Illustration by Dominic Bugatto
If you pitched Hollywood circa 2025 as its very own blockbuster-sized disaster flick, it would get laughed out of the room for being too on-the-nose: Natural disasters! Moustache-twirling politicians! Economic collapse! Artificially intelligent robots! Bob Dylan going electric!
Okay, that last item might not quite make the cut, but otherwise this year’s Academy Awards arrive in the thick of what might politely be called a raging dumpster fire of a movie industry. Everywhere you turn, there are showbiz crises blazing wildly out of control, with the few hydrants around either malfunctioning or long since tapped out.
Welcome to a culture on fire.
The problems start, and ultimately stop, with the movies. While every year brings its own particular and peculiar bounty of award-worthy cinema, this year’s Academy Awards-certified gems look especially rough when slid under even the weakest of microscopes.
Brady Corbet’s The Brutalist is a staggering achievement (even though it offers solid evidence that America’s most gifted filmmakers are continually forced to work abroad and outside the studio system), while RaMell Ross’s Nickel Boys is just as inventive, ingenious and bold (even though it proves that streamers still have no idea what to do with geniuses who land in their laps). Dune: Part Two is epic filmmaking that might singlehandedly be keeping the big screen alive. And Anora soars on the broken, sweaty backs of its once-in-a-lifetime cast. But dig through the rest of the nominees, and your fingernails get real dirty, real quick.
In what world does a half-cocked musical like Wicked, directed by someone who seems to abhor both colour and choreography, nab 10 nominations? Emilia Perez is narratively, thematically and politically incoherent – and that is not even considering its sideshow scandal. A Complete Unknown treats Bob Dylan’s legacy as a handsomely shot, feature-length Wikipedia entry. The Substance is an ultragory gas whose surface-level mischief has been mistaken for sublime satire. And Conclave? Perhaps it’s only right that such airport-bookstore-level pulp might be elected the ultimate Oscar champion purely because all of its competitors have been fouled by one whisper-campaign or another.
But there are bad crops of films, and then there is just a bad contextual landscape. Why does it feel like this year’s slate of contenders is the weakest it’s been in years? Blame the knock-down effects of the 2023 writers’ and actors’ strikes, which either pushed the production of major prestige-level projects deep into the future or scuttled them entirely, leaving us with, well, [gestures broadly at everything].
Yet there is something more disconcerting in the air. Movies worth discussing – movies worth fighting for – are arriving fewer and further between. Now more than ever, it feels as if the film industry exists to feed us work made for audiences with no attention span, by people with no soul nor spine.
For the past two years, the motto of the movie business has been “Survive till ‘25.” The aftereffects of the pandemic, the streaming wars, the strikes: That’s the past, let’s roll with the brave new future already. Well, here we are and the klaxons couldn’t be sounding more loudly across the Hollywood hills and beyond.
Illustration by Dominic Bugatto
Writers and actors are now facing increasingly brazen incursions by cost-cutting producers who see artificial intelligence as the future of storytelling. Meanwhile, of the five major Hollywood studios left, one is cutting itself to the bone after a contentious sale (Paramount), another seems to be led by a man who gets his kicks by erasing films from existence (Warner Bros. Discovery), while just about every other outfit is crassly capitulating to the Make America Great Again crowd – which seeks to turn back the clock on anything resembling cultural and artistic evolution – led by a U.S. President who thinks Hollywood’s best hope is Jon Voight.
It wasn’t all too long ago when Hollywood was led by the courage of its artistic convictions. Today, we must settle for Amazon MGM forking over US$40-million for an authorized Melania Trump “documentary,” and Disney washing its hands of any initiative with the word “diversity” in it. For a long while, Hollywood was the land of pop and colour, risk and reward. Today, it’s looking awfully black and white.
In Sundance, the best work independent American cinema had to offer wasn’t good enough to muster more than a few shoulder shrugs. In Berlin, the European market seems to be in just as much tumult as it is stateside, as gigantic streaming services continue to gobble up audiences in their quest for global dominance. And here at home, the Hot Docs film festival (and by extension non-fiction cinema itself) is still teetering on the brink, the Online Streaming Act aimed at levelling the playing field for Canadian storytellers is still lost in the bureaucratic weeds and the official opposition is still (rather successfully) campaigning to gut one of the largest funders of homegrown arts and culture.
Consider all the above, and the devastation of the California fires feels almost like a cruel wild card tossed into the mix – a Biblical-level wink from a higher power that, yes, things really have gotten that bad.
And yet, as always, there is hope for a Hollywood ending – or, rather, enough momentum to keep audiences from ever saying their final farewells to the big screen.
Just as last year’s twin forces of Oppenheimer and Barbie proved that there is still life left inside the studio system, moviegoers should feel heartened by something as wild, ambitious and wonderfully chaotic as Bong Joon-ho’s new sci-fi satire Mickey 17 slipping out into the world next month. And such boundary-pushing, culture-defining filmmakers as Luca Guadagnino, James Gray, Paul Thomas Anderson, Ari Aster, Kathryn Bigelow, Steven Soderbergh and Ryan Coogler have each been able to convince major corporations to let them pursue their largely franchise/“content”-free visions. To say nothing of the countless emerging talents who are fighting the good fight just beneath the surface.
Just keep the hoses at the ready – this thing could blow any minute now.
