After a grueling two-week festival of challenging international cinema, Los Angeles voters have breathed a collective sigh of relief upon discovering that this year's premier Spanish drama requires absolutely no active interpretation.
To observe the annual migration of the Cannes laureate to the Dolby Theatre is to witness a profound and tragic flattening of the cinematic form; one watches the rigorous, unyielding asceticism that once defined the Croisette be systematically sanded down into something palatable for a voting body that requires its emotional devastation to be spoon-fed between commercial breaks. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences announced early Tuesday that the Spanish festival darling 'La Bola Negra' has officially cleared the organization's rigorous legibility hurdles, confirming that Javier Bardem’s central performance contains the exact ratio of whispered monologues to visible teardrops necessary for American audiences to register that a tragedy has occurred.
It is an entirely predictable degradation of the medium, one wherein the quiet, creeping existential dread cultivated by European auteurs is hastily repackaged as triumph-of-the-human-spirit fodder for voters who still quietly believe subtitles are a form of punishment. The Academy’s preliminary assessment noted that while the film’s opening forty minutes briefly flirt with the kind of unresolved spatial tension that might have thrilled Pedro Costa during the grueling, shadow-drenched shoot of Colossal Youth, the narrative mercifully course-corrects; Bardem is soon placed squarely in the center of a warmly lit, softly focused dining room, where he proceeds to explicitly state his internal motivations in a manner that requires absolutely no cognitive effort from the viewer to parse.
We were initially terrified that the director might ask the audience to sit with an unresolved moral ambiguity for more than forty seconds, but thankfully, Javier delivers a monologue in the third act that explicitly tells us exactly how sad we should feel.
This same disheartening calculus is currently being applied to the American festival entry 'Club Kid', which has vaulted to the top of the Oscar prognosticators’ lists entirely on the strength of Scarlett Johansson executing a textbook, high-decibel hallway confrontation. It is a performance of staggering, desperate transparency; Johansson throws herself into the film's second act with a performative vulnerability that owes significantly less to the layered, tragicomical social architecture of Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, and rather more to the frantic, breathless exposition dumps that characterize the narrative pacing of Jon Turteltaub’s National Treasure: Book of Secrets. The Academy, predictably, is said to be enraptured by her willingness to shatter a prop glass against a wall, viewing this basic kinetic action as the absolute zenith of the actor’s craft.
One must also consider the utterly pedestrian deployment of the films' respective scores, which feature swelling, manipulative orchestrations that rise precisely when the Academy voter might otherwise become confused about how to feel. In 'La Bola Negra', the moment Bardem's character finally confronts his estranged brother is underscored by a crescendo of string instruments so aggressively on-the-nose that it functionally serves as a laugh track for human suffering. It is a far cry from the terrifying, weaponized silences of the mid-century avant-garde; it is, instead, an auditory safety blanket, ensuring that no member of the voting bloc is left alone with their own thoughts for even a fraction of a second.
Thus, the ritual continues, a sterile and entirely predictable coronation of the adequately competent over the genuinely challenging. As 'La Bola Negra' and 'Club Kid' begin their respective, multimillion-dollar tramps through the Los Angeles cocktail circuit, one cannot help but mourn the films they might have been, before they were meticulously reverse-engineered to appease an electorate whose primary cultural achievement is remembering to pay their guild dues on time. We will watch Bardem and Johansson collect their gilded statuettes, we will listen to their breathy, practiced speeches about the transformative power of storytelling, and we will collectively ignore the fact that we are celebrating nothing more profound than the successful execution of an emotional ransom note.