 | |||
Receiving an Oscar award is considered to be the ultimate accolade in film making. But when modesty makes its place in it, the moment is indeed a new high.
“There is no best.” as Paul Thomas Anderson noted when he accepted the award for the best picture at the 78th Academy Awards. “There is just what the mood there might be there that day.” he added.
And what was the mood in the room that picked One Battle After Another, a father-daughter story set in racist dystopia? It had raced past about a vampire film about the historical oppression of Black people in the US(Sinners), a Brazilian film about annihilation of memory under authoritarianism (Secret Agent), and Bugonia which is a satire about class hierarchy and rampant capitalism.
All these are richly imagined films anchored in contemporary anxieties. And they were be being feted in one of world’s most glamourous stages.
Oscars, Golden Globes and Emmys are projected as celebration of films. Yet they have long been lampooned as parties where an insular industry merely pats itself on the back.
If this year is more charged with meaning and emotional heft, it comes down to the films themselves. Many of these films captured the uncertainties and ruptures of the past few years.
The most mainstream films of the day are doing what art has long done. Capturing, crystallising and nudging a reckoning with these fears.
The days of frothy fares and blockbuster entertainers are certainly not over. But a wide acclaim of the films like Sinners, One Battle After Another and the Secret Agent show that critics and audiences are hungry for cinema that can give form to disquiet; it also finds a language for inarticulate rage.
Reverting to Anderson and the mood he referred to. The mood is now spilling from the streets into the cloistered world of films, is one of urgency.
