Well, for once, Cannes has helped the Oscar picture to come into focus. The triumphant premiere of Killers of the Flower Moon not only cemented the film’s status as an early front runner but it also confirmed that Leonardo DiCaprio will be in the running for Best Actor and Lily Gladstone for either Best Actress or Supporting Actress. It also sound like Robert De Niro could receive another nomination. (Despite the importance of his role, Jesse Plemons’s screen time is apparently limited.)
The other Oscar contender to come out of Cannes would appear to be Jonathan Glazer’s The Zone of Interest. There is some talk that the film itself could be a bit too chilly for the Academy and, being familiar with Glazer’s work, that would not necessarily surprise me. But, for now, The Zone of Interest is among my predicated Best Picture nominee. I’m also going to continue to predict that Oppenheimer will be nominated and, after seeing the trailer, I’m a bit more confident that The Color Purple will be nominated as well. And I’m still going to toss in Barbie because why not?
That said, the year isn’t even halfway over yet and there’s a lot of films to come. It’s entirely possible that the majority of the best picture nominees are going to be films that haven’t even shown up on anyone’s radar yet.
Below are my predictions for May. Be sure to also check out my predictions for March and April!
Air opens with a montage of the 80s. Ronald Reagan is President. MTV is actually playing music. Wall Street is full of millionaires. Sylvester Stallone is singing with Dolly Parton for some reason. Because the specific year is 1984, people are nervously giving George Orwell’s book the side-eye. Everyone wants an expensive car. Everyone wants a big house. Everyone wants the world to know how rich and successful and special they are.
What no one wants is a pair of Nike basketball shoes. All of the major players are wearing Adidas and Converse while Nike is viewed as being primarily a company that makes running shoes. CEO Phil Knight (played by Ben Affleck) is considering closing down the basketball shoe division. Sonny Vaccaro (Matt Damon), however, has a plan that he thinks will save the division. Instead of recruiting three or four low-tier players to wear and endorse Nike shoes, Sonny wants to spend the entire division’s budget on just one player. Sonny is convinced that a young Michael Jordan is destined to become one of the best players in the history of basketball and he wants to make a shoe that will be specifically designed for Jordan.
The problem is that Michael Jordan doesn’t want to have anything to do with Nike because Nike is not viewed as being a cool brand. Jordan wants to sign with Adidas, though he’s considering other offers as well. He also wants a new Mercedes. Even though everyone tells Sonny that he’s wasting his time and that he’ll be responsible for a lot of people losing their jobs if he fails, Sonny travels to North Carolina to make his pitch personally to Jordan’s mother (Viola Davis).
For it’s first 50 minutes or so, Air feels like a typical guy film, albeit a well-directed and well-acted one. Almost all of the characters are former jocks and the dialogue is full of the type of good-natured insults that one would expect to hear while listening to a bunch of longtime friends hanging out together. For all the pressure that Sonny is under, the underlying message seems to be one of wish fulfilment. “Isn’t it great,” the film seems to be saying, “that these guys get to hang out and talk about sports all day?” When Sonny runs afoul Michael Jordan’s agent, David Falk (Chris Messina), one is reminded of the stories of temperamental film executives who spent all day yelling at each other on the telephone. The efforts to sign Jordan feel a lot like the effort to get a major star to agree to do a movie and it’s easy to see what attracted Damon and Affleck to the material. Even though the majority of the film takes place in the Nike corporate offices, it deals with a culture that Damon and Affleck undoubtedly know well.
But then Jason Bateman delivers a great monologue and the entire film starts to change. Despite his reluctance to sign with Nike, Michael Jordan and his family have agreed to visit the corporate headquarters. Sonny has a weekend to oversee the creation of the shoe that will hopefully convince Jordan to sign. When Sonny shows up for work, he’s excited. But then he has a conversation with Rob Strasser (Jason Bateman), the head of marketing. Strasser talks about his divorce and how he only sees his daughter on the weekends. Every weekend, Rob brings his daughter the latest free Nike stuff. His daughter now his 60 pairs of Nike shoes. Rob admits that, even if he loses his job, he’ll probably still continue to buy Nike shoes because that’s now what his daughter expects whenever she sees him. Rob compares Sonny’s plan to the Bruce Springsteen song Born in the USA, in that the tune sounds hopeful but the lyrics are much darker. If the plan succeeds, Nike will make a lot of money. If it fails, Rob and everyone in the basketball division will be out of a job and that’s going to effect every aspect of their lives. Rob points out that Sonny made his decision to pursue only Michael Jordan without thinking about what could happen to everyone else. Sonny says that success requires risk. Rob replies that Sonny’s words are spoken, “like a man who doesn’t have a daughter.”
It’s an honest moment and it made all the more powerful by Bateman’s calm but weary delivery of the lines. It’s the moment when the film’s stakes finally start to feel real, even though everyone knows how the story eventually turned out. As well, it’s in this moment that the film acknowledges that the Air Jordan legacy is a complicated one. Rob talks about how the shoes are manufactured in overseas sweatshops. Later, when discussing whether or not Michael Jordan should get a percentage of the sales, Jordan’s mother acknowledges that the shoes aren’t going to be cheap to purchase. They’re going to be a status symbol, just as surely as the Mercedes that Jordan expects for signing with the company. Air becomes much like that Springsteen song. On the surface, it’s a likable film about a major cultural moment, full of dialogue that is quippy and sharply delivered without ever falling into the pompous self-importance of one of Aaron Sorkin’s corporate daydreams. But, under the surface, it’s a film about how one cultural moment changed things forever, in some ways for the better and in some ways for the worse.
It’s an intelligent film, one the creates a specific moment in time without ever falling victim to cheap nostalgia. Matt Damon gets a brilliant monologue of his own, in which he discusses how America’s celebrity culture will always attempt to tear down anyone that it has previously built up. Ben Affleck plays Nike’s CEO as being an enigmatic grump, alternatively supportive and annoyed with whole thing. As for Michael Jordan, he is mostly present in only archival footage. An actor named Damian Delano Young plays him when he and his parents visit Nike’s corporate headquarters but, significantly, his face is rarely show and we only hear him speak once. In one of the film’s best moments, he shrugs his shoulders in boredom while watching a recruitment film that Nike has produced to entice him and, because it’s the first reaction he’s shown during the entire visit, the audience immediately understands the panic of every executive in the room.
Air is a surprisingly good film. It’s currently streaming on Prime.
Here are my Oscar predictions for April! As always, when it’s this early in the year, I recommend taking all of these with a grain of salt. At this point, the only thing that anyone knows for sure is that it’s safe to remove Jonathan Majors and Magazine Dreams from any list of predictions.
Ben Affleck directs and Matt Damon stars in this upcoming film about the effort to get Michael Jordan to wear a pair of shoes. Here’s the Super Bowl spot!
Today’s music video is the video for AIR’s Playground Love.
This song was recorded as a part of AIR’s score for Sofia Coppola’s The Virgin Suicides. The video, which is largely made up of footage from the film, along with singing wad of chewing gum, is credited as having been directed by both Sofia and Roman Coppola.
(While not as well-known as his sister, Roman Coppola is a frequent collaborator with Wes Anderson and he also directed an excellent film called CQ.)
Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation left a strange impression on me. In a way I can only really compare to Casablanca, it burrowed into my memory like an actual personal experience. I don’t review movies, and I am ill equipped to explain what made it such a special film for me, but the bond that Bob Harris (Bill Murray) and Charlotte (Scarlett Johansson) forge over a few days in Tokyo is something I’ll always carry with me and look back on fondly. That’s pretty weird, but I’m not complaining.
Music was essential to Lost in Translation, embedded into scenes as a part of what Bob and Charlotte actually experience. The hotel lounge has a live jazz band. “The State We’re In” by The Chemical Brothers plays in the club they visit. Phoenix’s “Too Young” pumps over the stereo when they go to a friend’s apartment. A woman dances to Peaches’ “Fuck the Pain Away” at the strip club. The actors aren’t just seen singing karaoke; they perform it at length. Coppola was pretty clever about extending this integration to the more traditionally situated background music. Happy End’s “Kaze wo Atsumete” enhances the feeling that Bob and Charlotte are winding down from an exhausting night, but it drifts faintly into the hallway, as if playing from the karaoke room. Charlotte is wearing headphones when we first hear Air’s “Alone in Kyoto”. The Jesus and Mary Chain’s “Just Like Honey” kicks off as Bob enters his cab. The encore of “Kaze wo Atsumete” in the credits could easily be playing in Bob’s head. Almost every song in the movie functions within the environment, not just as a peripheral enhancement.
Garden State tried something like this a year later, though I don’t recall the extent of it beyond the awkward Shins sequence. The effect was a sort of garish, in-your-face endorsement of director Zach Braff’s favorite tunes. It didn’t really cut it for me, in spite of the soundtrack’s impressive cast. In Lost in Translation, Coppola was a lot more attentive to creating continuity between songs and bringing musicians on board with the film’s atmosphere. She didn’t stop at using “Sometimes” by My Bloody Valentine; she dug founder Kevin Shields out of relative obscurity to compose four original pieces. A lot of the other artists formed a pre-existing community of sorts, suited to engage the project as art rather than a quick paycheck. Soundtrack supervisor Brian Reitzell performed drums for Air on their 2001 album 10 000 Hz Legend. Both Air and Roger Joseph Manning Jr, a fellow studio musician on that album, contribute original music to Lost in Translation. Phoenix previously performed with Air, and Sofia Coppola ultimately married their singer. While their contribution was recycled (“Too Young” appears in the context of young adults who would have been familiar with obscure but up and coming artists; using Phoenix’s first single made sense), the band was still involved in Coppola’s social sphere of musicians.
“Alone in Kyoto” plays as Charlotte travels through the classic side of Japan, visiting shrines and observing ancient customs. While that could possibly put it at odds with my theme, Air’s approach keeps the feeling modern, casting tradition as a subtle, delicate element of the present rather than as a form of escapism. It also occurs in a sequence without character interaction, permitting a pure sense of exploration. Within Lost in Translation‘s soundtrack, “Alone in Kyoto” reaches closest to that Japanese dream that still permeated a lot of American subcultures in 2003. The movie itself brought many of us the closest we would ever come to actually living that dream.
Through the Shattered Lens 