Last week, after Babylon won its BAFTA for production design (forcing me to admit that, yes, it seemed like Baz Luhrmann’s Elvis wasn’t going to pelvic thrust its way toward an Oscar in that category), Ed texted to say that Damien Chazelle’s film would take all three of its Academy Awards. Then, in an expectation-defying outcome that more or less embodied this year’s BAFTA trajectories, Babylon lost its British bids for costume design and music score, leaving us slightly less sure about that but still pretty resolved.
If All Quiet on the Western Front, whose Inception button-swiping score did win the BAFTA, at least implicitly flatters the British sense of WWI allyship, then Babylon is progressively feeling like a “circle the wagons” moment for a Hollywood that’s increasingly finding itself boxed in in terms of what film projects it’s even allowed to mount these days. Chazelle’s film may be a dreadful, overlong, sloppy, self-indulgent bomb, but dammit, even that makes it something like a throwback in a time when even the Razzies have been mostly reduced to awarding “filmed” stage plays in the absence of modern-day Heaven’s Gate-es. (That is, when they’re not rescinding nominations for child actors and Bruce Willis with their heads bowed in shame.)
Yes, for every Reese Witherspoon or Jennifer Aniston who have the platform and leverage to say, no, they will never in fact consider acting in a Marvel Cinematic Universe production, there’s probably three to four thousand other actors who would kill for the chance just to be turned down. But even those throngs would probably admit that they would have had an even better shot in the freewheeling Tinseltown that Babylon love-hates.
That being resolved, it’s almost irrelevant to point out that Justin Hurwitz, who’s almost certain to be the next in line after Viola Davis to achieve EGOT status, stuffs enough music into every crevasse available to him. And let’s just say that his musical brand isn’t too shy about itself. In a category that, All Quiet on the Western Front’s insistent heavy metal harmonium riff aside, is dominated by subtlety, Hurwitz’s meme-priming dirt-bag jazz is a gimme.
Will Win: Babylon
Could Win: All Quiet on the Western Front
Should Win: The Banshees of Inisherin
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