mind if you do. I've got nothing in the world against Oscar. A lot of my friends enjoy the hype and buzz that attend awards season, and I'm not above caring deeply about things that mean relatively little.
For instance, I find myself caring about Baseball's Hall of Fame and was just about to write a column about how the exclusion of Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens (two of my least favorite players ever, yet two of the greatest players I've ever seen) by sanctimonious baseball writers is symptomatic of our society's unwillingness to grow up and embrace the harsh realities of adulthood when my editor rolled her eyes.
One of the great pleasures of being alive is letting go of rationality and getting lost in passions. The reason things like the Baseball Hall of Fame and the Oscars exist is so that we can enjoy investing so much of ourselves in what is ultimately a safe and meaningless endeavor.
So feel free to root for your favorite movie or to gripe about how Crazy Rich Asians was robbed. I'll watch some, maybe most, of the broadcast out of a sense of professional obligation, but I'd rather watch basketball. Or a movie.
People expect me to have an opinion because I write about the movies. But I try not to write much about show business, in part because I don't know or care much about show business. As a film critic, I believe the Oscars have absolutely nothing to do with me.
The only metric that determines how successful a movie is is how much money it makes for its investors. What industry observers or critics or even the general ticket-buying public think about it isn't material so long as it performs as an engine of revenue generation. All the rest is just stuff to talk about, to obsess over, if that's your thing. Who's the best actor to never receive an Oscar nomination? Joseph Cotten? Isabella Rossellini? Marilyn Monroe?
If you're looking to create content, the Oscars are a blessing. But if you're trying to work out what the stories we tell ourselves say about us as a culture or a species, they're of negligible value. You'd be better served to look at box office figures.
Louis B. Mayer created the awards luncheon that became the annual Academy Awards broadcast as a marketing device. He figured, quite rightly, that the press and public would pay attention to an event where glamorous and wealthy people gave each other awards for being intelligent and courageous artists. We did, and now the Oscars are an industry unto themselves, even as most of us admit that most of the awards go to films that fit a certain self-serious model, what film critic/artist Manny Farber called white elephant art -- "Oscar bait" movies that teem with "importance" and tell stories that ultimately flatter and reassure their presumptive audiences.
Which makes sense, because who would pay to see a movie that does things that genuinely disquiet you or undermine your assumptions about how you're supposed to live?
On social media this week I joked I was staying "on brand" by not reflexively commenting on the Oscars, but I don't mind commenting on them. I just understand what my hot takes are worth. Here's one:
I was bored by Black Panther until I watched it with director Ryan Coogler's commentary track on--the process of making the movie was far more interesting than the movie itself. Is it a worthy Best Picture? Sure, it's exactly the sort of canny, crafty filmmaking that I think of when I think of Best Picture winners.
I'd love to see it (or Roma or BlacKkKlansman or The Favourite) win because of what that might mean for the types of movies that get made--but I think Coogler's Fruitvale Station is a far better movie.
I could do the same for the rest of the nominees, none of which I dislike.
But it's more interesting, and more of service, to root out movies like We the Animals and Blaze that would never be considered for Oscars, and artists like Reggie Young, who'd never make a hall of fame.
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MovieStyle on 01/27/2019