Oppenheimer wins, after all

Back in July, when I had no idea how this whole Barbenheimer phenomenon would play out, I went to see Oppenheimer on opening night for both films. 

The Sun in Yarraville was decked out in pink, as were the eager beavers coursing through its lobby, many of them carrying drinks or posing for photos in the life-sized Barbie packaging. 

Meanwhile, my screening of Oppenheimer in one of the Sun's smallest screening rooms was attended by three other men, all older than me.

There were a couple obvious explanations for this last. One was that it was far more popular to attend a 70 mm screening of Oppenheimer at the Sun on one of its largest screenings, though that showing was halfway through its running time, so I wouldn't have seen any of those excited attendees in the lobby or anywhere else.

But I thought I'd collected enough evidence about the relative merits of these two movies to write a post entitled "Barbie wins," which you can find here if you are so inclined. 

Nearly seven months later, in the competition that confers on a film its immortality, Oppenheimer has emerged as the ultimate winner, taking home the statue for best picture at the 96th Academy Awards.

It was only my seventh favorite of the best picture nominees at my ranking deadline, and would now fall to eighth behind The Zone of Interest. But it was still my 26th ranked film overall in 2023, so I'm happier about this win than I have been about many of the best picture wins in the past decade. 

And as I told you I would yesterday, I watched the ceremony live for the second year in a row -- an hour earlier, as you know, so the 10 a.m. start time basically meant it did not impede on the trajectory of our Labour Day one iota. 

Here is what would have been my "live tweets" if I were on Twitter and if it were still called Twitter.

- The Australian television network 7+ is really making me kiss the ring in order to stream the Oscars for free. They've required me to sit through seven ads, in increasing agitation, in order to start watching. Fortunately, the telecast did then play from the start.

- Back to extensively praising the acting nominees. It's going to be a long night.

- How did I never hear Da'Vine Joy Randolph's name pronounced correctly before now?

- Rita Moreno must be the most still-coherent person over 90 in Hollywood.

- Love that Paul Giamatti was seated next to Randolph and had a tear in his eye during her acceptance speech, which was very nice, even if she did not thank him (or anyone else in the film, for that matter).

- I got the animated short winner correct so my first miss of the night comes when The Boy and the Heron wins best animated feature. It was dumb to go against Hayao Miyazaki's last film, even if I didn't like it very much. (Then again my guess, Across the Spider-Verse, was not a personal favorite either. But I knew Elemental had no shot.)

- Okay I liked that adapted screenplay joke by Jimmy Kimmel, who is off to a fairly disappointing start otherwise.

- What are Melissa McCarthy and Octavia Spencer talking about?

- I'm surprised that I correctly picked Anatomy of a Fall to win best original screenplay. I'm also surprised, though maybe I shouldn't be, that they played "P.I.M.P." as accompaniment to Justine Triet walking on stage. (Great, now it will be in my head again for the next three weeks.)

- The Oppenheimer sweep is officially off as it loses best adapted screenplay to American Fiction. (It didn't win for best supporting actress either but that was never going to happen.)

- Cord Jefferson is really likable. 

- Billie Eilish comes on stage and I continue to amuse myself by calling her "Billie Eyelash." But I don't know why we need 50 different shots of people reacting to her Barbie song. 

- Speaking of possible sweeps, Poor Things is going after all the art and design awards. (And I actually wrote this before it won for its costumes. Unfortunately, best costume was the only one of those things I picked correctly.)

- The John Cena bit was funny. "Costumes ..." (pause for laughter). Good stuff. 

- Okay, the reactions to the Killers of the Flower Moon song were many, so I guess this is a thing this year.

- Will Jonathan Glazer winning an Oscar cause him to want to make more movies? I hope so.

- The Gosling-Blunt Barbie-Oppenheimer rivalry bit was funny. When they introduced the montage on stunts, though, I wondered if they were finally giving out an Oscar for stunts and I just missed it on my ballot this year.

- That is one hirsute Sam Rockwell.

- It's taken a long time but Oppenheimer finally has its first win of the night. Robert Downey Jr. seems like he should have won an Oscar before, but it's only his third nomination. Unsurprisingly snarky acceptance speech, but with enough heart.

- The Oppenheimer editor is adorable.

- Okay, as Oppenheimer has now appeared in each of my last three comments, the momentum for it is building as it wins for Hoyte van Hoytema's cinematography.

- Of course Wes Anderson did not show up, even though it was expected he would win. 

- Wait, what is the movie Flamin' Hot again? (Checks IMDB.) Holy shit it's about Cheetos and Eva Longoria directed it! 

- John Mulaney made me laugh out loud with the second rip of Madame Web of the evening, but then I missed most of his bit about Field of Dreams because my wife and son came into the garage needing to get the beach tent. Okay, so much for having the day not impacted by the Oscars and vice versa.

- Picking Oppenheimer to win all the technical awards lets me down again. I should have figured that the sound in Zone of Interest was one of its best bets at an Oscar.

- I think it's funny that England has Mother's Day in March. The English-speaking countries need to get together and figure this stuff out. Australia and the U.S. both have it on the same Sunday in May, but they do deviate on Father's Day (which is in September here). I have no idea when British Father's Day is.

- Okay, Ryan Gosling is reminding me again of how awesome he was in Barbie. Remember when he went away for a few years? So glad he's back, and it looks like Fall Guy will be super fun. 

- Wait, Slash?

- Every Oscars needs a bring-the-house-down number. That was it. But thank you for playing, Cheetos movie song.

- When Kimmel continues to make references to his crush on Gosling, he's just saying what we're all thinking.

- Jeez Cynthia Erivo, take it down a notch with the facial jewelry.

- I just realized Mica Levi didn't get a nomination for her Zone of Interest score. And Robbie Robertson didn't get his posthumous Oscar, which seemed like an easy call. 

- Really, the other Barbie song wins? Come on Billie Eyelash. It feels like we have a future EGOT here.

- Tina Turner gets the last spot in the In Memoriam section. Not a fan that they never went full screen with it. Didn't learn of any deaths I didn't already know about except one: Lee Sun-kyun, who played the rich father/husband in Parasite. And now via Wikipedia I've just learned a lot of unsavory details about accusations and investigations of drug use that may have led to his suicide. I might have preferred not to know.

- I finally learned how Paul Giamatti did the eye thing in The Holdovers.

- Matthew McConaughey looks a bit like Spock looked after he fixed the radiation leak on the Enterprise in Star Trek II.

- Cillian Murphy wins in his first attempt. This should have been Giamatti's third if they didn't insanely forget to nominate him for Sideways.

- Nolan has eight nominations? That's crazy, considering that many of his films weren't really going for Oscars.

- Sally Field is still adorable.

- Emma Stone wins and Killers of the Flower Moon gets shut out. Seems like the biggest surprise of the night. She gives one of my favorite speeches of the night but I'm maybe a little surprised she's quite so emotional on her second win. 

- "Isn't it past your jail time?" NICE.

- For a second I thought they were introducing Robert De Niro to give out best picture, which would be a conflict of interest, but no, it's Al Pacino, looking his age. And acting his age, as he forgets to read the nominees again and gives a completely botched and confusing delivery of the winner's name. But yes indeed, it is Oppenheimer as we all thought it would be.

Past Lives and Flower Moon got shut out, which may be a tad disappointing, but so did Maestro, which was richly deserved. 

Just another quick thing I noticed ... the only non-best-picture-nominated features to win Oscars won them in categories where no best picture nominee was nominated. So Godzilla Minus One won for its visual effects, The Boy and the Heron for best animated feature, the documentary whose name I already don't remember for best documentary ... but in none of those categories was there a best picture nominee. Even the best international feature winner was, of course, a best picture nominee.

And so that puts an official final wrap on my Oscars coverage and on 2023 in general. Catch me again this time next year when Madame Web takes home its statue for best picture.

Barbie babies and Oversold Barbie

I got out to see Barbie yesterday, totally unexpectedly.

My son's basketball team, which I coach, had a bye yesterday, so I trained into the city to watch a friend play baseball. I used to play baseball myself, you might recall, but I took this season off because of the conflict with coaching. It worked out well as we were also scheduled to be in North Melbourne, where I lived for my first eight years in Australia and where the baseball field is, for a friend's birthday dinner that night. I met the rest of my family there later.

I was expecting to watch my friend play and drink beers with him during the second game, but he got hit in the batting helmet with a pitch and actually took himself out of the first game early. That meant we could catch up for the rest of that game, and by the time it was over he was already cancelling his plans for that night. He was fine, just had his bell rung a bit, but I suddenly had more time between the baseball and the dinner than I originally anticipated.

Hello, Barbie.

I got myself over to Cinema Nova in Carlton and experienced a similar onslaught of Barbie fandom as I'd seen Thursday night at the Sun in Yarraville. Lots of pink outfits, lots of tickets sold. Instead of an oversized Barbie toy box to take pictures with, there was a big Barbie cake downstairs, decked out in layers of pink, in the window of the patisserie adjacent to the escalator you grab to get to the cinema.

In fact, there were so many tickets being sold that I actually bought the very last one for the 3:45 show.

This gave me pause for a moment. Do I really want to watch the movie from the worst seat in the house, likely the end of the front row on the side?

But that moment quickly ended when the woman told me they were assigned seats and this one was actually in the back row, on the aisle no less. "You got really lucky with this ticket," she said. Yeah, you know a movie is a phenomenon when the scarcity of tickets and the frequency of turning disappointed people away is an active reality for the cinema workers.

It was a relatively small cinema -- 75 seats, maybe? -- so indeed my seat was going to have a plenty good view. I did have to let people in and out a dozen times in the commotion before the start of the show. I guess I tend to forget what it's like being in a packed theater, where this person always has to leave to get food, or that person has to return from going to the bathroom, or the other person has to leave to talk to people two rows in front of them. Yes, it appeared that parties were separated by the scarcity of assigned seats near one another, and had untold amounts of checking in with each other they had to perform.

When the movie started, though, I was wondering how lucky I really was to have scored this particular seat after all. 

The first thing I heard as the first images came on screen were the cries of a baby. "Not where I thought they would go with this material," I thought. Then I realized that this was not part of the movie, but a baby in our auditorium.

A woman quickly walked into the aisle with a maybe four-month-old in her Baby Bjorn, up the steps and out of the theater. I rolled my eyes a bit at this, but at least she had the sense to leave entirely. Too bad she couldn't get more than ten seconds into the movie before she had to leave, but I guess that was her problem.

Then moments later, a man followed -- also wearing a Baby Bjorn and trying to shush a baby of the same age. The twin of the other, I imagined.

Only he didn't leave the auditorium. He bounced his child pretty much right next to my seat.

And then, perhaps emboldened by her partner's unwillingness to miss any of the movie while their child fussed, the woman came back in, so they were both bouncing and lightly shushing.

This story may sound like it has a horror show ending, but it doesn't. Like a miracle, both babies quieted down in less than a minute and were not heard from again. The parents returned to their seats and, presumably, enjoyed the rest of the movie undisturbed.

It was risky, but I suppose by four months, they needed to get out of the house, and this probably aligned with the kids' normal nap time.

The disturbances next to my seat were not over, though.

A man then came in with an usher, trying to locate the elusive last seat in the house that he'd paid for. They spent a few minutes talking quietly and pointing and gesturing to a spot that looked to be in the second row or thereabouts. 

But the man didn't move toward that seat. Instead, he continued standing next to my seat after the usher left.

Having someone stand over me, hovering as it were, is potentially even more of a distraction than a crying baby, especially for a person like me. (I hate to be seated while someone is standing over me, unresolved, and I attribute it to the fact that I am tall, so I don't like others to be over me. Look I'm not saying I'm proud of it.)

This story also has a happy ending. The usher returned with a chair, and the man sat down and watched the movie from this chair. As with the babies who were no longer bothering me, I quickly forgot about him too as I got engrossed in the movie.

So I don't know if the movie was actually oversold, or if they just determined the degree of difficulty in getting to the seat after the movie had started was too high. But considering that there were only 75 seats in the theater, it seems like he could have at least made the effort to get to the proper seat, if he'd paid money for it and if there weren't somebody already sitting in it.

In a way, since there were also two babies, you could say Barbie was oversold by three.

It occurs to me before you started reading, you may have though the word "oversold" in the title of this piece meant that its merits as a movie had been overstated. Well I'm glad to tell you that's not the case. 

I won't say I loved it, but I really liked it. I might have only laughed at 60 percent of the spots most of the crowd laughed at, but they were good laughs. And occasionally my own chuckle burst out of the silence at something no one else seemed to think was funny. Usually something Ryan Gosling was doing.

So obviously this won't be a discussion of the film in any substantive way, but I can say that I probably slightly prefer Barbie to Oppenheimer. They're both getting four stars from me on Letterboxd, though, which is quite a good outcome indeed of this hyped release date battle.

Barbie wins

The Most Hyped Release Date in Movie History arrived yesterday in Australia, and I was indeed out at the movies.

The Sun Theatre in Yarraville was prepared for the dual releases of Barbie and Oppenheimer, the hype around which -- each movie separately and the two as box office opponents -- I have somehow managed not to discuss thus far on my blog.

Perhaps a little more prepared for one than the other, as we shall see.

To end the suspense, Oppenheimer was the movie I saw. That's why I chose this poster. It was my first time out at the movies since I saw Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, an unthinkable three-week drought, only one of which can be explained by being out of town on my ski trip. 

I might have preferred to watch Barbie -- any time you have to sit down for a three-hour movie, it feels like a chore -- but I already have writers assigned to review that movie. Since I had some vague notion I might get the review up for Oppenheimer on Friday before the weekend, which is technically still possible despite the fact that I haven't yet started writing it, I opted for Christopher Nolan's three-hour opus, which would start at 8:50 and get me home sometime after 12:30. (Leaving no realistic chance to start writing the review last night, and making the whole decision-making process questionable at best.)

The real way to go would have been to go to a double feature, but since I was going out to dinner with my wife, there was no way that was happening.

I won't be able to go too many more days without seeing Barbie, so will probably try to go by Tuesday at the latest.

Especially after seeing how the Sun prepared itself for her arrival.

This is what I saw first when arriving at the cinema, and the small print will prompt me to explain it if i you can't read it:

On one side of the marquee it reads "HI BARBIES!" and on the other side it reads "HI KENS!" For the record, this is the first time I have ever been to the Sun when anything other than the names of the movies playing appeared on that marquee. Or I should say, maybe some other message appeared -- but the names of the movies also appeared.

My ability to snap this photo was short-lived, since almost immediately afterward they started changing it to this:

Same message still there, but now pushed entirely to the left, with OPPENHEIMER 70 MM now appearing on the right. As though someone in theater management had remember their journalistic oath not to show preferential treatment to one of the two political parties.

At first I wondered if it was a clever staggering of the marquee message based on the start times of certain films. But I had to toss out that theory when I remembered that the only reason I wasn't myself attending the 70 MM version of Oppenheimer was that it started at 7:30, when I was eating Italian food with my wife back in Altona. (More on the version I did attend in a moment.)

When you got inside, though, it was all Barbie.

How about this?

Or this?

Or this?

Yes, that last is an over-sized Barbie package where you and your Ken (or your Barbie) can take a photo. I didn't have a Ken or a Barbie with me so I had to settle for a photo of this woman taken on the sly. (Besides, it would have been weird to pose in there without even going to the movie.)

I want to say Barbie was playing on about three screens -- at least three screens -- and the place seemed to be full of people gabbing about the movie, having either just gotten out of it or getting ready for it to start, clogging the hallways to keep me from passing as they rested obliviously in their state of pre- or post-viewing. At least one of the screenings was sold out, which is unheard of these days. There may have been earlier sellouts but the earlier showtimes no longer appeared on the screen.

And as you can get a sense of from this last picture, the prospective and past Barbie attendees were usually dressed up in an outfit accentuating the color pink, or at least something clearly celebratory. I didn't see any drag -- in fact I only saw one man that I was sure had just come out of the movie -- but I have to suspect that element was or would be present as well.

How did Oppenheimer counter this?

Well there were no Oppenheimer-related promotional materials except for the poster advertising its arrival that had been on the wall for months already. I guess the studio didn't sent a mushroom cloud in front of which viewers could pose. But the movie had been accorded the cinema's biggest screen to play in glorious widescreen format. I may have discussed in the past that this is one of the cinemas that set itself the task of outfitting a screen to play The Hateful Eight in 70 mm nearly ten years ago now, and I believe still shows it sometimes. I've also seen 2001 in this format here.

When I'd checked that 7:30 screening earlier in the day just to gauge what percentage it was sold, to give myself an idea whether my own screening at 8:50 was likely to sell out, most of the tickets did seem to be bought. Those people were in the middle of their movie when I arrived so they were nowhere to be seen.

But there was my own screening about to start, so where was the Oppenheimer contingent for this one?

Well, I was a full one-third of it.

That's right, although the 70 mm Oppenheimer did get the royal treatment, the other instance was put on one of the theater's smaller screens, in an auditorium with only 40 seats. They were leather couch seats, a benefit for a movie this length. But the couch cinema is almost always used for smaller, more independent releases, the ones that haven't invested a huge budget in their sound design and are expected to attract a more niche crowd. 

In this auditorium, two other solo men and I were dispersed about as far away from each other as we could be. Both of those men were over 70. In fact, I joked to myself that they were watching the movie because they were contemporaries of J. Robert Oppenheimer.

It's too early to know what the verdict will be from the U.S. box office, but all signs point to Barbie right now. That three-hour running time does tend to kill off a lot of interest, even in the latest movie from the guy who made three Batman movies.

While Barbie seems likely to win the battle (i.e. the opening weekend box office), the outcome of the war (the critical reaction) is less certain. You reading this may already know the critical response, but I haven't sampled it yet, in part because I'm about to write my own review and I don't want to be influenced.

I will say that Oppenheimer will definitely have a shot in that regard. My positive feelings for Oppenheimer, while muted in some respects, are probably more uncomplicated than for any Nolan film since The Dark Knight. To be clear, I think Inception is the better film, but my first viewing of that film did leave me wanting, and I only appreciate it more after two subsequent viewings. The third Dark Knight was fine, didn't love it. Interstellar has its problems despite some obvious strengths. I famously didn't like Dunkirk when I first saw it (and only appreciate it a little more on a second viewing), and Tenet is problematic despite strengths -- kind of like Interstellar, except Interstellar is better.

So you have to take being less of a Nolan fanboy into consideration when you receive my words of Oppenheimer praise, but yeah, this is kind of Nolan "returning to form" -- despite still being at least 30 minutes longer than it probably needed to be

I'll see if Barbie's 114 minutes hit the sweet spot in the next couple days, and surely report back.