My verdict on the Oscars line-up

Los Angeles

Last Sunday in LA, we went to the cinema, where I’ve hardly been since Covid. I wasn’t expecting much from the film, as truly enjoyable and entertaining films have been thin on the ground recently. Regardless, I’ve always loved the whole experience of cinema-going, from handing over the tickets and finding your seat to the anticipation of watching the forthcoming attractions. But the trailers shown this time were mostly science-fiction — futuristic, computer-generated potboilers — and even though none of them probably cost less than $60 million, the previews left me cold… and deaf. I had to stuff tissue in my ears to muffle the booms and bangs. Ah, for those halcyon days when I was a child, watching exciting trailers for next week’s picture starring Gene Kelly (dancing beautifully) or Danny Kaye (singing hysterically) or a constellation of stars more jam-packed than heaven. Hollywood manufactured dreams then.

As for today’s Oscar-nominated films, they are generally bleak, confusing and interminable. Although there is much trumpeting about how inspiring and brilliant these films are by critics and trade papers such as Variety and the Hollywood Reporter, the consensus from conversations with people I know and respect is that they are unwatchable. They cut back and forth between scenes, overuse flashbacks (eight weeks back, two weeks forward, three years back…) and light them so poorly that all you can see is a dark screen as you strain to hear the dialogue over the soundtrack.

The public seems to be fighting back by simply not going to the movies nearly as much — attendance is way down. Take Babylon, the much-heralded drama about decadent 1920s Hollywood (nominated for three Academy Awards), which has taken a measly $15 million after costing $160 million to make. Another Oscar contender is Everything Everywhere All at Once. When we tried to watch it at home, we had to turn on the subtitles as the accented English was so difficult to understand, but since the dialogue switched between Mandarin and English, the English subtitles during the Mandarin exchanges were hidden by a large banner announcing that the actors were “SPEAKING MANDARIN.”

Another massively hyped contender for Best Picture is James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water. It’s a super-expensive sequel to the first one, which took in $3 billion globally. Can the new one beat it? As of now it’s still climbing, but personally I have no interest in which way water goes.

My bet for this year’s best movie (and best actor) is Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis, which has been both a critical and commercial success. It’s highly entertaining, if a bit frenetic. And as for the movie I went to the cinema to watch? It turned out to be great, a terrific action thriller called Plane that kept us in our seats with excellent performances and a wonderful, barely believable narrative. There were no flashbacks, scenes were resolved before they cut, and violence was kept to a minimum, thus used for maximum effect. It’s not an Oscar contender by any stretch of the imagination, mostly because it was watchable, satisfying and brief.

We have been in LA since just before Christmas and the weather has been unusually freezing and rainy most of the time, so that sweaters and woolly socks need to be worn in bed. That makes it doubly tragic to see the amount of homelessness in what used to be called the “Golden State.” There are rows upon rows of tented shelters in downtown LA and near the beaches — they resemble shanty towns. It’s heartbreaking that a state as rich as California seems unable to cope.

Recently, I was sitting in a nail bar in Beverly Hills when a homeless man came in and made a beeline for me. “Hello, Halle,” he said. “Will you treat me to a pedicure?” Every nail worker in the room suddenly stopped chatting to their clients and bent their heads in intense concentration.

“Erm, Halle?” I asked. “I’m not Halle.”

“Yes, you are! You’re Halle Berry — we’re good friends, remember?” he insisted. I looked to my manicurist for help, but none was forthcoming. I’ve never seen anyone so focused on my cuticles. The man was getting more and more frustrated as I insisted that I wasn’t Halle Berry, however flattered I was that he would think so. He started to get angry, and I started to get frightened, whereupon, like the prince who rides in on a white stallion, Percy appeared, having finally secured a parking spot. The manager of the shop was persuaded to give the man a pedicure and all was well that ended well.

This article was originally published in The Spectator’s March 2023 World edition.