In this episode, we are going to take an extremely brief look at 4 films that were nominated for major awards but were not among the 10 films nominated for Best Picture.

Hi, This is Chris Young. Welcome to episode 57 of Contemplating Life – Oscar edition.

In this episode, we are going to take an extremely brief look at 4 films that were nominated for major awards but were not among the 10 films nominated for Best Picture.

We start off with the Netflix film “Nyad” the story of famous long-distance swimmer Diana Nyad brilliantly portrayed by Annette Benning who is nominated as Best Lead Actress. She is accompanied by my all-time favorite actress Jodie Foster who plays Nyad’s best friend and coach Bonnie Stoll. She has received a Supporting Actress Nomination. The chemistry between these two is phenomenal. Together they put on a master class in acting. Both nominations are very much deserved.

Nyad set several records for long-distance offshore swimming. She swam completely around Manhattan Island, swam 89 miles from the Bahamas to Florida, and swam from Capri to Naples Italy in record time among other records. She is most famous however for her attempt to swim 103 miles from Havana Cuba to the Florida Keys at age 28. Unfortunately, she failed. She was a frequent commentator on ABC Sports Olympics coverage and was a successful author and businesswoman.

At age 60, Nyad realized she had unfinished business. She began training to tackle her white whale quest of the Cuba to Florida swim. At first, she trained alone and then eventually revealed to her friend Bonnie that she was going to make the Cuba attempt again. Bonnie began coaching her and assisting her in recruiting sponsorships.

Some initial test swims of 12 or 24 hours did not go well but she eventually built up her stamina and skills and began preparing for the attempt.

She recruited a man named John Bartlett as her navigator. He operated a charter boat in the area and was an expert on the currents and weather of the area. Nyad partially blamed her previous failure on the inexperience of her navigator. Bartlett is played by one of my favorite character actors Rhys Ifans. He recently appeared in HBO’s “House of the Dragon” and was in “Spider-Man: No Way Home” but I especially appreciated his performance in three seasons of the spy series “Berlin Station” which I highly recommend. I mentioned last week that his performance was more interesting to me than anything Ryan Gosling did in “Barbie” and I would have nominated him instead as Supporting Actor.

We follow Nyad through three more unsuccessful attempts at the Cuba crossing. She risks shark attacks and deadly jellyfish stings as well as a severe storm all of which nearly killed her. Unlike other such attempts, she did not use a shark cage. Rather she relied on electronic shark repellent systems. She also had to develop a special suit and mask to protect her from potentially deadly jellyfish stings. After these failures, her friend Bonnie, navigator Bartlett, and her entire team give up and encourage her to abandon her quest.

The film is a fascinating look at how a driven person surrounds themselves with supporters to help them achieve their goals but that those supporters pay a personal cost to be a part of the driven person’s life. This theme was especially meaningful to me as someone who is dependent upon a team of people just to live an ordinary productive life with a disability. After 68 years of being dependent upon other people for everything, I’m beginning to feel the weight of the cost it has on my friends and family. So the film triggered many emotions in me.

Nyad was raised to believe she has a great destiny in the water. She often tells the story of how her father explained that the word “Nyad” was the name of the Greek mythological nymphs who swam the oceans.

Once her friends realize that she is going to proceed with or without them, they relent and join her for one final try. I don’t think is a spoiler to say that her fifth attempt was successful.

The film fails to address the fact that her successes were not universally recognized by the marathon swimming community. For technical reasons, her successful swim from Cuba to Florida was insufficiently documented for her record to be officially recognized. Her record was removed from the Guinness Book of Records because they rely upon sanctioning bodies for such records. Still, there were over 40 witnesses to her swim and if she did not meet all of the exact technical requirements for the record to be recognized, it is nevertheless an amazing accomplishment.

I’ve been a huge fan of Jodie Foster for as far back as I can remember. I often joke about the difference between me and John Hinckley, Jr. whose obsession with Foster led him to attempt to assassinate Ronald Reagan.

Hinckley was obsessed with Jodie Foster and I claim there is nothing unusual or insane about that. I am similarly obsessed. Hinckley also hated Ronald Reagan as did I although not enough to want to kill him. There is nothing inherently insane about having those two views. The thing that separates me as a Foster-obsessed Reagan-hating person from a nut job like John Hinckley is that he somehow connected the two. That’s why he’s nuts and I’m not. Or at least I like to think so.

Even accounting for my obsession with Foster, you will probably agree she delivers a memorable performance, and as I said earlier, her chemistry with Benning is amazing. By the way, although both characters are lesbian, they are just friends in this story. Nyad explains early on that they dated briefly decades ago but are just friends. Still, you feel every bit of the great love they have for one another as friends.

Foster is my biased pick for Supporting Actress but I think that Da’Vine Joy Randolph in “The Holdovers” is more likely to win given her wins at the Golden Globes and BAFTA awards. I very much enjoyed Randolph’s performance and I will not be disappointed if she wins.

Benning is my second favorite choice as Lead Actress behind Sandra Huller in “Anatomy of a Fall” but Emma Stone is the odds-on favorite for “Poor Things”.

This Netflix film was released in November and shown in theaters only long enough to be Oscar-eligible. Its worldwide gross is only $16,056 according to IMDb. It is currently still available on Netflix. I highly recommend it.

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Our next film is another Netflix biopic. “Rustin” is the story of civil rights activist Bayard Rustin who planned and organized the 1963 March on Washington DC where Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. famously delivered his “I Have a Dream” speech.

Rustin is played by Colman Domingo and has earned a much-deserved Lead Actor nomination for the role. In that category, I greatly appreciated all five nominees and would place Bradley Cooper in “Maestro” as my favorite with the remaining four performances in a tie for second place. I just can’t decide.

Rustin was as openly gay as one could be in the early 1960s. We see the consequences of that situation as he is forced out of the civil rights movement for fear that his sexuality will damage the cause. When there were accusations that he was in a homosexual relationship with Dr. King, He offered to resign from the NAACP and expected King to refuse the resignation. When King accepted the resignation it caused a great rift between the two friends that lasted for several years.

Rustin had studied the nonviolent philosophies of Gandhi and is credited with introducing King to the concept of nonviolent civil disobedience.

Rustin conceived the idea of the largest nonviolent protest in history. A march on Washington DC that would attract 100,000 people. It was to be a two-day affair that included encircling the White House, protesting outside Congress, and a gathering at the National Mall in front of the Lincoln Memorial. Ultimately, he was forced to scale it back to a single-day event at the National Mall. The event was still a massive success that drew 250,000 people.

The film chronicles his difficult quest to gain respect in the movement in the face of his homosexuality. His primary detractor is NAACP chairperson Roy Wilkins portrayed by comedian Chris Rock. Although Rock does an acceptable job in a dramatic role, I could not help thinking of him as Chris Rock trying to be dramatic. His performance was not strong enough to make me forget his comic roots.

We get brief cameo appearances by actors we have talked about for their other nominated work. specifically, Jeffrey Wright plays Rep. Adam Clayton Powell and Da’Vine Joy Randolph plays Mahalia Jackson who sang at the event.

Rustin reconciled his relationship with Dr. King and they worked together on the March. When accusations arose again against Rustin, this time Dr. King supported his friend.

Similar to “Nyad”, we see the effect that this highly motivated, obsessed, driven person has on his friends and colleagues around him and the price they have to pay for being his friend.

I first became aware of Colman Domingo from his excellent work in the TV series “Fear the Walking Dead” where he plays a highly troubled character Victor Strand. In that series, he is often the villain but he is one who you can root for as he tries to constantly redeem himself. He also does an admirable job playing Mister in this year’s musical remake of “The Color Purple”.

In addition to his Lead Actor Oscar nomination, he was also nominated for the Golden Globe and a BAFTA nomination for the role. He is named as part of the ensemble cast in the SAG nomination for “The Color Purple”.

The film has appeared in a number of film festivals and saw limited theatrical release but no box office figures are available. It has been on Netflix since November and is still available.

The true life story is compelling and well worth your time.

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In our next film, Danielle Brooks has received an Oscar nomination for Supporting Actress in her work in the 2023 remake of “The Color Purple.” She is most famous for her work in 89 episodes of the Netflix series “Orange is the New Black.” Unfortunately, despite its popularity, I never watched the series so I was unfamiliar with her work.

I’m more embarrassed that I had never seen the original 1985 version of “The Color Purple” directed by Steven Spielberg. Initially, I could not understand why such an iconic and beloved film not yet 40 years old needed to be remade. Then I discovered that the new version was based on a Broadway musical adaptation of the story.

It seems strange to make a musical as is such a dark topic. But my three favorite musicals of all time in order are “Jesus Christ Superstar”, “Les Miserables”, and “Phantom of the Opera.” Although there are some upbeat numbers in those shows, none of them could be described as happy, feel-good stories. So the idea of taking the story of a woman who is used and abused and essentially made a slave of her husband could theoretically be ripe for appropriate musical treatment.

Sadly, this film is not an appropriate treatment of such a dark story. I am deeply surprised that Stephen Spielberg, Oprah Winfrey, and author Alice Walker are all listed as Executive Producers. They signed off on this travesty.

I watched the original and the remake simultaneously. How? I would watch 15-20 minutes of one film and then switch to the other one to see how it treated the same material. While indeed there are some happy moments in the early part of the story as Celie and her sister Olivia are young girls and this story does have a happy ending, the bulk of the story is a deeply tragic story of a woman who is sold by her father to be the wife of a horrible abusive farmer. Although they are all black and the story takes place from 1909 through 1947, he treats her as if she were a slave.

There are only one or two musical numbers that I felt were appropriately somber and emotional to fit the tone of the story. The vast majority of the numbers except for those during the happy ending and some numbers in a juke joint bar are completely tone deaf to the seriousness of the subject at hand.

I could write an extensive review almost scene by scene of everything wrong with this musical adaptation. But it’s not worth my time nor yours to do so.

Ultimately, we are only here to talk about the nominated performance of Danielle Brooks. It is difficult to be objective about her performance in a film which I so deeply hated. Brooks plays Sophia which is the same character played by Oprah Winfrey in the original film. One cannot help but compare the performances. While Brooks did an adequate job of playing the character as feisty and at times providing much-needed comic relief, overall her performance is nowhere near as moving during the tragic parts of her story as was Oprah’s original portrayal.

Sophia talks back sarcastically to the wife of the mayor of the town and ultimately strikes the mayor across the cheek which lands her in jail for many years. In Spielberg’s version, she comes out of the experience severely scarred with her left eye almost completely closed from the beatings she took over the years. In this version, there are no visible scars from her experience. Thus, the experience to me seems to be diluted or dare I say “whitewashed”.

I suppose to be fair, we ought to judge her performance on its own and not in comparison to the previous version. The kindest thing I can say about her in that regard is that her performance was adequate. I have no complaints about it. But I would not have nominated her.

I would have rather seen this Supporting Actress nomination go to Julianne Moore in our next film “May December” or Erika Alexander as Jeffrey Wright’s girlfriend in “American Fiction”.

I’ve done some soul-searching about my dislike for the film. I’ve asked myself, “Is this a case of a privileged old liberal white guy taking offense on behalf of bright people over this film?” I have concluded that if this was the story of white women who were being abused and enslaved by their husbands I would be just as offended by a lighthearted musical treatment of the topic.

The film was released on Christmas Day in the US. With an estimated budget of $100 million, it has earned only $60 million in the US and Canada and just $67 million worldwide. It is currently available for streaming on Max or for rent or purchase on Amazon and YouTube.

Okay, don’t hold back Chris… Tell us what you really think. I cannot recommend this film.

* * *

Our final film this week could similarly be accused of not taking a serious topic seriously enough. “May December” is a Netflix film starring Julianne Moore in a fictional story of a woman named Gracie Atherton who at age 36 had an affair with a Korean-American 13-year-old boy named Joe Yoo. She was the manager of a pet store and he worked as a stock boy there. Their affair was discovered and she was sentenced to jail where she gave birth to his child.

The film takes place 20 years later. Gracie was released from jail, and she and Joe were married. They had two more children. Their oldest daughter is in college and the twin boy and girl are about to graduate high school.

Natalie Portman plays TV actress Elizabeth Barry who is preparing to make a movie based on Gracie’s story. She visits the Atherton-Yoo family to interview Gracie and Joe so that she can accurately portray their story in the upcoming film. The couple is very cooperative with Elizabeth and they invite her to a family cookout, a family dinner, and other opportunities to get to know the family.

Elizabeth also interviews Gracie’s ex-husband, her children from the previous marriage, her lawyer, and other people around town who were familiar with the events from 20 years ago. I especially enjoyed her interview with Gracie’s lawyer who said that he had defended murderers, arsonists, rapists, gangsters, and other unsavory characters as a defense attorney in New York City. He had moved to Savannah Georgia to escape that kind of practice. He said that defending all of these horrible people never got him on the front page of the New York Times yet when he came to Georgia and soon after defended Gracie, that landed him on the front page of the New York Times.

Joe who is now in his 30s, is still very much emotionally a 13-year-old boy and Gracie often treats him as such. He is employed either as an x-ray technician or a radiologist in a hospital but it is not clear which. They live in a large well-furnished home on a lake or river. It’s unclear how they can afford such a place so perhaps he is a doctor. They never explained. Gracie spends her time baking and selling her baked goods to friends and neighbors who seem to only purchase them because they feel sorry for her.

There are several plot lines that seem to go nowhere as Elizabeth investigates the events from 20 years ago. Gracie is a highly emotional person who at one point breaks down hysterically simply because someone canceled a baking order.

The musical score accompanying the film features bold dramatic orchestral stings that seem to indicate something dramatic is about to happen. Yet in one example of such a musical cue during a cookout, Gracie is staring into the refrigerator and then calmly declares, “I don’t think we have enough hot dogs.” That’s hardly the dramatic moment that the music indicated we were going to see.

On initial viewing, I didn’t understand the film at all. Apparently, I was trying to take it too seriously. I was only reviewing the film because it was nominated for an Oscar for Original Screenplay. I did not notice until later that it had also been nominated for a Golden Globe as a comedy. Except for things like the overly dramatic “we need more hot dogs” and some over-the-top acting, I didn’t see anything funny about it.

So, I went looking for reviews of the film to try to figure out what others had seen in the film that I was missing. I came across a YouTube video by a reviewer I had never heard of named Broey Deschanel. Her video was titled “May December and the Melodrama of Film Twitter”. The 53-minute video talked about a Twitter debate over whether or not the film was a melodrama and whether or not the term “camp” applied to the film.

I had a rather generic layman’s understanding of the term “melodrama” even though we have briefly touched upon it in my writing seminar. But Ms. Deschanel gives an extensive history of the term from its earliest days in classic theater through more modern plays and especially in films of the 1930s through 1950s. She outlines several elements of what constitutes melodrama and as she was doing so I suddenly began to understand “May December”.

In some respects, it seems that the film is one giant inside joke for film aficionados. It is either an attempt to create a modern-day melodrama or it is a spoof of classic melodramatic films. I’m not sure which.

At one point, Ms. Deschanel is talking about Roger Ebert’s review of an earlier satirical look at the melodrama genre.

Ms. Deschanel: Roger Ebert uses that quote a decade later in his review of “Written on the Wind”. He says something in that review that caught my attention. “Written on the Wind”, like “Stella Dallas”, appears to be played straight. But while I didn’t cry while watching it, I did feel myself chuckling now and then at the ridiculousness of its stakes. Ebert points out this new, ironic take on the melodrama that Sirk is adopting and in that irony, that satire is humor. He says “If you only see the surface, it’s trashy soap opera. If you can see the style, the absurdity, the exaggeration and the satirical humor, it’s subversive of all the 1950s dramas that handled such material solemnly. Sirk’s style spread so pervasively that nobody could do melodrama with a straight face after him. (Roger Ebert, “Written on the Wind” rogerebert.com (1998))” Ebert ends his review with one blazing question. One test of satire is: At what point do we realize the author is kidding?” Which is how we arrive at this current discourse around “May December.”

Me: At what point do we realize the author is kidding? In my case, the answer clearly is I didn’t get the joke until I learned the history of melodrama as presented in this YouTube review.

The video also discusses whether or not the film is appropriately called “Camp”. Author Susan Sontag wrote one of the definitive essays on camp. She said that sometimes something is knowingly camp and other times it is unknowingly camp. She seemed to prefer the latter. The film director, Todd Haynes claims that his film is not camp. Either he is continuing to tease us or the film is unknowingly camp.

If you watched the film and didn’t understand it as a satirical look at melodrama, I encourage you to watch the YouTube review which I have linked in the description of this podcast. And even if you’re not interested in this particular film, that YouTube video is a fascinating look at the history of melodrama and camp satire. I think it is well worth your time.

So on initial viewing, I thought the film was a ridiculous mess. But viewed as satire, I begin to understand it on some levels.

I can’t recommend the film unless you are just curious about it. Many people are offended that someone would treat such a serious topic in a satirical comedic way. Then again, as Ms. Deschanel points out, one of the most beloved comedies in film history is Mel Brooks’ “The Producers” which is about a bunch of people creating a musical play about Nazi Germany including a hilarious number titled “Springtime for Hitler”.

This Netflix film saw only a limited theatrical release. With an estimated budget of $10 million, its worldwide gross is only $3.4 million. Box office numbers for Netflix films really don’t mean anything. It is still available exclusively on Netflix.

IMDb reports 176 nominations and 34 wins.

In addition to its Original Screenplay Oscar nomination, it had 4 Golden Globe nominations.

So, that wraps up our look at four films with five nominations that were not Best Picture.

Next week, we tackle a pair of films in a category I call “Genocidal Husbands” and we will follow that up with our final episode in this Oscar series “Genius at Work.”

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I will see you next week as we continue contemplating life. Until then, fly safe everyone.