Adrien Brody and Benicio del Toro in The French Dispatch.
Adrien Brody, arguably the greatest actor of his generation, has not been nominated for an Oscar since becoming the youngest winner to win for best actor, in 2003, aged 29. Are the Oscars broken? By Greg Bruce
One of the most brilliant movies of 2021, The French Dispatch is broken into four largely self-contained stories, the second and best of which, The Concrete Masterpiece, stars Adrien Brody (along with Lea Seydoux, Tilda Swinton and Benicio del Toro, all of whom are excellent). While watching The Concrete Masterpiece, I leaned over to my wife and said, "This is the best movie I've ever seen." I didn't still feel that way at the end of the film, but I nevertheless found it shocking (not shocking) to see The French Dispatch was nominated for zero Academy Awards.
To say awards are confounding and stupid and riven by unjustified beliefs, prejudices and personal hatreds is to say only that they are judged by humans. Nevertheless, we should continue to say it because humans have the potential to improve.
Awards are confounding and stupid and riven by unjustified beliefs, prejudices and personal hatreds. I've just been reading over the many, many lists of this year's Oscar snubs and surprises and, because they're all so long and there are so many of them, and because this happens every year, the only logical conclusion is that there are no surprises. The Oscars might give the impression of being a meritocracy but in fact they're heavily influenced by expensive marketing campaigns, personal relationships, nefarious tactics and open lobbying. As in American politics, as in life, money has an outsized influence on one's chances of success.
In The French Dispatch, Brody is an art dealer who makes a killing representing del Toro's brilliant but imprisoned painter. In one scene, Brody's character explains to his colleagues why del Toro's art is so good.
"You see the girl in it?"
"No."
"Trust me. She's there."
He takes them to a filing cabinet, pulls out a piece of folded paper and says: "One way to tell if a modern artist actually knows what he's doing is to get him to paint you a horse or a flower or a sinking battleship, or something that's actually supposed to look like the thing that it's actually supposed to look like. Can he do it?"
He unfolds the piece of paper and holds it up for them: "Look at this. Drawn in 45 seconds right in front of me with a burnt matchstick."
"A perfect sparrow!" one of his colleagues says, awestruck.
The idea the three men are expressing is that the true measure of one's artistic talent is the ability to depict life accurately in one's art. They are unimpressed by the abstract masterwork, unable to appreciate its brilliance, but can readily see the genius in a hastily scratched bird.
When Brody won his only Academy Award, in 2003, for The Pianist, it was for playing someone based on a real-life character, and his performance had therefore necessarily been designed for believability. By contrast, his character in The French Dispatch, like most of the characters in the movie, is deeply unbelievable. Wes Anderson's heavily stylised cinematic world, with its intricate choreography, couldn't be further from the mess and chaos of the everyday world. But it still has the power to move us: to make us laugh, think and care. The Academy Awards? Not so much.