Suzanne Harrington: The Oscars makes film critics of us all

Suzanne Harrington at home in Brighton. Pic: Andrew Dunsmore

The great thing about the Oscars is not the actual Oscars — rich people on red carpets, meh — but that in its build-up, it makes film critics of us all. 

In the dead of winter, what else are we going to do but head out on a freezing Monday night to see Pamela Anderson give the performance of her life in The Last Showgirl? 

Even if you don’t adore Pammy — and perhaps such curmudgeons really do exist — go for Jamie Lee Curtis’s beetroot fake tan and silver lipstick. Breathtaking.

Marvel at Isabella Rossellini’s nun in Conclave, surely a cinematic nod to Siobhan McSweeney’s Sister Michael from Derry Girls, Rossellini’s eye-rolls and icy sarcasm barely contained. 

Discover on Wikipedia Siobhan McSweeney went to the same school as you, and wish she were up for an Oscar too. 

Gnash your teeth that the Kneecap film, despite being shortlisted, wasn’t nominated.

Discover to your astonishment you love every second of A Complete Unknown, despite your complete disinterest in Bob Dylan, having been frogmarched/cajoled into the cinema. 

Hope that Mikey Madison wins everything for her ferocious, jubilant turn as Anora in Sean Baker’s answer to what Pretty Woman might have really looked like. 

Wonder if you’ll need to bring sandwiches and a flask of tea to get you through The Brutalist. Worry about getting the cinema seat equivalent of bed sores.

And what’s this? A French-made musical in the Spanish language set in Mexico but filmed in Paris, starring no Mexicans, about a deadly cartel boss who hires a lawyer to help him disappear so that he can undergo gender affirmation surgery and become a woman called Emilia Perez? 13 Oscar nominations, you say? And on Netflix? Well, plump the cushions and pop the popcorn.

And then sit back and watch in amazement. Not just at the far-fetched, Almodovar-hued, preposterous car-crash of a movie that is massively entertaining if you suspend every shred of disbelief, including the decision to nominate it for 13 Oscars, but the ensuing PR car crash when old tweets of its main performer are dug up.

Turns out its trans star, herself a member of a marginalised group, had been marginalising other marginalised groups on Twitter — slagging off George Floyd, Islam, and hilariously, Oscars’ diversity. 

Audiences become deafened by the noise of people hastily distancing themselves, and the clunk of rolling PR heads who had not thought to deep-clean their leading lady’s old Twitter feed. Yikes.

All of which shrinks to micro-trivia alongside Mohammad Rasoulof’s The Seed of the Sacred Fig. The bravest director in the world — he filmed in secret, before being forced to flee Iran to avoid imprisonment and flogging — has made a family drama about the bravest girls in the world, the young Iranians who risk violence and death as they peacefully protest for freedom. 

The film, claustrophobic and nuanced, is intercut with real phone footage from Tehran, shocking and visceral, of the Woman, Life, Freedom movement. 

In terms of urgent cultural context, of harnessing the power of film to highlight what’s actually happening rather than just tell a pretty story, it’s this year’s winner. No contest.