The consolidation of media looms over the year’s awards in an innate way, too: both “One Battle After Another” and “Sinners” (directed by Ryan Coogler) were produced by Warner Bros. The movie-division heads who had the foresight to greenlight two such audacious projects, Pamela Abdy and Michael De Luca, were both hired by David Zaslav, soon after he became Warner’s C.E.O., when the studio merged with Discovery. Now, of course, Warner Bros. Discovery has accepted a takeover offer by David Ellison, who has already acquired Paramount—and, with it, CBS—with the result that the network’s news division has been placed in Bari Weiss’s hands, and Paramount’s slate of releases has been severely thinned out. If the deal is concluded, it’s hard to imagine Warner Bros. backing such artistically bold and politically candid movies.
“Sinners,” set in rural Mississippi in 1932, is a story of Black twin brothers (both played by Michael B. Jordan, who won the Oscar for Best Actor) who, flush with money they stole from gangsters, open a juke joint and find themselves menaced by the Ku Klux Klan and by an altogether unexpected enemy: white folk-music vampires. The film’s meticulous detailing of life under Jim Crow and its allegorical vision of the cultural predation and erasure facing Black art and culture are no less relevant to current events than the action in “One Battle After Another,” but the kinds of stories it tells aren’t those of the headlines. This isn’t Coogler’s fault, needless to say, but that of the people who decide the headlines. (Andrew Jarecki and Charlotte Kaufman’s nominated documentary feature “The Alabama Solution,” about Jim Crow-like oppressions prevalent in prisons today, stands in a similar relation to the Best Documentary Feature winner, “Mr. Nobody Against Putin”.)
Although Anderson won for direction—and I’d contend that the scene that put it in the bag for him is the bravura chase near the end, which is dramatically arbitrary but old-school exciting in a way that few action films manage to be—the triumph of Coogler’s directing found acknowledgment in the award for Jordan’s twin performances. Directing and acting are inextricably connected; all the nominated performers are skillful and charismatic, but the distinction of their performances also conveys the tone that the directors set and the substance and range that the scripts offer. In “Sinners,” Coogler does more than tweak genre; he tweaks genre acting, though there’s exuberant energy and hectic comedy, gravity prevails throughout, and Jordan, tapping into it, turns the dual roles into ones that, for all their expansive power, are anchored by a fundamental, nearly sacramental quiet. It’s a performance that invites viewers to lean in and listen closely—exactly the opposite of what Anderson gets from Leonardo DiCaprio and Sean Penn in “One Battle After Another.” In that movie, blusteringly goofy roles yielded performances that were monotonous and hollow. Penn won for Supporting Actor nonetheless, and it’s noteworthy that he defeated Benicio del Toro, from the same movie, whose performance—altogether finer, subtler, and more imaginative—is far less showy. This was a classic case of the award going for the most acting rather than the best acting.
A similar misconception prevailed in the award for Best Editing, and the mistake was heralded by the preamble of its presenters, the father-and-son pair Bill and Lewis Pullman, which expressed the view that good editing should be “invisible.” If the winner, “One Battle After Another,” doesn’t quite meet that classical ideal, it doesn’t brazenly reject it, either—in stark contrast to the editing in “Marty Supreme,” which is by far the most original of the year. And, although “Marty Supreme” is arguably a case of the most editing, it’s also something of a manifesto on editing itself, a work of kaleidoscopic fragmentation that seems to belong to an entirely different artistic generation than Anderson’s. The editing of “Marty Supreme” was done by Josh Safdie, the film’s director, and his co-writer, Ronald Bronstein, two independent-film luminaries who brought a shattered-glass sensibility to the finished product. (“Marty Supreme” was, startlingly, not even nominated for Original Score; I found the electronic score, by Daniel Lopatin, to be both overbearing and unforgettable, far more distinctive than most of the nominees.) The film’s outsider style remains out of bounds even when crafted inside the borders of Hollywood.