Tag Archives: Martin Scorsese

Why Old Hollywood Will Win at the 2020 Academy Awards

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Last year at this time, the Academy Awards were buzzing with anticipation about Netflix possibly cleaning up at the Oscars. There was a very real possibility that the Netflix-produced Roma would become the first Academy Award Best Picture winner from a streaming company (which didn’t happen – although Roma won three Oscars). But even though Netflix landed 24 Oscar nominees in 2020, the 92nd Academy Awards are shaping up to be a victory for Old Hollywood studios, not the New Hollywood streaming companies.

Old Hollywood versus New Hollywood

There is a war waging between Old Hollywood and New Hollywood.

Old Hollywood is composed of well-established studios that earn their money largely by making crowd-pleasing movies distributed through traditional movie theaters. New Hollywood consists of streaming companies that finance storytellers who want to create daring, original work that sometimes challenges audiences. And they’ve joined forces with streaming companies for many reasons, such as Old Hollywood not financing their work, and New Hollywood making them lucrative offers. 

New Hollywood has steadily attracted big-name talent consisting of Old Hollywood executives and storytellers. For example, New Hollywood has attracted the likes of:

  • Storytellers such as Alfonso Cuarón (who made Roma with Netflix), Martin Scorsese (whose The Irishman was financed by Netflix), Viola Davis, and Forest Whitaker (Davis and Whitaker signed production deals with Amazon Studios in recent years).

As The Wall Street Journal reported in 2019, Netflix alone has been so successful at attracting talent that the company is changing how Old Hollywood studios compensate talent. 

It’s not accurate to say New Hollywood has disrupted Old Hollywood; more like New Hollywood has morphed out of Old Hollywood. And neither Old Hollywood nor New Hollywood has an exclusive lock on talent. All that said, Martin Scorsese’s widely reported diatribe against Marvel movies only hints at the resentment that New Hollywood artists feel about the way they’ve been treated by Old Hollywood studios. Old Hollywood companies, in turn, resent the way streaming businesses have developed movies with a streaming-first mentality, largely bypassing movie theaters and then expecting to have their films treated with the same respect and consideration accorded to films produced the traditional way. 

New Hollywood Gains Ground

New Hollywood is gaining ground when it comes to gaining artistic legitimacy. But this will not be a shining year for New Hollywood productions that have been nominated for major Oscars, most notably Netflix, which leads all studios with 24 Oscar nominations. 

Netflix’s most prominent noms include The Irishman (with 10), Marriage Story (six), and The Two Popes (three). The Irishman and Marriage Story are nominated for Best Picture. But being nominated and winning are not the same. In 2020, Netflix secured several Golden Globes nominations but was largely shut out. And the same thing will likely happen at the Oscars. The film pundits are predicting a poor showing for Netflix, and they’re probably right. Here’s why:

1 Netflix Faces Stiff Competition

Netflix-produced nominees are up against an extraordinary field of films, such as 1917, Once upon a Time . . . in Hollywood, and Parasite. Old Hollywood studios showered the world with strong, critically acclaimed movies that also happen to be the types of movies that Oscar loves. Sony Pictures’s Once upon a Time  . . . in Hollywood is not only a career highwater mark for Quentin Tarantino, it’s also a movie about Hollywood – and Hollywood loves movies about itself. Universal/Amblin Partners’s 1917 is not only a career achievement for director Sam Mendes and cinematographer Roger Deakins, it’s also the kind of sweeping, emotional drama that wins Oscars.

By most accounts, 1917 is the front runner, which has gained momentum following major wins at the BAFTA Awards and Golden Globes. If the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is going to reward a more daring, independent movie, look for Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite to get the nod.

Parasite wowed audiences on its release, but its popularity might have peaked too soon. In 2019, Roma showed that a foreign film could get serious consideration for Best Picture. Roma may have paved the way for Parasite.

2 Netflix Did Not Make Movies That Oscar Loves

On the other hand, Netflix’s offerings, while impressive, are not easy for the Academy to fall in love with. For example, The Irishman is long (well over three hours) and bleak (gangsters face the ravages of aging). One wonders how many members of the Academy saw The Irishman all the way through. Marriage Story is also downbeat, telling the tale of a crumbling marriage (as one Academy voter said anonymously, “ . . . it’s getting harder and harder for me to care about entitled people’s marital relationships”). The very attributes that made the films personal works for their directors have likely turned off Academy voters. Although you could argue that 1917 is bleak, the movie’s grand scale and compelling portrayal of an underdog soldier fighting the odds play well with the Academy.

3 Old Hollywood Wants to Put New Hollywood in Its Place

The identifies of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences voters is a secret, but they’re widely perceived to represent the Old Hollywood establishment. The Academy has made changes over the past few years in an attempt to be more progressive and diverse, with mixed results. But it’s fair to assume that the Academy still represents an Old Hollywood perspective, which is decidedly anti-Netflix. As Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling of The New York Times wrote, “The academy’s old guard has resisted a dogged push by Netflix to join the best picture club, arguing that, since the streaming service does not release its films in a traditional theatrical manner, its offerings should be better considered by Emmy voters. (Helen Mirren, onstage at the most recent National Association of Theater Owners convention, used an expletive to refer to the company.)”

Change Is Coming

Of course, tastes are subjective. (If I could wave a magic wand, Once Upon a Time . . .  in Hollywood would win all the awards for which it is nominated.) But it’s only a matter of time before New Hollywood productions win Best Picture awards regularly. That’s because the Academy voters, whose composition is already changing, will eventually be composed of people who have grown up in New Hollywood. Meanwhile, the power holders of Old Hollywood will eventually pass away. As they do, they’ll take to the grave their animosity toward New Hollywood. As a result, streaming companies will establish a new normal for filmmaking. The question won’t be, “Can Netflix upstage the establishment?” but “Who is going to beat Netflix this year?”

Why Netflix and New Hollywood Have Won the Golden Globe Awards Already

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The 77th Annual Golden Globe Awards nominations, announced December 9, constitute an emphatic victory for Netflix in its ongoing war with Old Hollywood. 

Netflix, the leading New Hollywood entertainment company, secured 17 nominations in film categories, an all-time Golden Globe Awards high for Netflix. The noms include Best Motion Picture – Drama for Netflix originals Marriage Story, The Irishman, and The Two Popes.

No one achieved as many film nominations as Netflix did. The runner up,  Sony Pictures, got 10. New Hollywood rival Amazon Studios got two noms.

And to think: Netflix only began creating original content in 2013 and its first original film in 2015.

These nominations are important because the Golden Globes are considered a preview of Academy Award nominations. (The 77th Golden Globes are broadcast on January 5, 2020. The 91st Academy Awards happen February 9.)

Netflix Creates a Home for New Hollywood Artists

Netflix has accelerated its growth by becoming a home for New Hollywood artists. New Hollywood storytellers create daring, original work that challenges audiences instead of comforting them with predictable tropes. New Hollywood artists are willing to work outside the traditional studio system and finance their films with New Hollywood entertainment companies such as Amazon Studios and Netflix. In turn, New Hollywood companies stream their movies (complemented by limited runs in theaters), thus disrupting the traditional way of distributing movies through theaters exclusively. 

Martin Scorsese: New Hollywood Master

The first wave of New Hollywood storytellers, such as Martin Scorsese, have emerged from Old Hollywood. Scorsese’s  latest film, The Irishman, is a risky, expensive epic clocking in at more than 3 hours. It’s a demanding and emotionally draining tale of gangsters facing the consequences of their violent lives. Old Hollywood studios wouldn’t finance The Irishman. So he partnered with Netflix.

Scorsese learned that working with New Hollywood creates complications. Netflix distributed the movie for a short period of time in theaters, causing a rift with theaters. Scorsese would have preferred that The Irishman be experienced on the big screen, and he fretted over people streaming the movie on small devices. In addition, he had to accept the reality that even though The Irishman scored strong viewing ratings when it dropped Thanksgiving weekend, many viewers didn’t watch the movie all the way through.  

But what choice did Martin Scorsese have? Despite his career achievements, and despite his obvious mastery of the gangster genre, this legendary director couldn’t get a studio to finance The Irishman. It’s the same situation Alfonso Cuarón faced when he made his critically acclaimed Roma, distributed by Netflix in 2018. As Cuarón said of Roma,

My question to you is, how many theaters did you think that a Mexican film in black and white, in Spanish and Mixteco, that is a drama without stars — how big did you think it would be as a conventional theatrical release? I just hope the discussion between Netflix and platforms in general should be over. I think those guys, platforms and theatrical, should go together . . . They both together can elevate cinema, and more important, they can create a diversity in cinema.

As Scorsese said recently at the BFI London Film Festival, “There’s no doubt that seeing a film with an audience is really important. There is a problem though: we have to make the film. We’ve run out of room, in a sense; there was no room for us to make this picture, for many reasons.”

Netflix gave him room.

Fernando Meirelles and The Two Popes

Another Netflix movie that scored multiple Golden Globe Awards nominations, The Two Popes, may not have received as much attention as The Irishman. But securing two acting noms, a writing nom, and director nom should help. The movie’s director, Fernando Meirelles, is another storyteller noted for making original art, including his acclaimed City of God. When The Hollywood Reporter asked him about creating The Two Popes with Netflix, he said,

With Netflix and the platforms, it is a great moment for cinema because five years ago the studios would have to make films that were for a broader audience. So for whatever story you made, you wanted big names to make the story more appealing for a bigger audience. With Netflix they have a much broader potential audience. So if you do a niche film, say on LGBT or a film on the church, or a film like Roma, no studio would have produced a black and white film in Spanish without known actors. But with a platform it is possible. I know Netflix in India is producing 18 films plus 22 series. This wouldn’t happen with the other system. Now we can have very specific films for specific audiences. I am very excited about this new moment in cinema.

The Two Popes is certainly a specific film for a specific audience, focusing on Pope Benedict and future Pope Francis finding a common ground as they chart a future for the Catholic Church – not exactly an Old Hollywood crowd pleaser like a Marvel movie is. 

(And speaking of Marvel: like Martin Scorsese, Fernando Meirelles has a low opinion of Marvel. As he told The Hollywood Reporter: “I know that they are big but I don’t watch them. I mean, I like the technique, sometimes I watch fragments and trailers and all the VFX and the production is really spectacular, really first class people are involved. But I can’t engage with the story, I get sleepy. Sometimes I watch those at the cinema and after half an hour I am sleepy. It’s very overwhelming. It doesn’t interest me at all.)

Noah Baumbach: “People Have a Choice”

Marriage Story, with six nominations, achieved more Golden Globe nominations than any other movie, period. Here is another demanding and difficult film from an original voice, Noah Baumbach. He is known for making intensely personal stories such as The Squid and the Whale – a quintessential New Hollywood voice. With Marriage Story, Baumbach takes on the topic of divorce, drawing from his own life.

Like Scorsese, he would prefer people watch the movie in theaters. The price of working with Netflix is accepting a limited movie release. But the upside of working with Netflix is finding an audience. As he told Esquire,

My movies have always started small and then rolled out. So this release will be very similar to what I’m used to. I love that people are going to get to see this movie in theatres. After that, it’s going to get an audience on Netflix that my movies in the past would not get, no question. People have a choice: they can wait to see it on Netflix or go and see it first on the big screen.

All of Netflix’s nominations face formidable competition, including Joker, 1917, Once upon a Time in Hollywood, and Parasite, all of which scored nominations in major film categories. But regardless of what happens when the Golden Globe Awards winners are announced on January 5,  New Hollywood has won. Netflix has scored a major victory: 17 nominations are not a fluke. And when Netflix wins, New Hollywood artists win. Each Netflix nomination is an affirmation for storytellers who want to make personal, risky films that might not appeal to everyone — works that might take time to build a fan base beyond the Marvel Cinematic Universe. Filmmakers are competing not only with blockbuster movies. They’re also competing with games, music streaming, podcasts, user-generated content (e.g., TikTok), and many other distractions across online and offline media.

These artists need a home like Netflix. 

We See Dead People: Why Dead Celebrities Are Coming Back to Life through Digital

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We live in exciting and dangerous times in the entertainment industry.

First, the excitement: I recently saw Martin Scorsese’s The Irishman on the big screen, and I was impressed with the technology Scorsese used to de-age the lead actors, Robert De Niro, 76, Al Pacino, 79, and Joe Pesci, 76. The movie required them to play characters over a span of decades. Scorsese used digital to take years off their faces in order to play their characters at much younger stages in their lives.

I was skeptical when I heard about the approach, but the movie won me over. The technology made the movie better because The Irishman could tell a sprawling story over a period of time using the same actors to show the ravages of time and their violent lives on their faces. It wasn’t perfect: in a few scenes, De Niro’s face looked oddly sculpted and flat. But in the context of a three-and-half-hour movie, the flaws registered barely a flicker.

The de-aging technology in The Irishman is exciting because it challenged actors in ways they had likely never experienced. Even though their faces were altered, the actors still needed to learn how to adapt the way their bodies moved to match how their younger faces looked.

According to a widely reported story, the 79-year-old Pacino needed to do retakes of one scene in particular until he could authentically portray the movements of a character who was supposed to be 49 years old. And I think that kind of challenge is good. All the actors delivered masterful performances, and the technology pushed them to do so.

De-Aging Catches On

The Irishman not the only film using de-aging. Many films ranging from The Curious Case of Benjamin Button to Avengers: Endgame have used it. For example, in 2019, Captain Marvel took years off Samuel L. Jackson’s face (and impressively so) to depict a younger version of Nick Fury. Ang Lee’s Gemini Man re-created a younger version of Will Smith although the negative reaction to Gemini Man suggest the movie is a cautionary tale about the limits of the technology. 

But not since The Curious Case of Benjamin Button has a move so ambitiously made de-aging integral to the story.  The Irishman is a landmark moment that opens up possibilities for directors and writers to create stories with broader narrative arcs spanning the passage of time without needing to find multiple actors to portray the same character in one movie. 

That said, I think the technology needs to be managed in limited doses to be effective. Consider the epic film, The Godfather, Part II. Robert De Niro won an Academy Award for playing a young Don Corleone, only two years after Marlon Brando also won an Academy Award for playing an aged Don Corleone in The Godfather. To this day, they are the only two actors who have won Academy Awards for playing the same fictional character. But what if de-aging technology had existed in the 1970s? Would Francis Ford Coppola have been tempted to cast Marlon Brando in The Godfather, Part II instead of De Niro?  Audiences would have been denied two compelling performances by two different actors at the peak of their artistic powers, each interpreting a character in their own way.

Dead Stars Are Coming Back to Life

Now for the danger: a new company is forming in order to bring dead stars to life in digital form. As reported by Janko Roettgers in Variety, Worldwide XR will incorporate digital movie stars into experiences such as virtual reality, augmented reality, and movies. In fact, a digitally recreated James Dean already has a small role in a forthcoming movie, Finding Jack. Worldwide XR holds the rights to more than 400 celebrities, ranging from Jackie Robinson to Jimmy Stewart. 

Worldwide XR CEO Travis Cloyd told Variety, “Influencers will come and go, but legends will never die.”

Some present-day stars – as in real, breathing humans – were not thrilled. Here’s what Chris Evans tweeted:

Elijah Wood wasn’t too thrilled, either:

Bette Midler was not having any of it:

As Variety reported, Cloyd reacted with a shrug:

“It’s disruptive,” acknowledged Cloyd. “Some people dislike it.” However, he argued that the emergence of digital humans was inevitable, and promised that his company would vet any potential partners to make sure that they would do the celebrity in question justice. “We will do our due diligence,” he said.

In addition, Cloyd noted that digitally recreated stars go beyond the movies: we can also experience them in virtual and augmented reality, which opens up all kinds of possibilities, such as John Belushi crashing a bachelor party (for presumably a steep fee) or Audrey Hepburn guest speaking at your next corporate event.

“There is a lot more to come for James Dean,” Cloyd said. “Think of it as James Dean 2.0.”

Disruption Has Consequences

Cloyd has a point. Disruption upsets people – especially people who see their jobs at risk. Because that’s what we’re talking about when we bring dead stars to the screen: when a dead James Dean takes up screen time, a living actor loses a role. 

On the other hand, the possibility of James Dean in a theme park via virtual reality or augmented reality seems less threatening. I don’t hear anyone complaining about those applications (yet). It’s the incorporation of a digital James Dean into a movie that has the actors up in arms. And I don’t like the idea, either. I dislike the notion of a digitally recreated person taking a role that a living actor could play. I want to see how an artist takes a role and shapes it in context of the times we both live in. A dead person cannot do that.

The Technology Will Be Huge

But the technology is not going away. In fact, I predict it’s going to be huge. Already we’re seeing audiences respond favorably to touring holograms of musicians such as Roy Orbison and Frank Zappa. According to Rolling Stone, a hologram tour of Frank Zappa sold out, with people paying up to $125 a ticket.

Reports Kory Grow of Rolling Stone:

. . . a Roy Orbison hologram tour last year was a financial success, selling 1,800 seats on average per show. There’s enough demand that those tours have more dates lined up — Orbison’s will be touring with one of Buddy Holly this fall — and holographic versions of Ronnie James Dio, Whitney Houston, and Amy Winehouse will be hitting the road later this year. It’s a trend that marks a new wave of holographic tours that is much more sustainable than one-offs, like the Tupac hologram at Coachella in 2012.

But why is there a market to see dead stars when there are plenty of compelling living actors and musicians working today? I think a few factors are at play:

  • Nostalgia is powerful. As Don Draper said in Mad Men, “Nostalgia – it’s delicate, but potent.” Nostalgia explains why the 1980s have a hold on popular culture right now: when a popular show such as Stranger Things packages and sells the comfort of another time, we long for a past that holds us in a comfortable embrace. If you lived in the 1980s, you might remember the anxiety of the times, such as the ever-present Cold War throughout most of the decade. But we tend to view the past with rose-tinted glasses, and pop culture encourages us to do so.

Like it or not, we’re going to need to make way for dead stars in our lives. And maybe the detractors will warm up to the idea. In the era of the Marvel franchise, actors routinely perform with CGI-generated characters; perhaps it’s not a stretch to go toe-to-toe in a fight scene with a youthful Burt Reynolds from his macho Deliverance days or respond to the seductive power of a Gentlemen Prefer Blondes-era Marilyn Monroe? (Or maybe Brad Pitt could have squared off with the real Bruce Lee in Once upon a Time in Hollywood?) And for movie purists like me? Well, I was wary of de-aging technology, too,

Exciting and dangerous times, indeed.