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Speaker 1: I can see where this dooris going. It does not look good.

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Speaker 2: What's happening?

Brian: Did you recognize it? Snippet from Everything Everywhere All at Once, a movie that earned 11 Academy award nominations. It's been called an unusual, even improbable Oscar's favorite, but Hollywood's embrace of the fun ambitious, absurdist movie of the multiverses has been one of the great stories of this year's Oscar season.

The other, which we'll also talk about, or another, is the growing influence of streaming on the movie business and how we watch. With us now, A.O. Scott, the chief film critic at the New York Times for a few more days. After more than 2,200 film reviews for the Times over the last 23 years, he's moving on to the New York Times Book Review. Tony, welcome back to WNYC and for one last time in this role, we look forward to talking to you in the future as a book critic but be able to be-- I am glad to be able to go one more time around the block with you on film. Welcome back.

Tony: Thanks. It's great to be here.

Brian: I'm just going to make this personal. Right off the bat, I've seen 5 of the 10 best picture nominees this year, all at home via streaming. I love movies, but I don't think there's been any other year in my life where I've seen five best-picture nominees. Streaming just makes it so much easier, right? Not to mention cheaper. What I don't know is how unusual I am and if the watching I'm doing is changing what kinds of movies are made and therefore the effect on the culture. Where would you start to answer that?

Tony: Well, first of all, I don't think you're unusual. I think there are a handful of movies released in the last year, and a handful of the nominees that a lot of people have gone out to see in the theaters. They've tended to be the bigger movies, the more commercial, more traditionally blockbustery movies. People are also going to see non-Oscar-type movies. Horror movies especially have been doing very well.

I think that most people, and maybe most people, in [chuckles] middle age, let's say, or further into adulthood than young adulthood, are relying on the streaming services on various video-on-demand platforms and are choosing to watch movies at home.

That has, I think, good sides and bad sides. On the one hand, as you've suggested, makes the movies more accessible. You can get to them. You don't have to leave the house and go to them or find out what time they're playing. You can watch them when you want how you want with whom you want.

I think it also, it has had a very unsettling effect on the industry, and I think might also on the culture too. I think that movie-going has been for a very long time, a really central part of our collective cultural activity. It's something that a lot of people do. It's been maybe a source of social and cultural cohesion when there haven't been too many other sources. To lose it, that is to say, to lose the practice of, and the habit of mass moviegoing I think has some dangers and downsides too including a further splintering and fracturing of the audience.

Brian: Listeners, you can call in with anything you want to say about any Oscar-nominated film or any question you want to ask A.O. Scott relevant to the Oscars on Sunday night, including the Oscar's presentation itself, which I'm going to get to with him as well. 212-433-WNYC, 212-433-9692, or Tweet at Brian Lair.

Do you really think, though, to what you just said, that there is any social cohesion from going to the movies in particular? You walk in, the lights go out, you're sitting by yourself watching the film, and then you walk out just with the people you came with.

Tony: [chuckles] I think that's one of the great things about it. It's social cohesion for antisocial people, [laughter] or that's how I've often experienced it. I love going to the movies. I love going to the movies alone, actually, which is what I often do just as a matter of doing my job because I go much too frequently for any sane or normal person.

I think there is something about being in the darkness with a bunch of strangers watching the same thing, and each watching it in your own way and privately that's a very beautiful ritual. I think also there have been certain movies that have captured the public imagination in a way. I think there still are or will be those movies.

Brian: To argue against my own point, people do laugh together in the theater, and they cheer together in the theater. We remember that.

Tony: Yes. I've found in my career as a film critic that certain kinds of movies I don't really understand or don't really get unless I've seen them with an audience. Horror movies are like that. You can feel the fear and anxiety and suspense rippling through the audience. Action movies can be that way. You feel the excitement and the visceral thrill of the spectacle, and certainly comedies where the laughter is infectious and we're hearing the laughter breakout gives you permission to join in. I think that people will still seek that out but not as frequently and not as habitually, and maybe not as adventurously.

I have a worry that the movies that people will leave the house to see and go into theaters to see will be the familiar, the tried, and true, the franchise movies, the big safe movies., and that the sense of adventure, which is another part of what moviegoing has been, might be lost. I think that streaming might threaten it too because streaming is ultimately a more passive way of consuming these pictures and stories.

Brian: Let's take a phone call. 212-433-WNYC from JR in Brooklyn, who I think is going to say that something about the way movies tend to be edited these days is driving them crazy. JR in Brooklyn, yes.

JR: Yes. I'm out here. Brian, thank you for having me. Long-time listener. You are amazing. Thank you for all you do. yes, watching the movies is just hard because it's like cut, cut, cut, cut. There's not a scene that lasts more than a few seconds. It's programming our brains to look for different things. It's--

Brian: That's interesting. Do you think, Tony that movies are edited faster and faster and faster paced, shorter and shorter, shorter cuts?

Tony: I think that's been true. That's true of some movies. I think that they often tend to be edited in very standardized and unimaginative ways. I think that a lot of the Marvel superhero movies, for example, and a lot of action movies have lessened the excitement and the thrill of action filmmaking through very, very routine and predictable cuts.

I would say, this is a bit of a tangent, but if JR likes fewer cuts, the film critics polled in the sight and sound poll very recently named as the best movie of all time, Chantel Akerman, Jeanne Dielman, which is three hours long and has remarkably few cuts. If anyone out there is a fan of the long take, [laughs] the critical consensus is with you

Brian: [laughs] It drives me crazy in music videos. I just want to watch the piano player's fingers. I don't want to see darting around all over. Lenny in Farmingdale, you are on WNYC with A.O. Scott. Hi there, Lenny.

Lenny: Oh, good morning, a longtime listener. of course, we support the station.

Brian: Thank you.

Lenny: I made an observation that we have best actor and best actress and best supporting. Same thing. When it comes to directors the women are never, never nominated. I think if we had best female director and best male director, they'd get more recognition.

Brian: Then again, Tony, there's- and A.O. Scott goes by Tony, there's push in the other way, in the other direction. Drop the gender categories because gender isn't binary in our more enlightened conception of it.

Tony: Yes, it's true. There is a push to make acting gender-free categories. I'm not sure I would be in favor of directing in that way. The point that Lenny's making is true that you had a year where there were some remarkably popular and strong and impressive films directed by women, including The Woman King, directed by Gina Prince-Bythewood, and Aftersun directed by Charlotte Wells, a first film that was nominated in a few other categories. Yet somehow, all of the directing nominees are men.

That, unfortunately, is a pattern that's persisted for a very long time. It feels like a bit of a step backward in this year's nominees.

Brian: I want to ask you about the category at the Oscars of this show's special interest that few other people pay attention to. I don't know if you know. Many years we invite the directors of all five nominated best documentaries. We did it again this year. That means we had the filmmakers of All That Breathes, All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, Fire of Love, A House Made of Splinters, and Navalny, for anybody out there who actually knows any of those films or just listen to our series. Do you watch the documentaries as a film critic, and do you have any favorites this year?

Tony: I do. Actually, I reviewed three of those five, and put one of them on my 10 best list. I thought All the Beauty and the Bloodshed, which I didn't review, but I did think it was one of the 10 best movies of the year. I think that documentary is a fascinating and very vibrant form, and is having, I think a flowering, partly driven actually by streaming. I know I'm making streaming a little bit the villain of this story.

A lot of the streaming platforms, like a lot of the cable television and public television stations before that, are funding and feeding and building an appetite for documentaries. I think that it's a very important art form. Documentaries are a way of bringing us news and perspective on real things that are happening in the world, but they're also forms of storytelling and have aesthetic qualities that I think are important to pay attention to.

I think a lot of these movies have exactly that. All That Breathes is just a fantastic movie about some guys in India, in Delhi, who are running a sanctuary for wild birds, for birds of prey that are injured in the city. On the one hand, it's about the welfare of animals and about the environment and about city life, but it's also just a really beautiful meditation on the way that human beings relate to wild animals, and has some just lovely images and scenes and is just a great movie. Beyond its subject matter, beyond its status as a documentary it's as good as any of these other movies.

Brian: All the Beauty and the Bloodshed which you put on your top 10 list is the Laura Poitras film about the artist and activist Nan Goldin, just for context for listeners. I guess it was completely a coincidence that the Will Smith slap of Chris Rock last year came while Chris Rock was setting up the award for best documentary, of all things

Tony: [laughs] It's true. We had the moment.

Brian: The most sensational moment came at the most nerdy moment.

Tony: Yes, it's true. A moment of documentary, a moment of unscripted reality bursting into a highly-scripted evening.

Brian: It's a great way to look at it, which Questlove won last year. Do you think that the slap will have any impact on how the Oscars are run as a TV show any time this Sunday night, or at any time in the future?

Tony: Well, I think they'll work on keeping the distance between the stage and the seats, and maybe having some bouncers in between Jimmy Kimmel and whoever he manages to insult. The question of the show is always a big question. They've been going back and forth and, in every direction, desperately trying to get back the huge numbers that the Oscar broadcast used to feel entitled to. I think in some ways, it's not going to be that again. It's not going to be what it was in the ‘70s and ‘80s.

They also always try to control for any outbreak of spontaneity. Yet what we remember are always the spontaneous, sometimes disastrous moments, whether it's the slap or the mix up about La La Land and Moonlight a few years ago. I think that they will try to make the show as smooth and uneventful and predictable as possible. All we can hope for as viewers who have to sit down and watch what will be a very long show, is that that doesn't happen. That's something wonderful, spontaneous, unexpected happens which could just be an award.

I think if Michelle Yeoh wins best actress, as many people expect she will for Everything Everywhere All at Once, that will be a great moment. That will be an historic and wonderful moment for everyone around the world.

Brian: In our last 30 seconds, I'll acknowledge without having time to take them that we've gotten a lot of calls either defending going to theaters in person, as a significant emotional, communal experience or staying home is no, then I can watch it over four nights or then I cannot watch a bad movie after I've started it, otherwise I'm stuck. After defending the in-person experience, you're going to your new job which is going to be to sit in a room by yourself, presumably, and read books,

Tony: And read books which is where I started 23 years ago. When I was hired as a movie critic I had been a book critic. It's sort of a homecoming, but I will still go to the movies. I'll have to buy a ticket like everyone else. I'll buy popcorn.

Brian: A.O. Scott, thank you for all your years of film reviews. Good luck on the book beat, and thanks for coming on today.

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