The sums of money involved in making and selling films are so colossal that it’s often hard to see beyond them to the value of the movies themselves. It was no surprise to find the odd couple of last summer making the headlines for both the Bafta and Oscar shortlists – Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer for meeting expectations with multiple nominations and Greta Gerwig’s Barbie for disappointing them, even though it is ahead at the box office.
Few who witnessed the excitable swirls of pink outside cinemas, or have dwelt on the fortuitous weirdness of a movie about a Mattel doll being fused into a double header with a biopic of a nuclear physicist, could grudge their success at a time when cinemas all over the country were on their knees in the aftermath of the pandemic. Opinions may differ about their merits, but they have brought people out and been widely discussed.
Every awards season unleashes a flood of releases, as movies scramble for eligibility. Release dates vary on different sides of the Atlantic, but in the last few weeks UK cinemas have been packed with evidence that the big beasts have not sucked all the oxygen out of the ecosphere. It has been heartening to see the return of film to the heart of the water-cooler culture, a space increasingly dominated by streamed TV hits such as Succession.
Emerald Fennell’s posh Marmite offering Saltburn managed to have its sandwich and eat it by opening in cinemas and quickly turning itself over to streaming, where it has capitalised, whether by luck or judgment, on an unusually fizzy social media presence.
More interesting are a scattering of highly original arthouse films, led in the running by Yorgos Lanthimos’s Poor Things. This steampunk fantasy, based on a 1992 novel by Alasdair Gray, bagged 11 Oscar nominations and this week reached third place in the UK charts. It has so far made more than $34m around the world at the box office. Mr Lanthimos has provoked criticism for erasing Glasgow from a novel by a revered Scottish author, and has also inspired a furious debate as to whether he is passing a male sex fantasy off as a feminist update of the Frankenstein story.
Good for him: provocation is a legitimate part of any work of art. It is far better to annoy people than to bore them. What is indisputable is that he has drawn a dazzling performance from Emma Stone, while finding a truly filmic eccentricity (customised pets and cut-off gowns) to match the glorious waywardness of Mr Gray’s hybrid fiction.
Prizes, as Julian Barnes said, in a literary context, are “posh bingo”. Shortlists are where their value lies in casting beams of light on a crowded field. With Anatomy of a Fall, the French director Justine Triet has achieved a particular coup in becoming the only woman in competition for best director in either the Baftas or the Oscars – with an uncompromisingly cerebral take on the thriller genre. Meanwhile, a brave decision by Jonathan Glazer to make a German-language adaptation of Martin Amis’s Holocaust novel, The Zone of Interest, has put it in the unusual position of competing for a British film Bafta and a foreign language Oscar. In both cases, thoughtful and principled film-making has paid off. The glut may only be temporary, but we should enjoy it while it lasts.
