Academy voters like the kind of bland social critique that’s already a polite consensus among their kind of people. They like a solemn historical lesson, or, sometimes, a rousing historical extravaganza. They like movie politics that flatter their Hollywood politics. And, perhaps especially, these people in the moviemaking business really like it when a movie says that moviemaking and related things are important and redemptive, a source of moral light in the world. They like it when a movie says what Whoopie Goldberg once said of herself and her Hollywood friends when she was host of the Oscars: “Aren’t we great?”

Some years the movie that wins Best Picture is not only not the best picture. Sometimes it’s not even a good picture, and this apparent contradiction helps us in our sociologist’s work. It helps us measure the power of those Hollywood vanities. But in some rare years, the critic’s and the sociologist’s perspectives converge, or at least flirt. This is one of those years, when the nominee that’s arguably the best movie also deftly plays to the vanities of Academy voters, which makes it a strong favorite to win Best Picture. But this presents its own dilemma. When you’ve made a long habit of viewing the Academy’s choices with ironic if not smug detachment, of dismissing its judgments as middlebrow and self-serving, those occasions when you agree with the big choice can feel a little weird. 

Of the various ways for a movie to win favor from Academy voters, the most reliable might be the direct flattery I refer to above, joining Whoopie Goldberg in saying to those voters, “Aren’t we great?” Alas, the one Best Picture nominee this year that seems to say this, that hints at the redemptive potential of moviemaking, is a smallish film whose dialog is mostly Norwegian — Joachim Trier’s Sentimental Value. But I don’t want to be too glib about Sentimental Value, because it’s a lovely, acutely moving film with brilliant performances. Thanks to its smallness and Norwegianness, though, it has only a tiny chance of winning. Still, if it does, it will be thanks to the fond things it says about the integrity of famous actresses and the redemptive power of moviemaking, in which case I will want to claim a little credit for saying, two days earlier, that those vain things sometimes make the difference. 

The other nominee with a helpful hook in the professional world of acting and scripting and staging is Chloé Zhou’s Hamnet, an adaptation of Maggie O’Farrell’s novel about the death of William Shakespeare’s son Hamnet, which movie and film suggest inspired Shakespeare to write Hamlet. Now, Shakespeare carries definite weight with Oscar voters. Olivier’s Hamlet (1948) and the Romeo and Juliet update West Side Story (1961) won Best Picture, but the strongest evidence that Shakespeare and theater have beguiling power over Oscar voters is John Madden’s Shakespeare in Love (1998), which took Best Picture and six other awards despite being a bit of a trifle, built on a bit of a gimmick. 

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Hamnet is something like the opposite of a trifle, but it does carry the whiff of a gimmick. It is a movie of two halves, the first a story of love and family told in the style of Terrence Malick — murmuring, earthy, elliptical. But where Malick (at least at his best) makes a sort of poetic lightness of these features, the first hour of Zhou’s film is sodden and portentous, if also visually gorgeous. It feels a little too much like a setup for the second hour, which is an almost unbearable sketch of parental grief. But Zhou does have a lovely eye, and the slightly overwrought poetry that turned me off might be just the thing for Oscar voters seeking a semblance of gravity. Also, Jessie Buckley is just magnetic as Shakespeare’s wife Agnes. It’s a bold move to nudge history’s greatest writer aside, but Buckley makes that move pay off. 

Buckley probably has a better shot at Best Actress than Hamnet does at Best Picture, but the Shakespeare connection may not be enough for her either, because in that category she’s up against Emma Stone in Yorgos Lanthimos’s Bugonia. Then again, Stone’s won two Best Actress awards in the last decade, the second only two years ago, which might cause the Academy to shy from her. For her part, Stone is a total hoot in Bugonia, in which she plays the CEO of a pharma giant who’s kidnapped by a rural lunatic (Jesse Plemons). I wish Bugonia were as good as she is, because it has huge potential, but it blows a brilliant plot twist with hippie preaching that largely undermines its own subtle comedy. Bugonia won’t win Best Picture, but not because of the hippie preaching. In fact, the hippie preaching is probably a plus with Oscar voters, but it only comes in at the end of the movie. Bugonia won’t win because it’s sort of oblique and a little grubby, neither redemptive of spirit nor flagrantly arty. It’s just not very Oscar-y.

Then there’s Joseph Kosinski’s F1. It’s never occurred to me to love the Oscars’ 2009 change from five to 10 Best Picture nominees. I just thought it was a marketing device. But I love it this year, because without it we wouldn’t have F1 amid the nominees. I love this nomination for its hints of blitheness and randomness, of someone high up saying “Why the hell not?” I’ve taken to fantasizing about F1 actually winning, and everyone in the theater being like “What?” instead of clapping. A crowd-pleasing popcorn movie about car-racing, with Brad Pitt playing himself in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, winning Best Picture. F1 almost certainly won’t win, despite being a perfectly executed crowd-pleasing popcorn movie, but a guy who disdains the Oscars can still hope.

Another hoped-for winner for me would be Train Dreams, Clint Bentley’s beautiful adaptation of the late, great Denis Johnson’s beautiful novella about a logger in the American northwest who, through the love- and death-haunted adult life, watches the steam-powered 19th century become the electrified 20th. I’m not sure Train Dreams is quite good enough to deserve to win — I don’t even know what it even means to “deserve” to win this contest as I’ve described it — but I can serenely set aside these questions in the knowledge that Train Dreams has no chance. 

Another film enlisted to fill out the 10-nominee scheme while having no chance of winning is Guillermo del Toro’s Frankenstein, but I’m much less fond of Frankenstein than I am of Train Dreams, or indeed of every other film in this capacious category. Frankenstein lost me at the very beginning, when Danish sailors iced-in off the Baltic coast of Russia bring an injured man aboard who turns out to be Victor Frankenstein (Oscar Isaac), after which the ship is attacked from the ice by Frankenstein’s famous monster. Amid all this, Frankenstein starts telling his life story, from the very beginning, and the captain whose ship is being attacked is like, “Go on, I’m listening”. Del Toro’s whole movie is touched with this foundational nonsense. I’m being disdainful towards Oscar voters, but I do credit them with preferring coherence in a story, and Frankenstein has little of that. What it has that puts it under Oscar consideration is the technical stuff, elaborate sets and grisly visual effects and some interesting historical costumes, and one heroic achievement in makeup, which pertains, obviously, to the monster, beautiful Jacob Elordi being made monstrous and kind of ugly but also, somehow, still beautiful. The most I’ll say for Frankenstein is that it almost certainly deserves the makeup award.  

Another notable achievement in makeup in a Best Picture nominee, on another actor of laughable beauty, occurs in Josh Safdie’s Marty Supreme, which gives Timothy Chalamet’s exquisite face the pizza treatment. But unlike Frankenstein, Marty Supreme has a few things going for it that give it an outside chance to win the big award. It has an iconic American setting attractive to Academy voters, postwar lower Manhattan, and it’s wrapped around a showy but also genuinely great lead performance by Chalamet, a likely winner for Best Actor. And the movie carries bold ambitions that it realizes almost perfectly. It’s a sweaty, white-knuckle affair, like an action movie set in a manic person’s undershirt. I have not yet discovered the mood setting in which I like Safdie films as much as I admire them, and I’d bet, somewhat ruefully, that the standard Academy voter shares my ambivalence. That Chalamet’s titular Marty is an obnoxious, amoral figure probably works against the film’s Best Picture chances but, ironically, ups Chalamet’s chances for Best Actor.  

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Kleber Mendonça Filho’s The Secret Agent is another actor-centered Best Picture nominee. But where Chalamet talks like an auctioneer through Marty Supreme, Wagner Moura gives a laconic, almost drowsy but somehow riveting performance as Armando, an academic in hiding from government thugs in Seventies Brazil. The Secret Agent resembles Marty Supreme in that it immerses you in a beautifully built world from the last century and that, set in Recife in northern Brazil, it’s pretty sweaty. It’s also a sprawling and unnerving portrait of Brazil’s military dictatorship in its shabby corruption and low-rent political terror. What’s impressive about The Secret Agent, as a political film, is how un-insistent it is, how relaxed it is in unfolding both its political tableaux and its personal drama, and how it uses this slow pace to create real tension. It’s a noble film without really trying to be. Indeed, if it tried harder and more cloyingly for political nobility it might have a better chance with Academy voters.

The two likely frontrunners for Best Picture — Ryan Coogler’s Sinners and Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another — are also political films: and the political messages of both are agreeable ones in liberal Hollywood. Their Best Picture chances are thus improved by the dynamic of political self-flattery I mention above. But there’s an interesting twist in this Best Picture showdown, in that the better film has the sillier, more decadent politics. 

One Battle After Another is overtly political, featuring several set-pieces in which likable revolutionaries work against US immigration agents to protect vulnerable migrants. Sinners, by contrast, does not have political action on its narrative surface, as something its characters are doing or talking about. Instead, it uses a story about blues music and vampires as a bitter political allegory. Sinners is a film about what people these days call “cultural appropriation”.  

Accusations of “cultural appropriation” are often best met with an eye-roll. But the cultural appropriation that Sinners deals with is not frivolous. It’s a huge fact of American and British popular music. That’s why Sinners has vampires. On one hand, the film’s vampire conceit makes total sense. The music industry really did use white artists to extract value from black musical forms, as if vampirically, value that never made its way back to the forgotten geniuses who created and refined those forms. This vampiric extraction is almost too vast, and too ubiquitous, to comprehend. Whole musical genres grew from it. 

So, conceptually, the vampire thing hits home. But dramatically, it introduces a note of whimsy, of irony, of arbitrariness, which cuts against the historical texture and gravity that the movie conveys so powerfully in its first half. Sinners remains entertaining as it becomes a vampire movie, and it does get you thinking about the vast apparatus that turned the music of black suffering into money for white people. But it also breaks its own movie spell a little, makes you think of Ryan Coogler as a sort of Great Oz busily manning the controls, right over there behind the curtain. Still, the movie did set a record with its 16 nominations, and this might give it a peremptory aspect of greatness.

Then again, perhaps the politics of Sinners are too well-grounded, even for the Hollywood liberals. Maybe a movie about cultural vampires hits too close to home for people in the entertainment business. Maybe they’re more comfortable with the fluffy anti-Trumpism of One Battle After Another.

It may seem strange for me to claim that One Battle After Another is both a sillier, more decadent movie than Sinners — and also a better one, indeed the best movie in the Best Picture Category, but that is my claim. That’s how much of a formalist I am, and how much I reveled in the formal virtuosity of Anderson’s movie, even as I note the emptiness of its characters’ politics. It stages a curious political conflict in which a cadre of idealistic people are trying to foment a revolution on behalf of the status quo. French 75, the revolutionary group in question, are fighting to protect the idyll of sexual freedom and liberal consumerism, supported by abundant low-wage migrant labor, that already abides in Western societies.

There’s no talk of class politics, no ideas of redistribution. There aren’t even any airy academic harangues about “power relations” or “structural racism” or “patriarchy”. Besides a reasonable call to be nice to migrants, no one makes any concrete demands or proposals. No one lays out the counterfactual vision of revolutionary change, because, again, this is unnecessary. The revolution is on behalf of the factual, which means it’s not even a revolution. It’s a counterrevolution. Even if you believe that Trump and other populist movements threaten this condition of liberal comfort, you have to admit that using revolutionary methods to preserve it makes little sense, in practical terms especially — revolutionary play-acting being the most reliable way to turn populism into fascism.

But as a pretext for making a movie that’s really about something else besides a silly revolution, it makes a ton of sense. Partway through One Battle After Another, the revolution starts to peter out, and it becomes a movie about a father’s quest to protect his daughter from a bad guy, and it stages a dancerly series of gripping, beautiful, sometimes very funny scenes to tell this story. One Battle After Another is skillful, inventive, exuberant moviemaking. I feel bad for people who got offended or deluded by its ostensible politics and missed its delirious fun.  

This fits with my overall argument to claim that the ostensible politics of One Battle After Another, its fluffy anti-Trumpism, will help it win Best Picture on Sunday. It’s true that, more than any other nominee, it feeds the feel-good politics of Hollywood back to Hollywood, and that this gives it a huge advantage with Oscar voters. I might also say that it deserves the Best Picture Oscar thanks to its artistic merits, but, as I said, I don’t know what deserving a Best Picture Oscar even means, or what artistic merits have to do with it.  

In recent decades, there has been a backlash against the Great Man theory embodied in that Ancient Greek icon of Helios. Thomas Carlyle summed up this once prevailing view, claiming in a lecture on heroics, “The History of the world is but the Biography of great men.” The idea that societies are driven by the will, and virility, of exceptional (overwhelmingly male) individuals, rather than complex societal forces, is seen not just as reductive but anathema. The legend of the lone wolf genius has long been both a cloak and a cudgel. It has been employed to steal ideas, deny provenance, and bury the achievements of others. It has exploited women, under the guise of the muse, and justified the capricious venal desires of coddled elitist men. The built environment has been no exception, with the Shitty Architecture Men list being only the tip of the iceberg in terms of sexual misconduct, dubious morality, and toxic work culture.

If the discourse is anything to go by, then, the colossal Great Man has been toppled. A multitude of online articles say so, each a fragment of that fallen colossus. The only real differences are the vocabulary wielded against the heroic view of history and whether it’s casually disdainful or wildly alarmist. Yet just as there was hubris in the raising of such a statue on unstable foundations, there is, too, in celebrating its destruction. It has long been rumored that the Berlin Wall pieces sold to tourists are mostly manufactured. With a ripple of lamentations that Brady Corbet’s Oscar-nominated film The Brutalist, which tells the tale of a visionary architect, resurrects that idea of the Great Man, a thought recurred — what if these fragments were similar forgeries? What if the colossus never fell?

In 2012, I found myself in a godless tiki bar on the Gulf of Thailand shore. It was quiet, aside from one backpacking Patrick Bateman droning interminably on his phone. Suddenly, there was a commotion, and the bartenders vanished. Word spread there had been a massive earthquake off the Indonesian coast. Tsunami warnings were issued. Memories of the 2004 tsunami were raw. Lacking the wisdom of the locals, I took the idiot route and got hammered. All the while, facing mortality, that oblivious voice was babbling on the phone. He had been reading Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead — the hero of which was an egotistic young architect. The book, now deemed synonymous with The Brutalist, had changed his life, he repeatedly insisted. This was to be the soundtrack to our impending deaths, the last words filling my ears before the flood.

We both lived, but I carried the grudge. Rand was, of course, persona non grata in nice liberal book circles, a petulant right-libertarian dogmatist who extolled excellence if only we could free ourselves from the shackles of ethics. She was fanatical in her zeal for laissez-faire capitalism, individualism and reason, collecting a cult following who were enthralled to at least two thirds of her formula. I was, though, eventually relieved of my anti-Rand bias by Slavoj Žižek. It was, he suggested, counter-revolutionary to throw her away. He compared her to Pascal, Kleist, Brecht… figures who are “over-orthodox”, who “spell out the secret premises of the ruling ideology in such [a] clear radical way that it’s unacceptable and embarrassing for the ruling ideology itself”. She is the paradigm of “enlightened egotism… no compassion for others… pure individualist brutal capitalism”. Rand, then, in his view, reveals not so much the inner workings of the elite but their internal mythos — the way they want to see themselves, as opposed to what they are (bankrolled by the state or asset-strippers of the High Street), something all too evident in the Musks and Bezos of the world. But while Rand’s The Fountainhead claims to be a portrait of an architect-genius Howard Roark and his adversaries, whether spiteful mediocrities or disingenuous ideologues, it inadvertently does something critics of the Great Men theory also do. It misattributes responsibility. The colossus it erects is as false as the one the critics decry.

The real colossus remains untoppled. For the architect was not the colossus. It was the client. It has always been the client. And they, whether market or state, have all the power, influence and money. The architects may receive the credit and blame but it is corporations who commission skyline monstrosities. It is institutions that block the advancement of female architects. It is board room meetings and government departments that bulldoze neighborhoods and vernacular architecture. Yet, partly due to the anonymity of the former, it is architects who pick up the check, in both senses.

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The Oracle of Delphi wisely forbade the rebuilding of the Colossus of Rhodes. Her view prevails today with The Brutalist coming in for flak for piecing together a “dangerous” archetype, comparisons with Rand’s egomaniac Roark abounding.

Beyond the vagaries of the discourse, The Brutalist offers truths or truisms. Conformity can be stifling, brilliance can be traumatized, vocation can mean sacrifice, and power can be sadistically cruel, raising the slippery question of who the Brutalist of the title actually is. The film certainly has elements of the unintentional mock heroism of The Fountainhead but the humanity it displays, at its best, is instructive. The main character László Tóth (an exceptional turn by Adrien Brody) is, however, fictional; a Hungarian-Jewish survivor of the Holocaust, Bauhaus alumni, émigré to the US, and visionary architect. Tóth initially, superficially, seems based on Marcel Breuer but the differences between the cool-headed gregarious Breuer and the (forgivably) histrionic Tóth outweigh similarities.

The character, then, seems to be a composite, except none of the parts fits. The Brutalist is like The Fountainhead in the sense that their disjuncture between fiction and reality is as illuminating as their closeness. Tóth survives Buchenwald concentration camp. In our world, countless architects such as Alfred Grotte, Diana Reiter and Harry Elte never returned from the camps. Ignjat Fischer’s health was broken in a Fascist prison, and he died not long thereafter. The eccentric outsider architect Friedensreich Hundertwasser survived under an assumed identity for the war’s duration. Marcel Janco only got out when friends were butchered, while Oskar Kaufmann watched his wife die while trapped as refugees.

Life after escaping the Nazis could be relentless. Exiles were treated with suspicion as “enemy aliens”. Some, like the once-revered Bruno Ahrends, were interned. Many more like Pierre Chareau, creator of the innovative House of Glass, slid into destitution. The genuinely visionary Erich Mendelsohn ended up constructing replica German housing for the US air force to firebomb, as practice for the real thing. Last act coronations were rare, if they existed at all.

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Few of these lives embody the Great Man legend, except in the sense that greatness lies in resilience against hardships and the odds, the most redeeming aspect of The Brutalist, a quality hardly restricted to men. There were, after all, numerous female architect exiles. And there were success stories of architects who fled the Nazis — the Bauhaus maestro Gropius for instance became well-established and helped many émigrés — often as teachers rather than superstars. If anyone came close to the Great Man trope, it was Mies Van Der Rohe, who was not Jewish and who had been courted by the Nazis before migrating. Yet even he had masters, as well as essential collaborators — whether property developers, the government, or multinationals like Seagram and Bacardi. Even Rand’s inspiration, Frank Lloyd Wright, hid financial calamities (his unbuilt designs remain tantalizing) and personal tragedy (the Taliesin massacre) behind his egotism. Life is not as simple as constructing a colossus or obliterating one.

The Brutalist is raw and intense, for Hollywood at least, but suffers from many of that realm’s ills — for a film that so hysterically cares, it extends little consideration to the architectural schools, styles and eras it misrepresents and throws into disorder. Its script is a convoluted shambles which would be admirably refreshing, if it did not somehow belie the complexity of reality. Its knots are too neat, its loose ends too ragged.

Impressive in cinematography and acting, The Brutalist, like its more politicized critics, relies on historical inaccuracies, cliched dialogue, and character simplifications. This makes it more now than then. Whether superhuman or disgraced, individuals are forced into molds, so that our worldviews can be substantiated. It’s one thing to examine how factual a movie is, and another to consider how fictional our perspective is. Within architecture, professional concerns are legitimate. No one should work under the tyranny of an egotist. Yet wider societal control does not begin or end with such figures. For all the talk of the collective, there is a staggering inability to see how insidiously powerful the corporate has become. Instead, everything becomes an atomized morality tale, where rotten fruit is picked off while the rotten tree is ignored.

It is not the shattered face, then, of the overthrown egocentric colossus that’s the architectural symbol of our times or the fates of our cities. It’s something far harder but essential to rail against — the acronyms, the monopolies, the faceless. The colossus, then, is more of an effigy than a statue. Who commissioned it and why, The Brutalist suggests, is the real story.

What is stranger still is that, outside of Maréchal Le Pen’s posting about the film’s trans star, Sofía Gascón, on X “So a man has won the Best Actress prize…”, the criticism of the film has come from those it purports to represent. “Emilia Pérez is a glorious disaster,” wrote trans critic Drew Burnett Gregory, for Autostraddle, while GLAAD, a non-profit media monitoring organization devoted to LGBTQ representation, called the film a “step backward for trans representation”. You mean to say that a song-and-dance number set in a sex-change clinic with nurses twirling their gurneyed patients around them, singing “Mammoplasty! Vaginoplasty! Rhinoplasty!” isn’t the step forward the trans community have been waiting for? Huh. There’s no pleasing some people.

It wouldn’t be the first time that Hollywood rushes to self-congratulate over a terrible film about a marginalized group, while the group in question says, “will you please stuff it?”. Back in 2018, Green Book won at the Academy Awards only as it was simultaneously demolished by younger critics-of-color for its retrograde white-savior narrative — but the heat-haze of confusion around Emilia Pérez is revealing of the fact that the film is itself a very confused film. Like always breeds like at the movies — films labelled “divisive” are often so because they are divided against themselves. Emilia Pérez is really two films, the first of which was the one Audiard pitched to the film’s star when they first met in Paris to discuss the project, a libretto in four parts adapted from a chapter in Boris Razon’s Écoute, which introduced, in passing, the character of a drug trafficker who signs up for gender-affirming surgery in order to evade capture by the authorities.

“The day we met in Paris, he asked me, ‘What do you think?’” Gascón told Rolling Stone. “And I said, ‘I like this, I don’t like that, I like this, I don’t like that…’” Chief among the objections were that the trafficker transitions solely to flee justice. “The entire thing would’ve been a joke,” Grascon said, and suggested instead that Manitas transitions because his desire is sincere. “She led me to understand that, well before transitioning, we’re already what we want to become,” said Audiard and duly changed his script accordingly. That is the film that we see, by and large. The drug-lord fakes his own death, stashing his wife Jessi (Selena Gomez), and their two young sons in Switzerland, undergoes secret gender reassignment in Israel and, unbeknown to anyone but his lawyer, begins a new life as Emilia Pérez, a human-rights campaigner clad in Saint Laurent who atones for past wrongs by means of a charity locating the graves of the “disappeared”.

Is Pérez’s atonement sincere? It’s hard to say because we know next to nothing about what prompted it. Having eliminated all cynical motive from Pérez’s transition Audiard’s screenplay inadvertently creates a new problem for itself: why does a murderous drug trafficker jack in his highly lucrative trade? Audiard has no idea, except to imply that the moral redemption is somehow a consequence of the gender-reassignment. “Changing the body changes the soul,” argues the lawyer, Rita (Zoe Saldana). “Changing the soul changes society.” It’s here that the film stirs up a whole bee’s nest of trouble for itself. For transitioning is rarely a moral or ethical choice; it’s the result of a dysphoria from which sufferers long to escape. (“I’m happy now,” says Emilia. “I’m myself.”) The only people for whom transitioning carries a moral charge are the trans community’s champions, for whom the cause of trans rights has the same halo of righteousness as that for any such social justice campaign.

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In short, Emilia Pérez, as a character, is fashioned almost entirely from the imagined liberal audience’s feelings when contemplating trans women — and the problem with projecting onto others the feelings they inspire in us is that those feelings have a habit of coming unstuck. Whom we first deem a saint we later turn on as a demon. And so it proves in the second half of the film, where Emilia, missing her children, inserts herself incognito into the household of her widow Jessi in Mexico City, posing as an Aunt, only for the disguise to crumble. Emilia, in the middle of an argument with Jessi, throws her bodily onto a bed and chokes her using a man’s full strength and voice. It is this scene that has caused most problems with trans critics, understandably, because in terms of “representation”, it is not just unflattering, but something of a nightmare: an onscreen depiction of a trans woman who is “secretly”, underneath it all, still a man, possessed of a man’s murderous strength and instincts, who, when push comes to shove, snaps right back and plays dirty. “If he’s a he, she’ll be a he. If he’s a she, she’ll be a she,” says the Israeli surgeon who performs Emilia’s surgery. “If he’s a wolf, she’ll be a wolf.”

The implications of this hardly need spelling out. Emilia Pérez is a film which, for all its aura as a trans champion, comes down squarely on the side of those who argue that trans women should not be allowed access to women’s bathrooms, prisons or sports fields. “[The film] presents Emilia as a nesting doll of gendered selves,” wrote trans critic Harron Walker, perceptively. “She is a woman trapped in the body of a man, then a woman in denial of the man she still harbors within.” Far from being, as Hollywood seems to want to think, a champion of trans rights, the film lends strength to the argument of those women who fear for safe spaces and fight for sex-based rights.

It’s a measure of just how baffling the film is, and how effectively the musical numbers skate by any real psychological or moral depth, that it is hard to say what the intention was, exactly. I suspect that the musical form was chosen by Audiard for precisely this reason, in fact, to avoid answering questions that he sensed he couldn’t, or didn’t want to, answer. That doesn’t seem to be stopping its momentum: the academy loves a musical, particularly one that makes history. But there are so many better films in contention such as James Mangold’s terrific Bob Dylan biopic A Complete Unknown and Sean Baker’s excellent Anora, which has barely a naysayer out there? But the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences has a remarkable tendency to mistake itself for the Nobel Peace Prize committee, and Emilia Perez is riding a train few will want to stand in front of.

Sammy Fabelman lives in suburbia between two poles, real and metaphorical: his artist mother, who makes music, and his scientist father, who makes machines. Both parents are, in their own ways, thwarted and incomplete: his mother cannot have her art — she is a pianist, but gave it up to raise her children — and his father cannot have his family, because he is a workaholic. Sammy learns, as artists do, to create a world he can control.

He can change the world by filming it: change its emphasis; change his place in it. Sammy films, without realising it at first, his mother’s touch on his father’s best friend during a camping trip and learns that she is unfaithful. The insinuation — and this is the most self-aware thing in The Fabelmans — is that cinema is a poisonous medium: eat from the tree of knowledge and be cast out of paradise. But Sammy collapses to its incredible power to transform. The antisemitic bully of his schooldays in Arizona becomes a hero through Sammy’s lens, so much so that even the bully is humiliated by it. Sammy makes him small by making him big and sends him back to the world with his shame.

The shame, though, was Spielberg’s: in making The Fabelmans he is collapsing to the very power that he describes. Why can he not be honest about the scale of his ambivalence? According to his biographer, Joseph McBride, Spielberg was so ashamed of his Judaism he once pretended he did not know his own grandfather. “And suddenly,” Spielberg said, “my grandfather, with the yarmulke, comes out of our house, two houses down, and yells: ‘Shmuel! Shmuel! [Steven’s Hebrew name]. I’m not answering him. I’m pretending I don’t know him. I’m denying that name. My friend is saying, ‘He’s looking your way. Does he mean you?’ They point at me, and I’m saying ‘No, it’s not me’.”

Like all 20th-century American Jews, Spielberg grew up among stories of the Shoah — his parents talked about it constantly, inappropriately. I suspect this unimaginable loss was magnified by the loss of his family’s happiness, which shattered when his mother’s adultery was exposed: apparently by him. He was spoiled, though. “We never said no,” his mother Leah said in an interview. “Steve really did run us. He called the shots.” He describes her too: “We never grew up at home, because she never grew up.”

So, a shattered, gifted child: making himself big where he was once small. His sister Anne wrote the script for Big, in which a 12-year-old boy is given the body of an adult. He is fearful — what else could he be? Spielberg’s films are about anxiety. The truck (Duel) or the shark (Jaws) will kill you. Or the suburbs will: your own home. Suburban children are terrorised in Spielberg’s work. Their alien friend (though Spielberg is both Elliott and E.T.) is threatened; corpses rise from the ground (Poltergeist). He was very afraid as a child: “I used to be afraid of my hand shadow.”

Cinema is a solution to this, and this explains his monomania, and his skill. It is an act of survival. “I had no way to sublimate or channel those fears until I began telling stories to my younger sisters. This removed the fear from my soul and transferred it right into theirs.” Later he found a bigger audience. “One of the best ways to cope with it [fear] is to turn it around and put it out to others. I mean, if you are afraid of the dark, you put the audience in a dark theatre. I had a great fear of the ocean.” After Jaws, we all did. The great white shark was collateral damage.

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An obvious theme develops across his work: this man is preserved in childhood. He “can always trace a movie idea back to my childhood”. The mother is tortured; the father is lost. There are few politics in Spielberg’s films, and there is no sex. The sex scene in Indiana Jones is a man having sex with his mother. “Where,” she asks him during foreplay, “doesn’t it hurt?” Sometimes the child finds the absent father. In the final Indiana Jones film, I thought the grail was his father. Indiana says to Henry: “We never talked…”

And like a child, Spielberg is covetous, often unkind. He bought one of the Rosebud sleds in Citizen Kane, but he wouldn’t help Orson Welles, its creator, get work. Julia Phillips, his producer on Close Encounters of the Third Kind, called him “a writer fucker”. He can be amazingly obtuse, because he has lived his life in Hollywood and because he is always transmitting. He was so confident he would be nominated for the best director Academy Award for Jaws, he invited a news crew to film him watching the nominations. Only four came, including editing: no best director. According to Phillips, he had the editor, who won the Academy Award, kicked off his next film.

He had a public adolescence in 1993, with Schindler’s List: his acknowledgement of his Judaism. “The experience of making Schindler’s List made me reconcile with all of the reasons… I hid from my Jewishness,” he said in a 2017 documentary. “And it made me so proud to be a Jew.” Even so, it is a film about Jews non-Jews can live with, because it is about non-Jews: Oskar Schindler and the commandant Amon Göth.

It was Schindler he identified with, of course, as David Thomson noted: the morally complex showman, the maker of enamel, then souls. “The closest Schindler’s List comes to art may be in aiding Steven Spielberg to back into the upheld coat of his own mysterious, brilliant, actorly nature.” Again, it came from his childhood. He told The Jerusalem Post that the antisemitic school bully “never became my real friend. I was able to stop some of the hatred by, in a way, doing what Schindler did. Which was to charm him and make him a conspirator… Schindler consorted with the enemy, and he got what he wanted.”

He had wanted to film in Auschwitz but was forbidden. I had thought — how could he even ask? — but then I read about him: he is Steven Spielberg. He felt he could. His fake concentration camp outside Krakow is still there. I have seen it. I think he did Jews a real disservice with Schindler’s List, though unconsciously: his Nazis are glamourised while his Jews are a mute and terrorised mass.

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Remember the last scene: the imposition of a redemptive ending, which felt more horrifying than anything that went before? How could he make such a film and then miss the point of it? A film-maker friend saw a rough cut of Schindler’s List: he reported no music, no child in a red coat, and no redemptive ending. He thought it was a masterpiece. But that is Spielberg. He cannot stop editorialising because he does not trust the audience, only himself. “I am the audience,” he said.

The usual complaint about Spielberg is that, a gifted child making cinema for less gifted children, he has turned cinema from the sophisticated art form of the Seventies into an anaesthetic. Pauline Kael said the problem isn’t Spielberg but his acolytes: “It’s not so much what Spielberg has done, but what he has encouraged. Everyone else has imitated his fantasies, and the result is an infantilisation of the culture.”

His response to this is typically hurt: “I think some people would like me to make a movie that explores the dark side and provides no easy answer to make the audience feel better when they return to their cars. If those critics want more pain in my films, they can give me $2 million — that’s all it would take to make a film about pain — and I’ll make that movie.” I like to think that the only thing standing between him and greatness is his self-deception — his insistence on his own affability — but the awful thing is I know he could make it. And I wish he would.

I wonder how much he understands himself: The Fabelmans, despite its beauty, suggests not at all. His wife, the actress Kate Capshaw, who starred in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, once asked him what happened to her career. “He said, ‘You weren’t supposed to have a career. You were supposed to be with me.’” It’s what happened to his mother precisely: it was the source of her anguish. He says so in The Fablemans. But I am not surprised that he forgets this. His films don’t deal with the characters’ relationships with one another. They deal with Spielberg’s relationship with himself. His work looks ever backwards to the glittering, and limiting, landscape of the child.

Put the price of fame aside, and the real pressure faced by the Fresh Prince, and to a lesser extent his “bitch slap” whipping boy Chris Rock, is being that most problematic of black male stereotypes: the role model.

Ironically, the pugnacious Smith’s rather comfortable living has come from playing an assortment of morally righteous heroes, including a homeless salesman, Muhammad Ali, and Venus and Serena Williams’s father. Arguably, as an actor, Smith is merely portraying characters who have little or no bearing on his real personality. By his own admission, his public persona is a confection, a construction “designed to protect myself, to hide myself from the world”. But under closer scrutiny, his self-indulgent tale doesn’t really stack up.

Smith has, for some years now, cried, crumbled and collapsed in countless interviews, reality TV scenarios and bizarre family encounters. He has spoken of his battles with mental health issues and his contemplation of suicide. He was left on the brink of a televised meltdown following his wife Jada Pinkett Smith’s revelation of an affair in 2015, aged 43, with a 22-year-old rapper. Pinkett’s adultery, which she described euphemistically as “an entanglement”, led to gossip about her and Smith agreeing to an open relationship (which to me sounds like cuckolding by another name).

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Yet Smith has courted the role-model dollar for decades. Way back in 1993, he refused to kiss co-star Michael Anthony Hall in one of his breakthrough movies, Six Degrees of Separation, for fear of the scene alienating his fanbase. His carefully chosen and generally wholesome roles, as well as occasional musings about running for president one day, have ensured the sort of “four-quadrant” appeal that has made him Hollywood gold. But his emotional outbursts, which include a previous slapping incident involving a reporter in 2012, not only illustrate Smith’s edginess, they demonstrate the fragility of the black role model.

If you’re a working-class black kid from South Central or South London, the chances are you’re still battling with disproportionate levels of unemployment, mental health, and urban deprivation in your neighbourhood. In an ideal world, it’s these areas that can really benefit from role models on the ground. But in the absence of government or corporate behemoths investing heavily in disenfranchised black youths — perhaps by building a well-funded, sustainable, nationwide role-modelling programme — the whole idea is just that: an idea.

Practicalities aside, role modelling is fraught with philosophical and ideological difficulties. Many of those who champion them set unrealistic examples for young people to emulate, despite probably knowing hardworking black men and women in their area who could mentor a kid desperately in need of basic life skills.

While there have been predictable calls for the Academy to strip Smith of his Best Actor award, it is striking he didn’t wake up yesterday and face multiple cancellations by studios, corporate sponsors and the global media. “Successful” black men are something of a fetish, not just within the mainstream black diaspora, but also for white liberals and buccaneering reactionaries alike.

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The diaspora likes straight up and down, messianic or redemptive figures. For many, complexity is in the journey, not in the flaky mind of those who break down and sob on camera because, you know, like, success is like, hard, man. For real.

White constituencies, on the other hand, who are in search of a strong black man, see a successful brotha as being either proof of what can be, or evidence of what is. Here, complexity is all in the mind: it’s either about idealism, dreaming and, in reality, exceptionalism. Who needs rich parents, connections, a private education or any of that luck stuff that comes as an accident of birth? Just pull your socks up and the rest will follow!

As uncomfortable as white observers may be about viewing the melee in LA through a racial lens, for black people, role modelling is always about racial dynamics, be they existential or more abstract. The “community” is all too aware that Smith’s violent outburst and the uncomfortable close-up of him yelling at Rock to “keep my wife’s name out of your fucking mouth” will have triggered a wider sense of vulnerability in the diaspora. If Smith can meltdown like this, it can happen to anyone. Well, newsflash, is does happen to anyone. All the time. Which is why it’s time to forget about Will Smith and Jada Pinkett representing anything other than their own self-indulgent, decadent, narcissistic selves.

Certainly, some within the community will look at Smith making an ass of himself and feel a sense of shame and embarrassment. Not only have we “lost” a role model, they will reason, he will have played into the hands of detractors who suggest that white audiences can tolerate black entertainers just as long as they focus on being entertaining and don’t trigger the white mainstream’s latent fear of the “big black man” or “crazy black woman”.

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When I look around, I don’t see white kids being force fed the idea of role models. Many will counter that white youths don’t need obvious role modelling because mainstream society is already awash with white role models. But I think we’ve reached a point where role models have become confused and conflated with heroes and mentors — both of which offer more tangible meaning to young black people.

The distance and otherness of heroic figures, for one thing, allows for fantasising and stimulating the imagination, something I feel black kids are not encouraged to do enough as they are often consumed by in the moment “reality”. Mentors, on the other hand, are very much about taking the here and now by the scruff of the neck and showing young people how to navigate the world with practical ideas, strategies and tactics, to survive and thrive. Role models fall between these two stools. When the bar is set vertiginously high, too many black kids feel they can’t measure up to an Obama or a Stormzy or a Will Smith.

What they need are practical skills to deal with the day-to-day dramas that can help them through the labyrinth of school, family and their local postcode. And what they don’t need is another wannabe hero who can’t read the room.

Weinstein’s guilty verdict remains unusual. Despite the precedent it set, and successful efforts to reduce the stigma of reporting a sexual assault, most accused rapists still never see the inside of a courtroom. It’s not just that criminal prosecutions of sex offenders are few and far between, owing to the difficulty of proving a crime that usually leaves neither witnesses nor physical evidence. Even civil lawsuits usually end before trial: with a mutually agreed-upon settlement.

Settlements, and the NDAs that often accompany them, have long been a thorn in the side of those who want to see sexual assaults taken seriously and punished in the same way as other crimes. Weinstein’s ability to pay off the women who threatened to sue him for sexual harassment — and the women’s willingness to accept money in exchange for their silence — allowed his predatory behaviour to continue unchecked for ages, an open secret that actually acted as the punchline to many a Hollywood in-joke. And while the #MeToo movement might have ended Weinstein’s reign of terror, it hasn’t ended the practice of paying victims to shut up and go away.

We’ve been reminded of this most recently with the resolution of Virginia Giuffre’s lawsuit against Prince Andrew, Giuffre having agreed to settle for an undisclosed sum. Although the media response has been painstakingly charitable to Giuffre, suggesting that the settlement is close enough to an acknowledgment of wrongdoing on Andrew’s part, and she has good reason to be satisfied, one still senses the disappointing spectre of the trial-that-never-was lurking unrealised in the background.

After it was reported that he had demanded a jury trial, there was much speculation about how he would perform on the witness stand, some of it almost gleeful. But unlike Weinstein, Andrew will never suffer the humiliation of a trial, never be subject to excruciating questions under penalty of perjury, never have the stain of a guilty verdict affixed permanently to his name. An expression of regret is still not an admission of guilt, no matter how you slice it. Giuffre’s choice might be good enough for her, but it leaves a number of questions unanswered.

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The question of how best to make men answer for the sexual violation of women is age-old, a conundrum that humans have been trying and failing to solve since the dawn of time. The Bible, for instance, suggests punishing rapists by forcing them to marry their victims, a “you break it you buy it” policy rooted in the archaic notion that a woman deflowered, even against her will, has been stripped of her most vital asset.

Until a woman was recognised as a person with bodily autonomy, sexual assault was seen as a crime against her keeper — a husband or father — rather than the woman herself. It’s an idea that is spectacularly offensive today, dehumanising and trivialising at once. There’s a jaw-dropper of a moment in Ridley Scott’s The Last Duel, a film based on a true story and billed as a sort of fourteenth century #MeToo saga: the heroine Marguerite is informed that her rapist will only answer for what he’s done if her husband is willing to bring charges for her defilement as his property. In reality, she would undoubtedly have been aware of this fact already; a male character only needs to explain it to her for the benefit of an audience who might not have realised how bad the bad old days actually were for women. It’s not Marguerite’s suffering that must be answered for, but her husband’s wounded ego.

The Last Duel was meant to be an Oscar contender, but instead of accolades and nominations, the film was scrutinised for its #MeToo relevance and met with questions about whether its content was meant as an apology of sorts for its stars’ former affiliation with Hollywood’s most notorious sex offender. (Matt Damon and Ben Affleck, who wrote the film, won a Best Screenplay Oscar back in 1998 after Weinstein rescued their script for Good Will Hunting from production purgatory.)

Damon dismissed that notion, instead citing the real Marguerite’s heroism — continuing to speak truth to power, even though her husband’s loss in the titular duel would have seen her burned at the stake for bringing a false accusation — as the impetus for making the movie. And right on: after what she went through, Marguerite deserves better than to have her story subsumed into a redemption tour for male filmmakers who are discomfited by their one-time relationship with Harvey Weinstein.

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In highlighting the horrors of sexism in the fourteenth century, and one woman’s courage in the face of them, The Last Duel shines a light on the ways in which things have changed — mostly for the better, but not entirely. Implicit in our admiration of Marguerite is a sense that this, really, is how a victim should behave: speaking truth to power at any cost, even if it means sacrificing her own life in the process. Why? Because we, the people, want to see justice. And even in a post-MeToo world where we treat sexual assault with the seriousness it deserves, justice has nothing to do with ensuring a good outcome for the victim; all that matters, all we care about, is that perpetrator meets a bad end.

This desire, not just for punishment but the public spectacle of a brutalised victim standing up and demanding recognition, has reigned throughout the contemporary quest to topple predatory men from their positions of power. Witness the lionisation of Christine Blasey Ford for her choice to testify publicly against Brett Kavanaugh. See the two books written by the journalists who exposed Weinstein, in which the women who spoke on the record, despite the risks and their fears, are rewarded with glowing profiles (while those who were, by implication, too cowardly to speak out sometimes seem like roadblocks in the path to justice). One of the key sources, Rose McGowan, wrote a memoir that was called simply: Brave.

For a period of time, the #MeToo essay was a genre unto itself, as women laid bare their sexual trauma for an insatiable, slavering audience. The movement demanded martyrs: the more a woman suffered to tell her story, the more heroic she was. And implicit in this conversation was that those who didn’t destroy their lives for the cause — who stayed silent, who took money, who signed NDAs — were the opposite of courageous, even selfish, allowing the men to get away with it and perhaps even enabling them to do it again. A peculiar twist in the Virginia Giuffre story is that once she stopped pushing for a trial and accepted a settlement, the greatest praise for her bravery came not from the media, but from the man she had accused.

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The desire to punish rapists comes from a good place, of course: a necessary correction to a system that too often failed to punish men for sexual assault. But, in our all-consuming quest to punish the man, the woman he hurt is once again forgotten. Like Marguerite’s husband, we pursue justice in the victim’s name, but not her best interests. No longer is rape seen as a property crime; it’s more traumatic, more terrible, on a par with murder or perhaps even worse — and the man who did it has to pay. But the very idea of compensating the woman seems impossible, given the magnitude of the offence.

And so, in our attempts to construct a new narrative around sexual assault, we have managed to reinforce the worst conclusions of the old one: where a rape victim used to be seen as so debased by the experience that she could no longer move in polite society, now we imagine her pushed to the margins by the magnitude of her trauma. The nature of the damage has changed, but the song (and assumption of irreparable ruin) remains the same. Like the Biblical woman deflowered, the victim can never be whole again. No, she’s not dead, but the unspoken subtext is that she might as well be — and so, like the victim of a murder, the system seeks only to avenge her.

But unlike the murder victim, the woman who’s been sexually assaulted still has a life to live. And what if her vision for that life doesn’t involve sacrificing herself a second time over on the altar of society’s thirst for vengeance? What if a trial, traumatic in its own right and with no assurance of a good outcome, is something she’d rather not endure? What if she prefers to sue, and settle, in a more private process that centres her desires and offers material reparations for her suffering?

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Ultimately, Weinstein’s victims got both the satisfaction of a guilty verdict and the recompense of a financial award, albeit one litigated (and hence reduced) by the bankruptcy court. There’s a poetic justice there: Weinstein extorted sex by promising success and stardom for those who cooperated, alongside the threat of financial ruin if they didn’t. For him to end up incarcerated and destitute, while the women he harmed walk away with millions, feels like the proper conclusion.

But the victim who keeps on living after being assaulted, let alone one who demands compensation in order to live well, remains deeply inconvenient to a society that wants to punish its criminals with little thought for the people they’ve hurt. When all is said and done, it’s the bad men, not their victims, who we tend to remember. And so, rather than heaping scorn or judgment on women who settle out of court, who seek reparations on their own terms, maybe we should see them as taking back something vital: their agency, their freedom to move forward, and their right to decide how trauma does (or doesn’t) define their lives.

On the one hand, our societies are desperately keen to assert that all people are the same: not just equal under the law or equal in dignity, but equally capable and with the same abilities. One demonstration of this is that there are no currently acceptable explanations for unequal outcomes that do not currently fix solely on prejudice or lack of opportunity. The era insists that we are all equally capable, and if we are not in the same place at the end of it, then that is only because the playing field has not been sufficiently levelled.

As the same time, we also like to believe that certain groups of people bring special attributes to the table, the phenomenon I have tried to identify as “Equal and also better”. So, for instance, there is the example of Christine Lagarde, who regularly asserts — without of course having any skin in the game herself — that women bring attributes to the table that men do not.

Last month she was at it again, claiming that world leaders who happen to be female are doing a better job at dealing with coronavirus than their male counterparts. Putting aside for a moment whether that is provable or not, or indeed correct, the deep assertion is what is important: there is something about women which makes them more capable in coping with pandemics. Equal, but better.

And that may be even be true — but you cannot run this programme at the same time as the programme that says we are all the same and that the justification for women being at the top table is that they have precisely the same competencies as men. Or you cannot do so without some serious grinding of gears.

Now Hollywood — like all other areas of the entertainment industry — is at present contorted by this same underlying contradiction. With an eye on the prevailing winds, this week it was announced that only films which are “diverse” will now be considered for the Best Picture award at the Oscars. Specifically, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences declared that certain diversity criteria would need to be met in order to satisfy the judges.

For these purposes the Academy is focusing on “underrepresented groups” and lists these as “women, racial and ethnic groups, LBGTQ+ and people with disabilities”. To be considered, a film must fit at least one of the following criteria, among them:

— “At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors: must be from “an underrepresented racial or ethnic group”

— Underrepresented people must be in creative leadership positions, as departmental heads or as part of the crew.

— There must be paid apprenticeships, internships and training for underrepresented people.

— Audience development, from publicity and marketing to distribution, must also include people from these categories.

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Cinema is already one of the most diverse industries on earth, a place where human life in its fullest is already on display, from Gandhi and The Last Emperor to Dances with Wolves to Rain Man — all previous Oscar winners – not to mention the all-black Moonlight, which in 2016 was finally given the award after it had been wrongly handed to the rather bland, all-white La La Land. But by then already the demands for more representation were in full-flow, the #OscarsTooWhite campaign showing what the real problem was. Hollywood might be diverse, but it is not diverse in the right way. Diversity means minorities being equal, but better.

Yet the film and entertainment industry is unusual, and trying to use Hollywood to address underrepresentation is as doom-laden as trying to use it as a test-pad for global sexual etiquette. It thrives on untypical people with exceptional talents, tall poppies who don’t reflect the wider population. Although Hollywood is a town where progressive views are almost mandatory, it is also a land of almost brutal, Darwinian competition, and the last place to enact an egalitarian experiment. Rather than being fair, success is won or lost by most unjust of criteria — beauty, wealth, nepotism personal connections, and raw talent.

None of the Oscar winners of the past decades has been the product of fairness or equity, but of unusually talented and exceptional artists. Few previous Oscar winners would have passed this diversity criteria – which is perhaps the point – but then it’s hard to see how any of them would have been improved by diversity.

Would The Godfather have been a better movie had it featured more “LBGTQ+ people” or “people with disabilities”? Would The Departed or Shakespeare in Love be improved by its producers being compelled to offer training opportunities to people from underrepresented groups?

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The assumption behind criteria like those introduced this week is that the answer is that, yes, The Godfather would have been a better movie if it had had better representation. But that is a difficult, bold claim to make, so the only acceptable argument to make would be to state that The Godfather would have been exactly as good a movie if it had fulfilled the new criteria. Diversity equals the same, or better.

Nor will it end there, because it never does, not when a group of people are determined to hold two impossible things at once: that diversity in itself is good, but that diversity must also mean equality (except when minorities are overrepresented, of course). The #OscarsSoWhite campaign of recent years has not concerned junior apprentices and there is not a chance it will be satisfied by it; the real goal is onscreen representation, a criteria by which very few of the past winners could ever be made today.

Perhaps The Godfather, about a clannish Sicilian society unwelcome to outsiders, would have to feature some people of colour to pass the test, although obviously not as fellow criminals because visibility only counts if it is positive in its portrayals. Titanic is full of quite unfashionably white people drowning and would have to feature black working-class Irish passengers in Third Class (a BBC production might actually do this). Schindler’s List could obviously present a problem on the representation front, with the famous lack of diversity in the Third Reich, and casting black actors as victims or perpetrators of the Holocaust could be deemed insensitive.

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Still the diversity demands will expand, because the film industry is stuck in that same logical conundrum as Christine Lagarde and everyone else – that the representation of certain groups is desirable because members of that group have exactly the same abilities as everybody else. And also that they bring something which makes the end product distinctly better.

It is possible that the diversity criteria will mean that Hollywood movies from now on will be distinctly better, in which case everyone — not least any cinema-goers who still exist — can celebrate loudly. Or it is possible that it will make no difference.

But of course a third possibility exists, which is that the results are worse, that the films – their plotting and casting – are more obviously contrived, and that the audience does not take to the films which Hollywood wishes them to. And there lies a possible end-point to this commonly held contradiction in our age – that the great play for equity will have been made and the end results will be seen to be not just the same or better, but in fact visibly worse. What a story that will be.

The self-aggrandising, faux-naïf speeches drag. The host starts to make cracks of the “chin up, we’re almost halfway through” variety. Throughout this process there’s always the outside chance that you might have won something. And then you lose, and a dash of sour grapes is added to the cocktail of physical fatigue, existential ennui, and mild drunkenness. 

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Why was I there? Why did people tune in? What is the function of prizes? These ceremonies are one of those cultural rituals that we just accept, and everybody goes along with. They’ve always been there and they always will be there, so nobody pays them much conceptual thinking, like herpes or Ken Barlow. But, recently, they’ve turned from an obvious lot of industry puff and guff that didn’t do much harm in the universal schema, into supposedly significant grandstands of the culture war battles, adding an exciting new stratum of nonsense. 

These prizes are often old, sometimes very, very old. The first Oscars ceremony took place in 1929, the first BAFTA was handed out in 1949, the first Booker in 1969. The Brit Awards came along in 1977. Most are decided by mysterious secluded juries of the great and the good, though anyone with a BAFTA membership gets to vote in the first round of nominations, which goes some way to explaining why they are often frowned upon, what with their faint whiff of democracy. 

Awards voted by the public are disparaged and discouraged, because they show up the gap between what people actually like and want, and what they should like or want. Public votes such as the National Television Awards are about the mass market; stasis, habit, continuity — witness the endless wins for Ant & Dec. The twitter snob reaction to Mrs Brown’s Boys winning Best Comedy at the NTAs was very telling. Art as a thing that tickles or soothes you rather than makes a great statement is regarded as hopelessly improper. 

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The most obvious purpose of awards is to show the reverse of public opinion, to act as a showy, physical embodiment of the even longer established magazine round-ups or newspaper critics’ lists. A prize is not just the object or the prize money itself. It can keep a cultural product alive, give it a second lift. It enhances the career prospects of the winner. These are all reasonable enough things. 

But add grievance, moral purity and racialised thinking as criteria into the mix of ego and whoomf — the balloon goes up. The steady, slow seepage into the arts of HR nonsense and polytechnic critical theory has led to awards becoming flash points of accusation and reaction. They’re #sowhite, or #somale, and everyone gets to pull their ‘terribly concerned’ face or their ‘oh don’t be ridiculous’ face, depending on where they stand. We now have the somewhat silly spectacle of the Booker Prize being given to two people, not because of the quality of the work but because the writers look different. 

The licensed fool is an anthropological figure used to puncture pretensions and diffuse tensions in human societies down the centuries. Combine this with the more specific (and slightly baffling to us) American tradition of the ‘roast’, and step forward Ricky Gervais. These interventions allow some steam to blow off, yes — but nothing actually changes. The whole pompous, pious circus rolls on. 

This is how the Hollywood of awards season can apparently be both a shining city on a hill dispensing moral lessons and a cesspit of degradation, when in fact it’s just another workplace where law should be applied and crime punished. 

The key thing about the licensed fool is that he is licensed. Gervais has (ironically) the privilege of being able, literally, to afford to tell Hollywood to its face that it’s a hypocritical freak show. Anybody working in the arts without that licence cannot risk questioning the smothering zeitgeist, or even to laugh at or question the nuances of sweaty-palm issues like #metoo, or the indisputable moral worth of ‘diversity and inclusion’ drives, no matter how murky their unintended consequences.

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No lasting awareness of the ridiculousness is engendered. The licensed criticism just glances off. Just a few weeks later, Prince William — of all people! — was able to pontificate about diversity at the BAFTAs without turning a hair, without even a particle of self-awareness. This got rather lost in the media scrum around certain other global events, but I think it was a really significant moment. It was proof that the ideology of grievance and gesture is now so firmly baked into the establishment that a prince, heir to the throne, can opine on it, as if it was as uncontroversial and uncomplicated a thing as his great-grandmother saying “yes, the weather has been very bad today, have you come far?”. 

Pre-regnal finger wagging leads us back to the existential question. What is the function of art? Why does it have to be something more than itself? Art is without morals — it is not a good or a bad thing in itself. Yes, it can bring people together but sometimes it can make them come together in a really bad cause. It can open up debate. It can also close it down. 

Joaquin Phoenix’s nauseating ramble at last night’s Oscars put the tin hat on it all, providing us with the definitive mission statement (and it is a mission, in the Onward, Christian Soldiers sense of the word). The deluded bubble politics, the patronising and quasi-religious tone. The function of making movies is, apparently, to “give voice to the voiceless” and to “guide each other to redemption”. Translated, this means giving voice to people who agree with ‘us’, and no, not cancelling those who disagree (such godlike mercy!) but instead steering them off the primrose path for their self-evident sin in disagreeing with ‘us’. The transformation of Oscars stage to pulpit is complete. 

The great irony is that by becoming so hung up on niche political concerns, by trying to be good people, the cultural sphere is becoming more sequestered and remote. And we see that very starkly on the nights the prizes are handed out.

What struck me about the 2018 Oscars ceremony wasn’t so much the still simmering rage and smattering of black dresses. The first Academy Awards ceremony since the Harvey Weinstein scandal engulfed Hollywood was always going to feature numerous A-listers – men and women alike – condemning the mistreatment of female actors.

They were right to do so, of course. Such abuse has existed for years, hidden in plain sight. And it no doubt still exists – extending way beyond the previously rarified circle of a once powerful film mogul with a predilection for black t-shirts and greeting his guests in a bathrobe.

No, what I found particularly interesting about this Oscar season, the first of the Trump era, was that it featured two major movies set in blue-collar middle America, the kind of ‘flyover’ country that rich, liberal coast-dwellers so often fail to understand.

The first, and most celebrated, was Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, a fictional story about rape, violence and racial tensions in the US ‘heartland’. It won Best Picture, with leading actors Frances McDormand and Sam Rockwell also recognised as Best Actress and Best Supporting Actor respectively – a feat they first achieved at the Golden Globes.

The second blue-collar movie was I, Tonya, the real-life, world-famous story of the rise and fall of Tonya Harding, American figure skating’s best-known, self-confessed “redneck”. Less critically acclaimed, it still won an Oscar, with Allison Janney, who plays Harding’s ghastly, embittered mother, taking Best Supporting Actress.

Even though they were released a year into his presidency, these movies would have started to take life long before Donald Trump’s 2016 Presidential election victory, before he had even declared as a candidate for the Republican nomination.

Both of these films, though, two of the biggest of 2017, can reasonably be characterised as portraits of Trump country. The worlds depicted in Three Billboards and I, Tonya are a very long way from the lives of middle-class Americans who tend to watch the kind of films that vie for Oscars and Golden Globes.

Both films describe the ‘wrong side’ of America’s cultural divide; they tell the stories of the white working class, of the Trump supporters that Hillary Clinton so disgracefully described as “deplorables”. Alongside Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance and Amy Goldstein’s Janesville, both factual literary accounts from America’s blue-collar school of hard knocks, these films are set in places where Trump’s election victories were forged.

I, Tonya, though, like the books by Vance and Goldstein[1. Vance overcame a ‘back-country’ upbringing to win a place at Yale. In Goldstein’s book, workers laid off from a Wisconsin car factory struggle to retrain while displaying immense courage, dignity and grace.] is ultimately uplifting: a real-life story of an under-privileged person who, despite suffering poverty, alienation and class contempt, achieves a greatness of sorts.

Three Billboards is not only less authentic, but risks being patronising and condescending. The characters are typecast – whether racist, lazy, bull-headed or plain stupid. Despite superb individual performances by McDormand and Rockwell, the story seemed contrived to promote all the clanking stereotypes, showing ordinary working people in the worst possible light.

Tonya Harding, on the other hand, is portrayed as a complex individual. To anyone over 40, her story is well known. From Portland, Oregon, Harding was the squat, snub-nosed ‘white trash’ competitor that the US skating establishment never learned to love. Their choice was the lithe, almost impossibly beautiful Bostonian Nancy Kerrigan. So when a thug whacked Kerrigan’s knees with a crowbar head of the 1994 Olympic qualifier, apparently paid by Harding’s deranged ex-husband, it seemed that the whole of America – the entire world – held Harding in contempt.

Further reading in the series

Why we should be worried about our distorted political models

By Graeme Archer

What emerges in I, Tonya is that Harding was not only an incredibly gifted skater – she was the first American woman to land the famously tough “triple-axel” in competition – but also that she was a grafter. Yes, she swears and smokes and eats bad food, but she is up at 5am to train, then waiting tables all day, then back at the rink, and all the time dealing with a heartlessly cruel mother and a husband who seems to take pleasure in hitting her.

Shackled to these ghastly people, lacking the financial or emotional resources to strike out alone, Harding perseveres, nurturing her talent, not only dreaming of greatness, fame and riches, but getting out of bed every day to take and make them real, pushing a body not built for skating to its limits and beyond.

“I can do a triple-axel, so fuck you,” Harding says to camera, after getting knocked back yet again by the snooty skating establishment. “Am I ever going to get a fair hearing?” she says to a row of judges, as the crowd slow handclaps her. “I mean, I am clearly out-skating everyone. What do I have to do?”

I found I, Tonya extremely moving. Of course Harding is flawed – and, while she denies ever knowing about the planned “hit on Kerrigan”, she did plead guilty to hindering the subsequent investigation, resulting in a lifetime ban from professional skating.

These are the grievances and hardships that Trump has understood and, whatever you think of him, exploited so successfully to propel himself to power. These are the issues that US Democrats, having lost the support of their traditional working class base, pitching themselves against low-income workers in America’s escalating culture wars, will need to recognise if they are to regain the White House.

Three Billboards is, by any standard, a very good film. I wouldn’t want to discourage anyone from seeing it. But for all its moral seriousness, it is deeply contrived. From the bigoted rural policemen, to the bandana-wearing leading lady (channeling Rambo) who firebombs their police department, the story seemed unreal. Coincidences abound – the point seemingly always to create another moral dilemma that can be resolved so as to please a liberal, well-heeled audience. Pretty much all the working-class characters are, if not outwardly violent, then spoiling for a fight.

Yes, there is a sense of tragedy, memorable cinematography and spell-binding performances (did I mention that McDormand is great?). But Three Billboards, to this viewer anyway, for all the air-punching moments, ultimately reinforces middle-class prejudice, mocking the inhabitants of Trump-country, doing nothing to bridge America’s fast-growing cultural divide.

I, Tonya, in contrast, is an attempt, long overdue, by wealthy, well-connected Hollywood filmmakers to empathise and understand.

Further reading in the series

We will never not feel tired. We will never feel hopeful. We will never not be poor.

By Michael Burleigh