Oscar Season with Talk Easy

It's a great listen and don't worry, we'll be back on Thursday with the next episode from Development Hell.

Today, I'm joined by writer and fellow podcaster Wesley Morris. Since 2015, Morris has served as the critic-at-large for The New York Times, where he's also co-hosted the popular podcast Still Processing alongside Jay Wertham. While the show has been on hiatus, Wesley has continued publishing searching and often moving essays that explore the intersection of race and pop culture. His work was first awarded the Pulitzer Prize for criticism in 2012, during his tenure at the Boston Globe. And then again, most recently, in 2021, at the height of the pandemic. But what I think makes his work special, and you'll hear it a fair bit in this conversation, is not only his ability to connect the dots or to see the bigger picture. But to do so in real time with readers and listeners alike.

Wesley doesn't come to the page or the microphone. With the puzzle pre-assembled, the pieces of the story or the theory are always there. Yes, but the road to a good idea. The discovery process, which can often be vulnerable and vexing, is one he invites us into with wit, wisdom and warmth. And so this week, I wanted to sit with Morris on the heels of this year's Academy Award nominations. To try to make sense of what these ten films both say and represent about movies in 2024. Pictures like Barbie Oppenheimer, Killers of the Flower Moon, The Holdovers are they a window into the future of cinema, or merely a reflection of this precarious moment in Hollywood? We also discuss his early adventures in moviegoing, growing up in Philadelphia, the indie boom of the late 90s, the gradual erosion of what he calls the middle-brow movie. In the wake of Marvel Now, Mattel. And how. The film industry has continued to struggle in its attempts to create a more diverse and equitable ecosystem. Both in front and behind the camera.

When Wesley accepted his second Pulitzer prize in 2021. He said At its most essential, criticism does save people money, and it can expose them to new, mind-blowing work. It doesn't save lives, but it can give life. And so, by the end of this conversation, it's my hope that this episode will do the same for you. And with that, this is Wesley Morris.

I mean, this is the year of our Lord 2024.

I think we're all in for some labor. If I sound like this in January, I think you need to check with me in 11 months or 10 months and see where I am. Do you?

That guest should not be me. You can do better than me. I think David Remnick has signed up for that slot, Remnick.

For better or worse.

No, we don't do panels. I mean, that's not how this works.

So now that we have the nominations and the dust has settled a little bit.

And it was pretty funny because things looked really bad, and how things looked a couple of years ago was that we weren't going to go to the movies again. And every best Picture nominee was probably going to be watched on a TV by more people than saw it in a movie theater during its initial run. And that is how, in some ways, you wind up with a movie like Coda winning Best Picture. Which is the kind of movie where, like, you know, I watched it the way. Pretty much everybody in the academy who voted for it. And you just got to think, like, with your eyes closed.

I like that movie and it's funny because I watched it and I knew instantly by the time. Like, when they go to the audition and she does the song and the family's up in the balcony and you experience it from their point of view. I was like, there's no way in the world. This movie does not win the Oscar for best picture, it's your winner.

I felt like, this is what the movies deserve, the movies deserve. CODA winning best picture. The point is, I feel comfortable with where we are now versus where we were in 2019 to 2020 2021, mostly because the movies are better. I think the movie attendance is not as bad as it seemed like it was going to be. You know, it's funny. Coco Gauff, in her press conference the other day after she lost to Irina Sabalenka in the semifinals of the Australian Open, was talking about how bad. How she wasn't going to get too down on herself.

And she's like, You know, I'm tomorrow's another day, I'm just going to go see a movie and say that. I didn't do so bad. And I was like, this is a 19 year old person saying they're going to cheer up by going to a movie. Incredible. That just kind of it kind of gladdened my heart a little bit.

It made me like it was possibly 1989, and I just think that, for one thing. The best picture nominees include the two movies that made people believe that movie going was going to be okay and would survive. And would be would remain profitable. And not just it's not just the money, it's also just the cultural lifespan of what Barbie and Oppenheimer managed to do. You know, it created a sort of side imagination in the culture, where we could not stop mocking, memeing, overthinking, rethinking, defending some aspect of both those movies.

And they're their best picture nominees.

Keep going.

Your millions of fans love you, you're both so much more than.

Having watched the movie like three days ago, and what do you think? Oh, I mean, first of all, I think that Barbie is extremely well made. It's so well made in some ways that you kind of can't believe that the things that are interesting about it are. Even in the movie, there are avant garde sequences in this movie.

There are things that, like, come out of beach movies from the 60s and John Waters. And I mean, there are all kinds of influences being pulled from here. In a movie that is very funny. There's a line I don't know. At some point, she winds up in the boardroom.

I don't know who is speaking, but at some point, the lowly guy who is the only person who is a free thinker in the in the in the land of suits doesn't even have a suit. I think he's in a vest or a sweater. He's like, I'm a man with no power. Does that make me a woman?

And he meekly asks it, I just think that line is really funny. There's, I mean, the speech that the America for our speech is is really good. I think that the big problem with the movie, in a weird way, is that Ken Ryan Gosling, as Ken is, is too good. And it's hard, in some ways, to not see past what he's doing, because it's just so much better and richer, and and more shaded.

There's something underneath that person, he's playing something like, he's tapping into that to a pain. That's not dissimilar, or an or, or like an aspect of being a particular kind of human, that is not dissimilar from what Margot Robbie is finding. And she's got like two really good scenes where she's connecting her dullness, that the character's dullness to the to character's humanness.

But the problem with the Ken thing is that, like, the kindness kind of overwhelms the barbiness in a particular way. But not the sort of politics of the movie itself, right? The movie's politics are completely intact and very coherent, and and legible, and funny, and right in so many ways. I mean, OK, they're bald, they're a little bit blatant, but there's so much humor to be had.

I watched nine to five, and it's so funny, the those movies you could play Barbie in nine to five movies that are 20. Sorry, 44 years apart, and nothing really would have changed about them, except how much better the filmmaking is.

The guilds nominate each other, right? the craft categories nominate each other. So nine thousand people don't have a say in whether, whether Greta Gerwig is the best director nominee. Five hundred and maybe 60 or 80, something people do.

And they don't really care to see the achievement of what it is that she managed to do. I mean, just the colors alone, I don't like if you look at the color palette. Of the five best picture of the Best Director nominees movies. I mean, hers is the one that, you know, came from a candy shop.

And that alone is probably a deterrent for an entire class of directors branch member. It isn't explicitly her being a woman, but it's her interests as a woman that are kind of alien. I mean, she should have been nominated for Little Women and was, but you know, this is her.

Like, all three of her movies have been best picture nominees, as all three of her movies as a director have been best picture nominees, and they've all been screenplay nominees. She'll probably win, she and Noah Baumbach will probably win in the in the adapted, in the hilarious adapted screenplay category. I don't know what this movie is adapted.

A lot of his priorities aren't apparent A lot of his typical priorities aren't apparent, or they're not foregrounded in this movie. He's not interested in acting here. It's one of the rare instances to me in which his interest in acting and actors is kind of secondary to the politics. And the sort of thematic urgency of what it is he's trying to do. I am not surprised that Leonardo DiCaprio is not a best actor nominee, for instance, if we're going to keep this in the realm of the Academy Awards.

This is maybe his least convincing performance of all the ones he's given in Scorsese movies alone. This is an impossible part to play. He's playing a truly stupid person who is also truly in love and truly evil.

Easily duped into doing horrible things to people. On that. I want to play a little bit of this clip.

Why did you come here for what to live here? Yes, I live here.

Why? Well, for my uncle, I work with him.

And your brother is Brian Byron, That's right, Byron.

Are you scared of him, my brother? Who your uncle?

Well, no.

No, he's the king of the Osage Hills, He's the nicest man in the world. I know. if you cross him, what he could do? No, I'm my own man, I do my own work.

I'm a businessman, man.

In a weird way. The thing that sort of comes through in this movie to me is the thing that in reading January 6th reports really leapt out at me. Which is like all the people who stormed the Capitol, who were like, I don't know I. I was just following the crowd and the crowd went up the steps and into the Capitol. So I did, and this movie is really to me about, so I did. It's people sort of betraying their own souls, selling their souls, I mean, and really for nothing, honestly for nothing.

I mean, it's land, but I mean, there's land everywhere for oil. I mean, I don't know, go find some oil with some land on it. I mean, the movie is is steeped in such such incredible, vivid pettiness. But I would say, God, you know? I mean, I think that the Oppenheimer, Oppenheimer doesn't really interest me as a movie. And part of it is it doesn't really feel like it's living.

I felt like Oppenheimer, to me, was a series of talking heads. The movie isn't really asking any questions, it's just recapitulating, and the recapitulation just never got me as filmmaking. I mean, I don't know.

I just sort of feel like the introduction of the Communist end of things was way more was more than the movie necessarily needed. And I feel like, if you're going to do that, you kind of have to make Oppenheimer more of who he actually was to the culture. I mean, there was a period during which he was an extremely famous American. And lots of people admired the turn that he took away from the building of the bomb and his outspokenness against it. So all the stuff with Louis Strauss and the McCarthy hearings, I just feel like there is a bridge from the creation of the bomb to those hearings that's missing.

And it can't be that it's Albert Einstein on the lawn with a pipe. I actually like the film, but I mean.

What about the movie worked for you? There's a lot that got me, I feel probably.

So I was moved by it, but I want to ask you, because the second group that I had divided for us is Barbie and Maestro. Both are actors turned directors. Both are making big, ambitious films that are kind of upending the genre that they're working in, even in time.

This week, there was an article by Stephanie Zakirak titled Greta Gerwig, Bradley Cooper and the Strange Curse of Ambition.

I mean, it spans time, there are shifts in aspect ratio, which if you do that, you know you have my heart, but it also is really. I mean, the movie is being sold to us as being about a marriage, and I don't really know if I mean it's not about marriage.

It's about, it's about a man's behavior's effect on America and all of its impulses. To avoid showing Leonard Bernstein really doing the thing that makes him one of the great Americans of the 20th century. And to focus on his energy, his insatiable, unquenchable thirst for all kinds of things and people, his unembarrassability, and it's, I guess it's shamelessness, his shamelessness, I don't know.

I just love that. It wasn't a love letter to Leonard Bernstein, it was a real portrait of an asshole. And the asshole happens to be a musical genius, but the movie isn't about what a musical genius it is.

It's actually about what an asshole he is, definitely, it's definitely not about what a genius is. And I actually liked that. And in that way, it kind of frees the movie to be, whatever it is, the person who made it wanted to be.

And I also feel that way. I mean, it's funny because now that you put me in this position, like, I mean, I think Barbie is also doing a similar thing. Where at no point in watching it, although at every moment, up until the point I actually saw the movie, did I think that Greta Gerwig was beholden to Mattel in doing its bidding? She clearly had thought about, had had some connection to, not only the dolls. But like the politics of girlhood itself, and the politics of the evolution of girlhood into womanhood. I think that there is such a struggle happening in that movie. That's about living with the capitalist impulse to own, consume, buy things that are not in your political or, in some cases, ontological self-interest, things that are designed to oppress, dehumanize, demotivate. Even when you start putting glasses on them and lab coats and give them clipboards and stuff.

I don't know there's a real conflict here about what it means to have a consumerist girlhood. And I thought it was so smart to invent the America for our character, finding herself estranged from her daughter. There's so many layers of conflict here that are sort of Barbie adjacent, but entirely human part of the reason that, like, you know, if you're some serious filmmaker from Japan, or I don't know some other part of the world. And you are looking at this movie and you, like, have to say the words Barbie Land. I can see you being like, I don't know whose movie really is this?

But to me, it is entirely Greta Gerwig's. I mean, it's like this movie is of a piece of Lady Bird and little women. And they're all dealing with the same themes of girls and mothers, and comings of age of various sorts. The arrival at womanhood, even if you have been invented to automatically look like a woman. Which, to me, aligns Barbie more with poor things than Maestro. I can think of very few better examples of how to both integrate and subvert corporate interests into your auteur sensibility than Barbie.

I think Greta should have had you on the campaign trail with her.

It's funny because I don't really. I think a lot about these awards. I've been thinking about these awards that the Oscars. Especially since I was six years old, seven years old. And it always just seemed so final and binding. You know, these certificates of bestness. And now that I'm older, I can see in it the kind of bogusness of it. I mean, the thing that, like everybody always knows about, it's like.

It's like I discovered that Santa Claus is also my dad, my very human, extremely fallible dad, who also just wants me to not have my fantasy disturbed.

After the break, more from Wesley Morris.

You know, there's a way in which any discussion about these movies, or or contemporary cinema in general, turns into an elegy for the medium itself. And so, in that spirit, I want to understand exactly what we may be losing by talking about what we had, or what specifically you had. Because growing up you went to boarding school, much like the characters in The Holdovers in North Philadelphia.

OK, it was this enclosed campus with giant walls. But eventually, you were able to go back home on the weekends and stay with your mother Judith. And I think it's with her in that house that your love of movies was born. Because your parents got a VCR. And then two video store memberships, one to Blockbuster and one to West Coast Video. What did that early fascination look and feel like to you? You were discovering that there was a world that was.

And I was like, Wow, they made this, this shaggy dog really big, I don't know. There was just something about seeing with your own eyes someone. Imagine other ways of being or other options for life. That just, I don't know. It just really captivated me. I mean, it's the same experience I had becoming a reader.

But this was a different thing because you in a weird way, it's kind of pre-imagined for you. And then you can take this thing, these these images that you've been given. And sort of rethink. What their meanings are and and how they relate to your life or don't relate to your life. Or, you know, have nothing to do with relating to anything. It's just a world that exists and you don't. You'll never really be a part of it, but it's great to think about every once in.

And then at some point, you reach a peak and it just drops you off. And the movie is so blatantly aware of what it is that it throws in an actual roller coaster sequence, right? There's an actual ride in the movie. And it's perverse in that way, and I sort of loved the perversity of it. I loved that, like you were watching adult behavior that is recognizably adult.

Like, I didn't watch that movie and want to fuck Michael Douglas. I just knew, though, that there was a power in attraction, right? There was a power in two people meeting and responding to the desire that they felt for each other.

Can I ask you something? Why don't you have a date tonight? Saturday night? I did have a date, I stood him up, that was the phone call I made.

Does that make you feel good?

Where's my wife?

My wife is in the country, with her parents visiting on the weekend.

And you're here with a strange girl being a naughty boy. I don't think having dinner with anybody is a crime, not yet.

You go to Yale in the late 90s, you graduate, you quickly land a job at the examiner. Then the chronicle movies are at a pretty fascinating place at that point.

There's a wave of young independent filmmakers I'm thinking about Paul Thomas, Anderson, Wes Anderson, Steven Soderbergh, Tarantino. Those are just the white straight men, but there's many more.

Did you think that the form would continue to evolve, or did it feel like perhaps movies were peaking?

I didn't think that there couldn't have been another year that was as good as 1999.

2008 was also a really good year for movies, too. 2008, I think, is also.

Iron, man, to me, is the beginning of that sea change.

Well, I mean, yes, in that movie itself is a depiction of Afghanistan that is troubling, right the way it runs roughshod over the war. Essentially, it was clear at that moment, by 2008 at least, that things were changing in all kinds of ways.

I mean, Obama's election is the beginning of this divergence, right? Where some people saw a glorious horizon and some people saw the end of the world. It just is a pivotal year. I also think that in terms of movies again, the forces of capitalism were much stronger than the forces of culture. The idea that you could take a movie like Iron Man, although it's hardly the first example of this, but you could just play it everywhere.

Then you could start making versions of these movies where you would cater to the places whose money you wanted most. In the case of China, it just has the most people.

You start doing what the Chinese government wants you to do. To these movies, I don't know, you lose something. The thing that materially got lost was a whole class of movies that just wouldn't get made anymore. We're talking about the entire middle of the American movie-going ecosystem.

I mean, you look at these best picture nominees for 2023, and really, the only one of these that I can see being something that would have come out in May and had no real Oscar aspirations, except for the fact that it was made by Alexander Payne, who's been nominated for a bunch of Oscars, is the Holdovers the rest of these movies? I mean, I guess Barbie is kind of innocent of this. And Oppenheimer, to its credit, did open in the middle of summer. It's not that these other movies are guilty, but I mean, it's more like these movies would have been recognizable in 1987 as movies bound for Academy awards. In one way or another, whether it was the intent of the studio or a thing the academy couldn't resist. But if you look at a year like 1988 and what was nominated for best picture? And I'm going to try to do this off the top of my head. It was like the accidental tourist.

What the fuck it's like a travel writer who's getting a divorce and starts having a relationship with a woman who walks his dog or trains his dog? Best Picture nominee Dangerous Liaisons costume drama about two people manipulating each other because they can't have sex with each other anymore. 88, Mississippi Burning. I don't even know if that movie would get made now, given his point of view, which is the FBI.

Rain Man, the winner. That movie would definitely not get made now, that style of movie just does not exist. It's not based on real people. You have Dustin Hoffman playing an autistic person. I don't know how that would go over now.

But yeah, I mean, 88's an interesting year. I mean, you could do this like a cross, but not one of those movies. Of those five movies is a movie that's screaming nominate me for a bunch of Oscars. Maybe Dangerous Liaisons, but even that movie is so weirdly done. I mean, John Malkovich is the sex interest in that film.

Glenn Close is still at her movie star. Peak is the other sex star of that movie, which makes sense given that it comes after fatal attraction. There was real belief in her erotic power because she actually had erotic power. Those movies just don't get made now, and I'm not nostalgic.

I'm actually angry, right? Because there's a whole realm, there are whole realms of human experience, of American life, American regional life. There are places we don't see in movies anymore that we used to see all the time in movies, places that movies just don't go. You're either in L.A. or you're in New York, or you're in outer space, or wherever Nick Fury lives.

Or you're in the past, right? You're in the deep past, you're in the past in order to not be in the present. And one of the things about Killers of the Flower Moon that I love is that it's so aware that it's being made in 2024 or 2023. It's so much about looking at these incidents with the Osage from the vantage of its present, of the filmmakers present.

I think the thesis here is what we've.

Well, that's a more.

There's this tension between coming up with a review or liking something a lot they love that, or really panning something. When I worked at the Boston Globe, for instance, we gave things stars. If I was like, Killers of the Flower Moon, two stars that would have superseded anything. I necessarily wrote about it. I think many people would have read the review, but I think that that middle place, the middle of moviemaking, is gone.

I think a kind of mixed criticism, people sort of lost patience for that. Like that, a movie can't have things that work and don't work. I mean, the middle, the disappearance of the middle is there's so many middles that have disappeared, right? middle ground, middle brow, middle class. There's either, there's either, or.

There's no, there's very little room for not even debate, disagreement, but like, just complexity, you know? Like, I find it really interesting that none of the 10 movies on this best picture list include May December. I don't know, did you see that movie? I love it.

Yeah, I did not. The first time I saw it, and then I went and saw it again and was like, What was my problem? I saw it the next day.

I don't know, I just I think that's a movie that that has so much going on, that is so some it's. It's so of a piece with where we are right now. It just doesn't. It's not telling you what it's doing, or how it's feeling, or what even it is. It's like the weird touchlessness of Todd Haynes. Even though there's so much touching in this movie, the music is touching, like the The Butterfly metaphors are touching you.

Like, his fingerprints are all over this thing, but it still feels like the hand guiding it is completely invisible. And these characters are just doing, they're just doing whatever it is that they've been set on this earth to do. To sit down and talk about this movie and like, what is happening here? It's really deep and really satisfying to unpack it or argue with people about it. I don't, I mean, there's some movies where you just I, and it doesn't happen very often.

Like, you leave them, I leave a movie and I do not trust my response to it. And in the case of May December. I just went the next day and saw it again. It was like seeing something dead come to life right before your eyes. I found that expansion of my mind exhilarating. But we don't have time for that movie now. It's just like, it's too. It asks too much.

It asks too much. It's funny that that line you had.

Funny how Hillary Clinton did not tweet about Origin.

I'm not sure about how to define how I'm doing it now, all I know is that I feel like I'm tapping out. I've tried to work within the system for the last 10 years, I've sat on the boards of Sundance, I am DGA board.

I am a governor of the academy in my second term. I really wanted to learn, I wanted to understand how these institutions worked, and there's some great people there and beautiful legacy.

But ultimately, the shifts and the cumulative effect of this, like how the overall industry works, are so insignificant in their velocity, in their scope, in their real impact. That I feel like, you know what I've done, what I could, because it was a lot. It's a lot of extra time, a lot of extra effort, a lot of calls, a lot of meetings, a lot of thinking, a lot of trying. And it's time to pass the baton to someone else who has a fresh energy and who wants to take. And I've achieved some things within those organizations that I'm proud of, but for me, it's just not.

I feel like I'm tilling ground, that I'm an old pioneer on a bad plot. And I think that I started. And I was like, Oh, this place can change, there are people here, this is a liberal town, it'll change.

And there have been some beautiful things that happened. But my success is not change Nia Dacosta's success, Gina Prince-Bythewood's success. When you can name us all on two hands, that's not change. That's a few lovely things that happened to a few people.

And for me, that's not worth it. I would rather just try to build something sustainable and beautiful, and smaller and lovely in my own likeness with people who think like me. And in some ways, I think, ah, is that small-minded? Is that just closing ranks? But at some point, it just becomes what's healthy.

And I don't know. I have a lot of sympathy for her because she's taken on a lot. I'm curious what being done, handing the clipboard and the Frolodex to somebody else. What do those things look like for her art? I think that there are people like me out there. We actually believe that this movie is a turning point in some way.

And for many years, Ava was a publicist. She knows how to work the system, she knows how the system works. And at some point, you don't want to keep doing that if the thing on your business card says filmmaker.

If it says artist, you want to make things, you don't want to bureaucratize the making of things, right? But I mean, she's so historically minded, she's so she's so aware of history and the archives and the record. That she does feel responsible for making sure that it has as many black woman, non-white, non-straight names as can be put. And that work. Ask the civil rights folks, they will tell you it takes a toll. If it doesn't literally get you killed, it definitely burns you the fuck out.

And especially when you can look at the labor, the struggle, the everything right. Like Selma, I mean, what was Selma about? It was about getting one thing passed, It was about getting the voting rights bill passed, that was one thing.

And look at all the shit that had to happen to get that. I mean, the movie's not about any of this stuff. But like, think about all the stuff that happens in the passing of the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act happened. And then all the shit that happens after that happens, and people were just like, Well, what the fuck?

What do we just do? And now y'all are killing people, like actually assassinating our leaders? For what? For us to be able to, just like, have a say in who runs our county, that's it.

So what does it have to do with governors?

Well, it means that change is hard and people don't like it, and it's hard to make the change. But it's hard for the change makers, and so the change makers eventually just want to change things for themselves, because the making of the change writ large. It's just too much at stake, it costs too much. People are so resistant. The academy's membership, just to sort of come back to the Oscars. It has expanded meaningfully in the last 10 years, right?

They've gone out of their way to recruit all these younger, browner, more international like, less American eyes, voices, tastes, which Ava is partly responsible for. Yeah, I mean, to her point, I mean, it's interesting, right? Like, just to stay with Black people for one second. The math on this is tricky. But like, there have been more Asian and people of Asian descent winning the directing Oscar in the last few years. I think than Black people have ever been nominated. And I don't know what to do with that number.

I mean, it's great for changing the scope of who is in that club. I mean, the same is true for the three Mexicans, you know, Del Toro and Iñárritu and Cuarón. I think that the sort of expansion of, like, what a best director is? This chain is like, it's grown so wide. But not wide enough to say that. A Black American also best directed something. And there is like, a real, real, real resistance to thinking about Black people in a new way.

But just all right, just think about the best supporting actress nominees across the history of the Academy Awards. OK, what have those women been nominated doing? That's too generous. I mean, they're housekeepers, they're cooks, they are servants.

They work in the Jim Crow South as people who would have been doing that work. I mean, Danielle Brooks playing Sophia in the color purple. I mean, that's her job, her business, car would say, working for white people. Divine Joy Randolph.

I mean, she's a cook at the at the at the school. I mean, it is not about the quality of the performances of these women. Defined Divine Joy Randolph is fantastic. Danielle Brooks I mean, she is doing Sophia karaoke like nobody has ever Sophia karaoke before.

It's about the job they have in the film, it's about their function in the movie, right? And how many? Best Actress How many Black American women have been nominated for carrying a movie regardless of their job? We'll start there.

But if you make them something other than working for white people, how many? I don't have that fact at hand here. I mean, you don't need it because I'm telling you, we wouldn't get to this many fingers for best actress, right? I wouldn't use them all.

But my point is that I wouldn't need all ten of my fingers. A. b. The real point is that the thing that's great about the Oscars is they're telling the truth about the movies, right?

They're telling the truth about what the priorities actually are and who counts, who belongs. What gets made, who stars in it, how much do they make, who writes these things, who does the costumes? It's just like the whole industry.

I mean, the reports come out from the Annenberg Center, the USC, Annenberg Center. We know the numbers, the numbers, the numbers are the numbers, but the numbers tell a story. And that's where people like, you know, I guess me and you, because you have people on to come talk about this sort of stuff. But my only point connected to the way Ava Duvernay is thinking about what she ought to be doing with her time in life is that. These are stubborn, stubborn, deep, deep, deep historical problems. And there's so many of us who honestly believe that if we just got in there.

If we just got in there and made the calls and sent the emails and had the meetings and did it, it would just be better, it would just be better. But this is now a woman. Ava Duvernay, who is as far away from being a best director nominee. And I'm laughing because it's fucking tragic and sad. She's as far away. 10 years after. Like, the closest she was ever going to get to being a best director nominee and not getting nominated now as she was then.

And I'm not. This is not about origin or the quality of origin. Or should she even be nominated? It's like the the, it's just about the the scope and entrenchedness of the problem. And I think in some ways, in her case, she's thinking it through.

She's at least thinking through this question of justice in her work. And you know why? Why are we like this, America? why are we like this? But you know, the tidy fact of the Academy Awards is that it tells us that we are still like this. A mirror and a window.

Well, and a ceiling.

And what are we like, deluded? I mean, you know, we. We think we're one way, but like, I have a report that says we're not, we're this other way, but we keep saying we're not like the report.

We're like these other things, we're these other people. We don't have the values this report is saying, we have, we've got different values.

Look at us changing our values, but it doesn't matter how many more people you bring in.

They're bringing their values right, and a lot of the times those values have just been installed. I mean, this is sort of Barbie, this is Greta Gerwig thinking here.

They've been, they've been installed in you from birth, and it's hard to let them go. Barbie is about how hard it is to let some toxic ass shit go. And sometimes how good toxic shit feels, how good it feels to just be a fucking asshole.

I don't know what you do with that, I don't know what you do with how good it feels to just oppress people. Because it's easy and fun to like, bend an entire country's attention to your dysfunctional personality. Because you can't, it's just, I don't know. It's a really, really crazy time to be an American, to be a new arrival to this country and to see what people are saying about you and what you're doing here.

Yeah, I don't know so much about, I mean, I guess if my brain is applied to some of this, some of these problems, sure, I mean. But one of the great things that I love about my job is I don't have to. I get to think about the meaning of the stuff that people make for us to enjoy, and I get to think about how the stuff that people make makes me feel.

I don't have to like, weigh in on things, I just don't like that. I don't believe in having takes, right? I mean, I believe in the having of takes.

I just don't believe that I need to be having one.

These aren't really takes.

You are giving part of you to the rest of us. And you know, the way I think about my job is to respond to that offering. Sometimes I wish you had given me more, maybe maybe given me less, given me something different, but I'm always grateful to have received it.

I mean, I do think that so much of the thing that I want to try to do is never lose sight of the biggest picture that we have, especially as Americans. Because it's so easy to do that again. I hate to keep going back to Barbie, but Barbie is secretly deep, Barbie is really about like lost connections, displaced desires, like personal revelation, epiphany. And these are white people having these revelations, too, right? These are white people waking up to the reality of themselves.

And Barbie doesn't even know she's white, but she discovers it. I mean, not necessarily in the movie, but part of this, this schematic of awakening. And Barbie has to eventually involve her being aware that she is a white woman. Stereotypical, stereotypical. Barbie is what they call her, and I feel like that's a great euphemism for white.

But I just feel like trying to make these connections between where we currently are and where we've been. You know, I don't always want to be like, but you know, 35 years ago x y Z. Because sometimes an experience just doesn't have a historical corollary. Or, even if it does, it can't be used to cheapen the intensity of the thing you're experiencing. Now, if you're 17 years old and you know, hearing in the air tonight for the first time, it's new to you, so let's sit with it. I mean, I so deeply want to capture that sensation of, oh my God, holy shit.

Jesus fucking Christ, how did you? why did you do it again? Try to.

Just think as historically as I can about the present, without, like, using the history to oppress our enjoyment of what we are currently doing. But to say that, like, we're on a continuum, and to figure out where on the continuum we currently are at a given moment. In in, in present time, with respect to the past and to always keep that awareness with us, we don't want to bring it with us is the problem, you know?

I was like, Huh, look at all this? So like, once a month, I'm just like, Well, I didn't, I missed that. Oh, look, Min Jin Lee looks really good, you know what I mean?

Like, I just, I'd love that. So congratulations, I mean, just congratulations on on eight years, but go on well, thank you.

This is Wesley Morris in 2016.

Is that zone? I mean, if some of it's subjective, it's probably all entirely subjective. When it comes to the question, I'm actually asking, which is, which is like, what happens to this? The energy run out, right? Like, do I suddenly just get bored doing this?

And there are a lot of days where I'm like, This is dumb, really. No, I mean, yes, yes, no, like, really like. I mean, I believe in it.

But, you know, it's like six o'clock in the morning and you're like dragging yourself across your apartment. You're like getting dressed to go to work. And you're just like, What do I have to do today? Oh right, I have to write something that sounds smart about girls. Is that really important?

And then I'm like, yes, it is, I get to a point where I guess it's fucking important, but it takes it. Like, sometimes there are days when it just takes a little bit longer to get to like, yes, this is important. Some days it's like instant, like I don't even have to. There is no sort of meta conversation you have to have with yourself about whether or not you should be doing what you're doing.

But I, I will never, really, ever be satisfied with what I'm doing because I live in constant fear that I will lose the will to do it. I still feel that way, I still feel that way, I truly do. I don't know.

Every day that I wake up, Sam, I think, is today the day that it won't be there? will it not be there today? Like, not only the will to do it, the will to do it, that is, that is that is eight years ago, me like.

Now I'm like, is there still ink in the well? can I still get it up? Is the magic still there? Because it's really what we're talking about?

Honest to God, I swear to God, Sam. It's magic. Like there's a lot of work that goes into it, there's a lot of suffering. And you know, revising, and you know, false start. Everything that involves the creative process entails. But at the end of the day, at the beginning of the day, it's magic.

I still have the will to do it, but now I'm like, it's not even about the will, it's just truly about. Is the sparkle of the thinking and the writing still going to be there? Even if I want to still be wiggling my fingers across a keyboard? And I just?

I just thank the universe that.

And my ancestors, somebody in my family, had had this, I really believe that, somebody in my family who never got a chance to anybody. In my, in my, in my genealogy, in my, in my family history. Somebody was cooking and really loved it and whatever that was. I really feel like I got it from them, I got it from them, and hopefully I will have it. So that when I die, it is a through line to my sister's kids and or their kids and their kids.

Kids, I don't know. I'm holding on to something really old, I'm not even holding on to it, it's just what's passing through.

Me feels really old, I hope it.

Perhaps you'd want to read it for people?

I saw Rushmore when I was loosely older than Max Fisher. The movie's go-getting adolescent old soul protagonist, Anderson's declarative archness and rigorous eye rocked my world. A geek had gotten his revenge, opening a nerd-core floodgate, but more important, his romanticism felt true. Cruelly. My peer is now Paul Hunnam, a figure humbled by principle, hampered by pride, and, by the end of the holdovers, humbled some more.

He's Max Fisher slumped. Watching Anderson's films has steadily made me the ogler. Matthew McConaughey plays in Dazed and Confused. I keep getting older and they just stay the same. The romanticism is calcified. His movies are less ardent as much sculptures to passion, as passionate themselves. Payne's weakness was, for pessimism, a hardened, freewheeling version.

His movies were about cynics, the native-born, the Aravists. But somewhere along the way, he and Anderson swapped, and the romantic intruded. Payne's characters began needling each other and connecting, and that crackle kicked in. That's especially true of his last two. The other is downsizing, a soulful futurist satire with Matt Damon and Hong Chao that nobody saw.

In middle age, Payne has come newly to life. Whereas the Anderson of 2021's The French Dispatch and this year's Asteroid City seems to me as alienated from sensation as ever. Hiding in and fussing over the past, rather than interrogating or inhabiting it. The Holdovers kicks off with the same kind of twerpy, entitled under and upper-class folk that dominate Rushmore. But he sends them away to get down to a more pungent, nitty-gritty kind of comedy. One character tells another his near-murderous sob story, and at some point, a different character deadpans to him. Here you go, killer. This is Payne's first movie set in any kind of past. It's using the old MPAA rating card and was shot digitally by Eigel Brilde to achieve 35mm coziness.

But it doesn't feel stuck there. Payne's not locking us out, he's letting us in practicing what I suspect is Paul Hunnam's stock and trade during the school year. Bringing ancient civilizations to aching life. Alright, what was your point?

I don't know this guy is. This is a filmmaker who's only ever wanted to tell us who we are as a culture, as a people, as a national civilization. So if that guy wants to spend one movie in 1970-something, thinking about these, you know, spoiled people who have to, like, eke out a life in a real city like Boston. During the end of the civil rights movement and the Vietnam War. He gets to do it because he's earned it, and it's again, it does not feel like he.

Because that's the thing that's giving me hope, not that this great director who's done his work right. Where is, you know, a 30-year-old person who wants to give me an abortion? Comedy right now? Who wants to give me a really perfectly etched comedy about reproductive rights in America and the hypocrisies therein? Utterly cynical, very funny. Where's that person? Because I'm waiting for them and I don't know.

And I think you have done that a whole lot in the last eight years since we first spoke. So I want to thank you for that, and I want to thank you as.

Thank you Sam, thanks for having me. Wesley Morris. Take care, take care Sam.

If you want to help us out, be sure to leave us a review on Apple or Spotify, or wherever you are listening to this right now. If you want to go above and beyond. Sharing the program on social media, sharing it with a friend. All of it really does help us continue doing the work we do here every Sunday. You can follow us on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram at TalkeasyPod. If you want to buy one of our mugs that come in cream or navy, or the vinyl record we made with writer Fran Lebowitz, you can do so at talkeasypod..com. Slash shop. Talk Easy is produced by Caroline Rebach.

Our executive producer is Janicca Bravo, our associate producer is Caitlin Dryden. Today's Talk was edited by C..J. Mitchell and Caitlin Dryden and mixed by Andrew Vastola. It was taped at Spotify Studios here in Los Angeles, California.

Our music is by Dylan Peck, our illustrations are by Krisha Shenoy, our video and graphics are by Ian Chang, Derek Gabrzak, Ian Jones and Ethan Seneca. I also want to thank our team at Pushkin Industries. They include Justin Richman, Julia Barton, John Shnarrs, Kerry Brody, Eric Sandler, Jorna McMillan, Kira Posey, Tara Machado, Jason Gambrell, Justine Lang, Malcolm Gladwell, Greta Cohen and Jacob Weisberg.

I'm Sam Fragoso. Thank you for listening to Talk Easy. I'll see you back here next week with filmmaker Lulu Wang. Until then, stay safe and so long.