Speaker 1: And the Oscar goes to--

Speaker 2: And the Oscar goes to--

Speaker 3: And the Oscar goes to--

Speaker 4: And the Oscar goes to--

Speaker 5: And the Oscar goes to--

Speaker 6: And the Oscar goes to--

[music]

Brigid Bergin: It's The Takeaway. I'm Brigid Bergin, in for Melissa Harris-Perry. Even though we're well into 2022, the 2021 movie award season is finally wrapping up this Sunday. 10 films are nominated for Best Picture, but the race appears to be narrowing down to two potential winners. There's The Power of the Dog, which until recently was the presumed front runner. That Netflix film is Director Jane Campion's take on the western. It stars Benedict Cumberbatch, is a volatile cattle rancher, and Kodi Smit-McPhee as a young man who subtly stands up to him.

Benedict Cumberbatch: But your pa, Pete?

Kodi Smit-McPhee: My father?

Benedict Cumberbatch: Yeah, your father. I guess he hit the bottle pretty hard? The booze?

Kodi Smit-McPhee: Until right at the very end. He used to worry I wasn't kind enough. That I was too strong.

Benedict Cumberbatch: You, too strong? [scoffs] He got that wrong.

Brigid Bergin: Then there's the late-breaking challenger, Apple's CODA, which has won the top prizes at the Screen Actors Guild, Writers Guild, and Producers Guild Awards. Directed by Sian Heder, the film follows a deaf family with a hearing daughter played by Emilia Jones. Her dreams of becoming a singer clash with her family's desire to stay together as a unit.

Eugenio Derbez: You're the girl with the deaf family, everyone but you?

Emilia Jones: Yes.

Eugenio Derbez: And you sing? Interesting. Are you any good?

Emilia Jones: I don't know.

Brigid Bergin: To learn more about what to expect this Sunday, I spoke with Rafer Guzman, film critic for Newsday, and Alison Willmore, film critic at Vulture and New York Magazine.

Alison Willmore: This has been an unusually chaotic award season in terms of all of the different awards from the guilds and critic circles that kind of lead up to the big night and they're supposed to give you a sense of what's to come. I feel like, at this point, it feels like there's many possibilities. It seems like right now it's kind of split between The Power of the Dog, which is the Jane Campion western, and CODA, which has had this kind of late surge in wins and suddenly seems like it might also be one of the favorites. I would say right now, it's going to be one of those two.

If I were to vote on what I would like to see win, I would probably go with Drive My Car as much as I think that would cause the Academy to have a heart attack [laughs], a three-hour meditative Japanese movie about grief. It's just a tremendous film. I would love-- I'm happy that it was nominated for Best Picture. That in itself feels like a win.

Brigid Bergin: Rafer, same question to you, what do you think will win and what do you think should win?

Rafer Guzman: Well, I guess if I had my druthers, I would pick West Side Story which I just thought was such a terrific, terrific film. I thought it was really interesting the way that it took this older story of a bygone New York and made it feel new again, the nativist gang versus the Puerto Rican gang. It was a much tougher, much jazzier, much splashier version I thought. It's amazing to see Steven Spielberg, he is 75, he directs this movie like he is 25, he's like a kid with something to prove. It was amazing. No one saw it. No one really cared about that movie. I think younger audiences felt like they didn't know the brand West Side Story.

They stayed away. It made something like $38 million at the Box Office. It really underwhelmed, and I don't really feel like the Academy is behind it either. You would think that it would be because they're the right age for West Side Story, and Hollywood loves to pay tribute to itself and see its old classics redone, but I don't think it's going to happen. I really still think despite the late surge of CODA, as Alison was saying, and it did win the Producers Guild Award, which is a very accurate predictor of the Best Picture Oscar.

Despite all that, I do think it's going to be The Power of the Dog, this kind of weird, creepy Western from Jane Campion, which is a great film, but for whatever reason, I think people are really behind that film, and I think that's going to be the winner.

Brigid Bergin: Well, Rafer, can you talk a little bit about what is driving this momentum for CODA that kind of put it back in the conversation? Even if it's not the winner, it seems like it is picking up a little bit of steam right now.

Rafer Guzman: Yes, I think it's really interesting, and I think in a way, it sort of reflects on what's happening with the Oscars this year or maybe I should say, what the Oscars are trying to make happen this year, which is, they're trying to make themselves into a much more populist/popular show. I think the ratings have been down for the last few years, and during the pandemic, they just tanked. The ratings were at an all-time low last year. People haven't been going to the Multiplex, they've been staying home and watching streaming content and they're kind of forgetting about the movies.

I think the Oscars have had a long history of picking these highbrow movies for Best Picture that people haven't seen and audiences get upset and they wonder why their Spider-Man movie hasn't been nominated for Best Picture yet again. Here you do have this movie CODA, which was kind of a sleeper hit and a real word-of-mouth hit. It came out of Sundance, Apple bought it for this record-setting amount of $25 million. People have seen this movie. When I talk to other critics, they're all talking about The Power of the Dog, of course. When I talk to people in my life, they're talking about CODA. CODA is the movie that they've seen, and they loved it. It's a heartwarmer, it's a family film, it's a feel-good movie.

That's the movie they've seen. For it to win the Producers Guild Award and really have a shot at winning Best Picture at the Oscars, that's kind of incredible. Win or lose, it's an amazing run for that film, but a vote for CODA would really make the Oscars look a little better I think than a vote for The Power of the Dog, a film which I don't think that many people have seen.

Brigid Bergin: Well, Rafer, I'm catching up in all my films this year, but just remind those of us who are in that same boat, you said CODA is a heartwarmer, but what's the story about?

Rafer Guzman: Well, the title CODA, which is in all caps, stands for child of deaf adults. It's a story of a deaf family, but they've got a hearing daughter, and she wants to be a singer. The family can't really understand this. They're a working-class family, they run a fishing boat in Massachusetts. They want her to take up the family business and help them, they need the help, they need a hearing person on that boat. They don't understand this thing about singing because music is something that's not a huge part of their lives. They don't quite get this obsession with singing, and so you've got this tension between the girl and her family.

It's a little formulaic. We've heard this kind of story before, but it really works very well. I have to tell you, I didn't have to review the film, and so I didn't have to see it. I wasn't that interested in it, frankly, because it did look a little formulaic to me, but we had family over one night, some relatives, what we were looking for that people hadn't seen but were interested in. We all chose CODA. We were all sniffling and weeping and hugging each other by the end because it really is a great, very effective, and really moving film. If it wins Best Picture, I'll be very happy for that film.

Brigid Bergin: Well, Alison, moving in a very different way, in early February, you predicted that Don't Look Up would win Best Picture. What's the buzz going into Oscar weekend about that?

Alison Willmore: It does seem that Don't Look Up, which was a Netflix release, coming from Adam McKay, that it is not-- like dropped out of the discussion. I don't feel as strongly that it's going to be up there, though I feel also that as all of us staring at this from outside and trying to guess what Academy members will think. It is a movie that does a lot of things that I think the Oscars like. It has major movie stars. It has Leonardo DiCaprio and Jennifer Lawrence who are about as big as you can get as movie stars.

Brigid Bergin: Meryl Streep.

Alison Willmore: Yes, exactly, Meryl Streep. It's this giant cast of huge names. It is a satirical comedy about, kind of a climate change metaphor, which is something that the awards-- Everyone likes an award, that kind of feels like you're also awarding something that addresses a major issue that speaks to our time. It is also I think in its own perverse way a very flattering film about show business, which is also something that the Academy has tended to like in movies that it's given awards to at the time.

In fact, I think it features into some of the nominees this year, but yes, Don't Look Up is a movie about how everyone is so obsessed with celebrity culture that they're not really doing enough to save themselves from impending disaster, which is in its own way a kind of way for show business in Hollywood to pat itself on the back a bit, I think. Yes, it really hasn't been talked about as much. It's interesting, as we're going into the end of the year or the end of the award season, that that was a Netflix release, The Power of the Dog was a Netflix release.

People are really looking at this year as maybe the first one in which Netflix, which has been trying really hard to win Best Picture, that this might be the year it does it, but with CODA as this late-breaking possible challenger, it might go to another streaming platform. It'll be interesting to see.

Brigid Bergin: Alison, let's shift to a different category, the Best Director Award. Jane Campion could become the third woman to win this Best Director, again, for The Power of the Dog. How likely do you think that is?

Alison Willmore: I think that this is not necessarily going to be one of those years where the same award goes to both Best Picture and Best Director. Oftentimes, that feels like a natural pairing, but I think Campion feels more likely to me to be the lock on Best Director than necessarily Best Picture. I think that The Power of the Dog, as Rafer said, is this kind of odd, spiky movie. It's got a lot on its mind, it really is digging into the mythology and the imagery of the Western and then challenging it and subverting it. It's got some kind of big ideas about masculinity and how characters feel kind of trapped by it. It feels like a director's movie in this very powerful way.

I think in some ways giving her the prize, giving her Best Director may even feel like a better fit to the Academy in terms of acknowledging it than Best Picture. I can see those prizes being split. I think certainly everyone is interested in saluting Jane Campion in some way. She's had this incredible ongoing career and also this feels like her most prominent achievement I think to date, or certainly since The Piano, so I would expect to see her up there.

Brigid Bergin: Yet, at the same time, she's had this moment, a backlash after her somewhat misguided attempt at a joke about the Williams sisters, Venus and Serena, do you think that's going to hang over the ceremony at all, or is that just something that's in the past?

Alison Willmore: I think it probably featured into the immense calculations that go into how people vote. Yet Campion really had this interesting up and down on social media, I think within the space of a few days. Sam Elliott said a few things about how he didn't think the movie was really a Western and kind of complained about Benedict Cumberbatch's character and said things that kind of felt like they were challenging Campion's rights as a non-American filmmaker to make a Western, especially when it was not filmed in the US.

It was interesting to see social media sentiment to be very much on her side, especially when she responded on the red carpet and witheringly responded.

Then she made this very, I think ill-timed and ill-chosen attempt at a joke involving the Williams sisters. Yes, there was a real swing against her. I can't imagine that it's going to feature into the ceremony at all, and she has apologized. I think all of those little moments do seem to kind of factor into ultimately how people decide to vote. It's really hard to say how much that will have an impact.

Brigid Bergin: It's interesting. Rafer, in terms of other pushback, there's the decision to give out awards for eight of the categories, including Best Editing and Best Score prior to the actual live broadcast this year. I think you have some opinions about that, is that right?

Rafer Guzman: I do, along with many, many others who have opinions on this, as you might guess. To a lot of people, if you're sitting at home and you got to sit through the Oscars for documentary short and you got a live-action short and sound, especially back when they had Sound Mixing and the Sound Editing as two different categories. I think some of this stuff can sound kind of arcane and technical to people. I sort of, on the one hand, understand why the Academy would want to get to the big stuff, the acting categories, Director, and Best Picture and Animated Feature and Song, and things like that.

I guess I'm of the opinion that movies are a collaborative art, and if you don't have the makeup and hairstyling people, your movie is going to look pretty bad. If you don't have the guy who writes the score. Score is one of the categories they're going to put before the broadcast.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Rafer Guzman: If you don't have score, I don't know, what would Jaws sounded like without the score. I just feel like these are kind of important awards, and almost, especially for someone who is behind the scenes, winning an Oscar is a huge deal. This is the most important award in their industry.

It's one of the most important awards out there, and to give them short shrift and edit their speech and chop it up and put it in the broadcast, not in front of a live audience that way, it just seems wrong to me. There's been a big petition signed by 350 people in the film industry and are begging the Academy to not do this, guilds have spoken up, the American Cinema Editors have spoken up. IATSE, they've spoken up. Everyone has spoken up for this, but they're going to go forward, they're going to do it anyway. We'll see what happens.

Brigid Bergin: Alison, what's your take? Is there a better way to go about speeding up the ceremony?

Alison Willmore: I personally am not always a big fan of the things that they put in between the awards, the bits of comedy, sometimes they have musical numbers, or montages, which are often lovely but do feel a bit like filler. I-- Maybe this is an old-fashioned approach, and Rafer and I are not reflecting what people want now in a televised ceremony, but what I want to see are like spontaneous moments from people accepting awards. To see people who make these movies actually react to having their work recognized. I would like to be able to see those awards.

I think that the ultimate question here is can the Oscars or can any live award show, all of them have been dealing with this issue, can they really hold back the slow side of ratings when the audiences are just not as invested in watching live TV? Certainly not in the case of something like a ceremony. I think there's a lot of panic guiding these decisions, and they feel a bit short-sighted. Frankly, it just feels like in the desire to try new things in order to hopefully get more eyeballs on the ceremony, they're really getting rid of, and getting the heart and soul of the Academy Awards.

Brigid Bergin: Stripping out at least some humanity, and that is for sure. Let's talk about a new category that they're adding, The Fan Favorite Category. Alison, how is this supposed to work?

Alison Willmore: They added The Fan Favorite Category as what is largely assumed to be a way to mention Spider-Man: No Way Home, which has obviously been an enormous hit even when theaters have been struggling because of COVID. Spider-Man still managed to be this historic hit, audiences obviously really responded to it and had a lot of investment in seeing those characters and seeing those different actors together. It was not nominated for Best Picture. I don't think it should have been even in terms of just kind of pandering to an audience, I just don't think it was a Best Picture nominee.

The Oscars were clearly really interested in figuring out a way to include that category or that film in some way, and so they introduced this voting mechanism where you could vote on the website or on Twitter for whatever movie you, the fan, thought was best. That has led to basically I think, as you might expect, a lot of different fandoms battling to get their favorite movie in, I believe for a while. The Camila Cabello Cinderella was the number one pick because of her following was very passionate in voting.

Brigid Bergin: Oh, and it sounds like a Johnny Depp movie that very few people saw is poised to make a strong showing in this category. I did not even know Johnny Depp made a movie this year.

Alison Willmore: Well, that movie barely got a nomination. I'm not really convinced that a lot of the people who are voting for it are passionate fans of Minamata, which is his movie. I think it's a biopic about a photographer, but-

Brigid Bergin: There's a fandom.

Alison Willmore: -there is a fandom there. They are very vocal and not often very nice online, devoted Johnny Depp defenders. Yes, it's been an interesting experiment mostly in the power of Stan armies.

Brigid Bergin: Well, in our final minute, I have a question for you both just heading into this weekend. Rafer, let's start with you. What are you actually most excited to see happen on Sunday?

Rafer Guzman: I would say I am really most excited to see that Best Picture award. I really think that's going to be a bit of a nail-biter moment in a way that you don't really see that often. Again, this little film going up against a big film. I love that battle. I think that should be really interesting.

Brigid Bergin: How about you, Alison?

Alison Willmore: I'm very curious about Best Supporting Actress, which I think is an interesting race and an unpredictable one and has a few actors in it whose work I really enjoyed, and I am also a big fan of the new West Side Story. I thought it just did incredible things in terms of being in conversation with the first film, in terms of updating it, in terms of giving this new and kind of richer context to the story, and I thought Ariana DeBose was incredible as Anita, and she would be my pick, and I would really love to see her win, and I think she has a pretty good chance. That is something that I would love to see.

Brigid Bergin: We're going to have to leave it there. We'll have all the reveals coming on Sunday. Rafer Guzman is film critic for Newsday, and Alison Willmore is film critic at Vulture and New York Magazine. Thanks so much to you both.

Alison Willmore: Thank you.

Rafer Guzman: Thanks, Brigid.

[music]

Mason: This is Mason from Vancouver. My favorite movie of 2021 was Dune. This is because it opened up a brand new realm of sci-fi to me and my friends, and was an excellent representation of a book previously thought unfilmable.

Susan: Hi, this is Susan from Vashon, Washington, and my favorite movie of the year was Don't Look Up. It made it accessible, it made it funny, and it made it really clear that we're looking at annihilation.

Judy: Hi, I'm Judy from New Rochelle, New York. I had a lot of favorite movies this year, but what I loved most about the movie West Side Story, seeing Rita Moreno in the role that they gave her. I just was thrilled by her performance, and her singing just blew me away.

Host 2: This is The Takeaway, call us at 877-8-MY-TAKE to comment on any story or give us your thoughts on any topic.

Host 3: [foreign language]

Host 2: Also, we're on Facebook and Twitter at The Takeaway. Let us know what you think, and thanks for listening.

[music]

Copyright © 2022 New York Public Radio. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use at www.wnyc.org for further information.

New York Public Radio transcripts are created on a rush deadline, often by contractors. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of New York Public Radio’s programming is the audio record.