Every time The Academy releases the nominees for the Oscars, invariably, lists are made to highlight the surprises and snubs. Over the last decade, one distribution studio has managed to consistently expand its footprint in the list of snubs compared to the ones that make the grade.
I am of course talking about A24, a studio whose films have come to be classified as both unique and tempered to yield to a certain wokeness. This year, the most notable presence from a A24 film at the Oscars is Denzel Washington’s best-acting nomination for The Tragedy of Macbeth – a casting choice that at least on paper, looks like a coup. Except it is a film now associated with a company name and an insignia that has, in recent years, come to symbolise quality, eclecticism, and maybe even the first place good movies go to survive. Incredibly, it all started with eight people and a plan to take unfancied cinema to people around the world.
To A24, an across-the-board Oscar snub must come with a sense of déjà vu, but in a year where a Marvel film was almost hype-lifted into Oscar territory, it is telling that understated indie gems that the studio continues to champion have not even been spoken of.
Founded in 2012, as a distribution company by David Fenkel, John Hodges, and Daniel Ketz, the small-time firm helped platform unheralded, even unheard of films like The Bling Ring and Spring Breakers in its formative years.
In 2015, A24 globally arrived in the most farcically declarative of ways with the Best Picture Oscar win of Moonlight at the Academy Awards. From documentaries like Amy to horror classics like Hereditary, the studio has since experimented with genre and categories, not to mention support the kind of cinema usually sidelined as 'acquired taste.' But even though the company has consistently helped independent and experimental cinema flourish under the aegis of big-studio overlords, its inability to register at the Academy Awards has turned into a bit of a story itself.
Hollywood has thankfully always had studios like Focus and Searchlight to support off-the-cuff films that resist the mainstream’s creative impositions that are as difficult to market as they are to make. This process has only become messier and more obstinate for auteurs and filmmakers wanting to make experimental cinema with the near global takeover by money-minting IPs like superheroes and the concept of binge-watching. It has come to a point where a slightly temperamental, broody portrayal of superheroes is considered the new ‘indie’ – not for what it does, but what it avoids. It is slick and masterly to create the noise first, and nuance later. But to the lovers of a form of cinema that seeks not just the universal good v evil themes but also the grey areas of life in between, bureaucratisation of art must sound as alarming as it sounds instinctively uninspiring.
A24’s slate of films in 2022 is ranged from the rewriting of history with The Green Knight, to the almost nauseating but disarming brilliance of a nubile Red Rocket, with the familiar, lightly poignant excellence of a The Humans, and a film in which even Joaquin Phoenix is overshadowed by a kid – C’mon C’mon. If you even google Oscar and snub together, you are likely to find several A24 films, overlooked over the years for one reason or the other.
Both Good Time and Uncut Gems were films made with actors cast against type at ungainly points in their careers. Robert Pattinson was a globally recognised heartthrob but his acting was associated with one of the most juvenile franchises to have existed. Adam Sandler, on the other hand, no one has been able to figure till date. Breathlessly stunning, both roles were shattering performances that deserved more. Slice-of-hell dramas with no real ‘message’ or moral catharsis to offer, these are the kind of films that though brilliant, cannot be framed for effect, the way most Academy acknowledged films are. The same can be said of Red Rocket, about a man who is ethically, morally irredeemable in a film that does not even want to try. It is the kind of film that not many studio execs would pass on, except for an A24 of course.
In an interview with GQ after Good Time, Pattinson said that it was ‘crazy’ that a distribution company had earned a reputation for not just saving but nurturing cinema that most others would pass on. It is almost strange then that A24’s importance, or the importance of methodology, and at times gut instinct, can be identified by the number of snubs it receives.
There is now even an A24-type film, a distinct aura around cinema created by a distribution company wanting to support not just the big-hitters but the wildest swings. The snubs hurt, of course, because the Oscars, their history pre-dates any attempt to reconsider cinema’s heritage and future. But even in these snubs, in the shadow of big-studio wars, the sight of a Phoenix, a Washington or an unknown Simon Rex sharing the same virtual sofa of cinematic cache feels oddly reassuring for the future. It is how cinema is supposed to be.
Oscars 2022 will take place on 28 March.
Manik Sharma writes on art and culture, cinema, books, and everything in between.
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