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The Atantic's Week in Culture

Don’t Miss

The Case for Shyness—Megan Garber traces the history of timidity via Joe Moran’s fascinating new book Shrinking Violets.

Chris Pizzello / Invision / AP

Oscars

Your 2017 Oscars Crash Course—Arnav Adhikari rounds up all the best stories from Atlantic writers to get you up to speed for the 89th Academy Awards.

My 2017 Oscars Predictions—Christopher Orr considers the top contenders for the biggest awards at the ceremony.

In Fire at Sea, Tragedy and Normalcy Live Side by Side—Anna Diamond reviews the Oscar-nominated documentary, which offers a compelling portrait of how the migration crisis affects a tiny Italian island.

On Denzel Washington’s Enduring Stardom—David Sims explores the reasons behind the Fences actor’s remarkable longevity.

A Common Theme For This Year’s Oscar-Nominated Documentaries—Sarah Feldberg explores the films focused on the migrant crisis and Syrian conflict at this year’s Academy Awards.

Sundance Selects

Film

Kiki Revisits the Power of New York’s Ball Culture—David Sims praises the new documentary, which looks at a safe haven for LBTQ youths of color, first examined in Paris Is Burning.

The South African Building That Came to Symbolize the Apocalypse—Ryan Lenora Brown shares the architectural history of Ponte City, Africa’s tallest apartment block which has become a mainstay of movies about the end of the world.

Why Netflix Will Release Martin Scorsese’s Next Film—David Sims unpacks the reasons behind why the streaming service will produce the director’s next gangster epic.

Get Out Is a Funny and Brilliantly Subversive Horror Film—David Sims relishes Jordan Peele’s excellent directorial debut.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore Is a Dark, Goofy Neo-Noir—David Sims watches Macon Blair’s directorial debut, which swerves between indie comedy and ultra-violence.

Wikimedia Commons

Books

The Politics of Retelling Norse Mythology—Lisa L. Hannett unpacks Neil Gaiman’s remarkable new book, which has triggered a debate about who owns pagan tales.

Simon & Schuster’s Completely Avoidable Milo Yiannopoulos Disaster—Sophie Gilbert criticizes the publisher’s delayed cancelling of the former Breitbart editor’s book deal.

Brooklyn Academy of Music

Theater

Escaped Alone Finds Comfort at the End of the World—Sophie Gilbert analyzes Caryl Churchill’s new play, which finds solace amid an apocalypse.

Universal

Music

The Maddening Media Obsession With Female Feuds, Katy Perry Edition—Spencer Kornhaber discusses the problems with how the singer’s supposed rivalry with Taylor Swift is portrayed.

Frank Ocean’s Surprising Slide Back to Pop—Spencer Kornhaber listens to the enigmatic singer’s new collaboration with Calvin Harris and Migos.

Eric Miller / Reuters

Media

Scenes From the Mall of America—Megan Garber weighs in on the massive shopping center’s announcement of a writing residency in honor of its 25th anniversary.

Why Are They ‘Stars’?—Megan Garber connects the history of why celebrities are considered celestial to Shakespeare, Chaucer, and movie cameras.

A Common Theme for This Year's Oscar-Nominated Documentaries

The documentary 4.1 Miles opens to a bright, sunny day on the Aegean Sea. It’s October 28, 2015, and for a moment the setting is beautiful: blue sky, blue water, horizon tilting in and out of view. Then you hear the screams. A gloved hand reaches out of frame and returns pulling a young boy to safety aboard a coast-guard boat. Then the captain spins around with a baby girl in his arms. “Put the camera down,” he says to the person behind the lens. “Take this.”

Just over four miles from Turkey, the Greek island of Lesbos has been on the front lines of the global refugee crisis. Since January 2014, more than 1.5 million people have crossed the Mediterranean Sea to Europe, with many fleeing the Syrian civil war, the rise of ISIS, and oppressive regimes and poverty in sub-Saharan Africa. Upwards of 12,000 have died or gone missing along the way, but many of those who’ve survived the short but treacherous journey have landed on Lesbos, which received more than 500,000 migrants in 2015 alone.

Daphne Matziaraki’s 20-minute Oscar-nominated film 4.1 Miles follows Greek Coast Guard Captain Kyriakos Papadopoulos as he and a small crew on Lesbos head out to sea again and again to pluck desperate men, women, and children from the swells. Before thousands of Syrians, Afghans, and Iraqis started setting out in boats in the hopes of finding refuge in Europe, Papadopoulos spent his days making routine patrols. But the film finds the captain thrust into the role of professional savior without any additional training or equipment—an average citizen trying to deal with a humanitarian disaster.

Of the 10 films nominated for the 2017 Academy Awards in the documentary categories, four deal with the Syrian conflict or refugee crisis. Along with 4.1 Miles, the Netflix original The White Helmets and Watani: My Homeland are up for the short-form documentary Oscar, while the Italian film Fire at Sea was nominated for best feature documentary. The strength of these projects lies in the emotional, and often stark, portraits they paint of their characters. If audiences can imagine themselves in the shoes of Syrian rescue workers, a Greek coast-guard captain, an overwhelmed physician, or a migrant mother, these films may do more than enlighten or inform. Their creators all told me they hoped that, like other documentaries that have mobilized viewers and influenced lawmakers, their films can make far-away problems feel more immediately urgent.

The films’ nominations were announced just four days after President Donald Trump’s inauguration and three days before he issued an executive order suspending refugee admissions from Syria indefinitely and from all other countries for 120 days. The order also temporarily halted arrivals from seven majority-Muslim nations and cut the total number of refugees that would be admitted to the U.S. in 2017 by more than half to 50,000. While the travel ban has since been suspended by federal courts, Trump’s executive order set off protests at airports across the country and pushed the people and issues portrayed in these documentaries back into the national spotlight.

“When I made the film [in 2015], I thought it was very timely because it was when the refugee crisis was in the news,” Matziaraki told me. “I would never ever imagine that unfortunately the film would be so much more timely now in the U.S.” While it’s unusual to have so many Oscar nominees address the same topic, The White Helmets producer Joanna Natasegara told me it makes sense in this case: “Storytelling has always engaged with the most pressing issues of any given time, and documentary perhaps even more than narrative [film].” Those issues today, she said, are the refugee crisis and the war in Syria.

As a medium, documentaries offer an intimacy and focus often missing in daily news. Since the Syrian conflict began in 2011, the escalating violence and resulting flood of migrants have been covered by the international press, but in the face of constant coverage, it’s difficult for many readers to sustain the same level of attention day to day. It often takes a particularly horrifying image—a dead toddler washed up on a beach, a blank-faced 5-year-old covered in blood and dust—to re-galvanize interest.

Matziaraki, who grew up in Greece but is now based in the San Francisco Bay Area, said even she felt disconnected from the disaster playing out in her homeland. When she arrived on Lesbos, she found the situation was worse than she’d imagined. “I really wanted to make a film that would [bridge] this gap between our comfort zone and the reality of the world,” she said.

“I asked them, ‘Why go across the sea if you might die?’ They said, ‘It’s the word “might” that makes us go across the sea. The word “might” is hope.’”

The White Helmets director Orlando von Einsiedel also admitted to feeling numb to the tragedy. The film, made with Natasegara, tells the story of the Syrian Civil Defense, a group of volunteer rescue workers in the country who respond to attacks on civilians. When the filmmakers saw a YouTube video of the White Helmets pulling a newborn from a bombed-out building, they recognized a story missing from the mainstream representation of Syria. “There’s a confusing, unbalanced picture of what is left behind for Syrian civilians on the ground, and a vacuum of any narrative about Syrians helping themselves or being active in their own saving,” Natasegara told me. “The idea of the Syrian hero was almost completely absent from the media landscape.” The White Helmets were the “perfect anecdote” to that gap: They were former bakers, builders, tailors, and students who’d banded together to save their fellow Syrians.

The other Syria-specific film, Watani: My Homeland follows the family of a rebel commander in Aleppo who has been kidnapped by ISIS. His wife, Hala, and their four children make the heartbreaking decision to flee the country and begin a new life in Germany. The director Marcel Mettelsiefen, a veteran photojournalist who covered the Arab Spring, said documentaries offer an emotional way into a story that can otherwise feel abstract. “The importance of documentary filmmaking is to humanize the conflict,” he told me.

In the feature category, Gianfranco Rosi’s Fire at Sea focuses on Lampedusa, an Italian island where hundreds of thousands of African refugees have landed since the 1990s. The filmmaker moved to Lampedusa for a year and a half to understand both the rhythms of daily life and the harrowing journey migrants endure to get there. “The film is a cry of help to raise awareness,” Rosi told me, recounting a conversation with one migrant. “When I asked them, ‘Why go across the sea if you might die?’ They said, ‘It’s the word “might” that makes us go across the sea. The word “might” is hope.’”

While documentaries may have once been considered stale educational fare, their reputation as an exciting and mainstream art form has undoubtedly grown in recent years. Because of new distribution options and social media, documentaries now have the potential to reach a more global audience. By licensing The White Helmets to video-streaming giant Netflix, von Einsiedel and Natasegara made their film available in 190 countries (fellow documentary Oscar nominee 13th is also on Netflix). Matziaraki’s 4.1 Miles—produced while she was a graduate student in journalism at the University of California-Berkeley—can be viewed on the New York Times’ website, free to anyone with an internet connection. Fire at Sea has been released in 64 countries, including Japan, where it opened earlier this month. According to Reuters, the country accepted only 28 refugees in 2016, yet the 10 p.m. showing sold out in Tokyo on opening night.

Documentaries can often have clear, measurable consequences—whether driving politicians to action or investing the general public in an issue that affects them. A 2015 study found that Gasland, the 2010 documentary on the dangers of fracking, led to greater discussion on social media and increased mass-media coverage, after its release and subsequent nomination for an Oscar in 2011. Sometimes films are credited with inspiring legislation—as was the case with the 2012 Oscar-nominated film The Invisible War, which investigated sexual assault in the military, and the 2013 documentary Blackfish, which explored the treatment of orca whales at SeaWorld. Of course, some films have been criticized for misleading audiences by omitting inconvenient details or twisting statistics to make a more convincing argument or interesting story (as was the accusation leveled at the 2010 documentary Waiting for “Superman,” which portrayed charter schools as the prescription for an ailing public education system.)

While it’s too soon to tell if this year’s Oscar-nominated documentaries have had a broader effect on people’s understanding of the migrant crisis or Syrian conflict, some of the filmmakers have already seen their work resonate on a smaller scale. Matziaraki said she’s received letters from viewers asking how they can help or donate, including from one who traveled to Lesbos to volunteer after seeing 4.1 Miles. “People that write to me and say, ‘Thank you for changing my mind. Thank you for making me realize what is happening.’ This is really maybe the most important thing,” Matziaraki said.

In the Fire at Sea director Rosi’s experience, the emotional connection fostered by these documentaries inevitably leads to a question: “What can I do?” Over the phone from New York, one of Rosi’s film subjects, Pietro Bartolo, offered one answer. As the physician on Lampedusa, Bartolo is often the first person to have real human contact with the refugees who arrive; he’s also the man who performs autopsies on those who don’t make it alive. He told me it’s important to simply show migrants they are welcome. “People say, ‘Can I come to Lampedusa to help?’ We don’t need the help. We never asked for any help,” he said. “On Lampedusa, we are the door. That we leave it open, this is not enough. [When the refugees] arrive in Europe they need to feel that they are home.”

Why Are They 'Stars'?

It makes so much sense to refer to certain kinds of celebrities as “stars.” At their heights, those people inspire the rest of us. They shine, larger than life, above us, and around us. They suggest, in their insistent omnipresence, a certain order to the world. To see the stars—or, more specifically, to believe in them, taxonomically—is to endorse a notion that the people before us on our screens, far from us and yet so close, exist, as the author Jeanine Basinger puts it, “on some plane between ours and that of the gods.”

But: Why are they “stars,” specifically? Why is Hollywood’s Walk of Fame populated by pentagrams of pale pink, rather than some other arbitrary shape? Why is it “stars” who are, obviously and incorrectly, Just Like Us?

Related Story

What We Talk About When We Talk About ‘Demagogues’

The answer has to do with Ovid. And Shakespeare. And Thomas Edison. And Mary Pickford. Stars are stars, certainly, because they sparkle and shine—because, even when they are bathed in the limelight, they seem to have an incandescence of their own. But they are “stars,” much more specifically, because they are part of Western culture’s longstanding tendency to associate the human with the heavenly. They are “stars” because their audiences want them—and in some sense need them—to be.

The broad use of the word “star” to indicate a leader among us dates back, Peter Davis, a theater historian at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, told me, to the Middle Ages. Chaucer, who was also the first recorded user of the word “celebrity” and one of the first to use the word “famous,” also hinted at the lexical convergence of the human and the celestial: In The House of Fame, Chaucer’s dreamer worries that he might find himself “stellified.” “O God Who made nature,” the dreamer thinks, “am I to die in no other way? Will Jove transform me into a star?”

Chaucer, Dean Swinford points out in his book Through the Daemon’s Gate, was recalling Ovid’s notion of metamorphosis—the idea that humans could be transformed, in this case, into the shiny stuff of constellations. Chaucer’s words also carried architectural implications that would likely have been apparent to his audiences: “Fixing with stars,” Swinford points out, “implies the creation of a mosaic-like decoration of the interior of a cathedral.” The building was an intentional mimicry of the sky, and an unintentional anticipation of Hollywood’s own kind of firmament: It presented stars as a constellation of gleaming lights, always above.

It was through the wily dynamics of public relations that “star,” in the United States, was born.

The US Weeklyfied version of stellification is in many ways a direct descendant of Chaucer’s: It emphasizes the role of the celebrity as a body both distant and accessible, gleaming and sparkling and yet reassuringly omnipresent. Stars have long suggested a kind of order—and orientation—within chaotic human lives. They have long hinted that there is something bigger, something beyond, something more.

Little surprise, then, that—especially as the world of science became more familiar with the workings of celestial bodies—the world of the theater seized on their symbolism. Molière, Peter Davis told me, made Chaucerian use of the personified “star”: In School for Wives, in 1662, Horace describes Agnes as “this young star of love, adorned by so many charms.” Shakespeare, too, neatly anticipated Hollywood’s blending of the personal and the celestial in both his plays and his poems. “We make guilty of our disasters the sun, the moon, and stars,” Edmund laments in King Lear, “as if we were villains on necessity, fools by heavenly compulsion.” Love, too, in Shakespeare’s mind, makes its highest sense as a heavenly force, reassuring in its constancy: In “Sonnet 116,” the bard finds love to be “...an ever-fixed mark / That looks on tempests and is never shaken; / It is the star to every wand’ring bark, / Whose worth’s unknown, although his height be taken.”

It was in this context, Davis explains, that the notion of the human star came to refer, in particular, to the decidedly grounded firmament of the theater—and to the decidedly human person of the actor. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the first reference to a “star” of the stage came in 1751, with the Bays in Council announcing, “You may Shine the brightest Theatric Star, that ever enliven’d of charm’d an Audience.” Around the same time, in 1761, the book Historical Theatres of London & Dublin noted of an apparently Meryl Streepian actor named Garrick: “That Luminary soon after became a Star of the first Magnitude.” Garrick would appear again in 1765, in an extremely effusive article written about him in The Gentleman’s and London Magazine: “The rumor of this bright star appearing in the East flew with the rapidity of lightening through the town, and drew all the theatrical Magi thither to pay their devotions to his new-born son of genius….”

By the 1820s, it was common to refer to actors as “stars”—for purposes of salesmanship as much as anything else. Theater touring became popular during that time, in both England and America. British actors, in particular, Davis told me, were often promoted as “stars” for their tours in the U.S. as a way to ensure that large audiences would come to witness their performances. Actors like Edmund Kean, George Frederick Cooke, and Charles and Fanny Kemble were celestially sold to American audiences. Sometimes, Davis notes, the actors were considered to have passed their prime in Britain; they used their American tours to reboot their careers back home. It was fitting: Through the wily dynamics of public relations, “star,” in the U.S., was born.

The term carried through as theater acting gave way to movie acting—as silent films gave way to talkies. “The observable ‘glow’ of potential stardom was present from the very beginning of film history,” Jeanine Basinger notes in her book The Star Machine. But it also took hold, as with so much else in Hollywood history, fitfully. As Jan-Christopher Horak, the director of the UCLA Film and Television Archive, told me, the earliest films didn’t name the actors who starred in them. That was in part because the actors, many of whom had been trained in the theater, were initially embarrassed to be putting their hard-won skills to the service of this strange new medium.

The earliest films didn’t bother to name the actors who starred in them.

It was also, however, because of the mechanics of the medium itself. On film, Anne Helen Petersen suggests in her book Scandals of Classic Hollywood: Sex, Deviance, and Drama From the Golden Age of American Cinema, the Hollywood star was a function of technology as much as it was one of culture. As early cinema developed in the early 20th century, bulky and unwieldy cameras made it difficult for cinematographers to capture anything beyond full-length shots of actors. “Because viewers couldn’t see the actor’s face up close,” Petersen writes, “it was difficult to develop the feelings of admiration or affection we associate with film stars.” As cameras improved, though, close-ups became more common, emphasizing actors’ faces and humanity. As sound became part of the cinema experience, voices, too, substituted full personas for lurching images. The “picture personality” had arrived. The “star,” yet again, was born.

With that came the star system that would give structure to Hollywood for much of its young life. Mary Pickford, Horak notes, one of the first movie actors to be billed under her (stage) name, soon began making films under her own banner. Charlie Chaplin, long before Andy Warhol would ironize the term, became a superstar. The star itself, in the era of spotlights and marquis banners, soon became a metonym—a convenient and fitting way to describe the people who studded Hollywood’s new and expanding firmament. The term that had taken life in the age of Shakespeare and Molière and early romanticism—a time that would, in some places, find art becoming obsessed with the dignity of the individual and the fiery workings of the human soul—came alive yet again in the glow of the screen.

It may be quaint, today, to talk of “movie stars.” This is an age defined, after all, by that other Chaucerian term: the “celebrity.” It’s an age of actor-founded lifestyle brands and internet-famous felines and people starring in reality itself. But our current celebrities, too, suggest something similar to what “star” has long evoked: orientation, transcendence, a kind of union between mortals and the gods they have chosen for themselves. “Celebrity” comes from the Old French for “rite” or “ceremony”; it suggests that even the most frivolous of the famous are filling a role that is, in its way, profound. Stars—fusions of person and persona, of the fleshy human and the flinty image on the stage and screen—have long offered a kind of structure within the hectic hum of human lives. They have long promised that most basic and inspiring of things: that we can be something more than what we are. “I am big,” Norma Desmond, that fading star, insisted. “It’s the pictures that got small.”

Frank Ocean's Surprising Slide Back to Pop

“Frank Ocean appears courtesy of Frank Ocean,” reads the liner notes to Calvin Harris’s new single “Slide,” which in this unseasonably warm late February has kicked off the 2017 song-of-the-summer battle. Most artists only ever appear anywhere courtesy of their record label, but Ocean is a free agent and this song is another surprise move in his ongoing rewriting of pop stardom.

Last summer, the buzzy R&B singer broke years of unexplained silence with a duo of albums, Endless and Blond(e), that defied conventions both musically and business-wise. The latter of the two releases—the one that was actually for sale and had distinguishable songs, in contrast to the free-form streaming audiovisual project Endless—arrived not via his record company, Def Jam, but independently. Through years of wrangling (and the help of Apple, the new corporate patron of label-agnostic pop artists), he had freed himself of the kind of contract that once was considered both prize and necessity for new singers.

It seemed possible he’d then use this newfound liberty to burrow deeper into an anti-commercial, anti-pop mindset. Blond(e) is a masterpiece, but a weird one: mostly free of drums, recognizable song structures, and anything that could be a hit. It took him four years to make, had two competing spellings for its name, and featured a tie-in print magazine. You can understand why its creator might not want to have to run all of his material past Universal Music Group’s A&R. And you might guess that future Ocean projects would become even more esoteric.

But today brings the mostly good news that Ocean has not entirely decided to withhold his talents—a voice that imparts both feeling and attitude, an adventuresome ear, a smart and funny lyrical sensibility—from the radio race. He’s paired up with Calvin Harris, the Scottish EDM star famous for unsubtle but irresistible Top 40 fare like “This Is What You Came For” (his 2016 summer smash, featuring Rihanna) and “We Found Love” (his 2011 summer smash, featuring, again, Rihanna). Rounding out the bill are two-thirds of Migos, the Atlanta rap group enjoying breakthrough national success in 2017 with the tricky-fun album Culture and the No. 1 hit “Bad & Boujee.”

Harris’s knack for consolidating popular trends and nudging them ever-so-slightly forward is on display here, with the beat for “Slide” sucking in Bruno Mars’s recent revivalist funk and Justin Bieber’s airy tropical house for a blend that will only reveal its full potential when heard on the beach. One of Ocean’s latter-day signatures, a squeaky manipulated voice, opens the track with the couplet “I might empty my bank account / And buy that boy a wooden pipe.” I won’t pretend to know exactly what the wooden pipe is supposed to mean here. But the sentiment comes across, to these ears, as a boy hitting on a boy.

Which is not insignificant in 2017 pop, especially in light of recent comments by Migos: Asked about the rapper Makonnen who’d just come out as gay, they said it seemed “fucked up” and “wack” that he’d previously put on a tough, streetwise persona. The group later gave an apology that said they were fine with gays but that didn’t quite address the stereotypes they’d seemed to endorse. In any case, they are now on a track with Frank Ocean, who shook hip-hop with a 2012 admission of an affair with a man—and who has since scrambled all sorts of expectations about culture, machismo, and sex.

Migos themselves sound great, the stickiness of their distinctive flows suddenly plainer than ever over such a sturdy and sunny beat. Ocean’s verses seem to cryptically, wearily talk about the moment at the end of a night in the club when the lights come up and you see who you might take home; Migos’s lyrics are explicit boasts of wining and dining and heterosexual screwing around the world. The divides between Ocean, Migos, and Harris’s sensibilities couldn’t be clearer, but the song is a reminder of pop’s power to make very different elements slide together.

My 2017 Oscar Predictions: A Lot of La La Land

It’s that time of year again, when we can all grouse about the inanity of the Oscars: how the Academy ignores blockbusters or ignores indie films or ignores people of color. Only this time, there seems less to grouse about than usual. There are snubs here and there of course (cough, Amy Adams), and actors who through error or pretense find themselves in the wrong categories. But overall the Academy did a pretty credible job this time—credible enough that for this year I’m abandoning my customary categories of “who was nominated but shouldn’t have been” and “who wasn’t nominated but should have been.”

But who is going to win? Before attempting to answer that question, I should disclose that I’ve gone 25 for 30 on my picks over the last three years (you can find them here, here, and here), but I missed on Best Picture last year. (I thought The Revenant would beat Spotlight, and I was delighted to be wrong.) It is also perhaps worth noting that I was so spectacularly certain that Avatar would beat The Hurt Locker back in 2010 that I wrote an entire article on the subject. (In that case, I was even happier to be wrong.) Also, as before, I’m only going through ten of the top categories, so if you need help with your picks for sound editing or live-action short, you’ll have to seek assistance elsewhere.

So keep all that in mind. As always, I obviously cannot condone any form of gambling, and will in no way consider it my fault if anyone happens to lose money based on my advice. Anyone who makes a little scratch, by contrast, and might be inclined to share it with their Oscar Whisperer, will find me easy enough to track down. Those curious about my own end-of-the-year awards, some of which are notably eccentric, can find them here.

Lionsgate / Summit

Best Picture

Nominees: Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, La La Land, Lion, Manchester by the Sea, Moonlight

This has long been, and remains, La La Land’s race to lose. It’s become fashionable to lament that this is a bad thing and it would be better if Moonlight were to win instead. There are perhaps good arguments to be made on this score, but most of the arguments being made aren’t very good.

It is without question a promising sign that Moonlight, a movie about the romance between two black men coming of age in inner-city Miami, directed by a black man, is not only a Best Picture nominee but a genuine contender to win. This is especially true given the Academy’s much-noted shortcomings over the last couple of years.

But the widespread critique that La La Land is “only” the frontrunner because it is about Hollywood’s love for itself dramatically shortchanges Damien Chazelle’s film, which is a tremendously ambitious undertaking on its own terms, novel and nostalgic in equal measure. This is not The Artist. Should La La Land come away with the statue, as I strongly suspect it will, it will mean nothing other than that it was a terrific film.

If you’re looking for the upset, definitely go with Moonlight. If you’re looking for a really big upset, try Manchester by the Sea or Hidden Figures. If you want an upset even bigger than that, buy a lottery ticket.

What will win: La La Land

What ought to win: Arrival

Dale Robinette / Lionsgate / Summit

Best Director

Nominees: Damien Chazelle (La La Land), Mel Gibson (Hacksaw Ridge), Barry Jenkins (Moonlight), Kenneth Lonergan (Manchester by the Sea), Denis Villeneuve (Arrival)

The big surprise here, of course, is that Mel Gibson was nominated, despite the facts that a) Hacksaw Ridge was good but not great; and b) not so long ago, Gibson had a very-well-earned reputation as a depraved maniac. But Hollywood can be forgiving, especially if you have the right friends.

In any case, Mel will not be repeating his Braveheart feat by taking home the actual statue. Here, again, the safe money is on Chazelle who, at 32, is already filling up his trophy case. For those who want to split their picture/director votes, Jenkins and Lonergan both have a shot here. Just not a very good one.

Which seems like as good a time as any—and no, it won’t be the last—to express my unhappiness that Arrival, the best film of the year, is not really in the running for any of the major awards. My best explanation for this is that the film ultimately found itself betwixt and between: too big to be the kind of arty film that critics love to champion, but not big enough (its domestic box office was almost exactly $100 million) to force its way into the conversation, à la Avatar, in a “the people have spoken” fashion. Regardless, it’s terrific. Go see it if you haven’t already.

Who will win: Damien Chazelle

Who ought to win: Denis Villeneuve

Lionsgate / Summit

Best Actress

Nominees: Isabelle Huppert (Elle), Ruth Negga (Loving), Natalie Portman (Jackie), Emma Stone (La La Land), Meryl Streep (Florence Foster Jenkins)

This is an unusually strong category this year, and would be stronger still if Academy voters hadn’t briefly lost their minds and forgotten to nominate Amy Adams, who gave one of the year’s truly indelible performances in Arrival. Shame on you, Academy voters.

Emma Stone is the favorite here, and she’s a perfectly solid pick—even if I’d prefer Negga or Huppert. The strongest challenger is probably Portman, which would be extremely dispiriting. Jackie was not a good movie, nor was hers a particularly good performance. When it comes to portrayals of well-known figures from the 20th century, there are two ways an actor can go: pure mimesis (the accent, the mannerisms, maybe a little prosthetic enhancement) or actually digging beneath the surface to find the real person underneath the fame. The examples I typically think of are Cate Blanchett’s grating, empty portrait of Katherine Hepburn in The Aviator (for the former category) and Christopher Plummer’s deft and nuanced work as Mike Wallace in The Insider (for the latter).

Portman’s portrait of Jackie Kennedy falls firmly into the former set. Still, if you want to bet against Stone, this is probably the way to go. There’s a reason Blanchett won for The Aviator and Plummer wasn’t even nominated for The Insider.

Who will win: Emma Stone

Who ought to win: Amy Adams (had she been nominated); of the nominees, Ruth Negga or Isabelle Huppert

Amazon Studios

Best Actor

Nominees: Casey Affleck (Manchester by the Sea), Andrew Garfield (Hacksaw Ridge), Ryan Gosling (La La Land), Viggo Mortensen (Captain Fantastic), Denzel Washington (Fences)

What was that I was saying about how Hollywood can be forgiving if you have the right friends? Well this is particularly true if those friends are Matt Damon and your big brother Ben Affleck. One can debate the ways in which the cases of Nate Parker and Casey Affleck are similar and are different, but the former’s early Oscar hopes vanished entirely and the latter’s appear to be chugging along unimpeded.

It helps Affleck considerably that his performance was genuinely remarkable and his competition is relatively weak, especially given the customary strength of the category. Denzel Washington has the best chance of pulling off an upset here—and it’s a pretty decent one. He’s hampered a bit by the fact that Fences (which Washington directed himself) has very much a “filmed play” quality to it, as does his notably theatrical performance. Gosling may have a (very) outside shot here, too. But if you’re looking for an upset in the major categories—or you just don’t feel good about picking Affleck—Washington is probably the way to go.

Who will win: Casey Affleck

Who ought to win: Casey Affleck

Paramount

Best Supporting Actress

Nominees: Viola Davis (Fences), Naomie Harris (Moonlight), Nicole Kidman (Lion), Octavia Spencer (Hidden Figures), Michelle Williams (Manchester by the Sea)

Every year, there is at least one performer who competes a weight class lower than he or she should in order to get a win. Last year, Rooney Mara and Alicia Vikander both submitted what were really lead performances, but were both nominated for supporting actress—a category that Vikander wound up winning.

Viola Davis is no dummy. She’s been nominated for Oscars twice before without winning (for Doubt and The Help), and she wants to take home that statue. Which, as it happens, she is overwhelmingly likely to do. I said it last year and I’ll say it again. The Academy has to take firmer control of its own nominating process if we don’t want to see category fraud like this every season. Davis is a great actress, and was the best thing in Fences. But she should be competing—and perhaps winning—against Stone, Portman, Negga, and Huppert.

If you must bet against Davis, Naomie Harris and Michelle Williams have about equal chances of pulling off an upset—which is to say, very little chance at all.

Who will win: Viola Davis

Who ought to win: Viola Davis

A24

Best Supporting Actor

Nominees: Mahershala Ali (Moonlight), Jeff Bridges (Hell or High Water), Lucas Hedges (Manchester by the Sea), Dev Patel (Lion), Michael Shannon (Nocturnal Animals)

Well, at least the Academy realized that if it was going to nominate a performance in Nocturnal Animals it should be Michael Shannon’s slightly creepy lawman and not Aaron Taylor-Johnson’s totally forgettable outlaw. The fact that the latter was nominated—and won!—at the Golden Globes is yet further evidence (as if any were needed in this age) that voters are capable of doing strange and awful things.

Let’s assume that the universe has righted itself sufficiently to correct at least this injustice, by giving Mahershala Ali the award he so very clearly deserves. His work in Moonlight was nothing short of stunning.

Jeff Bridges is no doubt just happy to be nominated for his outstanding work in Hell or High Water. But if you’re looking for someone to upset Ali, Dev Patel may have a very small shot. Or who knows? Maybe Aaron Taylor-Johnson can win again, this time by write-in vote. My capacity for astonishment has been pretty much exhausted of late.

Who will win: Mahershala Ali

Who ought to win: Mahershala Ali

Amazon Studios

Best Original Screenplay

Nominees: Hell or High Water, La La Land, The Lobster, Manchester by the Sea, 20th Century Women

It’s awfully nice to see The Lobster, Yorgos Lanthimos’s dystopian tour de force, get some attention here, though if it somehow manages an out-of-nowhere victory, I’ll eat … a lobster? That actually doesn’t sound so bad.

It’s also nice to see what could be a genuinely close race here, between La La Land and Manchester by the Sea. There are a number of ways of looking at this one. Will voters go with director Lonergan’s screenplay as an alternative to voting for Affleck as best actor? Or will any Affleck-related drag be able to sink the movie in a close race (like this one) but not in a possible blowout in the acting category? Will La La Land benefit, sweep-like, from its many awards? Or could Chazelle fatigue set in?

This is the category in which I am least confident of all, but I’m going with Manchester by the Sea by a nose.

What will win: Manchester by the Sea

What ought to win: La La Land

A24

Best Adapted Screenplay

Nominees: Arrival, Fences, Hidden Figures, Lion, Moonlight

Apart from Supporting Actor, this is the category in which Moonlight—which is adapted from Tarell Alvin McCraney’s play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue—is most likely to come away a winner. Arrival once looked like it had a solid shot here, like its fellow “thinking person’s sci-fi” movie—and best film of the year—Her three years ago. But my best efforts notwithstanding, it seems to have lost any momentum it ever had.

If there’s an upset in the making, it’s likely to be either Hidden Figures or Lion. But neither seems particularly likely.

What will win: Moonlight

What ought to win: Arrival

Lionsgate / Summit

Best Cinematography

Nominees: Greig Fraser (Lion), James Laxton (Moonlight), Rodrigo Prieto (Silence), Linus Sandgren (La La Land), Bradford Young (Arrival)

So what do we know about the cinematography award? We know that, because he is not nominated, Emmanuel Lubezki is probably not going to win for a fourth year in a row (following Gravity, Birdman, and The Revenant). And, nothing against Lubezki, but that’s probably a good thing. We also know that Roger Deakins, who has been nominated an incredible 13 times without ever winning, isn’t going to win—because he’s not nominated either. Nor is (three-time winner, nine-time nominee) Robert Richardson. Keeping track of the award this year is a little like watching the NBA Finals with LeBron James, Kevin Durant, Stephen Curry, Kyrie Irving, Draymond Green, and Kevin Love all sitting out hurt.

Bradford Young is the first African-American cinematographer ever nominated for the award, which is shocking, and he’d be my pick in a heartbeat for his magnificent work on (you guessed it) Arrival. (He also shot my two favorite films of 2014, Selma and A Most Violent Year.) But here, again, Arrival doesn’t seem likely to get much love.The safest bet, as so often this year, is probably on La La Land and its cinematographer Linus Sandgren. If you want to look elsewhere, Lion probably has the best shot at an upset. Or partisans of Moonlight and Arrival can just cross their fingers and take their chances.

Who will win: Linus Sandgren

Who ought to win: Bradford Young

Disney

Best Animated Feature

Nominees: Kubo and the Two Strings, Moana, My Life as a Zucchini, The Red Turtle, Zootopia

One of the most remarkable inversions in recent cinema is the way Pixar and Disney Animation—which are both owned by the same company and run by the same executives—have essentially switched places. (I’ll be writing more about this soon.) Disney scored two nominations in the Animated Feature category this year, with Zootopia and Moana. Pixar, meanwhile, couldn’t manage a nod for Finding Dory, despite the fact that it was the second-highest grossing movie of the year behind Rogue One. Go figure.

It was actually a banner year for animated movies, especially if you managed to avoid the truly awful Sing. The Red Turtle is a gorgeous, almost-silent fable. Moana is a classic Disney musical showstopper. And Kubo and the Two Strings may be the best stop-motion marvel yet produced by the always excellent Laika (Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls.)

But barring a borderline-shocking upset by Kubo, the Oscar will be going to Zootopia. Which is exactly as it should be.

What will win: Zootopia

What should win: Zootopia

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore Is a Dark, Goofy Neo-Noir

“What do you want?” an exasperated petty criminal asks Ruth Kimke (Melanie Lynskey), who’s in the middle of the strange vigilante rampage at the heart of the new film I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore. Ruth thinks for a second. “For people to not be assholes!” she replies, which feels as good a battle cry as any in these angry, polarized times. Ruth is a fitting anti-hero for 2017: She’s depressed, she’s being taken for granted in her job, and she has no idea where to direct her resentment.

So when it does come spilling out, it has all kinds of unintended consequences, some comical and others decidedly not. The debut film from Macon Blair, I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is a shambling piece of neo-noir that swerves between gentle indie comedy and horrifying violence with ease—a combination that helped it win this year’s Sundance Film Festival Jury Prize. The movie, released Friday on Netflix, is grounded by Blair’s eye for the gruesome, which he surely picked up working as an actor on projects like Jeremy Saulnier’s gory Green Room. At its best, Blair’s film is like Blood Simple crossed with The Three Stooges—a clever, gritty tale of revenge at its most inept, anchored by performances that brim with goofy fury.

The protagonist, Ruth, is a nurse living a fairly dull life in an unnamed town. Blair takes special care to focus on the tiny, insignificant details that clearly weigh on her, whether it’s someone cutting in front of her at the supermarket, or a local dog constantly using her front yard as a bathroom. When Ruth’s home is burglarized, the loss of her possessions seems to matter less than the sheer indignity of the matter. The local cops do little more than take a report, leading her to decide to take the matter in her own hands.

But I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is less like Joel Schumacher’s Falling Down than it sounds, at least for most of its running time. Ruth’s confused mission is largely focused on finding her stuff at local pawn shops and taking it back; she’s more interested in reclaiming a little pride than in finding her laptop. She enlists her weirdo neighbor Tony (played by Elijah Wood) as backup, drawn to (if disgusted by) his shamelessness in letting his dog defecate on her property.

Tony is the kind of neighbor you’d probably try to avoid interacting with too much if he lived near you; he has a collection of nunchucks and ninja stars but little social aptitude. But he proves a perfect companion for Ruth, and is eager to use her quest for some ineffable sort of justice as an outlet for his own boundless rage. They’re an odd pair of heroes to root for, and there is something darkly alluring about watching them run amok. Ruth finally secures some small moments of petty triumph—that is, until she meets the shady perpetrators of her burglary and things really descend into chaos.

Blair started out as an actor working with his childhood friend Saulnier, the American indie-horror director who expertly deploys very realistic, very shocking scenes of violence in films like Green Room and Blue Ruin. So I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore’s eventual nightmarish turn makes sense, and there’s certainly something to be said for the bloody creativity on display. But as the film goes on, it gets hard to figure out just what kind of a larger point Blair is looking to make. Is Ruth a modern-day Travis Bickle, similarly angry at society but far less adept at resorting to violence? If so, her heart doesn’t really seem to be in it by the time the stakes get truly deadly.

I Don’t Feel at Home in This World Anymore is most effective as a grumpy, shambolic comedy, a weird buddy picture for Lynskey and Wood that sees the former’s character dabbling in brutish selfishness and the latter’s enjoying a rare chance at a normal human friendship. It’s less interesting as a gory slapstick thriller, but the ending is memorable and Blair’s skill at directing action is undeniable. Still, the film perhaps works best of all as an unexpected treatise on the state of American manners in 2017—and as a story in which the real villain is humans’ collective lack of empathy.

Marine Le Pen: Madame Présidente?

Marine Le Pen is hoping the wave of populism sweeping the Western world carries her to the Élysée Palace.

“The wind of history has turned,” Le Pen, who heads the far-right National Front (FN), told a crowd of supporters at the kickoff of her presidential bid earlier this month in Lyon, the industrial city in southeastern France. “It will carry us to the summit.”

Opinion polls have shown Le Pen winning the first round of France’s presidential election in April, only to lose to whomever she faces in the second round of voting in May. That candidate will likely be François Fillon, the center-right candidate, or Emmanuel Macron, the independent; polls show the two men seesawing between second and third place in the first round. If no candidate achieves a majority in the first round, the top-two vote getters advance to a second round run-off. Although it’s still early, and polling can be wrong, the likelihood of Le Pen beating either Fillon or Macron in the second round is slim. Still, with the Western establishment reeling from Donald Trump’s victory in the U.S. presidential election, the U.K.’s decision to leave the European Union, and growing anger at political elites throughout Europe, Le Pen and other far-right, populist leaders in Europe fancy their chances.

Le Pen envisions a France with closed borders, its own currency, and tough immigration controls; a country that is independent of international bodies like NATO, and one that ultimately puts itself first. This inward thinking, Le Pen reminded supporters, would not be unique to France.

“Other people have shown the way,” she said, alluding to the Brexit vote last summer and Trump’s election last November.

Although such sentiments might be experiencing a resurgence, many of Le Pen’s policies are not new. Indeed, her 144-point manifesto outlining her vision for France reflects many of the policies the FN has put forward since it was founded more than four decades ago by her father, Jean-Marie Le Pen. From the onset, the party has opposed the European Union, economic protectionism, and same-sex marriage. It has also been characterized by anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim, and anti-Semitic sentiment (Jean-Marie Le Pen has repeatedly dismissed the Holocaust as a minor “detail” of history and defended collaborators of the Vichy government, which deported tens of thousands of French Jews to death camps during World War II).

Those views haven’t earned the FN much electoral success. The party didn’t win a single local election in 2015, and claims only two seats in French parliament. The FN’s previous best performance in the presidential election was in 2002 when Jean-Marie Le Pen advanced to the second round for the first time in the FN’s history; voters handed then-incumbent President Jacques Chirac 82 percent of the vote—an unprecedented victory that was widely regarded more as a rebuke of the FN than approval of Chirac. By the time Marine Le Pen took over as the leader of the FN in 2011, the party began a period of transformative rebranding—one which retained its far-right values with less emphasis on the homophobic, anti-Semitic elements. This ultimately resulted in the expulsion of the elder Le Pen from the party in 2015 in a family battle played out in the media.

National Front founder Jean-Marie Le Pen delivers a speech next to his daughter, Marine Le Pen, in Britany, France on March 17, 2007. (Daniel Joubert / Reuters)

“Voluntarily or not, he gave ammunition to our adversaries,” Le Pen said of her father in November, adding: “Today our adversaries no longer have that ammunition.”

Still, the younger Le Pen’s rebranding efforts alone may not be enough. Dr. David Lees, a researcher on French politics at Warwick University, told me last November that though Le Pen’s outsider status has certainly helped her anti-establishment image, it could also pose a challenge.

“The FN has only got two members of the National Assembly in France … so if she does win, she wouldn’t be able to form a government,” Lees said. “She would find it very hard to govern without having any sense of support in Parliament. She just wouldn’t get anything through because the options of ruling by decree in France are very small for a president.”

Indeed, finding common ground with other members of the government would prove difficult for Le Pen—especially in comparison to competitors like Macron, whose centrist, business-orientated agenda could be more appealing to swing votes on the left and right than the FN’s populist agenda. Still, Le Pen’s rebranding has proven effective in communities previously marginalized by the FN. The party has actively pursued more progressive causes such as promoting women’s rights and gay rights, as well as protecting France’s Jewish community from anti-Semitism—often by presenting Muslim immigration as a threat to all three.

“We do not want to live under the rule or threat of Islamic fundamentalism,” she told supporters in Lyon, and accused Muslim immigrants of “looking to impose on us gender discrimination in public places, full body veils or not, prayer rooms in the workplace, prayers in the streets, huge mosques.”

The FN has found common cause with far-right parties throughout Europe who share its anti-Islam and anti-globalist agenda, as well as other governments. Le Pen has praised both Trump and Russian President Vladimir Putin, noting that if she were elected, the three leaders “would be good for world peace.” Le Pen has been a vocal proponent of rapprochement with Russia. In addition to rejecting the notion of Russia’s actions in Ukraine’s Crimea as an invasion, she also condemned U.S. and EU sanctions on Moscow as “completely stupid.” The FN received an 11-million euro (about $11.6 million) loan from the Moscow-based First Czech Russian Bank in 2014, and Le Pen has reportedly asked Russia for another loan to finance her current presidential bid, citing French banks’ refusal to lend.

Fredrik Wesslau, the director of the Wider Europe Programme at the European Council on Foreign Relations, told me in January that Moscow’s ideological affinity with the FN is what attracts it to most of Europe’s far-right populist parties.

“They see a country that’s willing to stick up for socially conservative rights, that’s embraced authoritarian populism, that’s also xenophobic, in particular anti-Islam, which is something that many of these parties can relate to,” Wesslau said. “There’s a lot of overlap.”

And while the FN leader isn’t the only French presidential candidate to support better relations with Russia (Fillon, the center-right candidate, has also supported reconciliation), reports of Russian media coverage favoring Le Pen against other contenders has sparked concerns Moscow might try to interfere in France’s elections similar to the way it did in the U.S. elections.

But for all the challenges Le Pen faces as an untested leader of historically fringe party, one that is often overlooked is her role as France’s sole female candidate. Women have historically been underrepresented in French politics, with female lawmakers making up 25 percent of the National Assembly and 27 percent of the Senate. Édith Cresson became the first and only woman to serve as prime minister in 1991 under President François Mitterrand, but suffered low approval ratings and lost the post after less than a year—a loss some attribute to misogynist attitudes among the Socialist party elites. Socialist party member Ségolène Royal made French history in 2007 when she became the first woman to be nominated as a presidential candidate by a major party. She lost to Nicolas Sarkozy in the second round.

If Le Pen advances to the second round as polls suggest she could, she’ll only be the second female candidate to have done so since Royal. It’s a glass ceiling Lees said she may have a difficult time shattering.

“We’ve never had a female president, we’ve never had a female leader really in France,” Lees said. “So there really isn’t precedent there.”

With the first round of voting less than two months away, Le Pen has the task of maintaining the lead polls have given her since the start of the election. But it will also involve not being derailed by recent allegations she misused 300,000 euros of EU funds to pay her parliamentary assistants. It’s a charge Le Pen denies, and one that has resulted in the arrest of her chief of staff, Catherine Griset, who has been charged with breach of trust. Le Pen’s lawyers say the investigation is an attempt to harm the presidential hopeful “at the very moment when her candidacy is making a major breakthrough.”

On Denzel Washington's Enduring Stardom

The list of actors who have won three Oscars is vanishingly short. Walter Brennan (a character actor from Hollywood’s Golden Age), Jack Nicholson, and Daniel Day-Lewis are the only men to do it, with Meryl Streep, Katherine Hepburn (who won four), and Ingrid Bergman the only women. Awards season can be fickle, sometimes memorializing films and performances that don’t linger in the public eye, but multiple wins are rare enough that they usually cement an actor’s iconic status in the industry. This year’s Oscars are a mostly decided affair, with La La Land expected to sweep the major categories, but there’s one top award that still seems up in the air: Best Actor, for which Denzel Washington is nominated.

For months, the obvious frontrunner for the Best Actor trophy was Casey Affleck, whose work in Manchester by the Sea drew raves and a slew of critics’ awards. Washington, the director and star of August Wilson adaptation Fences, looked to be overshadowed by his co-star Viola Davis (still tipped to win for Best Supporting Actress). But the momentum shifted after Washington won the Screen Actors Guild Award to make it more of a toss-up. With every Oscar race comes a narrative, and for Denzel it’s a simple one—winning a third trophy would be an acknowledgment not just of his skill as an actor, but of the ubiquity of his stardom, which has lasted longer, and gone in more fascinating directions, than almost any of his peers.

Proof of that stardom is the simple fact that Washington made Fences, a project that has long been ignored by Hollywood because its author, August Wilson, had always insisted on hiring an African American director to adapt his Pulitzer Prize-winning play to film. In 1991, The New York Times reported on Wilson’s efforts to convince Paramount Pictures to hire someone like Spike Lee, Gordon Parks, or Charles Burnett—legendary names in the industry—and the studio’s intransigence on the issue, despite the involvement of A-lister Eddie Murphy.

In the intervening 25 years, the script bounced around the industry and was reworked by Wilson before his death in 2005. In 2009, the producer Scott Rudin offered it to Washington, who agreed but wanted to mount it as a Broadway revival first. Even after the play’s short Broadway run in 2010, it took years for Washington (who had directed two other films, Antwone Fisher and The Great Debaters) to make the movie, and what he produced feels reverent and intimate. Fences is a hallowed piece of playwriting, and the film radiates respect for Wilson’s words, stripping away almost everything (from elaborate sets to camera movements) to live in its long, winding monologues and shocking, dense bursts of exposition and plot.

Fences at times feels like a showcase—a preservation of Wilson’s most famous work that is truest to his vision, rather than its director’s. But it’s also a showcase for Washington as an actor, a chance for him to channel his incredible charisma into a part that slyly comments on it. Troy Maxson, the protagonist of Fences, is a charming motormouth who spends much of the film holding court on various topics, some trivial, others not. His magnetism belies his malevolence. Troy is a seemingly settled, stable family man, but he boils with resentment, real and imagined, over the errant path of his life and the athletic achievements of his son, who he fears will eclipse his own past as a baseball prospect.

There aren’t many actors who could pull off what Washington attempts in Fences—to make a stagey film that’s profoundly un-cinematic in a lot of ways and that leans heavily on its performances. There’s little for Washington to hide behind. It’d be so easy for the film to feel inauthentic, like a museum piece in which monologues are delivered direct to camera just for some archival purpose. But Fences feels like a living, breathing work of character, a granular examination of a man’s passions and insecurities, and, especially as it races to its conclusion, the story of a woman (Troy’s wife Rose, played by Davis) who finally begins to acknowledge and push back against her husband’s stifling flaws.

Fences simply could not have been produced without Washington’s sway, but more importantly, it’s a film that succeeds (and was nominated for Best Picture and Adapted Screenplay along with its leads) because of Washington’s understanding and care for the material. In recent years, his movie appearances had largely concentrated on action films and thrillers, a genre in which he has always excelled—projects like The Equalizer, The Magnificent Seven, and 2 Guns. Fences was a departure only in that it was the first serious non-genre work he had taken on since Flight in 2012 (which led to his last Oscar nomination).

But Washington has taken that bifurcated approach—balancing roles in genre movies and weightier films— for most of his career, after breaking out on TV’s St. Elsewhere and getting his first Oscar nomination for playing the anti-Apartheid activist Steve Biko in 1987’s Cry Freedom. He won a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for Glory in 1990, and filmed his first of four collaborations with Spike Lee (Mo’ Better Blues) the same year. He began working with great directors like Lee, Jonathan Demme (Philadelphia), Mira Nair (Mississippi Masala), and Norman Jewison (The Hurricane) while also churning out blockbuster action films like Crimson Tide, Out of Time, and Man on Fire.

Unlike most of today’s biggest actors, who are often propelled to success by a franchise, Washington has never even appeared in a sequel. He has achieved a long-lasting run of sterling box-office success solely on the back of his on-screen presence. Fences, which has earned a terrific $55 million at the box office (more than double its budget) may mark a new stage in his career—one where he uses his clout to adapt less commercial work, such as Wilson’s entire 10-play Pittsburgh cycle, which he is working to bring to HBO. That influence is part of what the Academy would be honoring with a third Oscar on Sunday night. If Washington wins, his trophy would be a recognition of his rare, enduring star power.

Get Out Is a Funny and Brilliantly Subversive Horror Film

The opening scene of Get Out is a familiar horror-movie image—a stranger walking an unfamiliar street, in the dead of night, nervously looking over their shoulder at every rustle of sound. The setting is the suburbs, a frequent favorite of the slasher genre, only the victim is not a scantily clad teen girl, but an African American man, uneasily navigating what seems like hostile territory. A car pulls up alongside him, blasting the dirge-like old-fashioned ditty “Run Rabbit Run.” “Not today,” he mutters, turning around and walking in the opposite direction. But of course, his fate is already sealed.

Get Out was written and directed by Jordan Peele, one half of the legendary sketch-comedy duo behind Key & Peele. That show had a remarkable grasp on the visual hallmarks of the film genres it often mimicked, and its humor often lay in the preciseness of its parody. But Get Out is no mere pastiche. It’s an atmospheric, restrained, extremely effective work of horror with a clear point of view, a darkly hilarious movie that never trips over itself in search of a cheap laugh or scare. What might sound like a one-joke premise turns into something richly textured; what might seem like an easy metaphor is, in fact, anything but.

Like so many horror films, Get Out is exploring the creepy menace of the suburbs. Usually, similar slasher movies exist to puncture the false veneer of safety that comes with a white picket fence, but in Get Out, the threatening vibe is present from minute one. Chris (Daniel Kaluuya) is about to meet the parents of his girlfriend Rose (Allison Williams) for the first time and is nervous when he realizes she hasn’t told them that he’s black. After a long drive, their manse turns out to be exactly what you might imagine—giant, secluded, pristine, and filled with trinkets from trips around the world.

Rose’s father Dean (Bradley Whitford) is a little too eager to call Chris “my man,” her mother Missy (Catherine Keener) is icy and standoffish, and her brother Jeremy (Caleb Landry Jones) is weirdly aggressive, but there’s nothing that unusual going on at first. Peele layers in a familiar awkwardness before slowly introducing elements of dread. The house’s maid Georgina (Betty Gabriel) and the groundskeeper Walter (Marcus Henderson), both black, have strangely placid demeanors; Missy is a psychiatrist who keeps offering to hypnotize Chris (just to help him stop smoking, you understand); and, naturally, there’s a locked basement no one’s allowed to go into (just a nasty case of mold, of course).

It’s best to know as little as possible about Get Out’s second and third acts. Peele’s plotting is as crisp as his knack for visual storytelling, and he doles out tidbits of information with glee, letting the audience slowly figure out the particulars of Rose’s family while they guess at just how deep the malevolence goes. Chris is on edge from minute one, understandably; behind the family’s friendly surface is the kind of passive prejudice he obviously feared from the get-go. The delight comes in watching how Peele heightens that into real terror. Get Out is clearly playing on the discomfort a young African American man might have in visiting a largely white community—something rarely explored by the horror genre.

There are few more frightening monsters to conjure than racism, after all. It’s a topic the genre has brushed up against—with the black protagonist of Night of the Living Dead, a rare sight in 1968, or in Bernard Rose’s 1992 classic Candyman, in which the titular figure in part represented America’s history of slavery and repression. But racism is still a surprisingly uncommon subject matter, and Peele addresses a more insidious fear—of the fallacy of America being a post-racial society, and of the nightmares one can imagine under that benign surface.

Kaluuya, a British actor who was extraordinary in the Black Mirror episode “Fifteen Million Merits” and, more recently, played Emily Blunt’s stoic partner in Sicario, is terrific in the lead role. Williams excels as Rose, weaponizing the lack of self-awareness she deploys so well on HBO’s Girls. The entire cast is perfectly restrained, save for maybe Jones, who feels unhinged from the start, and the delightful Lil Rel Howery, who plays Chris’s friend Rod, a TSA agent with the kind of moxie and deductive powers one might not expect from an employee of that particular agency. He’s a vehicle for the film’s biggest laugh lines—but Get Out is funny throughout, wringing jokes from even the tensest moments.

Best of all, though, is that Get Out is truly frightening. Not because it’s loaded with jump scares (though it does have a couple of good ones), nor because it features excessively visceral violence. It’s so perfectly calibrated that every escalation feels organic: What begins as an awkward tale of meeting the parents becomes something much, much worse, but it’s all part of a fully realized whole. Get Out is an extremely confident debut feature for Peele, one steeped in the language of horror cinema rather than merely copying it. It’s also likely to be one of the wryest, funniest, most relevant films of the year.  

The Politics of Retelling Norse Mythology

Myths are funny. Unlike histories, they are symbolic narratives; they deal with spiritual rather than fact-based truths. They serve as foundations for beliefs, illustrating how things came to be and who was involved, but they’re often sketchy about when or why. There’s a brief scene from Neil Gaiman’s new book Norse Mythology that does a remarkable job of capturing just this: the wonderfully nebulous sense of being in illo tempore—the hazy “at that time” of the mythic past. It begins, as many creation myths do, with “an empty place waiting to be filled with life,” but in this instance some life already exists. There’s Ymir, whose enormous body produces all giants and, eventually, the earth, skies, and seas. There’s Audhumla, the celestial cow, who licks the first gods out of blocks of ice. And there are three brothers—the gods Ve, Vili, and Odin—who must devise a way out of this timeless nowhere:

Ve and Vili and Odin looked at each other and spoke of what was needful to do, there in the void of Ginnungagap. They spoke of the universe, and of life, and of the future.



Odin and Ve and Vili killed the giant Ymir. It had to be done. There was no other way to make the worlds. This was the beginning of all things, the death that made all life possible.

It’s a passage that gives us a fascinating glimpse into an Old Norse worldview: It suggests that these early medieval people believed gods were many and formidable. That carefully chosen words could be as powerful as deeds. And that sacrifices must be made to secure a good future. In writing it, Gaiman has provided an enchanting contemporary interpretation of the Viking ethos. Like the Vikings themselves, his characters value ingenuity as much as physical prowess, since both help to build a memorable reputation. To paraphrase a sentiment attributed to Odin in the Viking Age poem Hávamál: Although everyone and everything eventually dies—giants and gods and brave warriors included—tales about praiseworthy folk will outlast them all. Myths about these impressive beings survive, then, because they captivate audiences; they survive because they’re continuously shared. And because they are shared, they change.

It’s perhaps less the notion of sharing than the possible changing of these Old Norse stories that sparked a mini-controversy last fall, when Gaiman announced his new book’s publication date. In less than three days, Gaiman’s Facebook post attracted more than 20,000 shares, 50,000 likes, and more than 3,200 comments. Reactions were polarized: On one side, throngs of fans were eager for the author’s recreation of these tales; on the other, a smaller, but no less vocal, group of self-proclaimed pagans seemed to dread his inevitable misunderstanding of their religious beliefs. At the time, none of these commenters had read Gaiman’s book.

Both the hype and the backlash seemed to stem less from the book itself, than from the way it had been promoted. Last June, The New York Times called Norse Mythology “an almost novelistic retelling of famous myths about the gods of Asgard,” while in July the book-discovery platform Bookstr asked, “Is Gaiman writing the definitive book on the gods?” This sort of marketing at once fed fans’ hopes that the author would produce another bestseller like American Gods (the 2001 Hugo and Nebula Award–winning novel currently being developed as a TV series for the Starz network), parts of which are inspired by, but nevertheless vastly different from, Norse stories. The implication that Gaiman has altered, revised, remade, or somehow improved the source material also incited a small-scale cultural appropriation debate in the comments to his post.

Gaiman is, it seems, fully aware of these discussions. In his introduction to Norse Mythology, he explains, “I’ve tried my best to retell these myths and stories as accurately as I can, and as interestingly as I can.” These are noble, sensitive aims—but the first of them, in the case of Norse myth, is ultimately futile. Each author tackling this material is like Ratatoskr, the squirrel running up and down the world tree Yggdrasil’s trunk, carrying messages from the dragon curled under its roots up to the eagle perched in its branches. Who knows what he’s forgotten on the long trip to the top? Since there’s no real “original” with which to make comparisons, it’s impossible to know precisely what a Norse tale sounded like in the first place.

Vikings weren’t known for their writing. That isn’t to say they didn’t have a way with words: They were skalds, storytellers, lawspeakers, singers. And many of the runes carved in the Viking Age (c.793-1066) survive today. However, these runic inscriptions are brief; wood, bone, and stone aren’t conducive to detailed narratives. The stories recognized today as pagan Norse myths were written down—and possibly reinvented—in more extended prose form by outsiders and Christians.

Tacitus, a Roman historian, wrote about Germanic peoples and their rituals centuries before they migrated to the British Isles. Ibn Fadlan, an Arab diplomat traveling the Volga trade route in the 10th century, described the funeral practices (ship burial and slave sacrifice among them) of the Rūs, a group of people believed to be Swedish Vikings angling to control eastern trade routes. Saxo Grammaticus, a Dane writing in Latin in the late 11th century, brought the Norse gods down to earth, downplaying their divine qualities and also situating their kingdom in Byzantium instead of in heavenly Asgard. Adam of Bremen, a German monk writing around the same time, shared stories about pagan worship at the temple in Uppsala, Sweden, one of early medieval Scandinavia’s most sacred sites. (Told second-hand based on an informant’s account, Adam’s frequently referenced work includes vague details about the blót ceremony held there every ninth year, at which nine specimens of every creature—including humans—were said to have been sacrificed to the gods.)

The vast majority of what is now known about Norse mythology, however, survives thanks to Snorri Sturluson, an ambitious and powerful chieftain, lawyer, politician, poet, and saga writer who lived in Iceland from 1179 to 1241. These dates are significant: They tell us that Snorri was recording these narratives roughly 200 years after the Christian conversion in Norway, Denmark, and Iceland. They also, significantly, tell us that “original” and definitively pagan narratives about the Norse pantheon do not actually exist.

Readers hoping for a fully novelistic reinvention of these myths in Norse Mythology will be disappointed.

This claim needs a bit of qualifying. Scholars mostly agree that the myths Gaiman has retold—the same ones found in Snorri’s Prose Edda—were inspired by earlier pagan narratives. In fact, several stanzas of pre-Christian poems are preserved in Snorri’s work. Other snippets of pagan poetry also appear in 13th and 14th century Icelandic sagas, truly novelistic accounts like Grettis saga and Egils saga (the latter also possibly written by Snorri). Yet by the time Snorri was composing his versions of the Norse myths, his worldview was solidly a Christian one.

Even if, for the sake of argument, it’s accepted that Snorri was channeling his pagan ancestors at the time of writing, that they were completely accurate 13th-century reports on pre-Christian mythology, we’d still be none the wiser for doing so. The versions of the Norse myths Snorri heard and recorded aren’t necessarily the same ones being read and circulated today. At least, not precisely. Most scholars agree that Snorri’s Prose Edda was completed around 1220, but the three primary manuscripts containing these stories that are still available to us today date between the 13th and mid-14th centuries. At some point over the course of 130 years, Snorri’s myths were collected along with various other early medieval works, and included in compilations that are sometimes abbreviated, often incomplete. It’s possible that one of these manuscripts is a direct copy of Snorri’s text—but even so, it is still a copy. Overall, there are gaps in these narratives. Missing pages. Lines of text packed densely onto vellum (in places, almost illegibly) to save precious space. These manuscripts capture the hands of different scribes at different moments. They are projections into the past reflecting Snorri’s own rearview projections. It’s impossible to say what shape the myths may have taken before these transcriptions, much less before Snorri himself wrote them down; we cannot make arguments out of silence.

Readers hoping for a fully novelistic reinvention of these myths in Norse Mythology will be disappointed. Gaiman has neither fabricated passages that might fill lacunae in existing manuscripts, nor concocted new adventures for old gods. Instead, Norse Mythology is a considered retelling of sixteen familiar tales, presented in virtually the same sequence as they are found in Snorri’s Prose Edda, and crafted as sympathetically as any modern author can. There are echoes of Ibn Fadlan’s account, for instance, in Gaiman’s description of the funeral of Odin’s second son, Balder, one of the most beautiful and beloved of the gods. Like the noble Rūs man whose body was brought to the riverside, laid in a ship there, and burned with a woman by his side, Gaiman’s Balder was brought down the shingle, and when his wife “saw her husband’s body carried past … her heart gave out in her breast, and she fell dead on to the shore. They carried her to the funeral pyre, and they placed her body beside Balder’s.”

Gaiman does, however, take some creative license—largely for the better. This is perhaps most evident in his fantastic riffs off the pun-heavy Old Norse sense of humor. Snorri’s work emphasizes Thor as a god worth admiring for brawn rather than brains; Gaiman develops this characterization, fittingly, for comedic effect. When Loki explains that the lord of ogres wants Freya’s hand in marriage, for instance, Thor thinks it’s not such a bad deal: “She had two hands, after all, and might be persuaded to give one of them without too much of an argument.”

Gaiman’s retelling adds another leaf to this ancient tree of myths.

The gods in Gaiman’s stories are also far more talkative than those in medieval versions, and readers are granted further insight into their thoughts: “The people worshipped Frey and they loved him, but this did not fill the empty place inside him.” Here, Gaiman reads Snorri’s more superficial depiction of Frey’s desires as a sign of the god’s loneliness, which offers a poignant and logical explanation for his pursuit of the giantess Gerd later in this tale.

Still, Gaiman stops short of elucidating what rituals were performed when the people worshipped the Aesir and Vanir, the two groups of gods in the Norse pantheon. By and large, his lively expansions to existing passages succeed in being true to the spirit of earlier tellings. His alterations neither fundamentally change the source material nor our understanding of it, but they may very well enhance our experience of reading it.

That these stories continue to exist at all tells readers that Snorri—like Gaiman—wanted them to endure. As Snorri explains in Skáldskaparmál, the extended lesson in poetic diction that makes up the second half of his Prose Edda, it would be a loss to forget these “ancient metaphors,” because without them the poet’s vocabulary would be diminished. Given that the trademarks of skaldic poetry are its ornate meter, difficult syntax, and often obscure kennings, it’s understandable that a writer like Snorri would want to have a wide variety of words and phrases available for reference. But Snorri also seems to relish these myths for their vivid subject matter, even as he insists that in no way are “Christian men to believe in heathen gods, nor in the truth of these tales.” His Prose Edda, one of our most full and elaborate records of pagan Norse mythology, is, in other words, far from an objective manual for religious belief (much less a guide to early pagan rites). Rather, he suggests, it is a handbook of stock images and characters for budding poets to draw upon when creating their own narratives. Though there’s little doubt that at least some of the stories he’s inherited came from older, pagan sources, readers today can never know how much Snorri changed for didactic purposes, nor how much he invented.

In Norse Mythology, Gaiman mimics the elision also found in Snorri’s own accounts, the avoidance of specifics where certainty about the old ways can’t reasonably be found or expected. Gaiman’s Odin “stood by the grave at the end of the world, and in that place he invoked the darkest runes and called on old powers, long forgotten. He burned things, and he said things, and he charmed, and he demanded.” What these things entail, not even Gaiman can say.

These tales, much like Snorri’s Edda, evoke more than they explain. They entice and enthrall. And in these (as in all) new versions of old myths, what readers encounter are the authors’ impressions of pagans and gods, tolerant and flawed and wise, shaped by good intentions. But the seeds of these stories were planted so long ago now, there’s no way of telling what branches shot up from which roots—only that the passing centuries haven’t stopped them from growing. Gaiman’s retelling adds another leaf to this ancient tree: It’s not a new species in its own right, but rather a fresh sign that the old one is still thriving.