“This is for anyone who has the faith and the courage to hold on to the goodness in themselves, and to hold on to the goodness in each other, no matter how difficult it is to do that. And this is for you. You inspire me to keep going.” Chloé Zhao, during her Best Director acceptance speech for her film Nomadland

“Our minds are big enough to contemplate the cosmos but small enough to care about who wins an Oscar”  Dean Cavanagh

I love the Academy Awards; I love the glamour and I love the meritocracy. This year, there was less glamour – although LA’s Union Station, this year’s Oscar location, was full of gorgeous people, properly social distanced – and a lot more meritocracy and I am thrilled. Growing up, we were told that, unlike San Francisco which is chock full of quality people like our family was aspiring to be, Los Angeles was a land of shallow people and that Hollywood – or the movie industry, or, maybe just actors – was the poster child for that shallowness and phoniness. But quality people is just a cover for who your grandparents are is more important than who you are and LA was a civilization almost devoid of grandparents in the middle of the last century when it boomed. Everybody came from someplace else. In the movie, biz, they pretty much still do.

Steven Soderbergh, originally from Atlanta, Georgia, was one of the producers and he is being given the most credit – or blame – for The Oscars looking so different this year. A charge that’s pretty hard to dispute with the Oscars opening with a super-long tracking shot of Regina King – looking mighty glamorous, BTW – striding into Union Station carrying an Oscar. I personally liked the whole thing even though I didn’t even know all the movies and even less of the winners. However, with way fewer movie clips and much longer acceptance speeches, I got a much better sense of who the people were. But whoever put the Award for Best Movie third from last made a big mistake…”And the winner is Anthony Hopkins…uh…a non-existent Anthony Hopkins… uh…the credits.”

The nominees were the most diverse group I’ve ever seen and it gave the Awards a slight feeling of a Star Treckian alternate universe. I’m sure that the strangeness of 2021 had a lot to do with the diversity of the awards, several expensive, whiter, movies are just waiting for theaters to open, but I also like to think that people in the Academy have done some soul searching over the last year and this is the happy result. Still, I don’t think we are going to see another Nomadland win the Award for best picture in a long time.

For me, the biggest surprise was a Mia Neal and Jamika Wilson who were the first Black women to win an Oscar for best hair and makeup for their work. It was one of those moments when I think What? the first Black women, that can’t be right…oh yeah, it’s right. BTW, my vote for Best Dress would go to Jamika Wilson and Regina King, if you are into that sort of thing (like me). 

I have not seen Minari but I thought Youn Yuh-Jung’s acceptance speech was the best of the night (and it was a night of good acceptance speeches). She somehow managed to be both touching and funny. I don’t know if she charmed everybody, with her thick accent, but she charmed me and I thought it was the best example of letting the acceptance speeches run on.

And finally, at the climactic end, where it should have been, is Nomadland. I’m a big fan of Nomadland and I’m both glad and surprised that it won. What I liked about it is that it is both very particular in its details and universal in its resonance. While it seemed to have the same sort of rough-hewn characters as Nebraska and Winter’s Bone – two movies that the critics loved but I have to admit, I didn’t – but seen through a more sympathetic eye that made all the difference to me. In both Nebraska and Winter’s Bone, I felt like a voyeur, disdainful of every character except Jennifer Lawrence’s Ree. I could never connect enough to get past feeling bad for the characters but, in Nomadland I felt these are just regular people. Maybe that is because I know – or, more accurately, knew – Empire the company town whose shutdown pushes Fern into her story, or, maybe, it’s just because Nomadland was that good. I think it is the latter.

The director of Nomadland, Chloé Zhao was born in Beijing in 1982, studied in England, finished high school in LA, and learned movie directing at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts where she studied under Spike Lee. She now lives in  Ojai, California, with, according to Wikipedia, three chickens and two dogs, and her partner Joshua James Richards. The lead in all the stories I read about her plays up that she is only the second woman and first Asian to win Best Director but I’m inclined to think that was at least partially because of this crazy year. More telling, way back in pre-Covid 2018, before most of us had even heard of Chloé Zhao, Marvel Studios hired her to direct a 200 million dollar superhero film, and I’m inclined to think that should be the lead. It is classical LA, after all, outsider comes to town with no connections, makes a small indy film most of us haven’t seen, and hits the big time. Actually, that is bigger than LA, that is the American Dream.