Oscar Movies May Have a New Role: Political Therapy

While attending an awards season event recently, I found myself hearing a sonnet familiar to any of us who have toiled on the Oscar circuit.

“I wish it was over already,” the person said. And though that’s a slightly strange thing to say in October — like bemoaning how the oral surgeon hasn’t finished the implant at the first sign of a toothache — I understand the impulse. The endless schmoozing, standing, snacking, sitting and speechifying — and, oh yes, watching good movies — can seem like a lot when all we want to do is go to our beds, or anywhere no one has ever spoken the phrase “qualifying run.”

This year, the hoopla can seem especially overwhelming. Climate regulations are being destructed, diversity programs are being reducted, innocent people are being abducted, AI systems are being inducted, and, on top of that, nuclear tests are now being conducted. Go to an awards event? I’d rather doomscroll and scream.

This is not going to be one of those columns that tells you the importance of culture, how movies make you feel the humanity that can be lost elsewhere, how cinema is a “mirror” held up to society. You’ve been to a Cannes premiere, or felt jealousy for someone who has. That’s thin slop.

The truth is, movies, even awards ones, can seem like a very out-of-step activity at times like these, a guilt-inducing diversion from real-world problems or a behavior that feels like it lacks much relevance at all. But watching the array of contenders at various screenings and fall film festivals over the past number of weeks, I did perceive something notable: just how powerfully, if also sometimes stealthily, the movies are engaging with these issues. And how helpful that engagement can be.

As The Hollywood Reporter‘s awards coverage gets going — in these pages and the pages of stand-alone special issues — it’s a point that bears remembering: In many ways, what we’re honoring with these modern Oscar campaigns is a reckoning, is the effectiveness of these movies in sorting through the disbelieving chaos raging through our minds.

How Nuremberg and Wicked: For Good warn against the runaway consequences of an imperious leader.

How Sinners shows what happens when we banish the other.

How Frankenstein demonstrates the downside of a science untempered by humanity.

How One Battle After Another grapples with the best ways to wage a revolution.

How The Lost Bus dramatizes the risks of climate neglect.

How A House of Dynamite showcases the dangers of nuclear profligacy.

This year, that engagement has already started to bubble up with Dynamite, which in just a few short weeks of release has already garnered an internal Pentagon memo criticizing its accuracy, a robust op-ed response from Massachusetts Sen. Ed Markey and a retort from director KathrynBigelow, to my colleague David Canfield, that “I just statethe truth.”

But by engagement, I don’t just mean political controversy off the movies, though there is sure to be a lot of that, with Dynamite and others. I mean new ways of thinking about a subject. I struggled to internalize the implications of a scrapped wind farm project. Then I saw The Lost Bus in a giant Toronto theater, and it became clear: It’s a dad trapped with two dozen kids who are not his own as fires close in while he tries to figure out what to tell them. Anyone who has watched Nuremberg or One Battle After Another after attending a No Kings rally will feel the same reckoning.

And we’re lucky. The best movies about, say, the Vietnam War, like Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket, came out years after it ended. But in the midst of so much strife, we have a host of movies that we can turn to for understanding, for comfort, for righteous upset, for just a good way to engage with the topic outside of our own heads.

A study published in Nature in September found that “film therapy can effectively improve a variety of mental health problems, such as anxiety and depression.” And while I don’t know that sitting through a Saturday screening at the DGA will necessarily replace our therapists, compared to falling for the latest rage bait, it’s practically a weekend at Ranch Malibu.

Last year’s Oscar season began with the hope for a new White House day, only to be jarringly interrupted by a dramatic election result and subsequent daze in many of us over how any of these movies, or even culture at large, could address the reality that had landed on us.

This season hits differently. It comes after a year of absorbing those blows, with time to know what we need and how we want to talk about our anxiety. None of the movies will offer solutions for our current quagmire, and I can’t in good conscience say the majority of them will make us feel a whole lot better. But like a worthy therapist, they just might make us feel a little less alone.

This story appeared in the Nov. 5 issue of The Hollywood Reporter magazine. Click here to subscribe.