The Intensity of the Reaction to Greta Gerwig's Non-Nomination for Best Director

In light of the earlier hoopla for Barbie I was surprised when Greta Gerwig did not get a Best Director nomination for helming the film--and then completely unsurprised by the extremity of the "We was robbed!" reaction from her supporters.

This was in part because we see this kind of thing every year, for multiple films, if not always at the same level of volume and intensity. And that makes it worth saying something about that reaction as an example of a tendency I have written about in the past, namely just how disproportionate the volume and intensity of chatter about pop cultural product can be.

It seemed to me writing then that four factors were specifically noteworthy, namely

1. The Frame of Mind of an Audience Looking for Entertainment.

2. The Ascent of "Fan" Material in the Marketplace.

3. The Marketing of Popular Culture.

4. The Media's Obsession With Itself.

Spelled out in brief this means that:

People take their entertainment in a state of emotional vulnerability (they are sitting down to relax, letting their guard down, generally expecting to be pandered to), with all that means when things do (as when they are absolutely pandered to) or do not (as when they are slapped in the face instead) go the way they would like.

It is also the case that much of popular culture is connected with franchises whose members are more than usually emotionally invested in the material coming to the movie--to the point that one can say that they feel like they "own" it and are owed something by those who would create something out of it--amplifying their reaction to what is done with it, negative reaction included. And,

Finally a self-obsessed media relentlessly exploits controversy, and with it provocations and other expressions of ill will, in promoting its products, and itself, doing everything to feed a frenzy which eventually feeds on itself. (We see this even in such things as the way that people constantly use box office data to try and prove that the public is on whatever side of the argument they happen to be.)

Still, relevant as all this seems there is the plain and simple fact of what so much of the pandering and the offenses and the controversy has to do with these days (and certainly had to do with in the case of Barbie), what Richard Hofstadter called "status politics." Centering on issues of group status within society at large in ways not allowing of redress in any practical, material, way status politics (in contrast with "interest politics" where people have problems that are in a technical sense redressable) tends toward lingering on bad memories, bitterness, etc., and all that easily follows from them--not least a tendency to accord immense symbolic significance to minor matters, see offense anywhere and everywhere, make accusations accordingly, and treat any objection to one's behavior (that they may be acting unfairly toward others, for example) with complete contempt. (Postmodernism has, of course, reinforced this with its worship of "subjectivity," which basically means that people feel their selfishness and prejudices are sacrosanct, and no one can have a valid opinion contrary to their own--their "subjectivity" the only one that matters, or even exists.)

Certainly going by how many have viewed the film, from all sides of the culture war, as all but designed to stoke such politics; and certainly the way the movie was promoted, and large portions of the media embraced it; only encouraged this. The resulting, extreme, success of the movie at pushing "hot buttons" made the movie a hot button topic itself, and how the movie has been treated by the Academy (even if this remains to be fully seen) itself a status politics issue, with all the intensity that this prompts. That is to say that for status politics-minded "supporters" of the movie Gerwig's not getting nominated becomes about much, much more than one director not being up for one prize in one particular year. It was for them a test of the Academy's readiness to recognize equity across gender lines among filmmakers, and more fully display its respect for their understanding of social justice more broadly; and the Academy's declining Gerwig the nomination, even as they accorded the film so many other honors (in part, perhaps, because the movie having a Best Picture nod without Best Director or Best Actress can make the Best Picture nomination look like an empty gesture toward big movies, as with the one for Top Gun 2 last year), a refusal to do all those things in their view. Of course, even understanding the reasoning here not everyone will see it as valid--to regard it as plausible for them to attribute so much meaning to one prize--but again, such differences in attitude are in the nature of such politics.

The Theme Song for The Fall Guy

Recently thinking about The Fall Guy's old theme song I took another look at "The Unknown Stuntman," and, yeah, I'm reminded not just of how much that memorable theme seems to comport with a spirit other than the one the trailer conveyed, but how it belongs to another era in other way. This is not only a matter of the specific references--as with those to the singer's having "been seen with Farrah," and "gone fast with a girl named Bo" (though in fairness, how many members of the target audience for the upcoming movie would know who he's talking about going just by that information, let alone appreciate the humor in Lee Majors singing about "Farrah" specifically, or get why supermodel Cheryl Tiegs, if they recognize that name, is in the list at all?). It is also because through all of them the song references an era that saw, beyond any one celebrity or group of celebrities and the minutiae of their careers, a media world which still had screen stars and sex symbols, and in which one could expect to acknowledge that men are dazzled by screen goddesses' exceptional, conventional, physical beauty and the sex appeal derived therefrom without condemnation or hypocrisy and not bring upon themselves a frenzy of pearl-clutching (or even real) outrage for having done so.

How very, very different is this third decade of the twenty-first century (as one piece I ran into about the song made clear as I did my bit of research for this post)--and how very different is the movie version of The Fall Guy likely to be from what we remember, likely not to the film's advantage as either a piece of entertainment, or a commercial endeavor.

Madame Web's Boxoffice Pro Forecast, Updated

The week's Boxoffice Pro long-range box office forecast is out--with bad news for Madame Web. The already low expectations for its opening have fallen further--from a weak $25-$35 million over Valentine's Day weekend to a weaker $20-$29 million. In the process the $100 million bar that Boxoffice Pro calculated as within the range of the possible two weeks ago has just edged out of reach--a fairly impressive multiplier (3.5+) required to get the movie anywhere near that from the opening now projected for it.

Alas, a drop like this in the weeks before the movie's release often goes with the actual release being worse. At the moment I have little inclination to speculate too precisely--but I can fairly easily picture the movie falling short of $50 million in the worst-case scenario, rather more easily than I can picture it breaking the $100 million barrier at this point.

Hollywood has had a lousy few months since Barbie and Oppenheimer finished their parts in bucking up its performance, and is heading into a year for which expectations are muted relative even to an ultimately underwhelming 2023 (already followed by an underwhelming January 2024)--and this particular film will not do much to improve the prospect.

The January 2024 Box Office: How Did the First Month of the Year Go for Hollywood?

As noted here, 2023 went much less well for Hollywood than many thought it would at the start of the year--in large part due to the rejection of many tried-and-true-seeming franchises and even genres (the Marvel Cinematic Universe and other superhero films, Disney animation, etc.).

Did the first month of 2024 provide any relief?

As it happened, in current dollars the gross was well down from that of January 2023 ($494 million versus $584 million), but one may argue for the prior year's January having been boosted by the behemoth that was Avatar 2--which took in so much in 2023 that it is actually #7 on the list of the year's highest-grossing in-calendar releases. Still, one can point out that it has been the norm for December to have really big movies still cleaning up in January, with the point underlined by what we find when we look at the average in the six year 2015-2020 (January 2020 included here because even if things changed just a little later that year that month at least went like a normal, pre-pandemic January), which had the grosses to show for it. Here are those grosses adjusted for December 2023 prices (change from which to January 2024 prices we can assume as negligible for the purposes of this calculation):

January Box Office Grosses, 2015-2020*
2020--$1.07 billion
2019--$993 million
2018--$1.19 billion
2017--$1.215 billion
2016--$1.346 billion
2015--$1.322 billion

In the above figures we can see a downward trend--but one can argue for 2015, 2016, 2017 having been really exceptional due to the surprise success of American Sniper and the particularly high grosses of the first two of the new Disney Star Wars films. Moreover, even January 2020 (which improved on January 2019 by almost 8 percent in real terms) was a more than billion dollar month in today's prices, with a gross at least twice as high as what January 2024 managed. The result is that one can see the January box office as down by not just 18 percent in comparison with 2023 (adjusting for inflation), but down by at least half from the pre-pandemic norm, with just 40 percent of the average January gross seen in 2015-2020 (circa $1.2 billion).

These are very discouraging numbers--underlining just how rough the year ahead could be for the battered movie industry.

* Current dollar data from the Box Office Mojo, adjusted using the Consumer Price Index.

The Decline of the Movie Star, Revisited

Way back in 2012 (which feels like both yesterday and an eon ago to me) I wrote a piece about what seemed the declining relevance of Oscar night. In the course of that piece I had something to say about what was already becoming a fashionable topic, the decline of the movie star.

All these years later it seems to me that the talk about the decline of the movie star was well-warranted, for exactly the reasons that many were raising then--the fragmentation of pop culture and the sharpening divisions among the audience, the ascent of franchises (and special effects) at the expense of actors, the social and cultural changes that have eliminated those niches that made actors into icons. Indeed, if anything all of this seems to me to have become a good deal more pronounced in those years, with this reinforced in particular by the changes in how we get our movies, reinforced by the pandemic. Less and less do we see them in the theater, which I think had its element of mystique--and more and more do we see them privately on smaller screens, and indeed via streaming services that have done as much as anything else to divide our attentions. Exemplary of this is how the funding of for-streaming content years ago got to the point at which really big movies with A-list cast and crew regularly get made and released ($150 million, $200 million, $300 million movies directed by the likes of Michael Bay and starring people like Ryan Reynolds), with many of us scarcely noticing they were there, let alone their "entering the zeitgeist."

Of course, the streaming services have been cutting back on their funding of "content" for a while now--indeed, in the case of WBD's Batgirl they have gone to extreme lengths to cut anticipated losses on what seem to them unpromising projects--but I do not see the landscape wholly reverting to its earlier condition, all as the decline of the theatrical experience seems likely to continue regardless as studios find their longtime formula for getting people to the theaters failing, and show every sign of incapacity of finding a new one. The result is that at this point I see just about no chance of the film star making a comeback as a pop cultural institution, however much some seem to yearn for its return.

How Did Aquaman 2 Play in China?

Back in 2018 a significant factor in the first Aquaman film's success was its exceptionally robust performance internationally, especially in China. Grossing just short of $292 million there, this made it the DCEU's sole billion-dollar success to date (and that when, five inflationary years earlier, a billion was worth quite a bit more than it is now).

Speculating about the sequel's likely overall gross I acknowledged that that level of success in China was very unlikely (the opportunities for Hollywood there have shrunk considerably these past several years), but it still seems worth considering how the movie did there. According to Box Office Mojo the film has, to date, picked up just under $60 million in China--about a fifth of what the original did before inflation, about a sixth after, a drop of 83 percent or so from what the film made.

This is considerably worse than the film's North American or international performance outside China.* The North American gross stands at about $118 million--about 71 percent down from the original's inflation-adjusted gross, while the gross for the world outside China stands at about $353 million, and just 67 percent down from the first film's gross for the "non-Chinese market." (Indeed, had the film's gross relative to its predecessor in China held up merely as well as it did in the rest of the world it would have made twice as much money, putting Aquaman on the road to a half billion dollar gross.)

The fact that this sequel to a movie so well-received in China five years ago has fallen so much further there than elsewhere (where those backing the movie might have hoped for the opposite, that the sequel would have held up better in China than in other markets) can seem a reminder of just how rough the going is for American film in China generally these days, adding to its already enormous stateside problems.

* The original Aquaman made $335 million domestically and $1.152 billion globally. Adjusted from December 2018 to December 2023 prices this gives us figures of about $410 million on the domestic front and $1.41 billion globally. By comparison the movie has made a little under $120 million at home, and $410 million worldwide.

Deadline's Most Valuable Blockbuster Tourmanent: Who Will Win in 2024?

For those interested in the commercial side of filmmaking Deadline's annual Most Valuable Blockbuster Tournament always provides plenty to chew on.

I do not expect to see this year's list out until April, but with 2023 now several weeks behind us we have the box office grosses that are a major indicator of how things generally go, along with a fair amount of data about production budgets, between the two of which we have a plausible basis for hypotheses about a film's profitability. (You can see my thoughts about making such estimates here.)

Given that really high grossers were few this year, it is fairly easy to make guesses about the most profitable films. The top two spots seem likely to go to Barbie and The Super Mario Bros. Movie, far and away the highest grossers of the year. As to which of the two will get the #1 spot: Barbie made a bit more but also cost a bit more, while I suspect the Super Mario Bros. Movie will do at least a little better in home entertainment, so I would give it the edge in the competition--but not by much. I would be very surprised were the near-billion dollar-grossing Oppenheimer to not also make the top five, with the same going for Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse, as, underperformer that it was, Guardians of the Galaxy 3 could plausibly round out the top five.

Those who follow the Deadline tournament should remember that there is a separate list for the most "valuable" of the lower-cost, lower-grossing movies, and it seems easy enough to make some guesses about this too. Five Nights at Freddy's and Taylor Swift: The Eras Tour (two movies made for $20 million or less with global grosses of $250 million+) are likely to be represented among the top lower-budgeted profit-makers, while the numbers may be similar for Sound of Freedom. Beyond that candidates get tougher to discern (as grosses drop, but budgets do not).

Meanwhile, in a year very crowded with losers I still expect to see The Flash, The Marvels, and Indiana Jones 5--as three movies that all cost $200 million+ and made under $400 million (below $300 million in the case of the first three, and barely more than $200 million in the case of The Marvels)--to take the top three spots, though I hesitate to rank them. (Indiana Jones 5 grossed much more but also cost more than The Marvels, at least, going by the reports I have seen, and it is hard to say whether the higher gross or the higher cost will matter more--especially given the likely claims partcipations will have on the revenue.) Disney's Wish, if likely getting a greater boost than these from home entertainment, will probably not be far behind, if the higher figures for its budget I have heard (another $200 million movie that has not made much more than $200 million) are to be credited.

Beyond that it is, again, hard to say, because there were so many high-cost underperformers. Consider, for instance, Fast X--which grossed $700 million, but may have cost $340 million, alongside such films as Mission: Impossible 7, The Little Mermaid, the latest Transformers and Aquaman films. Any one of these might take the number five spot--and certainly I will expect to see many of them filling out the remainder of the top ten should Deadline elect to publish those numbers. By contrast even lower-grossing films like Shazam 2, Blue Beetle and The Expendables 4, if making a lot less, also cost a lot less--sparing them at least this particular ignominy.

Remembering Naked Gun 33 1/3rd

Naked Gun 33 1/3rd: The Final Insult is not the kind of film that tends to be accorded much of a place in cinematic history, but it still seems to me to rate a mention that way nonetheless. Looking back I think of it as, if the least-regarded and lowest-grossing of the three Naked Gun films, the last real product of the Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker team's collaboration (as a sequel to the last film where all three were credited together, the first Naked Gun), and more broadly, the last movie to come out of that broader boom of the gag comedy so clearly underway in the '70s and gone bust in the '90s to have enjoyed any real measure of popular success--or, more arguably, offered much in the way of entertainment. (Later movies in the decade like Jane Austen's Mafia! worked a good deal less well, and the revival of the form a few years on that shortly came to be dominated by the Friedburg-Seltzer team seems, at best, an anticlimax after movies like this one, never mind a Blazing Saddles.) If "historical" in a more Trivial Pursuit kind of way one can also remark it as the last acting role in which O.J. Simpson was seen (the movie actually came out in the fall of 1994, after we had all seen the Odyssey of the White Bronco, and the more astute thought to ourselves "We are never going to hear the end of this"), while also the high point of Anna Nicole Smith's cinematic career (which, alas, I was disappointed to see did not continue much after this--just a couple of straight-to-video releases and then, done).

Personally speaking, I can add that I think of the film every year at Oscar time. While the film, as less friendly critics remark, is more uneven than its predecessors, and I could have done without a good deal of the film's middle stretch, the last act, where the goings-on center on the year's Oscar ceremony, really is inspired--and every year as we hear about the lousy ratings the Academy's once-widely watched ceremony got, I find myself thinking that this bit of the film is way, way more entertaining than the, to use the film critic David Walsh's words, "scripted, sanitized and embalmed" productions the Academy stages for the public (without ever thinking "Hey, maybe that's got something to do with why people don't watch anymore"). Indeed, Walsh's coverage of the ceremony in itself tends to be more entertaining than anything they put together--even when he is not satirically presenting what he would have liked to see instead of what we actually got.

The Fall Guy Movie Trailer: Thoughts

I remember when I first heard about the plans for a The Fall Guy feature film I was dubious about the project--not only its chances of producing a movie people may actually like, but people even being interested enough to go and find out whether they like it or not by seeing it themselves. I have already discussed here why Hollywood has probably done well to draw back from its earlier obsession with turning old TV shows long off the air into major feature films--not least, how reruns of old TV shows are just not the pop cultural staple they used to be. There is, too, the fact that '80s nostalgia is ever less salable for having become so mined-out at this point (to say nothing of the remoteness of the '80s themselves for ever more of the population as the decade recedes further and further into the past), while The Fall Guy in particular seems a poor prospect given the obscurity into which it slipped pretty quickly, certainly as compared with Miami Vice, or The A-Team, the feature film versions of which of course did not deliver boffo b.o.. (After all, when was the last time you saw it on a classic TV channel, or streaming? Or even heard it mentioned anywhere?)

The trailer for the movie has not changed my mind about the film's chances, only confirmed them. The big-screen The Fall Guy is not an action movie, but an action-comedy whose feel seemed to me all too reminiscent of Seth Gordon's ill-conceived Baywatch, and just as likely to fail to grab new fans while annoying the old (what there are of them, anyway). Certainly Ryan Gosling makes an extremely different on-screen impression from Lee Majors. (I can't picture him playing one of Martin Caidin's Steven Austin-type ultra-competent, ultra-macho heroes, any more than I can picture Lee Majors playing "Kenough" from Barbie.) It also seems very unlikely that the particular charm that Heather Thomas (and Markie Post) brought to the series will have any analog here. And altogether the texture of everything comes across as very different, given that the movie's action-adventure spectacle looks like it will derive more from the movies in which the protagonist is a stunt man than his actual adventures in the real world; the associated saturation of the thing with the kind of Computer-Generated Imagery that was still just science fiction back in the 1980s; and the particular flavor of humor implied in Gosling's shoving his sunglasses up his nose with his middle finger as he looks at the trailer for a movie where his stunts made the actual star of that film look heroic, which feels very much more of our post-'90s indie film universe than the spirit which produced the lyrics to the show's theme song (which lingers in the memory even after so much else of the show slips away).

I expect, at best, a lackluster opening for the movie on the first weekend in May, when it kicks off the summer season of 2024--as unprepossessing as the season, and the year, look likely to be given what we know of them at present.

I know, I know--it is another grim prediction, and indeed yet another grim anticipation regarding the movies of 2024. But it seems to me nearly impossible to offer much of anything else these days unless you are one of the bought and paid for claqueurs and courtiers of the entertainment press (or gullible enough to believe what claqueurs and courtiers tgell you).

Fortunately for you, if you prefer what they have to offer, you will have no trouble whatsoever finding it elsewhere.

Aquaman 2 vs. Captain Marvel 2 at the Box Office

In a month of global release Aquaman 2 has collected almost $400 million at the worldwide box office.

Compared to the original film (which took in almost a billion dollars more in its run in inflation-adjusted terms), this is a disaster--a gross of less than one-third of what its predecessor made. Indeed, the neighborhood of $400 million was about what I estimated back in September when talking about a scenario of collapse for the Aquaman series.

However, there is no question that it is far superior to what that obvious point of comparison, Captain Marvel 2, managed in the same season--about twice as much in fact (Captain Marvel 2 having barely broken the $200 million barrier before hitting streaming). One may add that the Aquaman sequel did this in spite of having its own burden of unhelpful factors, like the equally long wait since the last film (five rather long years from the end of 2018 to the end of 2023), the fact that it was coming after not a comparative hit for its "cinematic universe" the way Captain Marvel 2 did (the Guardians of the Galaxy sequel, if not all that might have been hoped for, still pulling in over $800 million just a half year before Marvel hit theaters) but the debacle that was the release of The Flash, and the weakness of its own promotional campaign, which gave many the impression that the studio was all but refusing to throw good money after bad.

Does this at all refute the claims of superhero fatigue and franchise fatigue? Absolutely not. In fact it confirms them when we consider just how badly one megabudgeted superhero epic after another flopped, especially from June forward, underlining how little the audience's showing up for them can be taken for granted now as compared with before the pandemic. Still, I am doubtful that those who make the decisions will heed the lessons. Rather I suspect that the studio bosses will seize on anything and everything that can seem to justify their "staying the course"--treating Aquaman 2 as a comparative success story for not doing as badly as Captain Marvel 2, even with so much against it (and play up the reception of Guardians of the Galaxy 3, and anything else they can think of), as grounds that they can still make this work--that all they need is better writers" and more "adult supervision" for directors, and all will be well--all as the onlookers well aware that they are just digging a bigger hole for themselves await their chance to once more tell them "I told you so."

The End of the English Composition Class?

The premise behind the English composition class is that it will equip the student entering it to read and write at the level they need to in order to successfully cope with the course work they must perform to complete their college studies.

As someone who taught composition courses for two decades, and eventually decided to write a book for composition students, it was clear to me that--if I think the classes did at least some students some good, giving them some exposure to new ways of approaching and working with text, a measure of practice and polish--they fell far, far short of that goal of reliably and consistently producing a high minimum standard of competence that is their mission. It also seems to me that the classes could hardly have been expected to do otherwise, for several reasons.

Perhaps the most fundamental is that the gap between the actual skill level of the students who came in and where the composition class was supposed to bring them up to tended to be wider than it ought to have been--a matter of bringing up students who graduated high school but are actually working at a middle school or even elementary school level to a college one. Such a feat would take more than a couple of 15-week courses in even the best of circumstances, and all involved are not working in the best of circumstances. As a practical matter, English departments, in line with the reality that the seniors handing the boring and dirty jobs to juniors is all in the spirit of "Can't someone else do it?" rather than edifying them, tend to leave the work of teaching a composition class--which is, frankly, more grinding and tedious for most than teaching literature--to the instructors who are least experienced and trained (graduate "teaching assistants"), or most insecure, underpaid and overworked (adjunct professors), as the people with secure jobs and seniority opt for any and every other task.

Meanwhile, even where one has the (relatively) most able and willing instructors, there is the weakness of the curriculum all too evident in the way the textbooks are written--a lack of clear priorities that produces a great deal of clutter, a stress on niceties of form over essentials of content and structure, and a tendency to haziness and roundaboutness rather than precision and straightforwardness in explanation. Some instructors may well try to correct for this. (I know I did; there is a reason that the subtitle of my book, which derived from my experiences in the classroom, was What Your Textbook Isn't Teaching You.) But many do not, for lack of opportunity or incentive to think seriously about what they are doing. (Graduate students, of course, are just beginning to learn the job, such that it is all they can do to emulate their instructors, while having a lot else on their minds, like finishing their degrees and trying to land a full-time job in a disastrous market. Meanwhile adjuncts are likely too harried to think too much about "professional development," and even where they do manage just that "professionally develop" by giving up being adjuncts altogether before too long, because even in this era of lousy prospects for working people many will get fed up enough with their lot to seek out, and often manage to find, something that at least promises to be less insecure, stressful and penurious.)

However, many of those who do have a chance to think about what they are undoing unfortunately embrace those weaknesses of the curriculum I am talking about and take them to extremes in what can seem like pseudo-Zen master routines (they're the kind of "Zen Master" whose whole knowledge of Zen comes from a long-ago viewing of the "wax on, wax off" scene from The Karate Kid) that, of course, flatter the vanity of a certain kind of person but, I suspect, only frustrate and annoy students, while imparting to them very little of what they need in the way of practical skills. (Anyone who thinks I am exaggerating need only read Stanley Fish's New York Times essay "Devoid of Content," in which he was actually advocating such an approach.)

Making this all the harder is the fact that students simply have no enthusiasm for a mandatory subject which manages to be dry and grinding for them too all as they have little respect for it, such that little can be expected from their end, even when they are not stuck with a pretentious wannabe Zen master.

The result is that, again, much in the curriculum simply does not work as well as it would were more students at least willing to live up to their end of the bargain--to, for example, seriously try and respond to verbal and written feedback on their papers by making a serious effort at the revision required of them, or to take "peer review" sessions seriously. (Moreover, should anyone be under the illusion that this is a matter of "These kids today!" William Whyte all the way back in 1956's The Organization Man quipped that "anyone who has ever tried to teach composition knows . . . the student who has yet to master it would give anything to be done with the chore." One should note, too, that the humanities-bashing STEM fetishists do not exactly make them more open-minded about it.)

Still, if the classes were very far from perfect as tools for teaching those skills, the skills at issue here--reading and writing at a collegiate level, with this obviously including the capacity for close and critical reading of texts, the generation of theses, the presentation of complex material in a manner that the reader can follow with ease--are not just worthwhile, but essential. And for all their flaws in the manner in which they tried to impart those skills there is the reality that something like them seems indispensable to achieving their goal--specifically having students write papers, and get feedback on them, and revise them until they acquire the level of mastery desired. However, in an age in which even scholars intent on academic publication are handing the task of writing their papers over to chatbots the prospect of getting students to do this, weak before, seems to me weaker still now, so much so as to eliminate what meaningfulness still attached to the activity, at least in anything like the form we knew. Indeed, I think that we are going to see the traditional composition class decline in one form or another--with talk of a "return to handwritten essays" and a greater reliance on in-class work striking me as futile attempts to swim against the tide, the more in as alongside the technological changes we are looking at broader changes, not least the decline of the English major that did so much to supply English departments with the cheap labor that made composition classes a paying proposition for budget- and staff-minded administrators fighting for their piece of the action in an age in which higher education has become a near-trillion dollar operation.

Barbie, the Oscars and Greta Gerwig's "Snub"

The Oscar nominations are out.

The big surprise is that Barbie, while having eight nominations including Best Picture, two acting nominations and a nomination for Best Adapted Screenplay (and did I mention Best Picture?), has not got nominations in the Best Actress category--or of more importance, Best Director.

Deserving or not (since when have the Oscars had anything to do with being deserving?) I had thought Gerwig a lock for the prize this year simply because of the politics that surround the ceremony ("I didn't get one last time so it's my turn," etc.), and because I thought the movie similarly a lock for Best Picture, which tends to pretty strongly correlate with Best Director honors.

Certainly it is rare for a Best Picture winner to not even get nominated in this area--and my first thought was that maybe its chances at Best Picture have fallen to nil. Still, it is worth remembering that the correlation is far from perfect--that as recently as the 2022 ceremony CODA won Best Picture without a Best Director nomination, while in just the 2010s fellow Best Picture winners Green Book (2018) and Argo (2012) also lacked Best Picture nominations, three in scarcely a decade.

And one can in fact look to the same politics that make Barbie seem like the obvious winner as explaining why it did not get a Best Director nomination. If Barbie has a very loud cheering section, there are always lots of other egos, interests, groups, to be placated, producing a pressure to distribute the honors so as to make sure that, even if there is no pleasing everybody, the Academy can make sure no one who matters ends up too unsatisfied, and indeed one can make a case that the Academy has in fact been very careful about that this year (perhaps encouraged by the unpleasantness of the Andrea Riseborough affair last year).

The result is that I can picture Barbie being given Best Picture as a smaller film (perhaps, for example, Justine Triet's Anatomy of a Fall) is honored with the Best Director award, and Greta Gerwig is compensated indirectly (if Barbie gets the Best Picture honor after all), and/or directly for her next film a couple of years down the road (maybe even for a film which her own sympathizers will regard as less deserving, even as they think, "At least they're making up for the last time").

Still, I am less persuaded than before that Barbie will get the Best Picture honor, and not only because it failed to land the Best Director nomination. As it happens, Oppenheimer, which came close to sweeping the Golden Globes the way Barbie's fans hope the movie will sweep Oscar night looks to have the momentum here, so much so as to seem a very strong candidate for that biggest prize announced only at the end of the ceremony.

Bad Writers, or Impossible Writing Tasks?

Last year Arnold Schwarzenegger (you know, the slap-fighting promoter) blamed the problems of the Terminator film franchise on the later films having been "not well-written." A little while later (as I remarked at the time) the functionaries at Marvel blamed the weaker response to their more recent films on the writers.

As I also remarked at the time that the buck-passing was nothing short of staggering in its stupidity and shabbiness. At the time my emphasis was on the presumption that there are some clearly identifiable "better" and "worse" writers working in Hollywood, and megabuck Marvel, which had long ago gone far past the point at which the sheer resources and visibility of this most successful division of the most successful studio in Hollywood meant that it could get anybody, declined to hire the best it could get--an extremely stupid claim to make. This is all the more the case as executives hardly ever sit back and let the writers do their thing, instead interfering all the way up and down the line for the crassest of reasons to the point of routinely bastardizing scripts out of all recognition, as they are able to do because they, not the writers, call the shots.

However, there is another level of stupidity to these claims, which is that in their insane (and increasingly self-destructive) fixation on exploiting run-down franchises they ask writers the impossible. On the whole audiences do not seem to have loved Terminator 5--but, even before considering the extreme strictures of the studio system in which even those few writers allowed past the gate are required to work, can you picture anyone managing to create a fourth Terminator sequel that they would have loved? Of course not. The franchise was done, and it was time to admit that--but they would not, and neither would the (again, apropos of such characterization as they truly deserve) courtiers and claqueurs of the entertainment press whose idea of doing their jobs is respectfully transcribing the words of the idiots they deify as gods.

Ridley Scott and History on the Big Screen: A Quantitative View

Recently discussing Ridley Scott's track record as a maker of historical epics I went with my own impressions of his movies, and what seemed to me the views of the professional critics, both in their generality and the remarks of a specific few I think more incisive than the rest. Subsequently it occurred to me to check out what the numbers on Rotten Tomatoes say about the matter regarding those films I think qualify as such epics (1492, Gladiator, Kingdom of Heaven, Robin Hood, Exodus, The Last Duel and now Napoleon).

Where those films are concerned the single most poorly reviewed movie was the Biblical epic Exodus: Gods and Kings, with a thoroughly "rotten" 31 percent score, while the Columbus quincentennial film 1492: Conquest of Paradise was only marginally better reviewed, with a 32 percent score, and Kingdom of Heaven and Robin Hood got only slightly better scores than that (40 and 44 percent, respectively). At the other end of the spectrum Gladiator got a "fresh" 79 percent score, and The Last Duel, if a far weaker box office performer than Gladiator, actually got the best score of the lot (85 percent).

By that standard Napoleon, with its 50 percent score, would rank as one of Scott's stronger efforts. Still, it seems worth acknowledging that the critics, going by the score aggregator, have got a lot more generous in their appraisals over the years. In spite of the complete lack of evidence that movies have got better over the time frame (and I think, plenty of room to argue they have got worse), the average score for a wide (1000+ theater) release jumped 15 percent between 1998-2009 and the first three-quarters of 2019 (from 44 to 59 percent)--while that can in cases look like an underestimate. (Consider the 40-point gap in the scores critics gave Top Gun in 1986 and the scores critics gave Top Gun: Maverick in 2022, even though they were "basically the same movie," even in the view of many of their admirers.) If one subtracts 15 percent from Napoleon's score then one ends up with a score of 35 percent--putting the film all the way down with the Columbus movie and company, near the bottom of the list.

Will history bear out that judgment? We'll see in the years ahead--perhaps, by seeing that no one is seeing the Napoleon movie at all.

Has the Entertainment Press Still Failed to Grasp the Reality of the Film Market?

In considering the answer to the question that is the title of this post I think it fair to say that, as one always deriding the generality of the entertainment press as claqueurs and courtiers of the industry about which they write (epithets mild next to the ones they truly deserve) I am perfectly aware that what they say is not necessarily what they actually think--with the gap between one thing and the other likely to be especially large in this period of extraordinary turmoil for the industry.

That said, it has been impossible for commentators desirous of retaining any credibility at all to avoid offering some acknowledgment of what has been happening in the year that saw its first really big release, Ant-Man 3, noticeably underperforming, and The Flash, Captain Marvel 2 and Aquaman 2 all flop. But all the same, I find the folks at Screen Rant predicting a $1-$1.2 billion opening for Deadpool 3. Looking at that I find myself thinking of how at the start of 2023 they predicted $1 billion for Ant-Man 3, more than that for Guardians of the Galaxy 3 ($1.2 billion), and only slightly less for Captain Marvel 2 ($950 million). They were way off on all three counts, and in the same direction, and I can only suspect that the optimism about Deadpool is more of the same--while I find myself also noticing that in a Deadline piece warning that they expect the box office to bring in a billion less in 2024 than it did in the still rather weak year of 2023, still assuring the reader that there is "hope" in the year's 31 tentpoles.

Looking at that list of "tentpoles" I see not the solution to Hollywood's woes, but the problem--that in 2024, just as in 2023, even after the bumping of a number of films by the historic "double strike" of Hollywood's actors and writers, the release slate is packed with a lot of very costly movies that the public is just less and less interested in seeing; with more shameless retreads of stuff gone stale, epitomized not just by the plenitude of new superhero films even as the genre seems to be collapsing in the manner of the musical back in the '60s (like a Madame Web movie to which very few seem to be looking forward) but by how far back the studios are reaching for past hits to which to make sequels (like Twister from the summer of 1996, and Gladiator). The movies will play, few will come to see them, and Hollywood will again and again record colossal losses on balance sheets already drenched in red ink--all as the chances of surprise hits like Barbie doing something to save the day look very slim indeed this year.