Hollywood

If there is such a thing as a formula for making a hit film, it has something to do with giving audiences a new and unusual villain. Over the years, screenwriters have thrown their protagonists up against enemies as thuggish as boss Johnny Friendly in 1954’s On the Waterfront and as smooth as Olivier’s Crassus as in 1960’s Spartacus. “The more successful the villain, the more successful the film,” as Hitchcock himself once put it. Which is why Hollywood’s constant search for new and unusual bad guys has explored almost every conceivable milieu: corporate America (The Big Short), street gangs (The Warriors), hospitals (Coma), prisons (Shawshank Redemption), law firms (The Firm), and even the movie studio itself (The Bad and the Beautiful).

One of the most enduring images from the Oscars came two decades ago, at the 2002 ceremony, when director David Lynch revealed himself as one of the most courteous and pleasant figures in contemporary cinema. Ron Howard had just won the Best Director award for his work on the dishonest and ephemeral mental health drama A Beautiful Mind. As the beaming Howard — one of the most popular figures in Hollywood — headed onto the stage to collect his prize, two of his defeated rivals, Robert Altman and Lynch, embraced one another.

Exactly when and where are our stunning and brave Hollywood stars prepared to take a stand for gay rights? Liberal actors and celebrities have a made a show of standing against Florida’s Parental Rights in Education Bill, signed earlier this month by Governor Ron DeSantis, a man progressives seems intent on making the next president. When activists and journalists realized they couldn’t stop the bill from becoming law, they deployed their new favorite tactic: demanding that corporations speak out against the bill (see also: how in response to Georgia’s new voting legislation, they insisted that Major League Baseball relocate the All-Star game).

Next week marks the release of the third J.K. Rowling-scripted Fantastic Beasts film, a series that has overstayed its welcome. This latest iteration is subtitled The Secrets of Dumbledore. As if to wrong-foot those who would smirkingly speculate that one of Dumbledore’s secrets is his sexuality, the film opens with the old wizard and his former lover-turned-nemesis Grindelwald (now played by Mads Mikkelsen, replacing a disgraced Johnny Depp) mourning the end of their love affair, which at least makes the homosexual subtext hinted at in previous films explicit. But that, alas, is about it for any kind of coherence, or interest, or originality.

The news that Bruce Willis is to “step away” — rather than explicitly retire — from acting following a diagnosis of the brain disorder aphasia, is sad for both personal and artistic reasons. Even as a flood of stories emerge about Willis’s erratic and unpredictable behavior on film sets over the past few years, it is a bitter irony that, after a lengthy career as the tough guy hero — in Armageddon, he defeated no less an antagonist than a planet-threatening asteroid — the actor has finally been undone by his own brain. The news also makes the recent receipt of Willis’s Golden Razzie “award” for his performance in Cosmic Sin particularly cruel, not least because he was “honored” with a special category, “Worst Performance by Bruce Willis in a 2021 Movie.

The news stories regarding the 2022 Academy Awards were supposed to be about how it was the first time a film (Coda) produced by a streaming service (in this case, Apple TV) took the highest award at the Oscars. But moments earlier, Will Smith had marched on stage to slap Chris Rock — and everything changed in an instant. Without any doubt, the thirty seconds it took Smith to assault Rock, who had been making poor-taste jokes about Smith’s wife Jada Pinkett’s alopecia, and to bellow repeatedly, “Keep my wife’s name out your fucking mouth,”will prove to be game-changing, both for the Academy Awards and for Hollywood at large.

It is a depressing statement on the banality of the film industry that the death of actor William Hurt, at the age of seventy-one, was marked by at least one obituary stating, “Avengers star dies.” Hurt, who appeared in several Marvel films as the military character Thaddeus Ross in his latter-day career, did indeed appear in the mega-grossing Avengers films Infinity War and Endgame, and I very much hope that he received some tiny portion of the films’ enormous box office receipts in recognition of his appearance. But to describe Hurt’s life and work as defined by his Marvel roles reminded me of the great Alan Bennett line about his sexuality: “It’s like asking a man who has just crossed the Sahara whether he would prefer Perrier or Evian water.

I remember enjoying Murder on the Orient Express a few years ago, when I took refuge from a real-life blizzard in a Jackson, Wyoming theater to watch Kenneth Branagh’s decadent take on Agatha Christie’s snow-covered murder mystery. It was memorably cast with big-name talent (Johnny Depp makes one heck of a sleazy bad guy) and exquisite, if sometimes over-the-top, costumes and décor. If memory serves, the movie ended as a suspenseful and satisfying cinematic treat. Death on the Nile, not so much. Branagh teased his next adaptation of an Hercule Poirot novel at the end of Orient Express, but I found his second attempt wasn't worth the five-year wait.

This week, Christopher Nolan’s new picture Oppenheimer began production. Its star-studded cast features everyone from Cillian Murphy as the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer to Emily Blunt (as his wife Katherine) to Matt Damon (Manhattan Project director Leslie Groves) to Robert Downey Jr. (as Oppenheimer’s nemesis Lewis Strauss), with Florence Pugh, Rami Malek and Kenneth Branagh in support. Nolan has been granted a $100 million budget by his new studio, Universal, after angrily leaving Warner Bros. in a row over their decision to deny their 2021 pictures an exclusive theatrical release. The implication is clear: Oppenheimer will be a very big deal indeed. Nolan himself possesses a unique level of influence in contemporary Hollywood.

Lady Gaga fans, unite in grief. Their idol — who was widely expected to win the Best Actress Oscar this year for her performance as the murderous Patrizia Reggiani in Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci — has not even been nominated for the award. In her place are Kristen Stewart, Jessica Chastain and Nicole Kidman — who are recognized for playing real people, respectively Princess Diana, Tammy Faye Messner and Lucille Ball — as well as Oscar stalwarts Olivia Colman and Penélope Cruz. Any of them stands a decent chance of winning now that the Gaga threat has been removed. But this still represents the greatest volte-face in what is otherwise a largely predictable set of Academy Award nominations.

Recently, the Golden Globes were handed out in the most low-key fashion imaginable. Gone are the days of glitzy, alcohol-laden bashes, complete with Ricky Gervais making near-the-knuckle digs at Hollywood icons, who look as if they’d happily knock him down. Instead the results this year were announced in that most pandemic-friendly of ways: via the Hollywood Foreign Press Association’s social media feed. It was socially distanced, devoid of any potential for gossip or scandal — two qualities forever associated with the Globes — and deeply boring. The results themselves were mainly sensible.