The Oscars are a funny thing sometimes. Well, every year, I guess. Something’s always snubbed in place of something less deserving.
Take this year’s 95th Academy Awards, celebrating the films of 2022. Damien Chazelle’s fifth feature, the absolute hot mess that is BABYLON, snubbed for a Best Picture nomination, and forced to look on while Baz Lurpak’s visual diarrhoea ELVIS and James Cameron’s sludgy AVATAR: THE WAY OF WATER got nods in that category.
That one sequence in ELVIS where the jumpsuited Big-E first plays Vegas showed the skills of a master director, but it displayed a certain amount of control that was missing from the rest of the picture. The rest of Luhrmann’s film was full of Tom Hanks’ dodgy-sounding Colonel Tom Parker narrating from a casino afterlife in what looked like the VFX equivalent of a Life Insurance TV commercial, while we were subjected by shot after shot of the camera entering Austin Butler’s eyeball before exiting his diamond-encrusted oesophagus while he vomited up cheeseburgers. Or something.
And James Cameron’s long-awaited AVATAR sequel – that nobody was actually waiting for – arrived on our screens just to show us how much VFX work has plateaued into mediocrity over the last decade. Even if you ignored the video game cut-screen aesthetics of the visuals, you were left with a soap opera-heavy narrative that was such a struggle to get through, we had to cut in half and watch it over two nights. And, unbelievably, this is now one of the highest grossing films of all time, proving that that metric is worthless when not adjusted for inflation…
In comparison, BABYLON hit cinemas relatively swiftly, in and out, with little fanfare. I saw a preview screening here in Auckland, to a fairly big crowd, and I loved it. Is it my favourite Chazelle film so far? Nope, definitely not. I’d put WHIPLASH, FIRST MAN and LA LA LAND ahead of it, and only his film school thesis film GUY AND MADELINE ON A PARK BENCH (notable only for the sound of Justin Hurwitz hitting the ground running with a brilliant musical score) behind it.
Yet, it’s still a far stronger film than Luhrmann’s or Cameron’s.
I wondered whether Hollywood had rallied against BABYLON because of its ‘here’s the history of cinema and here’s this very film right here with all these other classics’ finale, but Hollywood usually laps that shit up. In fact, a Hollywood film about Hollywood itself is usually a sure-fire way to get the Academy voting for you.
Chazelle’s film isn’t perfect, but it’s thoroughly entertaining with a gloriously melancholic streak that pervades throughout, and Justin Hurwitz’s balls-to-the-wall soundtrack score perfectly echoes this. When I first heard those two or three main themes on the score, I immediately thought he had just recycled some of his themes from LA LA LAND, and while they do sound similarly childlike, I do admit that there’s more going on in them than you first suspect. The whole oomph of the score reminded me a great deal of the instrumentation and arrangement on Ben Fold Five’s Steven’s Last Night In Townfrom WHATEVER AND EVER AMEN, which aims for a similarly raucous big band blowout style. Despite most of the soundtrack sticking to a single brief – old-sounding music with a contemporary beat – the track Toad even sounds like something Muse would put out, and Blockhouse sounds like something Nick Nightingale would play at the ceremony in EYES WIDE SHUT.
I’m spinning a limited edition expanded pressing of the soundtrack with an insert of the cover art signed by Justin Hurwitz, which I was able to snag with the help of a fellow soundtrack lover.
Hidden Gem: Champagne
Vinyl Stylus 