Happy Hump Day, friends!
Awards SZN starts today!
A few coronavirus updates — apologies to anyone who would prefer alternatives to masks, but per The New York Times, face shields and masks with valves do NOT offer more protection. They might be more comfortable to you, but they put everyone around you at an increased risk based on how they let large plumes of air particles escape from your own breathing.
Meanwhile, Derek Thompson at The Atlantic penned an essay with a provocative title but a sensible solution: “Mask Up and Shut Up.” The thesis boils down to highlighting research that shows COVID-19 is spreading most when we talk loudly … and barely spreading at all when we just don’t talk in public altogether. Here’s a key tl;dr graf:
“Talking less, more quietly, or not at all limits the manufacture of both large droplets and aerosols. When you breathe or whisper, your respiratory system doesn’t emit large droplets. Jimenez [a professor at the University of Colorado at Boulder, who studies disease transmission] told me that, compared with yelling, quiet talking reduces aerosols by a factor of five; being completely silent reduces them by a factor of about 50. That means talking quietly, rather than yelling, reduces the risk of viral transmission by a degree comparable to properly wearing a mask.”
And now that we’re exiting summer and entering fall, maybe it’s time to spruce up your mask game? CNN rounded up 18 of them that will give some of your money to charity!
Now, what you came for…
DAY 174: For Your Consideration (available on Hulu)
Somewhere in an alternate universe where the United States competently handled the coronavirus, I would have been sending this newsletter from Newark airport and be almost taking off for Italy to attend the Venice Film Festival, the unofficial kick-off of “awards season.” (Maybe next year!) I’ve tried to deprogram myself of this urge to turn evaluation of artistic merit into a cage-match for Oscar glory, but it seems like there’s a switch that flips around this time every year that turns critics into awards pundits. There are few movies themselves that have dared name and shame this phenomena, and none as successfully as Christopher Guest’s satirical comedy For Your Consideration.
More than any Guest film, this one homes in on a single member of the vast ensemble and elevates their storyline. Here, that’s the dastardly named Marilyn Hack (Catherine O’Hara doing a proto-Moira Rose performance), a dependable actress who upends the production of family drama Home for Purim with the murmurs of Oscar buzz for her performance. The tiniest sparks of an Internet rumor become a blaze that eventually engulfs the film entirely as the cast and crew begin to adjust their ambitions and expectations for what they can achieve. For Your Consideration, with blistering humor, illustrates just how an obsession for the rewards of art seeps into the process of making it — and ultimately warps the entire process.
This is Christopher Guest at his most acerbic and prosaic. He pulls a clever and quietly devastating narrative trick by redirecting the pity we feel for Marilyn and the menagerie around her from comedy into tragedy. We laugh at her exaggerated transformation with blinding Botox and eye-popping cleavage to capture more media attention in her awards hobnobbing only to see her ploy for recognition assume a truly pathetic dimension. Meanwhile, all around her, the trademark Christopher Guest absurdity seems rather … normal. After all, this is a town whose default mode is to blissfully ignore the disconnect between what they say and how they act!
“[Awards are] the backbone of the industry,” declares a makeup artist when Marilyn’s Oscar buzz is in its infancy. It’s a claim to which one of her co-stars replies, “An industry noted for not having a backbone!” As easy as it is to lose ourselves in the thrill of the Oscar race (I won’t deny that Parasite winning last year was a lot of fun!), it’s good to have something like For Your Consideration to wittily remind us that the films themselves come first. All other recognition is just gravy.
Be good to yourselves and to each other,
Marshall