![]() ![]() ![]() “The Holdovers” is also very funny when it’s not heartbreaking, and like “American Fiction,” delves into the tricky navigation of race, class and what it means to distance yourself from who you used to be. As a girl raised in a majority-Black city who felt she had to fit into a racial box created both within and outside of her community, it felt wickedly familiar and very funny. In a liquor fueled snit-fit, he creates the most broadly sketched, urban trope-ridden pile of garbage imaginable, and when it winds up selling for an absurd amount of cash, Monk has to confront both his and the public’s relationship to Blackness and what that actually means. ![]() Monk (an excellent, droll Jeffrey Wright) is a pompous yet not prolific writer whose novels are not stereotypically “Black” enough to sell. We have a lot of those here, me included. “American Fiction,” though set in Los Angeles and New England, was the most Baltimore-adjacent to me because of the high number of bougie Black people. Sometimes that hope is hard to find, but I have to believe it’s there, even in these stories about race, gender and identity, the concepts of home and exploration, and the most sinister case of cinematic NIMBYism I’ve ever seen. Though I liked some more than others, I found thematic threads in each that reflect the difficult but still strangely hopeful space we find ourselves in right now, around the world and here in Baltimore. Become one.īut through the power of caffeine and nap breaks, I powered through. The Baltimore Banner thanks its sponsors. I want to say the word that describes most of the nominees is “heavy” - what with the murder inquest, atomic bomb, Nazis and racially motivated theft and slaughter. I spent the greater part of this week glued to my couch for a marathon best-picture viewing, which did not make for the most carefree movie binge. Kramer said he’s excited about the just-released slate of Academy Award presenters (which includes Zendaya, Ariana Grande and Al Pacino) and the continued hosting of Jimmy Kimmel, “who knows how to do live TV beautifully.” He’s also happy and that the nominated films honor big-budget blockbusters like “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” small, quiet indies like “Past Lives,” and international films like “The Zone of Interest” and “Anatomy of A Fall.” “It’s likely the return to a great public interest in the movies.” There’s such a wide range of nominees, such a diverse slate of nominees,” said Bill Kramer, Timonium native and CEO of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences. For this year’s Oscars, I decided to write about common themes among the 10 best picture nominees that relate to our fair city and environs, but then I found out we have an even more direct link: the guy running the show. My editor and I have a running joke that no matter what happens in the news, from politics to pop culture, I can figure out a way to make it about Baltimore. ![]()
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