Lucy Nichols’ take on Hollywood’s season of self-indulgence

It’s that time of year again. While the rest of us trudge to work and gear up to freeze on cold, winter demonstrations and picket lines, the faraway land of Hollywood decks itself in glitz and glam. It is ‘awards season’. Here, the whole world is invited to watch as people with more wealth than we will likely ever see in our lives pat themselves on the back for creating the best (or highest grossing) art.

As US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) wage war on ordinary Americans, and Trump threatens to overthrow the already shaky world order, the stars of film, TV, and music prepare humble acceptance speeches and magnanimous losing faces.

There is no doubt that many awards shows will be peppered with anti-ICE, anti-Trump and maybe even pro-Palestine sentiment. But with the Golden Globes offering guests goodie bags worth $1 million, it is hard to find the heart to care about awards season in the face of all of that is going on around us.

However, understanding the dominant culture is arguably rather important. We can make some, somewhat cautious, conclusions from the films that are expected to do best this year.

Marty Supreme has already begun winning awards, with lead actor Timothée Chalamet taking home a Golden Globe and Critic’s Choice Award (usually a good predictor for the Oscars). Marty Supreme, from Josh Safdie, is a fast-paced whirlwind about the working-class Jewish experience in New York (and table tennis). The main characters are all working-class Jews coming to terms with a new world after the Holocaust: a particularly poignant scene with a Hungarian Holocaust survivor comes to mind. The film depicts an instability faced by Jewish, immigrant, and black working-class Americans in post-war America.

Sinners, from Ryan Coogler, is also tipped to win big this year having already broken the record for most Academy Award nominations. More than just a musical about vampires, this film starring Michael B. Jordan is about African American in 1930s Mississippi, the height of the Great Depression and Jim Crow. It is a horror film, arguably ripe for political analysis.

Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another, starring Leonardo DiCaprio, is another contender. This film is about Bob, a revolutionary, and his comrades. They form an armed activist cell seeking to take on border patrols in an increasingly right-wing America.

Other films expected to do well include Frankenstein, Wicked: For Good, Bugonia and Hamnet. Every one of these films subverts traditional storytelling and favours the underdog, the underclass, the subaltern.

This isn’t to say Hollywood has taken a turn left, or that there is any serious resistance to the status quo in any of these films. Yet they can be seen as a reflection of what is popular now. People are less interested in the story of a hero, or of capitalistic rises to wealth and power.

The popular films are ones that ordinary people can relate to in some way, and as the world around us becomes more unstable, perhaps watching an underdog taking on a corrupt system is more attractive. Also to note is that many of the films tipped to do well delve into the supernatural and the obscure, as if realism doesn’t offer people the escapism they need.