Oscars

I have watched every film nominated for Best Picture. Thank you, thank you, I accept the plaudits.

People are saying it's a great year, which it may be. I don't think any of the ten nominated films are bad or undeserving. Equally, the way it's going, I feel like I might disagree with pretty much every major award at the Oscars (apart from Davine-Joy Randolph, who will win and should win). Though I may not.

Here is a ranking. It is not exactly least favourite to favourite, but some charting of least enjoyed vs a combination of my own highest expectations and the extent to which it has been justly or unjustly venerated or pilloried ... it will include the 10 Best Picture nominated films and the five others I've seen which were around and about being nominated for things ...

Past Lives. Theoretically right up my street, but I felt no strong emotions when watching it. Not a patch on some of the films it was favourably compared to, for me.

Napoleon. Kind of fun, but probably a fair bit sillier than everything else here.

Rustin. Enjoyed this very much, and the central performance is great, but it is a little formulaic.

Oppenheimer. I thought Oppenheimer was great, but it's going to win everything, right? So I place it here. I think it has more obvious flaws than most of the other films. Lots of Brits and Americans doing weird European accents. The first half-hour's dialogue bring a real whistlestop tour of mild clunkiness. The last hour being about something that it is really determined you find as interesting as the second hour, even if it's not. But it has more than enough that is great to overcome that. Though if Downey wins and it wins Best Picture, and Cillian doesn't, that'll be a madness. He makes the film great. 

Barbie. Fun, clever, but felt a bit discombobulated by it, really.

Nyad. The best acting performance I saw was Annette Bening in this. She should win Best Actress. The film is good. The story is a bit dodgy, apparently, which is probably why the film is not up for more.

The rest of them were all excellent, really ...

All of Us Strangers. As with Past Lives, I was less moved while watching than i thought i'd be, but then certain elements of it really started to hit home later. 

Poor Things. Just a load of fun people fucking about and having the time of their lives on a superbly designed film. A hoot. Here, the phony accents are the making of the film, unlike with Oppenheimer.

May December. Some major skills and dark humour in this.

Anatomy of a Fall

The Holdovers. If anything, I thought I would love this a tiny, tiny, tiny bit more. Maybe I was expecting a fairytale or gut-wrenching ending. The ending is right for the film, but it's quite low key.

American Fiction. Loved this. Strikes me that Jeffrey Wright and Paul Giamatti are pretty similar in status. Just absolutely guarantees of quality, mainly support acts, but can be great leads whenever the part is right. If either of them takes Best Actor from Murphy, think i'd slightly prefer it was Wright.

Killers of the Flower Moon. De Niro should win Best Supporting Actor. Like, obviously. Why is the fact someone who was once considered the Greatest Film Actor of All Time has given his best, most thrilling, commanding, memorable performance for 30 years not more of a thing compared to the fact that, wow, Robert Downey Jr has done making billions of dollars in technicolor and also can act ok  in black and white ... who knew ... anyway, i think this film has a lot that is great about it, and little that isn't ... and they do treat Scorsese like shit at the Oscars, they really do.

The Zone of Interest

Maestro. I'm making Maestro my Number 1, because I was genuinely moved by it, it'll win nothing, and loads of people seem to hate it and be going all in on Bradley Cooper being a charlatan and a dick, whereas in fact he's directed excellently and acted excellently.

Poem (22): Swans

 

Swans

It’s such a filthy river where

the shopping trolleys dive then die in vain,

a seasonless reminder that

the bed’s been shat, the ooze attacks

the nose, the lack attacks the eyeballs

where I used to push you to the

outlet centre and you’d hoot - in the

dark pissy pass between the bins that overflow

with small town deeds undone

beneath the railway - you still do, to wit, to woo,

and I’m still required

with stern and stifled laugh

to steer you off the lightning cycle path -

 

you name the pylon by the depot

the Eiffel tower … why not, this slimy

Seine is all we’ve got.

 

Between the needles and the beer cans,

you saw, last Saturday, a single family of swans,

two parents and three chicks, hard to spot

below the zealot banks of nettles

and complacent weeds, you made me stop

and we discussed their history, whether perhaps

they were the poorer cousins of some

Canterbury congregation or perhaps republicans in exile,

distrusted of Tunbridge Wells.

 

It’s not swan country round here, I said,

it’s duckling country,

it’s an ugly duckling country.

Poem (21): I had a dream that I was not free

 I had a dream that I was not free

The helicopter I can see through wintered windows

buzzes like a bat above allotments

spending their changeless days spying on

the notoriously-near suburban twin tube stations,

which I’d join with icy tape in the dark blue shock of morning.

 

Every night, modern with disaster, the pride of the skies

clucks sudden and inevitable on its singular target

– which is me, curious and naïve - at a precise forty-five degree.

Move, boy, move, to the back room where you’ll be safe

with the black cat purring like a machine with no cogs.

 

Here it comes the smoking agent of bright night, all

features framed in childlike wonder, blinking over the newsagent

and the furniture showroom, pausing in kinship

with the crumbling cinema, bursting the bravest alien from

the sepia screen and spiralling to fill the frame of middle age,

 

clicked and cut like newsreel over the chimney

of Sydney and Sally playing their morning saxophones

viciously like a jazz lullaby, of Phillip the cameraman

crying his love to sleep, of Dennis the luminous drunk hitting his

pale children in the fragile explosive peace.

 

I had a dream that I was not free.

Poem (20): Pioneer

Pioneer

I flopped before Fosbury,
but stopped cos they threatened me
with infinite infamy.
Now history’s forgotten me.

Poem (19): The hose

 The hose

And after all that, it was me that left the hose

on overnight. I only meant to water that

new honeysuckle, as an afterthought at dusk.

They had to cancel my book tour, of course, for one

mistake that flooded every town. Non grata now.

Destroyer of civilizations, they’re calling me,

just for one small, albeit significant, brain lapse.

The honeysuckle won’t survive this dry summer.

Poem (18): Wrath

 Wrath

You sleep beneath a bivouac with nothing else

but tins of beans and worms of words like carbon, like

dioxide, sank into the bracken, listening for

the woken Kraken on your not-yet-broken back.

 

From somewhere near the cerebellum, ghosts of choirs

of fallen states sing resurrection vigils while

the wind spins mountains round the bend of history, till

your fears of futures unknown sink into the soil.

 

You call across another valley where was lost

a plan for boundaries, where was found a sound to dull

the shock explosion of aeonian progress, locked

and loaded in the flow of freedom and its will.

 

The right side of the loch is lapped in blood red swarms

of agitating midges, darkening flint and tints

of tingling scree – and now, you cannot rest to send

a message of remembrance to the enraged expanse.

One day more, one more day

Some thoughts and feelings about the Netflix 'One Day' series ... 

well, to start with, I'm a long-time sucker for a certain kind of slightly-indie time-jumping romance, from Before Sun... to Normal People to One Day.  Every now and then there's a romance that gets the po-faced indie men involved and proclaiming it's serious art, which helps make it a big deal. Surprised there aren't more of them, really ...

Back in 2009, I used to see women on the tube reading One Day, and eventually must have had some indication that it would be acceptable for me, a manly man, to also read it on the tube, so bought it.

I liked it very much. It pushed various buttons, was neat, funny, and sufficiently well written that, in the end, it made the second most probable plot resolution feel like a thunderbolt of despair from the outer galaxy.

A couple of years later, there was the fascinatingly doomed film. Doomed, at Square One, by casting one of the most famous, talented film stars in the world ... but also by being a film, rather than a TV show, which it should obviously have been instead. The fact of the film being the dampest of squibs rather sedated One Day as a cultural phenomenon. David Nicholls wrote some more good, but not culturally phenomenal, books, there were other zeitgeist romances, the world got a lot worse.

Finally, a decade and a half later, it's a good time to get One Day right. Which they've done. 15 years since the book, 36 years since events of the book begin. Although my own graduation ball in a beautiful courtyard on a perfect summer's night at a Scottish university was 13 years later (almost a whole generation), I remember immediately feeling when starting the book, and this TV series, that this was my world, my age. Edinburgh. The steps, the flats. Tramping up Arthurs Seat. Crappy 90s TV, crappy 90s haircuts. Outer London, inner London, weddings in the country. Are You There Moriarty? Phone calls, letters, compilation tapes.

Maybe the TV series is better than the book. I'm not going to read the book again to confirm or deny. But there are new possibilities, new angles. The leads are both excellent, offering fresh perspectives and contexts for their characters. Leo Woodall, who I've never see before, passes through many just-different-enough variations on pretty-boy 90s haircut, looks almost like various 90s heartthrobs, but surpasses the book's (and especially the film's) main weakness by really making you care about him and understand what Emma sees in Dexter. Dexter's never been a great character before, but here, he somehow is. Ambika Mod is just killer. I wonder if Anne Hathaway will watch it and say to herself "ay oop, i fooked that oop ..."

In the film, Rafe Spall, as the stopgap loser boyfriend Ian, was so much funnier, more endearing, more memorable, than the two leads, you wish the whole film was about him. In the TV series, all the supporting cast are great, but don't get in the way. Jonny Weldon, who I'd only know before from twitter parodies of an out-of-work actor, does a lovely job in that role,

What else makes the TV series better than the book? Well, the music ... some of it is quite obvious, which is fine, some if it (e.g the use of Nick Drake and Karen Dalton) is arguably a little anachronistic, which is forgivable, and, towards the end, it hits notes of specificity I just wasn't expecting, which made me feel, as the modern parlance goes, "seen". The Wild Ones. On and On. Get Me Away from Here I'm Dying. Three tracks from Bewilderbeast at the turn of the century! Up With People! Lilac Wine. And Olympian by Gene, mentioned by name, at the start of the climactic 13th episode, the most "if you know you know" musical moment I've ever ... known.

Even in 2009, One Day was a nostalgic work, but I was unprepared for the piercing algia of the nost this time around. 

No social media, no twitter, no facebook, nothing. There aren't even any e-mails sent in the whole series, I don't think. The introduction of mobiles is a feature of the story, of course, but that helps you cherish the absence of the rest. How much we've lost. There is no mention of the USA in the whole thing. There's a bit of American music, but only great American music. It made me feel so angry at myself. How did I get so consumed by US culture, by the US model of cultural criticism, by always looking west? The film is set in an era when Britain was large enough and Europe was close. God, I know I sound like a reactionary bore. I was as grateful as anyone for text messaging and e-mails saving me from awkward phone calls, But, yeah, we grew up and grew into adults in a very different age, and it's ok to miss it.

Anyway, what was One Day missing? A scene on the East Coast mainline.. Shorley Wall by Ooberman. One scene in Leeds. SFA. Hoopers Hooch. Caffreys. A day where they watch Neighbours and Home and Away twice each. But not much else. 

Poem (17): There's a man in black who's waiting at the gate

 This is another villanelle. I suppose it's about a man.

There's a man in black who's waiting at the gate

The man in black’s still standing at the gate.

You warned us he’d be there and he’s still there.

The demon you compelled us to create

 

was not identified until too late.

So many still can’t walk past the place where

the man in black’s still standing at the gate.

 

A doctrine of god’s love has turned to hate -

there’s not one with forgiveness left to spare

the demon you compelled us to create.

 

Oh, you, you’ve had your reckoning, your fate

is, of itself, agreeable and fair.

The man in black’s still standing at the gate,

 

though, waiting for the ones you’d separate

and celebrate, and order not to share

the demon you compelled us to create.

 

The narrative you’d nervelessly dictate

will never free the ones you did ensnare.

The man in black’s still standing at the gate -

the demon you compelled us to create.

Poem (16): Clearing up the mess, the mess

I'm not sure this is terribly good, but contains a couple of phrases that amuse me.

Clearing up the mess, the mess

I have come to love the gangsters of pitilessness -

with their courteous knives and their speechwriters

you met in a Clapham bar in 2004,

getting the titles and plots of films wrong

looking askance like you owed them a drink -

 

I have come to love the lights out of them

eventually, for what else is there to do -

as they sledgehammer printing presses

in the name of growth and utility,

after all, we were the ones who failed to practise penalty shoot outs -

 

yes, what else is there left on this rebounding earth

but to love their sternly empty lectures & inept grasp of history

since they were on their bike and entrepreneurial

and we were watching late night poker

while eating pistachios in the bath, and they advise us

 

as they recongeal more righteous and new than ever

to wrap ourselves in foil and buy a new kettle

for our rusty oligarch yachts for which we overpaid

because we were lazy fools

who were holding Britain back.

Poem (15): Last night I dreamed in colour

 

Last night I dreamed in colour

At school, they used to show us Pathé films

of the Hindenburg, or Donald Campbell 

in the Bluebird, and I would wonder from

how far away it’s sport to stare at death,

or whether they were testing our response

for nascent signals of psychopathy.

I’m still not sure what I was meant to feel

or whether I’ve evolved to greater depth

of understanding in the face of fire

and flash, of farce and fury as we trip

and totter backwards like stoned kids caught in

a bar fight, mesmerised by shards of glass

like milk-rich babies, seeing black and white,

just black and white with gentle shades of grey.

 

Last night I dreamed of Donald Campbell fast

and brave on Coniston, I saw his face,

I felt his breath, and now, we lift, we lift.

Poem (14): The bicycle

 

 

This was prompted, in a weird way, by Keats' To Autumn ...

The bicycle

Pens down; it’s funeral week. The walkers hew

a clear-sight track, straight through the wheat field, past

the footbridge which the summer stun-girl threw

her bike off, on the shortening squint-bright last

good day of August. Puddles brown the farm

car park where families scan the apple fayre

for ritual, while a distant smoke alarm

unsettles even the most debonair

of silver-haired consultants in retreat –

another apple falls to earth, to eat.

 

The woods don’t breathe for dens half-made, those spring

escapes to in-between world, long before

the purple sky rose like a flood chasing

a holed hulk off a dried-out mudflat’s floor,

to bathe a skate boy’s late girl in her choice

of dead ends. Quick commuters now reflect

they’d heard her pure and unaccepting voice

send echoes through the underpass, unwrecked,

as yet, unspoiled, as yet, by freeze and fall.

They know her naiad face, her siren call.

 

It’s funeral week. Dried flowers rack the rails

beside the road bridge. Trains crawl in, delayed

by on-line strays from loosely tied hay-bales,

the first free gales of winter’s ghost parade.

A nonplussed uncle sniffs the small-town drain

as soon as he steps to the taxi rank.

He stops. The town, the season, his again,

the open summer roads, the gods he’d thank.

The season, the quiet cries of her despair,

the town, the bicycle that went nowhere.

Poem (13): Aquarama

 Aquarama

When halfway through a somersault

in equidistant bliss,

he saw the concrete loom and smirk.

In choosing the abyss

that blinding day in media res,

he bent towards the mean.

Yet shame it was, and so remained,

to linger in between.

Poem (12): The killer whale in North Berwick

 

The killer whale in North Berwick

I remember a killer whale with luxury skin

doing clown tricks

near the pier at North Berwick

 

in 86,

the summer after Maradona,

we were chasing our mother

along the promenade

for cheap fish and chips and we saw

 

an orca in the water of the sea life centre,

the summer of the Edinburgh Commonwealth Games

and the lonely middle distance runners -

we were looping around East Lothian

for the most extravagant ice creams we could find.

 

Remember the ice creams? I asked my sister

last month at her 50th birthday.

The triple marshmallow deluxe oyster shell chocolate covered flake extraordinaire, with sprinkles?

Yes, I remember them, she said.

 

And the gannets on Bass Rock,

Seb Coe and Steve Cram

on the TV? I asked my other sister,

on her 46th birthday, last month.

 

Kind of, if you say so. I do remember the ice creams, she said.

 

And remember the killer whale? I asked my brother,

at his wife’s party last month,

as our creaking bones tried to keep up

with our children playing football.

 

The what? He said. The what? In the sea?

 

No, not in the sea, in a pool near the pier.

A killer whale, with a holiday smile,

doing tricks for the kids on warm and windy summer days,

 

the August after Chernobyl, on

the southern coast of the Firth of Forth,

where we stole golf balls from the rough

and staged cricket matches in corridors

for our mother’s horrified Morningside friends

who’d lent her the seafront flat.

 

There was no killer whale, he said, don’t be silly,

you’re confusing yourself with the kid from Free Willy.

 

There was, there was.

But my sisters agreed with my brother that

there was no killer whale, nor even dolphins.

Maybe seals, definitely gannets, we remember the ice-creams.

 

I asked our mother last month,

as she watched her

children and grandchildren

kicking lumps out of each in slow motion

on a makeshift football pitch,

at the end of the summer of fear and reconvention,

there was a killer whale wasn’t there?

A killer whale in North Berwick,

that transitional summer of 86?

 

Oh yes, she said, of course there was.

He was there for the ice cream, he leapt with contempt,

slid without fear out of the pool and across the pier

saying what happened to your humanity

your prisons cannot contain me

I’m returning to this here North Sea,

believe in me now or I will be

forever gone from your memory.

 

Yes, that’s the one, I said. I thought so.

Poem (11): True beauty

I wish i had an actual picture ...

True beauty

True beauty was

the contents of the tray I spilled

which fell

and smashed upon the marble hall

outside the lift

on the 6th floor

of the 700-room 5-star hotel

I worked room service

in 1996.

 

True beauty as

I disappeared

in shame and shade,

just to return

some three hours later, past midnight,

see the scene was just the same,

the shattered glass,

the scattered chips and chops,

the wine-stained stone –

my masterpiece, my worth.

Poem (10): Shades of blue

 Shades of blue

He grew up on the blue line

between green spaces

and white trails,

joined jejune dots on tube maps

like Georges Seurat’s

childhood nightmares,

 

was impressed by twin impostors

standing stock still

through dark tunnels,

dreamed of driving to Cockfosters

in a steam train

made of money.

 

Watching rain drip down the windows

he saw Pollocks

in the background

of the Mondrians on the seating

between Northfields

and South Ealing.

 

Hearing Heathrow every morning

he held Rothko

in his dreamline,

he grew up international

through the blue line,

blue as Yves Klein.

Poem (9): The trickle

The trickle

The toilet by the tables in the smoke-

dark snooker club was shut - a sign saying “Closed

for Cleaning” stayed in place for several hours

and so the lager-topped break builders forced

to find relief elsewhere told staff that it

was just not good enough enough enough.

 

The snooker club below the cinema

was shut on Sundays, so a crowd of men

would gather on its steps with stacks of cans

of Becks, from sinking moon through scolding bells

to heavy hints from spurned street lights to drink

one week into the next, the next, the next.

 

The cinema which faced the park was not

renowned for cleanliness or friendliness;

nevertheless, when suddenly it closed

for sixteen days, then opened boasting live

sex shows, there was a buzz of local loss

and letters of disgust, disgust, disgust.

 

The park which marked the start point of the high

street, though not noticeably beautiful,

was much appreciated by new mums,

street drunks and dog walkers, so when it was

replaced by flats, the neighbourhood was not

nor would be quite the same the same the same.

 

The large department store down from the park

was, in its day, the envy of the rest

of the suburban high streets leading straight

into the city’s heart, so when it shut

it felt as if the fabric of the place

they’d come to love was torn was torn was torn.

 

The toilet in the snooker club was closed,

they said, because someone detected, first,

a crack, a little crack, and then the crack

begat a trickle, just a trickle, but

the trickle in the city changed its course

and trickled up and up and up and up.