Atlantic Monthly Contributors's Blog, page 16

The Many Unanswered Questions About Trump's Border Wall

President Trump’s executive order Wednesday, mandating the construction of a wall on the U.S. border with Mexico, is a strange milestone—the validation of the central proposal of his campaign, one that has been roundly dismissed by experts as pointless, ineffective, and wildly expensive.

But while Trump can achieve much by simple executive orders, the order on the wall offers little in the way of clarity. Wednesday’s order is really just a set of instructions for Secretary of Homeland Security John Kelly. The American public still doesn’t know how big the wall will be, when it will be built, or how it will be paid for—to pick only the most glaring questions.

The executive order the president signed today touches on several areas of immigration policy and border security. Let’s look at the relevant ones on the wall:

Sec. 2.  Policy.  It is the policy of the executive branch to:

     (a)  secure the southern border of the United States through the immediate construction of a physical wall on the southern border, monitored and supported by adequate personnel so as to prevent illegal immigration, drug and human trafficking, and acts of terrorism;

   (e)  "Wall" shall mean a contiguous, physical wall or other similarly secure, contiguous, and impassable physical barrier.

So far this is clear enough. At times during the campaign, Trump supporters suggested that rather than build an actual physical barrier, he might create a “virtual” wall, or some sort of digital-surveillance mechanism. The order declares a policy that it’s a physical barrier, though that could change. But as the order itself mentions, this is ostensibly already the law of the land, under the Secure Fence Act of 2006. However, an alteration to that law a year later gave the Department of Homeland Security discretion to not build the fence in places where it deemed in unnecessary.

That means the president can order DHS to interpret the law in accordance with his desire to cover the whole border. What the executive order mainly does is to instruct the Kelly to figure out the tough details:

Sec. 4.  Physical Security of the Southern Border of the United States.  The Secretary shall immediately take the following steps to obtain complete operational control, as determined by the Secretary, of the southern border:

     (a)  In accordance with existing law, including the Secure Fence Act and IIRIRA, take all appropriate steps to immediately plan, design, and construct a physical wall along the southern border, using appropriate materials and technology to most effectively achieve complete operational control of the southern border;

     (b)  Identify and, to the extent permitted by law, allocate all sources of Federal funds for the planning, designing, and constructing of a physical wall along the southern border;

     (c)  Project and develop long-term funding requirements for the wall, including preparing Congressional budget requests for the current and upcoming fiscal years; and

     (d)  Produce a comprehensive study of the security of the southern border, to be completed within 180 days of this order, that shall include the current state of southern border security, all geophysical and topographical aspects of the southern border, the availability of Federal and State resources necessary to achieve complete operational control of the southern border, and a strategy to obtain and maintain complete operational control of the southern border.

In essence, then, Trump has announced his intention to follow the law of the United States. But the approach paves the way for Trump to alter the promises he made on the campaign trail in significant ways.

For example, could Trump (by way of Kelly) deem the existing border fence to comply with the law? That would ensure that he has a huge jumpstart on the project. Although he often talked about how tall the wall would be and what it would look like—generally somewhere in the range of 50 feet tall, and made out of solid concrete—Kelly could come back and suggest that was unnecessary or, as experts have argued time and again, impossible. One imagines that Trump would need to build at least a few miles of 50-foot concrete wall for the photo ops, but why bother building the rest when you can declare the promise kept and move on?

Declaring victory might be an alluring strategy for Trump more broadly on immigration. Illegal border crossings are already at historic lows; there were fewer apprehensions of unauthorized crossers at the southern border in 2015 than at any time since 1972. (Experts generally attribute this fluctuation not to American policy but to economic conditions in home countries of would-be migrants. Given that Trump’s ascent has sent the peso into a tailspin, however, that might encourage more attempts.) Deportations are similarly already in progress. Barack Obama deported millions of people, a fact that sometimes flew under the radar but was not lost on Trump himself.

That would also help Trump get off the hook for paying for the wall, a matter that is similarly unresolved by the order. Set aside the question of who will pay: How much will they pay? Trump has suggested a tag of $8 to $12 billion. Other estimates cluster around $15 to $25 billion, with some even higher. It’s up to Kelly to figure that out. Setting aside the late Senator Everett Dirksen’s famous quip, “A billion here, a billion there, pretty soon, you're talking real money,” that’s not a figure that Kelly is likely to come up with by simply juggling DHS’s budget, especially given all the other enforcement priorities Trump has laid out for the department in the executive order.

Trump continues to insist that Mexico will eventually pay for the construction, despite Mexico’s flat refusal. This does actually follow what Trump said during the campaign—he said the U.S. would front the money, and then Mexico would reimburse the U.S. Treasury. He also offered a plan for that, which involved cutting off remittances by unauthorized immigrants to Mexico; jacking up tariffs, which would currently violate NAFTA; cutting off visas to Mexicans; or increasing visa fees. As CNBC reported, there are reasons to doubt this would work to get Mexico to cough up.

In the interim, however, the U.S. still has to find some way to pay for the wall upfront. Members of Congress in both parties have expressed reservations about shelling out billions of dollars for a wall. Congress could raise taxes to pay for it, but that’s deeply unpopular with members, and often with voters. Congress could cut funding from other programs, but taking money away from other programs has a way of eliciting public ire. Or they could simply run up the deficit, which Republicans tend to view as unacceptable during Democratic administrations and more or less fine during Republican ones. So far, the Trump administration has had good luck bending the GOP-led Congress to its will.

For now, all of these questions are just as speculative as they were Wednesday morning. Trump has reaffirmed his intention to build a wall, but in most respects his signature policy remains as vague, and perhaps even vaguer, than it was during the presidential campaign—despite his affixing his signature.

Trump's 'Voter-Fraud' Investigation Targets States That Opposed Him

During his sole press conference as president-elect, on January 11, Donald Trump seemed to promise more favorable treatment for states that had voted for him in the election. “We focused very hard in those states and they really reciprocated,” he said. “And those states are gonna have a lot of jobs and they’re gonna have a lot of security. They’re going to have a lot of good news for their veterans.”

Already, on day 5 of his administration, there are signs of just how red and blue states—and more broadly, areas that voted for Trump as opposed to those that did not—might receive disparate treatment from the federal government.

During Wednesday’s White House briefing, Press Secretary Sean Spicer was asked about Trump’s false claim that millions of fraudulent votes cost him a victory in the popular vote. After that lie was ridiculed Tuesday, Trump tweeted early Wednesday morning that he would order a “major investigation” into voter fraud. But the claim is not just unsupported by any evidence—it was contradicted by his own campaign lawyers, who argued there was no evidence of fraud when Green Party nominee Jill Stein sued for a recount in some states. Why should anyone believe him now?

Spicer’s answer was stunning.

“There’s a lot of states that we didn’t compete in where that’s not necessarily the case,” he said. You look at California and New York, I’m not sure that those statements were—we didn’t look at those two states in particular … I think when you look at where a lot of places where a lot of these issues could have occurred in bigger states, that’s where I think we’re going to look.”

Here’s a shorter way to put that: Spicer is saying that Trump will target only states that voted Democratic for his investigation of fraud.

As my colleague Emma Green laid out yesterday in detail, there’s simply no basis for the claim of massive fraud. Activists who push the claim like to say that the absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence, but repeated investigations, over the course of years, have failed to produce any proof. When the George W. Bush administration spent five years looking for fraud in the 2000s, they came back with effectively nothing. This makes progressives look at warnings about voter fraud as just a pretext for voter suppression: Once the public is made to believe there’s widespread fraud, it will support strict voting laws that require photo ID to vote, restrict early voting, and more. Those laws happen to disproportionately affect minorities, students, the poor, and other demographics that vote overwhelmingly Democratic.

This is not just idle speculation. In North Carolina, the Republican-led government in 2013 passed a voting law that was described as the strictest in the nation. The law’s proponents argued that it was needed to avoid fraud, though they—like everyone else—could not provide evidence of widespread or systematic fraud. In July 2016, a federal court threw out most of the law, finding that it was deliberately designed to suppress the votes of black voters.

It’s hard to know what Trump’s own motivation for harping on the fraud issue might be. Given his easily bruised ego, the idea that he lost the popular vote fair and square seems to rankle him. But those around him have shown a penchant for pushing bogus claims of voter fraud. Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions, then a U.S. attorney, infamously prosecuted civil-rights activists for voter fraud after they sought to help elderly black voters in Alabama to register to vote. Kansas Attorney General Kris Kobach, who has been among the leading national proponents of the claim that there is major vote fraud, has met with Trump and says he is advising him to investigate fraud claims.

Hearing Spicer say in a press briefing that an executive branch investigation would target only blue states offers some validation for the fear that talk of “voter fraud” is simply an excuse to suppress Democratic votes. It ought to go without saying that the idea that voter fraud is occurring only in Democratic states, or only among Democrats, is illogical. (In December, The Washington Post reported that there were only four prosecutions for voter fraud nationwide related to the general election. Three were of Republicans or Trump voters, while a fourth was of a poll worker.)

To be sure, no one knows what parts of a Trump administration statement to take literally. On Tuesday, when Trump’s lies about voter fraud came up, NPR’s Mara Liasson incredulously quizzed Spicer on why, if the president believed in such fraud, he hadn’t ordered an investigation. Spicer deflected: “Maybe we will.” Lo and behold, Trump then made policy via tweet a few hours later. When everything is this fluid, one never knows for sure what’s bluster and what’s real.

But targeting of blue states would fit not only with Trump’s vow during his press conference but also with his actions over the last pair of days. On Tuesday, he tweeted that he was liable to “send in the Feds” to Chicago, a heavily Democratic city, to deal with violence. On Wednesday, he signed an executive order cutting off funding to “sanctuary cities,” which do not cooperate with the federal government on immigration-law enforcement. Most of those cities are also heavily Democratic.

Every new administration tends to favor the states that voted for the president. Those are the states, for example, that tend to end up with appointees in powerful executive-branch seats where they can direct aid back to their home states. In 2009, the Associated Press found that Barack Obama had visited those states that he won, or nearly won, in 2008 more than red states.

But no administration makes a public announcement that it intends to boost the states that supported the president and disadvantage others. For the White House to propose a punitive policy targeted at states that did not vote for him, with the likely purpose of suppressing the votes of its Democrats, is even more stunning. At a time when presidents are typically speaking the language of unity, Trump is sticking to the strategy of division that helped him win the presidency—apparently in the hopes that it will help him win the presidency by greater margins in four years.

1984 Isn’t the Only Book Enjoying a Revival

George Orwell’s 1984 is, at this moment, the best-selling book of any genre at Amazon.com—quite a feat for any novel, let alone one published 67 years ago. The resurgence of interest in Orwell’s dystopian portrait of an authoritarian society in which facts have been eliminated is credited to an interview on Meet the Press on Sunday, in which the presidential adviser Kellyanne Conway told Chuck Todd that administration claims about inauguration attendees weren’t falsehoods but “alternative facts.” Many responded on social media by calling Conway’s statement “Orwellian,” and a deliberate attempt to undermine verifiable truths that didn’t fit the narrative the Trump administration wanted to spin.

1984, which warns against the tyranny of government propaganda and historical revisionism, seems to be a fitting novel to read in this moment, if not an entirely escapist one. But it isn’t the only book enjoying a revival in the current political climate. Works by Hannah Arendt, Sinclair Lewis, and John Steinbeck have seen a measurable boost in both sales and the public interest over the last 12 months. Despite the fact that the new president seems less interested in literature than his predecessor, many people seem to have faith that reading is the best way to understand him, his voters, and his administration.

1984’s recent spike has been notable, but the novel has perpetually hovered on the bestseller list, featuring in the top 100 of Amazon’s most-ordered books for the last three years (in the last 24 hours, it’s jumped from around #91 to #56 on the list of books purchased on Amazon in 2017). For other works, though, their rise in popularity seems more directly linked to the emergence of Trump as a political leader. Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, a 1935 novel about the rise of an authoritarian fascist leader in the U.S., is currently the 26th most-purchased book on Amazon, and its spike on Google Trends corresponds with the U.S. presidential election on November 8.

John Steinbeck’s The Winter of Our Discontent, a 1961 novel about a Long Islander grocery-store clerk who resolves to abandon personal ethics to increase his wealth and status, has also seen boosts in interest that correlate to Trump’s de facto victory in the Republican presidential race in May, the Republican National Convention in July, and the election in November.

If the links between the events of the recent year and Steinbeck’s last book don’t seem entirely clear, The Atlantic’s review, published in 1961, is illuminating: “What is genuine, familiar, and identifiable [about the book] is the way Americans beat the game: the land-taking before the airport is built, the quick bucks, the plagiarism, the abuse of trust, the near theft, which, if it succeeds, can be glossed over—these are the guilts with which Ethan will have to live in his coming prosperity, and one wonders how happily.”

It isn’t just works of fiction being sought out by curious readers. J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, published in June 2016, quickly became a best-seller among people hoping for insight about rural American voters. The book was Amazon’s 17th-most purchased last year, and currently sits at #3 on the top 100. But an older book has also spiked in interest recently: Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. Published in 1951, it explores the rise of fascist authoritarian governments in Europe over the past two centuries, and how regimes employ racism and propaganda to gain power. Dan Weiss, a bookseller in San Francisco, told KQED that customers recommended the book for its insight into current events in America, and that since he put in an order for new copies, they’ve been “flying off the shelves.” In the week leading up to Christmas, according to data sourced by KQED, the book was selling 16 times more copies than usual, confirmed by a spike on Google Trends.

Obviously, no book is a perfect analogy for the complex events playing out in American politics and around the world. But for readers, historical works can offer insight into recurring societal trends, as well as reassurance that this moment isn’t unprecedented. As Barack Obama told The New York Times’s Michiko Kakutani at the end of his presidency, books are “useful as a reminder of the truths under the surface of what we argue about every day and [as] a way of seeing and hearing the voices, the multitudes of this country.”

How Amazon Got a Best Picture Oscar Nomination

With all the discussion of this year’s Oscar nominees—which embraced a more diverse range of performers and stories—another big industry change went largely unremarked on: the first Best Picture nomination for a film distributed by a streaming service. The movie? Manchester by the Sea, Kenneth Lonergan’s weighty, if darkly funny drama about a Massachusetts family dealing with tragedies in their present and past. If you were unaware that Manchester was available on streaming media, that’s because it’s not—yet. Though acquired by Amazon when it debuted at Sundance last year, the film got a proper theatrical release last November and has grossed an extremely healthy $39 million at the domestic box office so far.

Over the last few years, streaming networks (particularly Netflix and Amazon) primarily known for their TV output have strived to make inroads into the film world with splashy acquisitions. But only Amazon’s approach has really worked, earning a total of six Oscar nominations this month for Manchester by the Sea—Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actor, Best Supporting Actor, Best Supporting Actress, and Best Original Screenplay. Unlike Netflix, Amazon has quickly built up a reputation in terms of prestige because it gives its films actual theatrical runs, rather than treating the cinema experience as an afterthought.

Since moving into movie production, Amazon’s approach has been to mostly work with established independent filmmakers, leveraging whatever clout comes with their name recognition. This began with Spike Lee’s Chi-Raq in 2015, followed by Whit Stillman’s Love & Friendship, Nicolas Winding Refn’s The Neon Demon, Todd Solondz’s Wiener-Dog, Woody Allen’s Café Society, and Jim Jarmusch’s Paterson this year. In each case, Amazon partnered with a theatrical distributor to release the films nationwide before premiering them on Amazon Prime a few months later, where they can be streamed for free by subscribers.

It’s an approach filmmakers will always prefer, and, in most cases, one that helps spread the word about their movies. Love & Friendship was undoubtedly a niche property—an acidic adaptation of Jane Austen’s novella Lady Susan replete with Stillman’s typically florid, dense dialogue. But a slowly expanding release in May made it the biggest indie hit of 2016; it ended up grossing $14 million, the most for any movie that never reached more than 800 screens nationwide. A streaming network might balk at such success, because it cuts into the viewership one might hope for at home. But Amazon has so far struck the right balance, garnering appropriate hype for its films before they’re available to stream.

Like Netflix, Amazon has had to lay out massive cash sums to get a toehold in the movie industry. Manchester by the Sea was acquired at Sundance for $10 million. Woody Allen went to Amazon to make Café Society, abandoning his usual partners Sony Pictures Classics, because the company could provide the bigger budget required for a 1930s-set Hollywood drama. Aside from Manchester and Love & Friendship, none of Amazon’s films has been a big earner yet, although films like Chi-Raq, Paterson, and Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden got the kind of critical acclaim the studio was looking for.

Amazon is a blockbuster factory compared to Netflix, which is barely interested in releasing its movies at all. Netflix came on the scene with Beasts of No Nation in 2015, which made a paltry $90,000 in theaters, partly because almost every theater chain declined to feature it. Unlike Amazon, Netflix insists on releasing its films in theaters and online simultaneously, rather than prioritizing the theater experience. Though the company claimed 3 million people watched Beasts online in its first week, Netflix doesn’t make its ratings data public, so that claim was hard to parse—especially how many viewers sat through the entire film.

Netflix has revolutionized the television industry, but so far it’s continued to struggle on the film side.

Beasts of No Nation won a SAG Award for its star Idris Elba, but was snubbed at the Oscars, as has every other Netflix movie. Potential indie hits like The Fundamentals of Caring, Tallulah, Mascots, and Barry simply get added to Netflix’s ever-expanding library, which is harder and harder to browse (especially because the company doesn’t create easy landing pages for its original content—which, to be fair, is also a problem Amazon Prime has). This is why Netflix struggles to attract big names at film festivals like Sundance. It tried to get involved in the biggest bidding war of last year for Nate Parker’s The Birth of a Nation. Though it reportedly outbid Fox Searchlight by $2.5 million for the distribution rights, Parker went with the other studio because it could promise him a proper theatrical run.

With its binge-watchable seasons of original content that all release on the same day, Netflix has revolutionized the television industry, but so far it’s continued to struggle on the film side, and not for lack of trying. Manchester by the Sea was a hit with Academy voters because of its general critical acclaim, but that wasn’t the only reason it did well with them—it also seemed like a real movie that the general public was excited to go see, rather than add to their watch queues at home. One day, Netflix may get its hands on a word-of-mouth hit so extraordinary that it garners Oscar attention despite its unusual release model. But thus far, traditions are holding fast.

Losing Faith in The Path, Hulu's Cult-Set Drama

Religion, fanaticism, and the “prison” of faith is rich territory for television in this moment. HBO’s The Young Pope stars Jude Law as an arrogant, movie-star-handsome pontiff bent on restoring the Catholic church to its authoritarian roots, who might also be capable of working miracles. The Leftovers, which returns for its final season in April, has considered the role of organized religion in society with rational and emotional complexity. Even the A&E docuseries Leah Remini: Scientology and the Aftermath has been exploring the psychological ramifications of being in, and leaving, an organization that prizes fealty over freedom.

In its first season, which debuted on Hulu in 2016, The Path had a little of all of the above: magical realism, the testing of belief, power struggles, seeming acts of God. It featured some extraordinary performances from Aaron Paul, Michelle Monaghan, and Hugh Dancy as the young and charismatic linchpins of a spiritual group based on airy New Age ideals and muscular resistance to outsiders. But the most interesting thing about the show was its ambiguous treatment of Meyerism, the fictional movement at its core. The Path’s creator, Jessica Goldberg, seemed undecided on whether the sect she’d imagined was a cult, a benign but insular community, or a positive force for social change. As the first ten episodes played out, framed around Eddie Lane’s (Paul) crisis of faith, the show resisted clarity, leaving Meyerism open to interpretation.

But season two, which returns on Wednesday with new installments released weekly, falls victim to the primary weakness of streaming shows: It doesn’t have enough story to tell. To make things worse, the season has been given an extra three episodes to parcel out its morsels of plot, making an already downtempo drama feel almost catatonic. It isn’t until the eighth episode that anything intriguing begins to develop, and that’s after considerable hours of dropped threads, distractions, and suspended characters. In its sophomore slump, The Path seems to have forgotten why it wanted us to believe in it in the first place.

Season one benefited from the obligation of introducing Meyerism and its believers, based on compounds in Peru, San Diego, and upstate New York. Founded by Dr. Steven Meyer and a small group of friends some time around the late ’60s, it was a movement based on vague, New Age-ish ideas about light and truth, and a legend in which Meyer climbed up a burning ladder to receive both from a mysterious spirit. There were some apparent similarities to Scientology: The organization has 13 “rungs” or levels up which believers can climb, apostates are shunned, members participate in recorded “unburdening” sessions in which they confess their misdeeds, and they use devices that appear to be similar to e-meters. The leader of the New York faction was a magnetic man named Cal (Dancy), whose fierce temper and insecurities led him to commit acts of physical violence, sexual indiscretions, and even murder.

Over ten episodes, The Path contrasted Cal’s increasing instability with the internal struggles of Eddie, whose wife, Sarah (Monaghan) grew up in Meyerism and was one of its strongest advocates. Unbeknown to all of them, an FBI agent, Abe Gaines (Rockmond Dunbar) also infiltrated the group to investigate its cultlike practices, while an ex-member, Alison (Sarah Jones) tried to find out why her husband had killed himself. The season ended with several cliffhangers: Sarah discovered that Cal had written the last three rungs of the movement himself, rather than having them dictated to him by Meyer; Eddie traveled to Peru to visit Meyer, who’d recently awoken from a coma; and Alison, against all odds, returned to the fold.

Season two picks up some of these threads, although Alison has disappeared, seemingly never to be spoken of again. It disposes of most of its crucial reveals in the first episode, and then focuses largely on Meyerism’s financial problems, with Sarah and Cal both struggling to co-lead the movement as the so-called “guardians of the light.” Most of the old storylines pick up right where they left off—Eddie’s isolation, Gaines’s cover as a new member, Cal’s relationship with Mary (Emma Greenwell)—but a handful of new ones nod faintly to current events. One of the biggest dramas, believe it or not, involves whether the organization can receive tax-exempt status, while another revolves around a community being poisoned by chemicals a corporation is pumping into their water. The show’s ultimate goal seems less to explore the paradigm of faith than to communicate how hard it is being a cult these days.

There are a handful of new characters: Leven Rambin plays Chloe Jones, an old friend of Eddie’s brother, and Melanie Griffith appears as the mother of a new member, while Kathleen Turner has another insultingly brief cameo as Cal’s alcoholic mother. But they can’t make up for the fact that the show seems to have lost its mojo. Where once Meyerism was treated with nuance, now it’s more nefarious in its practices, pursuing “growth” as blindly as any Nasdaq corporation and using dirt on members to manipulate them. Even the show’s creative choices feel more restrained, with few of the trippy, ayahuasca-induced moments that made season one so inventive, and its “miracles” so persuasive.

There are moments when The Path’s counterintuitive treatment of religion shines through, like when scenes of Eddie attending a support group for ex-cult members are juxtaposed with Meyerist prayer meetings, and when Gaines’s FBI boss insists that Meyerism is mumbo-jumbo but believing a virgin bore a child is perfectly rational. Monaghan is stellar as Sarah, while Dancy sinks deeper into Cal’s weaknesses. But for the most part, the second season slowpokes its way toward a predictable conclusion, having no fun at all along the way.

In that, it exemplifies the burden of streaming shows, forced to grind out hours of content to hook new viewers without the material to pad it out. There’s nothing in either season of The Path that couldn’t be achieved in six episodes; shows like Amazon’s Fleabag and Starz’s The Girlfriend Experience have proven that experimenting with shorter episodes can lead to taut, focused, masterful television. Hulu’s experiments with delivery, too, seem particularly ill-planned in this case: The Path by its nature seems to reward binging episodes to get to the payoff at the end, but its week-by-week release means many of the throwaway plot developments could get lost.

But the biggest problem seems to be the idea, espoused by Netflix’s Ted Sarandos, that the whole first season of a streaming show is essentially a pilot, and that the payoff comes afterward. For one thing, it requires viewers to invest time and energy in a season for an ending that might not deliver. For another, it prompts shows to think more about dramatic conclusions and cliffhangers than doing the more vital work of being consistently entertaining. In this case, The Path was sometimes dazzling when it was figuring itself out; now, with the end so obviously in sight, it’s much harder to have faith that the journey will be worth it.

The Elegant Simplicity of The Red Turtle

A man, lost at sea, washes up on an island. Upon exploration, it proves to be uninhabited except for the occasional sea lion and a delightful platoon of curious sand crabs. Over time, the man builds a raft out of bamboo and once again braves the sea. But his craft is bumped by an unseen creature in the water and shatters. He tries a second time, with the same outcome; and a third, in which he discovers that the intransigent animal is an enormous red turtle that seems not to want him to leave the island.

Thus opens The Red Turtle, by the Dutch animator Michaël Dudok de Wit, and I would be remiss if I were to reveal precisely what happens next. Suffice to say that the man finds a woman, they have a child, and they face hardships together. The film that unfolds from these simple premises is spare, elegant, and profoundly moving, an evocative examination of the cycles of life, human and animal alike.

This is the first feature film by Dudok de Wit, whose Father and Daughter won the Oscar for Best Animated Short in 2001. That film caught the attention of the legendary animator Hayao Miyazaki (Princess Mononoke, Spirited Away, The Wind Rises), and in 2008 he proposed that the studio he co-founded, Studio Ghibli, assist Dudok de Wit in developing a feature.

The Red Turtle is the product of that collaboration, and in many ways it seems like a natural one. Dudok de Wit’s simple yet particular lines evoke not only past works by Studio Ghibli but also such European antecedents as Hergé’s Tintin. Apart from the turtle, whose complexity entailed CGI, the characters were hand-drawn with digital pen and set against glorious backgrounds based on charcoal drawings. The rich blues of the ocean and richer-still greens of the bamboo forest give way to haunting grays and blacks as the days and nights, too, rotate through their assigned cycles. And Dudok de Wit’s gift for the interplay between light and shadow is nothing short of glorious.

The story, co-written by the French filmmaker Pascale Ferran, is at once magical and familiar, and told without dialogue apart from the occasion wordless exclamation. There are dream sequences and elements of outright fantasy—the turtle itself is almost numinous in its watchful intelligence—as well as moments of danger and calamity. But the movie’s most powerful moments are often its most everyday: a woman and a man silently taking one another’s measure; two parents sending their grown child out into the wide world. Throughout it all, nature goes on about its business, with creatures preying upon one another in sublime innocence.

The result is a tale of uncommon beauty, at once singular and universal—a fable that recalls both ancient creation myths and Kipling’s “just so” stories. Even as it presents itself as a metaphor for life, The Red Turtle is also a straightforward depiction of it. Its title notwithstanding, it is a film almost bursting with humanity.

The Divine Comedy Within The Young Pope

One of the funniest moments of recent TV memory comes in the second episode The Young Pope during a tense meeting between Jude Law’s Lenny Belardo—Pope Pious XIII—and a cardinal who opposed his ascension to the papacy. Belardo asks the cardinal whether he is a homosexual; the cardinal, after a long and pained paused, answers yes. Belardo, silent, reaches to the button beneath his desk that sends a signal to his staff that he needs an excuse to end a meeting.

Into the room comes the papal secretary, Sister Surree. Chipperly: “Time for your snack, Holy Father!”

Belardo lets out a shocked snort of laughter and tries to stifle it. His voice exasperated, unbelieving: “My snack?”

“Yes, Holy Father, your snack.”

“Right,” he says, nodding. “That’s what she calls it. I have to have”—pause—“my snack now. Goodbye, your eminence.” The cardinal, knowing his career to have suddenly and unceremoniously ended, kisses the pope’s hand and leaves.

There are many, many amusing moments in The Young Pope so far, but this might be the best. Belardo has taken pains to seem inscrutable and unswayable; early on, the fact that he’s “a man of little appetite” strikes church officials as ominous. But sweet Sister Surree is apparently not in on the act. Her suggestion that he’s a child who needs to drop everything for snack time is totally wrong, and very hilarious.

Most importantly, though, it’s hilarious to the pope himself.

In the time since it premiered on HBO earlier this month, Paolo Sorrentino’s tale of the Vatican suddenly overtaken by a 47-year-old American who loves Cherry Coke Zero and cigarettes has puzzled viewers about what level of irony it’s operating at. “How Funny Does the Young Pope Want to Be?” asked The Vulture TV Podcast, summing up the primary question confronting critics of the highly stylized, often surreal-seeming drama.

The answer to that question is at the heart of the show’s genius. The Young Pope doesn’t satirize the Vatican; rather, with its meticulous attention to costuming, casting, and ritual, it aims for something close to a realistic depiction. It’s Belardo the character and Sorrentino the filmmaker who are funny. The two each bring keen perception, wit, and a flair for surprise to an unchanging, ancient place. The fundamental concern here is faith’s ludicrousness—both its rococo trappings and its colossal influence on individual lives. Belardo and Sorrentino embrace that ludicrousness fully, wringing from it both laughter and terror.

That Belardo crawls out from a pile of babies in the opening dream sequence of the series suggests, among other things, that being young is more than incidental to this young pope. He brings to a millennia-old institution the eyes of a child; for him and for the camera, there is nothing rote about the cardinals lined up in symmetry, the nuns playing soccer, the magnificent frescos and gardens, the outrageous papal vestments. Humor naturally arises from such a setting when seen fresh—especially when seen from behind the scenes, with holy men and women wielding iPads and wearing novelty t-shirts—perhaps for the same reason that a “a priest walks into a bar” is a cliche.

But the show’s novelty isn’t simply a matter of perceiving anew, it’s also a matter of making something anew. Belardo realizes the extent to which the church has become rote and furniture-like to both those within and outside, and he seeks to re-exoticize it. So he admonishes his cook to ditch the familiar tone she’d grown accustomed to using with previous popes; he refuses to have his image commodified on knick knacks; he keeps the world and his advisers guessing as to his intentions. “Mystery is a serious matter, it’s not some marketing strategy,” his mentor, Cardinal Spence, tells him. But Belardo’s path to mystery involves copious amounts of unseriousness.

Within the safe space of humor, he tests dangerous ideas, as when he confides that he doesn’t believe in god and then says “just kidding.” Through the entertaining power of humor, he gives his testimony more bite, as when he tells his confessor, “I was praying so hard I nearly shit my pants.” And through the luxury of humor—the fact that he is allowed to crack wise when others must remain solemn—he repeatedly asserts his dominance. “I’m not the one dispensing jokes in the Vatican anymore, Your Holiness, now it’s you,” Cardinal Voiello, the Vatican’s increasingly exasperated secretary of state, tells him. Belardo spits back,“First of all, I suggest you recover as soon as possible your legendary fake courtesy. And secondly, my jokes contain the truth.”

Fundamentally, The Young Pope a surprise machine—and surprise is the essence of comedy.

Sorrentino’s camera largely lives inside Belardo’s head, which means the filmmaker needs to be as funny as his protagonist. Whether with incongruous soundtrack choices, skewed angles, or jarring cuts between scenes, the show keeps the viewer off-balance and ever-guessing. You can see the blurring between filmmaking sensibility and Belardo’s interiority in the bizarre closing of the latest episode, when the Prime Minister of Greenland dances carefreely to rock music alone in an empty room as facts about her country flash across the screen. The best interpretation I’ve got is that the sequence is the Pope’s flight of fancy, perhaps a sublimation of sexual desire (along the lines of “think about baseball”) or perhaps simply a vision of a life less encumbered than his own.

All of this means that The Young Pope is a machine built to deliver surprise—and surprise is, of course, the essence of comedy. But because comedy is not necessarily the end goal of either Belardo’s or Sorrentino’s mischievous style—newness, wonder, and mystery are—surprise infuses even the most dramatic scenes. Which perhaps explains some of the audience’s confusion about how serious the serious stuff really is.

It’s fair, certainly, to ask whether we’re witnessing parody: Take, for example, a moment in the fourth episode where the pope spies on the laywoman Esther having sex and implores the Virgin Mary to grant her a child, sternly and repetitively ordering an unseen presence in the sky to do his will. But what else should earnest, desperate, stark-serious prayer look like? Belardo may not be certain god exists, but that uncertainty has only made the question of the divine all the more urgent to him. Even if the young pope and The Young Pope are aesthetically irreverent, deep down they are filled with reverence—fear and desire for something beyond this life.

Even within the show itself, this merging of sensibilities—heavenly yearning meets worldly quipping—can breed misunderstanding. In a scene from the most recent episode, Esther speaks with Cardinal Voiello. When she suggests she can sway the pope’s opinions because “he respects me,” Voiello puts his hand over his mouth and muffles a giggle.“I was about to laugh, but I stopped myself because I have a certain class,” he says. “We seriously doubt that the pope even respects God.” He’s wrong—we’ve seen the pope passionately beg repentance from above, we’ve seen his compassion for Esther, and we’ve begun to get the sense that he may even have divine powers. But Voiello has conflated impishness with impiousness. For once on this show, he’s heard a joke where there isn’t one.

In Praise of Corinne, The Bachelor's Human Conspiracy Theory

This post reveals minor “plot” points of episode 5 of The Bachelor season 21.

Call it The Corinnetervention. During Monday’s episode of The Bachelor, the women remaining on the show—frustrated to the breaking point at the antics of Corinne Olympios, the season’s resident woman-child—gathered upon a plush couch, wine goblets in hand, and offered her their indictments. Corinne, they said, is overly sexual with Nick Viall, the season’s appointed Bachelor and the women’s collective boyfriend. She is also too immature for the 36-year-old Nick. (It’s not just that Corinne is 24, the women insisted; it’s that—as she is fond of reminding her fellow castmates—she is a 24-year-old who has a nanny.) Corinne, also, is too “privileged.” She is too disrespectful. She slept through a Rose Ceremony. Perhaps above all: In a show in which the frenemyships among the women who are dating the same dude serve as a reliably satisfying b-plot to the central romances, Corinne is decidedly Not Here to Make Friends.

Which makes her, on the one hand, simply that most classic of reality-show characters: Corinne is this season’s appointed villain. She foments drama. She is a bikini-clad agent of chaos. She is a factory-formed fusion of Vienna from Jake’s season and Chad from JoJo’s, with a little dash of Olivia from Ben’s thrown in for good measure: She is wacky, and brazen, and she really, really does not care what you think. But Corinne is also, despite her outspokenness (“I definitely know how fto turn on the sex charm,” she says into the camera), a cipher. She invites, even more than disdain from her castmates or delight from her viewers … doubt. With her, the question isn’t just the typical one—is she Here for the Right Reasons?—but also the more basic: Is she here at all? Is Corinne really a 24-year-old “business owner” from Miami, looking for love? Is she an actor? Is she “a preteen girl who got trapped in a Big and/or 13 Going on 30–style body-swap”? Is she in on the joke? Or is she simply the butt of it?

The Bachelor, which has spent its 20 previous seasons figuring out what audiences really want from “reality,” is tantalizingly opaque about all of that. In a show that has long derived drama from its villain edits, Corinne offers a newer kind of character, based on a newer kind of trope, based on a newer way of teasing viewers. Corinne Olympios, “business owner” and nanny-haver, is getting the conspiracy edit.

The appeal is not the scene itself, but the questions it provokes. Is this girl for real? And, relatedly: How real can she be?

Take her antics on the show. One the one hand, they come from Corinne herself—from the camera’s observations of her behavior and of the commentary she freely gives in the show’s confessional booth. The business owner (and model?) regularly turns on the “sex charm” (so often and openly, in fact, as to prompt Fox News to ask, of the show’s “raunchiest season ever”: “Has The Bachelor gone too far?”). She removes her bikini top while in a pool with Nick. She dresses in a trench coat with very little underneath, to surprise him with 1) herself and 2) a can of whipped cream. Later, on a date at a dairy farm with Nick and the other women, Corinne expresses her distaste for the rustic setting by declaring, “I want to be at a spa, being fed a nice taco. Preferably … chicken.”

But. Corinne’s Corinne-ness has also been enabled—and amplified—by the show’s producers. Last week’s episode of The Bachelor found Corinne surprising Nick, during the pool party he threw for the women to celebrate his birthday, with an enormous bounce castle that had been installed in the mansion’s driveway. Yes, the kind you might see at a kid’s birthday party or a county fair. She took credit for the “surprise.” And then she bounced, in a bandeau bikini top that required censor-blurring from the show’s editors, with Nick. When they fell down, she straddled him. More censors. More sex charm.

And then, just as suddenly and magically as the bounce castle appeared at the Bachelor mansion: The other women got wind of its presence. They left the pool to watch the scene unfold between Corinne and Nick, disgusted with her (and with Nick for indulging her). Nick, meanwhile, told the cameras how much he appreciates Corinne’s sense of fun—fun, he said solemnly, being a key component in any lasting relationship.

What drama, all in all! But of course: If you know anything at all about the behind-the-scenes workings of shows like The Bachelor, it is that the contestants—even the “business owners” who have nannies—have basically no power, within the constraints of the show, to do things like order bounce castles to appear on the mansion’s driveway. The contestants on The Bachelor are, on the contrary, systematically detached from the outside world: They don’t have their devices. They don’t have the internet. They don’t have magazines. (Indeed, one Moment of Drama on JoJo’s season of The Bachelorette came when Vinny smuggled in a contraband issue of InTouch to show the other men.) The castmates have each other, their Moroccan lantern-lit mansion, and whatever little treats—foodstuffs, booze, more booze—the producers see fit to provide them while they live in isolation. It’s an environment meant to put people on edge, for drama-devising purposes; it’s also an environment in which a bounce castle will appear only if a producer decides that a bounce castle should appear.

The show’s audience, generally, understands this. They, too, read InTouch. They, too, understand the machinations that inform “reality.” And so, they will also be unsurprised when, directly after Corinne pulls her stunt with canned whipped cream, an ad for Reddi-wip airs. (The brand has been a sponsor of The Bachelorette, too: Last season, it ran a cheeky ad in which the can had to choose between a bowl of strawberries and a plate of brownies.) And they will know that, when The Bachelor airs footage of Corinne “sleeping through a Rose Ceremony,” the rose she has already received placed delicately next to her, as if she is starring in her own, Moroccan-lantern-lit version of Sleeping Beauty … the odds of this tableau having come together organically are very, very low.

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But that’s the appeal: not the scene itself, but the questions it provokes. Is this girl for real? And, relatedly: How real can she be? When Corinne explains of her napping, later on, that “Michael Jordan took naps. Abraham Lincoln took naps,” is she … serious? When she goes on a tirade, after that date at the dairy farm, about her unwillingness to “shovel poopie,” is she … kidding? When she offers an extended metaphor about how she is “a corn husk”—in that “you’ve got to peel the layers back. And then in the middle is this luxury yellow corn with all these little pellets of information. And it’s juicy. Buttery. You WANT to get to that corn. Nick needs that corn”—is she making fun of herself? Or of us, for watching all this absurdity? And for sort of wanting to get that corn?

It doesn’t matter, and that is the genius of Corinne, and of the Bachelor producers who selected/enabled/created her for the show. She is both nihilistic and inclusive, a person to be watched and a puzzle to be solved. She is a walking, talking, castle-bouncing conspiracy theory.

It’s fitting that this season of The Bachelor airs during a time that familiarized the American public with the coinage “alternative facts.”

And: She is a product of her times. The Bachelor’s 21st season has found the show, for the first time, offering an official Fantasy league to allow the members of Bachelor Nation to more actively participate in its antics. It’s a season that is airing in the wake of Unreal, Lifetime’s drama satirizing—but also illuminating the production-side workings of—The Bachelor. It’s also a season that was produced during a presidential campaign that revolved, even more than usual, around actual conspiracy theories. It is airing during a time that familiarized the American public with the coinage “alternative facts.” Nick’s season of The Bachelor, in other words—a season starring a man who has been the subject of some speculation as to whether he, himself, is There for the Right Reasons—is exploiting not just drama. It is also exploiting conspiracy. It is indulging in the paranoid style. It is inviting its viewers to question, to doubt, to peel back that husk to find out whether corn, on its own, can be Buttery.

It’s brilliant. And it’s fit for an age that, even when it comes to the most widely viewed of broadcast TV shows, encourages audience participation. The Bachelor is, in many ways, a 21st-century tribute to P.T. Barnum, the 19th-century showman who understood that the only thing more thrilling than being witness to wondrous things is the ability to question whether those wonders are fake. Barnum understood that reality can be boring—and that “reality,” after awhile, can be, as well. Mystery, though, is enduringly compelling. On Sunday, just before the latest episode of The Bachelor aired on ABC, Corinne’s mother told TMZ, of her daughter’s on-air antics, that “most of it is fake.” Mrs. Olympios, however, prefaced that comment with this: Corinne, her mother confessed, “decided either you are two people that get remembered—the winner or the villain.”

What, exactly, did Corinne “decide” for herself? What exactly, is “fake” here? It’s unclear. But will I be watching The Bachelor next week to try to answer those questions for myself? Without a doubt.

Is Trump's Presidency Off to a Successful Start?

From some angles, the Trump presidency is off to a rocky start. There were the somewhat disappointing crowds at the inauguration, and then the needless lies about them, presented as “alternative facts.” There’s the controversy over Trump’s remarks to the CIA, and precisely who in the crowd cheered his visit. On Monday, the president repeated a dumb and unnecessary lie about illegal ballots having cost him the popular vote during a meeting with members of Congress. The Washington Post reports in detail on White House infighting and an attempted reboot—just four days into the administration. ABC’s The Note frowns, “He can’t help himself, and he isn’t helping himself.”

But what if the Trump presidency is actually off to a surprisingly effective start? For months, Trump has shown a perverse ability to overshadow his own message with chaos and disorder, and the first five days of his administration fit right into that pattern.

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Take his nominations. Trump started his presidency with unusually few confirmed appointees. That was in large part the fault of his transition team, which has been slow to nominate and slow to vet candidates for the jobs. Many of the nominees who have come to hearings have had a rough go of it. Secretary of State-designate Rex Tillerson stumbled through his hearing. So did Secretary of Education-designate Betsy DeVos, who seemed in some cases unversed in federal law on education. Attorney General-designate Jeff Sessions seems to have misrepresented his record on desegregation. Tom Price, the nominee for secretary of health and human services, is facing down stories about alleged insider trading. Ben Carson, nominated to head Housing and Urban Development, previously said he wasn’t qualified to run an agency and has no experience in housing.

For all that, it seems possible that every one of Trump’s nominees will make it through. None is in certain danger now, especially after wavering Senator Marco Rubio announced he would support Tillerson’s nomination. James Mattis, who needed a congressional waiver to even qualify for the post of secretary of defense, won all but a single vote in the Senate.

That’s better than Barack Obama’s record at the outset of his administration, and he had a huge Democratic majority in the Senate. Tom Daschle (health and human services) and Bill Richardson (commerce) both had to withdraw after investigations. Tim Geithner (treasury) nearly went down over tax discrepancies. Judd Gregg (commerce again) withdrew over differences with Obama.

Or take Trump’s promise to intervene to prevent jobs from leaving the country. That vow, particularly targeted at the air-conditioner manufacturer Carrier, was dismissed during the campaign. But Trump quickly swung into action after the election, and announced a high-profile deal with Carrier to keep jobs in Indiana. The devil was in the details, of course: Carrier was still moving jobs to Mexico; Trump had unusual leverage over Carrier’s parent company, a major contractor; the deal cost taxpayers dearly; many of the “preserved” jobs might still be automated in the future.

But Trump got his symbolic win, and he’s since collected a host of others. Companies have announced expansions of jobs in the U.S. that were already planned or already disclosed, and Trump has hastened to claim credit for them, whether they were his doing or not. CEOs, who are not eager to get on the wrong side of a new president, are in no hurry to set the record straight.

There are plenty of other minor political triumphs underlying all of this. On Monday, Trump met with union leaders at the White House, and even though labor leaders endorsed Hillary Clinton, the meeting apparently went well. Sean McGarvey, president of North America's Building Trades Unions, told Josh Eidelson “it was by far the best meeting I ever participated in” reaching back to 1999. The leaders of both Canada and Mexico have signaled they’re willing to open negotiations on revising NAFTA.

Republicans in Congress, meanwhile, show little interest in investigating Trump’s conflicts of interest.

Trump’s conduct over the last few days has lots of observers scratching their heads. The Washington Post’s James Hohmann homes in on Trump as a sore winner, and while it’s impossible to disagree, the president’s insistence on repeating obviously, provably false claims—he had the biggest in-person crowd at an inauguration, or he would have won the popular vote if not for illegal voters—are also arguably an essential political strategy for him. Trump has no apparent interest in policy details or in working the levers of Congress; he has approached the presidency more as a bully pulpit than as a demanding executive role. But it’s a lot harder to use that bully pulpit if you’re not always viewed as a winner, so Trump insists he’s a winner even when he is not.

The result, paradoxically, is that he’s coming out as a winner on many issues. Some of these victories may prove to be pyrrhic. Getting shaky and unprepared nominees confirmed is a good way to produce shaky and unprepared Cabinet secretaries. Retaining manufacturing jobs works well until companies start automating and laying people off anyway.  In other cases, it’s simply too early to be too confident. The chaos within the West Wing that the Post describes bodes ill for an effective administration. Meanwhile, Trump’s early steps in other areas may still fail, or undo him later. His foreign-policy moves continue to inspire queasiness, as do continued reports about ties to Russia. (Of course, predicting the impending collapse of Trump has produced some of the least-accurate forecasts since Millenarianism went out of style.)

But it doesn’t require any alternative facts, only an alternative interpretation, to look at the Trump administration and see a presidency moving forward on many of its key goals and notching political victories. The optics may be bad, but then again, the optics of Trump’s entire presidential campaign were bad, too. It’s the results that mattered.

The Oscar Nominations: La La Land, Moonlight, and Arrival Dominate

As largely expected, La La Land dominated Tuesday’s Oscar nominations list, with the gauzy, self-aware throwback musical receiving 14 nods (tying a record held by All About Eve and Titanic) to lead the field in 2016. But the Academy otherwise spread the wealth among a largely worthy set of intimate dramas and critically acclaimed genre films. The list also did a far better job of acknowledging the film industry’s diversity of storytellers and performers than last year’s highly controversial list, which excluded any major actor, director, or writer of color.

The Miami-set coming-of-age drama Moonlight and the emotionally resonant sci-fi drama Arrival netted eight nominations each including Best Picture and Best Director. Mel Gibson’s World War II film Hacksaw Ridge, Kenneth Lonergan’s family drama Manchester by the Sea, and Garth Davis’s true-story travelogue Lion each received six nominations including Best Picture, a list that was rounded out with Theodore Melfi’s NASA biopic Hidden Figures, Denzel Washington’s August Wilson adaptation Fences, and David Mackenzie’s bank-robber thriller Hell or High Water.

This year’s list included seven actors of color, three African American writers (including the late August Wilson, who wrote the screenplay for Fences), and a Best Director nomination for Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), who becomes only the fourth black director nominated in the Oscars’ history after John Singleton, Lee Daniels, and Steve McQueen. After the controversy over last year’s nominees was crystalized in the “#OscarsSoWhite” online protests (the hashtag was started in 2015), the Academy moved to revamp its membership in an initiative spearheaded by its president, Cheryl Boone Isaacs.

Isaacs introduced this year’s nominees in a live-streamed video presentation along with several former nominees—a jarring departure from the usual tradition of bleary-eyed movie stars announcing the list to a crowd of publicists at five in the morning in Los Angeles. It reflected the Academy’s desire to keep up with social media and pitch its ceremony to a younger, more internet-savvy audience. Jimmy Kimmel will host this year’s ceremony, broadcast on ABC, on February 26.

La La Land, which won seven Golden Globes earlier this month, remains the obvious frontrunner for Best Picture after its 14 nominations. No matter how much the Academy’s membership changes, the Oscars will always be drawn to films about Hollywood, and La La Land is a celebration of the artists and dreamers who descend on Los Angeles to make it big, even if the story ends on a melancholy note. The film’s lead actors Emma Stone and Ryan Gosling made the shortlist, as did its writer-director Damien Chazelle, and the film racked up technical nominations for its aural and visual elements to reach that record-tying number.

Moonlight, a small-budget drama funded by independent studio A24, would not have topped any Oscar pundit’s list a few months ago, considering both its size and its storytelling focus (the early life of a gay black man in Miami). But rapturous critical acclaim and surprising word-of-mouth success propelled it to nominations for its writer-director Barry Jenkins, supporting actors Mahershala Ali and Naomie Harris, and several technical nods including for cinematography, score, and editing.

In a year largely free of controversy, the biggest complaints will likely be directed at the love for Hacksaw Ridge, Mel Gibson’s searing war film that dramatizes the battle of Okinawa and the stirring life of Desmond Doss (Andrew Garfield), a pacifist who nonetheless served in the army as a combat medic and won the Medal of Honor for his heroics on the battlefield. Gibson, who won two Oscars in 1996 for Braveheart, seemed permanently exiled from Hollywood after an arrest for drunk driving, accusations of domestic violence, and various incidents of leaked audio that showed him making anti-Semitic, sexist, and racist remarks in private. Hacksaw Ridge received good reviews and made nearly $70 million at the box office, but while Garfield’s Best Actor nomination was assured, Gibson’s Best Director nod was far more surprising.

None of the nominated films was a box-office smash (a whispered groundswell of support for comic-book film Deadpool never materialized), although films like La La Land, Arrival, and Hidden Figures have majorly outdone expectations with audiences. Other bigger hits like Sully were largely ignored. In an era in which Hollywood’s biggest grossers are now almost entirely animated films and superhero sequels, the Oscars are no longer a representation of the year’s biggest hits. Where it used to be commonplace for at least two or three of the year’s Best Picture nominees to have grossed over $100 million, this year’s list has none (so far).  

Among the other, smaller surprises: Ruth Negga made the Best Actress shortlist for Loving ahead of Amy Adams for Arrival, despite the Academy’s overall fondness for the latter movie. 20th Century Women’s Annette Bening was also snubbed from that list in favor of Oscar darling Meryl Streep (who got her 20th nomination for Florence Foster Jenkins, while her co-star Hugh Grant was surprisingly snubbed for Best Supporting Actor). Viggo Mortensen got his second nomination for Best Actor in the quirky drama Captain Fantastic over Joel Edgerton for Loving or Tom Hanks for Sully. Michael Shannon got a Best Supporting Actor nomination for Nocturnal Animals over his co-star Aaron Taylor-Johnson, who (somewhat inexplicably) won the Golden Globe in that category.

Among the first-time nominees were Andrew Garfield, Ruth Negga, Dev Patel (for Lion), Isabelle Huppert (the legendary French actress, shortlisted for Paul Verhoeven’s controversial drama Elle), Lucas Hedges (the young man at the center of Manchester by the Sea), and Moonlight’s Naomie Harris and Mahershala Ali. Returning favorites included former winners Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures), Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Natalie Portman (Jackie), and Nicole Kidman (Lion), as well as Viola Davis, who is hotly tipped to take the Best Supporting Actress trophy this year for Fences. Two other notable milestone came in Best Film Editing, where Joi McMillon (Moonlight) became the first black woman to be nominated in the category, and in Best Cinematography, where Bradford Young (Arrival) became the first African American nominee (the only previous black nominee, Remi Adefarasin for Elizabeth, was British).

The full list of nominees below:

Best Picture

Arrival

Fences

Hacksaw Ridge

Hell or High Water

Hidden Figures

La La Land

Lion

Manchester by the Sea

Moonlight

Best Director

Damien Chazelle, La La Land

Barry Jenkins, Moonlight

Kenneth Lonergan, Manchester by the Sea

Denis Villeneuve, Arrival

Mel Gibson, Hacksaw Ridge

Best Actor

Casey Affleck, Manchester by the Sea

Denzel Washington, Fences

Ryan Gosling, La La Land

Andrew Garfield, Hacksaw Ridge

Viggo Mortensen, Captain Fantastic

Best Actress

Emma Stone, La La Land

Natalie Portman, Jackie

Meryl Streep, Florence Foster Jenkins

Isabelle Huppert, Elle

Ruth Negga, Loving

Best Supporting Actor

Mahershala Ali, Moonlight

Jeff Bridges, Hell or High Water

Dev Patel, Lion

Lucas Hedges, Manchester by the Sea

Michael Shannon, Nocturnal Animals

Best Supporting Actress

Viola Davis, Fences

Michelle Williams, Manchester by the Sea

Naomie Harris, Moonlight

Nicole Kidman, Lion

Octavia Spencer, Hidden Figures

Best Adapted Screenplay

Moonlight

Arrival

Fences

Lion

Hidden Figures

Best Original Screenplay

Manchester by the Sea

La La Land

Hell or High Water

The Lobster

20th Century Women

Best Foreign Language Film

Toni Erdmann

The Salesman

Land of Mine

Tanna

A Man Called Ove

Best Documentary Feature

O.J.: Made in America

13th

Fire at Sea

I Am Not Your Negro

Life Animated

Best Animated Feature

Zootopia

Kubo and the Two Strings

The Red Turtle

My Life As a Zucchini

Moana

Best Film Editing

La La Land

Moonlight

Arrival

Hacksaw Ridge

Hell or High Water

Best Original Song

"City of Stars," La La Land

“Audition (The Fools Who Dream)," La La Land

"How Far I'll Go," Moana

"Can't Stop the Feeling," Trolls

“The Empty Chair,” The James Foley Story

Best Original Score

La La Land

Lion

Jackie

Moonlight

Passengers

Best Cinematography

La La Land

Moonlight

Arrival

Silence

Lion

Best Costume Design

Florence Foster Jenkins

La La Land

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Allied

Jackie

Best Makeup and Hairstyling

Star Trek Beyond

A Man Called Ove

Suicide Squad

Best Production Design

La La Land

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them

Hail, Caesar!

Arrival

Passengers

Sound Editing

Hacksaw Ridge

Arrival

Deepwater Horizon

La La Land

Sully

Sound Mixing

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Hacksaw Ridge

La La Land

Arrival

13 Hours: The Secret Soldiers of Benghazi

Visual Effects

The Jungle Book

Rogue One: A Star Wars Story

Kubo and the Two Strings

Doctor Strange

Deepwater Horizon

Best Short Film, Live Action

Timecode

Silent Nights

La Femme et le TGV

Ennemis Interieurs

Sing

Best Short Film, Animated

Piper

Pearl

Borrowed Time

Blind Vaysha

Pear Cider and Cigarettes

Best Documentary, Short Subject

Joe’s Violin

The White Helmets

Extremis

Watani: My Homeland

4.1 Miles