Have a Good Week, #5
Recommendations from the Lé Bump team + Oscars' takes from Noah Rollings.
The people behind The Biggest Party in the World™ return to the newsletter after 3 weeks of curated guests to give you more recommendations and a special Oscars breakdown from our notoriously long-winded resident “movie guy” Noah Rollings.
I first discovered Beans Magazine on our last visit to LA, when we decided to walk to lunch on Sunset and stumbled upon Book Soup (an independent bookstore with an excellent selection). Not only is Beans Magazine a great read, described on their site as “featuring surfing, skating, music, motorcross, art, and people all over the world. Capturing vibrant spirit and drawing connections across a diverse range of mediums.” They also have an incredible line of merch, including a bedazzled Beans hoodie as seen on Charlie D’amelio herself. Fingers crossed they re-release that one soon, but until then I’m eyeing all the merch currently available on their site. -ah
The Face Charli XCX Cover Story
If, like me and everyone else in the world, you became a Charli XCX stan during lockdown, then you’re anxiously awaiting her new album “Brat”. Her cover story for the Spring 2024 issue of The Face is a great look into her transformation from behind-the-scenes hit writer to full-blown pop star, defining the new rules for what’s cool. Paired with some great photography by Richard Kern, it’s one of those profiles that just gets it right. -bh
Patrick O’dell’s skateboard docuseries returned recently after a way too long 6 year hiatus. Think ESPN’s 30 For 30 but for skaters, Epicly Later’d dives into the careers and lives of the biggest names in skateboarding and some unsung heroes. 2 of my favorite episodes are Andrew Reynolds and Geoff Rowley, but the first return episode with Don “Nuge” Nguyen is an equally great place to start with this series. -bh
I am sitting in here as I type this and I’ve been a loyal patron since moving to Wicker Park 4 years ago. Coffee roasted in-house, a good but not too loud playlist and solid breakfast/lunch options, nothing to complain about. This comes in addition to the fact that you can purchase locally curated art directly off the walls. I’ve never been to their West Town location but if you’re in either neighborhood, be sure to stop in. -mb
Put together by Caroline Patton, this is the best resource bar none for concerts in the Chicago area. Posts are curated by Caroline but events are submitted by artists and fans alike, so there’s not much that gets looked over. Check out the website here and support however you can. -mb
Academy Awards Special Report from Noah Rollings
This weekend, awards season officially reaches its grand finale. It’s Hollywood’s Biggest Night™! The Stars will be out! It’s time to celebrate The Movies! That’s right, folks: it’s the Oscars!
For film-addled freaks like myself, Sunday night is a big deal.
You might ask, “Noah, is that because there’s merit in treating art as competition, especially when awarded by a body like the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences which consistently rewards the most deserving movies and filmmakers?” No, certainly not!
For better or for worse, the Oscars are the filmic award show of record. To win is to be written into posterity. When a kid 20 years from now, much like myself 20 years ago, wants to learn the history of film, the first place they’ll start is a Wikipedia article cataloging decades of Best Picture winners.
And sure, as that kid delves deeper, they’ll grow to understand the shortcomings, limitations, and complicated history of that little golden man. They’ll discover a whole world of cinematic splendor filled with wide-ranging voices and perspectives from every corner of the known world. These stories will enrich this young person’s soul, widen their horizons, and (god willing) make them feel less alone in this world…
Until then, enjoy that Green Book-Crash-Driving Miss Daisy marathon, young one!
But unfortunately, for the larger public, which understandably doesn’t care about the history of motion pictures or our hypothetical budding cinephile, the Oscars are largely met with a shrug. Last year’s telecast drew 18.75 million viewers. In comparison, the Super Bowl a month earlier garnered 115.1 million.
It may seem a bit unfair to compare a middling Oscars broadcast to the then-most-watched US television program in history, but if we flip our calendars back to 1998 when Titanic took home 11 awards, the ceremony drew a 34.9 Neilsen rating. Super Bowl XXXII came in at 44.5.
Yes, there was a world where a movie award show swam in the same pool as the Super Bowl! It’s true! It happened!
But as the monoculture and moviegoing have receded, the viewership for an award show built upon both has followed suit. We share less and we’re alone more. From my perspective, this is a bad thing! Movies unite us, bringing us together in dark rooms with total strangers as images projected upon a big, silver screen appear before us. Briefly, we see ourselves and each other, and we mustn’t lose that. And the Oscars are meant to celebrate that!
This is by no means entirely the fault of the viewing public, though. Since 2008, the American film industry has become dominated by superhero films and IP cash-ins. The biggest box office hits failed to garner recognition from Academy voters. Thus, the public seemingly lost rooting interest in the awards and stopped tuning in.
This year, four of the top five highest-gross films of 2023 are nominated, with the Barberheimer duo both picking up Best Picture noms. Similar to the upswing provided by Titanic in 1998, I anticipate this year’s ratings will be on the rise.
Then, we wait to see what lessons Hollywood and the Academy take away from such a resurgent year. Will the powers that be see audience’s clear thirst for rich, original stories centered on the human experience? Almost certainly not! But at least we’ll be hoping together.
Anyways, I wanted to stroll through some of the top categories to give you a primer for the show, dig into the projected winners, and peek into what it all signals about our movie culture. Additionally, in keeping with the spirit of Have A Good Week, I wanted to toss in personal recommendations for each category that were not recognized by the Academy.
Join me, won’t you?
ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
The consensus going into the night says Robert Downey Jr. will take home his first Oscar for his Salieri-esque performance in Oppenheimer. Deservedly so!
For the past decade and a half, RDJ has been an avatar of sorts for the Superhero Movie Industrial Complex. He was thought of as one of the most talented performers of his generation, but he put on the suit and donned a mask for a decade-plus, leaving many wondering what work we were missing out on. For Downey to win now, in his first Real Movie post-Marvel, would feel like a fitting end to the arc and an apt microcosm for this era of the industry, for the films that could’ve-been, as the Marvel Machine continues to fumble & bumble post-Endgame.
Recommendation: Glenn Howerton, BlackBerry
ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Da’Vine Joy Randolph, congratulations, you are an Academy Award winner!
After one of the most dominant award season runs in recent memory, this is the biggest lock of the night. Randolph first popped for me in 2019’s Dolemite Is My Name (great picture), but her turn as Mary Lamb is lights out. She displays a generosity as a performer that helps to erase the inexperience of Dominic Sessa’s wonderful debut and to bolster and soften the more verbose, curmudgeonly work of Paul Giamatti’s dynamite lead performance.
Randolph may be Sunday’s only victorious representative of The Holdovers. This should be worn with pride.
Recommendation: Penelope Cruz, Ferrari
BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Historically, Original Screenplay has become a sort of Cool Kid’s Best Picture, where more transgressive, otherwise-shut-out movies like Get Out, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, and Pulp Fiction are recognized, saving the major categories for more typical Oscar-fair. This has changed a bit in recent years, when Best Picture winners like Parasite and Everything Everywhere All at Once were victorious in the category. But this year, the odds-on Best Picture favorite Oppenheimer is competing in Adapted, so uncertainty remains.
To varying degrees, I like all of this year’s nominees. Yes, even Bradley Cooper’s Maestro! (Sorry to the haters and losers who can’t appreciate terminal earnestness.) Past Lives would fit the Cool Kid bill, and Scorsese and Nolan’s recent evangelizing for the film implies an appreciation amongst the Academy. There’s a lot of love out there for Alexander Payne as well, with The Holdovers being the nominee that leaves viewers feeling the warmest & fuzziest, something not to be discounted. In contrast, the acidity of Samy Burch’s script for May December, my favorite of this bunch, has seemed to sour some voters.
After taking home prizes at a number of precursor shows, the leader in the clubhouse appears to be Palme d’Or winner Anatomy of a Fall. Justine Triet’s script is a crackling dissection of truth and womanhood, putting both on trial amidst the theatrics of the French court system.
Justice for Snoop!
Recommendation: Showing Up, Written by Kelly Reichardt & Jonathan Raymond
BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
This is one of the most stacked categories of the year, and, like Original Screenplay, will come into Sunday with a great deal of uncertainty. Cord Jefferson’s American Fiction was one of the great theatrical experiences I had last year, with an absolutely raucous, sold-out crowd savoring every bit his satire had to offer. Oppenheimer is the runaway train of the awards season and a lot has been made of the unique, first-person structure of Nolan’s script. Poor Things was seen as a frontrunner coming out of festival season, but has seemingly lost steam in the subsequent months despite being a box-office success and centering one of the year’s best performances. Gerwig’s work on Barbie was able to imbue a texture and humanity into Mattel plastic that seems unimaginable from any other contemporary voice.
With The Zone of Interest, Jonathan Glazer has been elevated to status of Great Artist. Much of the chatter leading up to the show has become centered around the timeliness of the film as the war in Gaza continues, but a win for this unrelenting, observational Holocaust drama would not feel (to me) to be a self-aggrandizing, pat on the back. Glazer’s pen and lens lay bare the banality of evil and the hideous, corporatized killing structures that must churn for the erasure of a people to occur. The work doesn’t flinch for a moment.
Recommendation: Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., Written by Kelly Fremon Craig, based on the novel by Judy Blume
BEST DIRECTOR
The past eight months have been a slow march toward the coronation of Christopher Nolan. The long-time patron saint of Redditors everywhere who’s simultaneously taken too seriously and not seriously enough, Nolan has been the great populist filmmaker of the 21st century. But like Spielberg after his win for Schindler’s List, Nolan will soon, deservedly, be cemented in legacy and status as one of our great filmmakers. After his Best Director win, Spielberg continuously waded back and forth between prestige efforts and box office fair, free to make brutalistic pictures like Munich or dip his toes into technological experiments like The Adventures of Tintin. At 53 years old, with decades of filmmaking in front of him, Nolan will be given more creative breadth than ever before.
Oppenheimer is a triumph, a technical and dramatic achievement brimming with as much propulsion as the medium can handle, that despite being so clearly collaborative, sits firmly at Nolan’s feet. No other filmmaker could turn a three-hour biopic about the inventor of the nuclear bomb into a billion-dollar grosser. He is The Protagonist of this operation.
Recommendation: Todd Haynes, May December
BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Of the Big Four categories, Best Actress is the most tightly contested. It’s a two-woman race between the top actor of her generation and a largely-unknown actress who carried the best movie of last year, and precursor awards have gone back and forth, providing no clear view going into the night.
Emma Stone debuted 17 years ago in Superbad and his since gone on to be nominated for four Academy Awards, winning one for her leading performance in La La Land. She’s also starred in hits like Easy A, Zombieland, and Cruella. She’s remained present in our lives for almost two decades and somehow no one has gotten sick of her. At just 35, her career is still largely ahead of her, and we’re lucky for it! She’s chosen to redeem all of her accrued cachet on arch projects like Poor Things. In a film landscape (and society) that has become increasingly conservative and puritanical, it is sincerely brave for the biggest movie star of her time to enthusiastically embrace a role that is so unabashedly sex-forward. Stone is transformative and singular as Bella Baxter.
The performance that has stuck with me the most throughout the year though is Lily Gladstone’s turn as Mollie Burkhart in Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon. She exists as the foundational center of last year’s best film, providing an emotion cogency that allows every other piece to fall into place. Within Gladstone exists a seemingly bottomless reservoir of emotionality, that she releases judiciously and with extreme grace. Simultaneously, she possesses a magnetism that holds the frame in a way few others can. As she sits in a two shot with Leonardo DiCaprio, our biggest star of the past thirty years, it’s impossible to pull your eyes away from her.
In Killers of the Flower Moon, Gladstone lets out a wail that has sat in my memory ever since. The singular film moment of 2023. She should be rewarded here.
Recommendation: Cailee Spaeny, Priscilla
BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
At the start of awards season, Leading Actor seemed to be a hotly contested category, with Cillian Murphy and Paul Giamatti, two long-time supporting players, competing in a mensch-off for the year’s leading acting prize.
As a Big Fat Liar fan, Giamatti has long been one of My Guys. He’s at the top of his game in The Holdovers, eeking out empathy with effortless modulation that allows the entirety of the film’s emotionality move in lockstep with his performance.
Murphy will be the one that is awarded on Sunday though, and it’s become so clear that I feel like we’ve lost sight of how non-Oscar-y of a performance the Pride of Ireland is giving. So often, a biopic is dominated by a charismatic, showy caricature designed to overwhelm audiences. While there are certainly bouts of charisma within the performance, Murphy chose to imbue his character with a haunting emptiness. Oppenheimer exists almost as a vacuum at the center of the film, a hollowness that allows for the supporting actors to bounce off of him, but also gives audiences a chilling chasm to glimpse into, sometimes only temporarily before its becoming too much. Murphy is restrained without being tied down, mannered without wading into quirk. It’s an absolute powerhouse performance.
Recommendation: Franz Rogowski, Passages
BEST PICTURE
THE OPPENHEIMER TRAIN DON’T STOP!
Big Opp is taking home the top prize, and who can be mad? While it was outgrossed by its release day partner Barbie, it feels like the defining film of 2023; an intimate epic about the everpresent power to anhiliate ourselves that became an endless meme factory. A bit on the nose, don’t you think?
But this is deserved, and a perfect encapsulation of what makes cinema so great: a mass entertainment device capable of delivering moving, deeply human works of art.
Movies rock. I love movie.
Recommendation: The Killer, The Boy and the Heron, The Iron Claw, Godzilla Minus One
Upcoming Events
Smoke & Mirrors with Luc & Dane Radoja on 3/9. Free RSVP here.
Subterranean with Special Guests on 3/21: Tickets available here.
Subterranean Series #1
We're very excited to announce the first-ever installment of SUBTERRANEAN SERIES, kicking it off with none other than local legend FINGY, recorded on January 21, 2024.
Lastly, here’s “have a good week,” updated with 10 new songs. Hopefully, there’s something in there for you, but if not, that’s your problem.
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