An Oscar Sunday Story: On Being Alive

Happy Oscar Sunday, for those who celebrate: On the subtle, astonishing film "Living," the how-then-shall-we-live theme that pulses through this year's nominees, and who I'm rooting for tonight.

Oscar-nominated Bill Nighy (center) as “Mr. Williams” and Aimee Lou Wood as “Miss Harris” in 2022’s Living, a re-make of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru 生きる (“To Live” in Japanese.) Image via Lionsgate.

For many years, the Oscars have been my Superbowl. There were parties and themed cocktails, betting pools and the occasional opportunities for fancy dress.

But that was in the before times — before COVID, before parenthood (for me), and, if counterintuitively, mostly before moving to California where more than a few of our friends and neighbors make their living in the business of show.

Because I’ve written professionally about the intersection of film and television and spirituality throughout my career, some years I’ve had to watch all of the nominated films to write a series or a feature about them. It was an assignment. It’s rarely a chore, rather a task I’ve relished. And yet, it’s been quite a while since I’ve seen every nominated film — last year I was so uninvested in the proceedings I wasn’t even watching them live when Will Smith slapped Chris Rock.

This year, however, for whatever reason — a strong argument could be made that a rich and deep field of cinematic work released in 2022 is the prevailing one — I have seen nearly all the films, long and short, foreign and domestic, live action, animated, documentary and feature that have been nominated for an Academy Awards in this their 95th year.

So, tonight we have invited two of our most ardently cinephilic friends to join us for the Oscar Sunday sacraments of watching the Red Carpet, live tweeting a running commentary, shouting at the television screen when our nominee loses, hooting when they win, tearing up at the In Memoriam montage, and getting verklempt during more than a few acceptance speeches, while downing Indian food and sparkling mango mojitos (virgin for me.) I may also have gotten sparkly helium balloons for the living room ceiling.

** SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD ** ** SPOILER ALERTS AHEAD **

One of the last of the nominated films I watched, after scouring the web for it for months, was Living, the 2022 remake of Akira Kurosawa’s 1952 film Ikiru, for which one of my most favorite actors, the always wonderful Bill Nighy, has been nominated in the Best Actor category for his performance that is, to my eye, the best of his already lengthy, august career.

It is a quiet performance in a quiet, understated, thoroughly British film. And Nighy, 73, is nothing short of virtuoso in his portrayal of the taciturn mid-level bureaucratic civil servant, Mr. Williams. There is so much nuance and depth in Nighy’s embodiment of this seemingly unremarkable, languorous widower so lean of expression that he visibly startles his coworkers when he smiles or speaks above a whispered rumble.

Williams is the walking dead. “Mr. Zombie,” is the affectionately cruel nickname bestowed on him by a junior secretary in his public works office, Miss Harris (Aimee Lou Wood), who becomes an unlikely confidante. Grief and the grind of a life of service on paper (literally) that he feels has helped actually no one, has worn his soul to a whisp. He is dying, the doctors tell him, but he hasn’t been alive for quite a while.

Like so many of the nominated films this year, Living seems to ask the question: How, then, shall we live? With all this grief, with all this anger, with the atrocities facing us or in our past? With all this rage, with all this privilege, with all this inequity? With all this self-loathing, with all of this pain and addiction and abuse, with all that we have done and left undone? With all the fear and with all the options and with all the regret and when we are surprised by joy?

How, then, shall we live in a world that is beautiful and terrible?

In Living, the answer comes in the form of choosing to do something instead of nothing — a small thing with great love. With only months (or is it weeks?) to live, Mr. Williams (like Ikiru’s Mr. Watanabe before him) shepherds a project through its many heretofore impassable bureaucratic hoops to build a playground in a depressed neighborhood of the city.

In the Oscar-nominated Living screenplay, adapted from the original Ikiru material by the Nobel laureate Kazuo Ishiguro, a mother’s group lobbies tirelessly to have a World War II bombing site remediated for use by neighborhood children until Williams takes up their cause and champions it. It’s the last thing he ever does.

“Should there come days when it is no longer clear to what end you are directing your daily efforts, when the sheer grind of it all threatens to reduce you to the kind of state in which I so long existed,” Williams writes in a note delivered posthumously to a young colleague in whom he sees a bit of himself. “I urge you then to recall our little playground, and the modest satisfaction that became our due upon its completion.”

The original Japanese film was itself inspired by another existing story — the 1886 novella by Leo Tolstoy, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, a dying magistrate whose life is “most simple and most ordinary and therefore most terrible.”

There isn’t a lot of overtly cheery fare on offer among the 2023 Oscar-nominated films, even in the Best Animated Feature category where I’m rooting for the heartbreaking-yet-life-affirmingly-whimsical Marcel the Shell with Shoes On over the similarly heartbreaking-but-life-affirming Guillermo del Toro’s Pinocchio.

It is, I’m sure, a sign of the times. We’ve all just been through and continue to live through so, so much.

Everything Everywhere All At Once, the awards season juggernaut that has 11 Oscar nominations and is the favorite to sweep pretty much every category for which it is a contender tonight, is a reflection of this so-muchness. In a multiverse of endless possibilities and endless opportunities to suffer or cause suffering, the film urges us to “be kind.” That, then, is how we shall live.

There is a call and response among the nominated films:

How, then, shall we live? Please be kind.

You see it in The Quiet Girl (probably my favorite film of last year), and in To Leslie, for which Marc Maron should have received an Oscar nomination for his emotionally-devastating and understated performance. We also see it in a cautionary-tale form in The Banshees of Inisherin, which I so wish I’d loved more as a whole, but which contains some of the year’s strongest performances. (If Barry Keoghan wins Best Supporting Actor this evening, I will ugly cry for at least seven minutes.)

Yesterday, I watched the Oscar-nominated documentary feature set among orphans and at-risk children in Ukraine, A House Made of Splinters, right after viewing Darren Aronofsky’s devastatingly beautiful The Whale and its most empathy-inducing performance by Brendan Fraser (who deserves to win even if I’m rooting for Nighy).

There’s a line in the film — a quote from a middle-school student’s essay about Moby Dick — that is oft repeated in The Whale:

“This book made me think about my own life.”

This Oscar Sunday, in a year laden with stories that might change us if we allow them to, we all could say, “This movie made me think about my own life.”

Now, how, then, shall we live?

Please, for the love of anything holy, be kind.

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Cathleen’s Heart Picks:
Who I’d Like to Win Even If It’s (Largely) Unlikely

BEST PICTURE:
Women Talking

BEST DIRECTOR:
This is where Sarah Polley’s name should be for Women Talking, but since it’s not, and Aronofsky also got snubbed for The Whale, I guess I’ll throw my support behind The Daniels for Everything Everywhere All At Once

BEST ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Michelle Yeoh, Everything Everywhere All At Once

BEST ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Bill Nighy, Living

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS
Hong Chau, The Whale

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR
Barry Keoghan, The Banshees of Inisherin

BEST ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Women Talking

BEST ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
Triangle of Sadness

BEST ANIMATED FEATURE
Marcel the Shell with Shoes On

BEST DOCUMENTARY FEATURE
All That Breathes

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE
The Quiet Girl

LIVE ACTION SHORT
An Irish Goodbye

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RELATED POSTS:

Sunday Stories: Cultivating Kindness

Sunday (on Thursday) Stories: The Quiet Girl

Birthday Ambivalence and Other Super Powers

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I’ve been humming this tune all week: “Being Alive,” the Bernadette Peter’s version

Somebody hold me too close
Somebody hurt me too deep
Somebody sit in my chair
And ruin my sleep
And make me aware of being alive
Being alive…

Somebody need me too much
Somebody know me too well
Somebody pull me up short
And put me through hell
And give me support
For being alive
Make me alive

Make me confused
Mock me with praise
Let me be used
Vary my days
But alone is alone
Not alive

Somebody crowd me with love
Somebody force me to care
Somebody make me come through
I’ll always be there
I’m frightened as you
To help us survive
Being alive, being alive
Being alive

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Let us live, as bravely and kindly as we can.

And please don’t forget, beloveds, that you haven’t met yet everyone you will love and you haven’t met yet everyone who will love you.

Much love from me and congratulations to all the winners (and losers) tonight,