Soup to Nuts to Blood

Thoughts on the Academy Awards

Soup to Nuts to Blood

Sarah Miller

Lame for Sean Penn to have won best supporting actor. I’m not saying he wasn’t good in One Battle After Another but everyone who got nominated was good. Sean Penn doesn’t need any more Oscars. I guess these Oscar ballots are just sitting around on people’s counters or inboxes and one day they look at the ballot like, oh, Christ, I have to do this. And Sean Penn is just someone they know so they check off “Sean Penn” which just means “I know who that is.” Though presumably they know other people as well, like Delroy Lindo, though, I don’t think we need to point out the difference between these two men. The whole point of winning is the speech, so not only was this a dull choice but there was also no speech and what a waste.

Weird of Barbra Streisand to center her tribute to Robert Redford around him calling her Babs. The premise of her argument was that she was “not a Babs.” We were all supposed to agree, like, “You? A Babs? Hahaha no way.”

You’ve got to imagine a lot of people under forty watching the Oscars “don’t even know huh.” Those of us who do shrugged and were forced to ask ourselves, “Is Barbra Streisand a Babs? I have no idea!” Sorry to memeify a legend twice, but she put us in a real “Bitch, I don’t know your life” situation.

Someone should point out to Barbra that Robert Redford is a prime example of other people, who are not her, existing, or having existed, and that despite her worst fears, she actually exists, and will not disappear if she stops constantly reminding everyone this is so.

What else. I have since discovered that Mikey Madison’s dress was Dior. On television, it looked like she got it at Macy’s. Do not wear burgundy on television unless you’re playing a prostitute during the Gold Rush. At least she was not wearing double-breasted formal wear. All I have to say about double-breasted suits is that they are never preferable to single breasted-suits. I guess because perhaps they became popular during the Depression the idea is that since we are in a similarly shitty time wearing them might result in life getting better. I don’t foresee life getting better and if it does it will be for other reasons.

My least favorite moment that wasn’t merely silly but in fact offensive was Jessie Buckley’s acceptance speech, about Hamnet and the importance of a mother’s love. She dedicated her Oscar to the “beautiful chaos of a mother’s heart.” Must we keep enduring this depiction of motherhood as so wild and profound we can’t possibly wrap our minds around it? Nothing that is presently wrong with the world has anything to do with any lack of understanding that other human beings have about how much women love their children. People who kill children know how much mothers love their children, for example. That’s why they kill them. When Buckley told the crowd “It’s Mother’s Day in the U.K. today,” the audience clapped like it was some kind of miracle that someone had won an Oscar for playing a mother on the day mothers were being honored and also as if thousands of children were not going to be killed this week by the host country of this ceremony.

You just know drunk moms who have cried that Iranian woman can’t wear bikinis were coming up to her all night and thanking her for daring to say moms love their kids.

The movie One Battle After Another was the big winner. The movie is about state violence and people who fight back against it. The world shown in the movie is the world we live in. Some of the characters in the movie fighting back against the state repression could qualify as what the federal government and the media call “Antifa” as if “Antifa” were a thing, like the AFL-CIO, or the Dallas Cowboy Cheerleaders. Last Friday, nine people in North Texas were convicted of various felonies for fighting back against state violence. The prosecution leaned heavily on their being members of “Antifa” to convict them.

Paul Thomas Anderson, coming to the podium in a double-breasted tux for three awards, used none of these opportunities to mention these people, all now in federal prison for doing exactly what his movie praised. He did not mention Leqaa Kordia, a Palestinian woman who was detained for over a year after 2024 protests at Columbia University and released last week. He did not mention ICE at all, even though his movie is, in large part, about ICE. His sole engagement beyond the mere thrill of winning and love of cinema in general consisted of an apology to his own children about the world left to them and a fervent hope/common trope, that they would be the generation to save us all. Later, questioned about where this world was headed, he said, “Aren’t we supposed to be partying?” before going on to mutter the usual about human decency.

I’m not mad about Paul Thomas Anderson in particular. He is fine. But the day after the Oscars I felt dirty, off, grosser than usual. I haven’t watched the Academy Awards in a long time. My emotional hangover felt specific. Of course, everyone knows the Oscars are ridiculous, that movie stars make inane comments about acting in their dress up clothes, that presenters ask them stupid questions, that watching it means sitting through unbearable moments like Ewan McGregor and Nicole Kidman singing All You Need Is Love and Robert Downey Jr. and Chris Evans presenting silver male stripper panties to Channing Tatum. That said, you can grasp you’re watching something famously, aggressively frivolous and still understand with great despair as you watch that American state violence is nothing more than a subject to be molded into narratives for personal advancement and artistic achievement.

Death and killings are nothing more than an opportunity for audiences to reflect self-importantly on the general dire state of humanity and the violence in the world, to take a profound emotional journey while never arriving at the conclusion that the United States is the greatest killing machine ever and must be stopped now by any means necessary. The people who make these stories will, when rewarded for having done so, talk endlessly around what is at the heart of what they’ve made, but they will never ever get up there and say “America/NATO are fascist entities destroying human life.” I’m not saying that a politically forthright Oscars is the path to the world becoming a site of human flourishing. I’m not sure what would happen if such a miracle were to take place, if Javier Bardem were not the only person in the whole ceremony to say “No war” and make a direct comment about Palestine. I’m simply saying the Oscars are an annual reset where we all agree that this is how it is, that the United States will export the violence and then turn around and export the content about the violence. The remorse is lucrative and therefore included.

The stupidity — the Babs garbage, her hideous post Babs-garbage warbling, the bad jokes, the kissing up to moms, which one must admit sounds better in an Irish accent— it’s just there to reassure us that this is the best we can hope for, because honestly, how can you take this all seriously. But it is serious. The images are serious. But they are just images. I saw One Battle After Another and I was foolish enough to let it affect me. The courage and commitment of the characters in One Battle After Another, the anti-state violence they commit, their hatred for the U.S. government and police and armed forces, are firm, impressive, and threatening if real. The ceremony is designed to lower, not raise, the threat posed by the winning material. It’s not that any of this is a surprise. I just wanted to describe how it feels to sit through the movie, the accolades, the award, the gratitude, and the senseless folly all around it, and understand it’s the process through which all of it — from soup to nuts to blood — can be carried out again.