The 2025 Oscars!

The Immigrant Experience in This Year's Oscar-nominated Films

Each year I do the same thing: the weekend of the Oscars I try to watch as many movies as I can that I haven't seen before the awards show. It is easier now that some of them are streaming and there are all those big screen TVs everywhere. I huddle under my weighted Gravity blanket with a bag of Skinny Pop and watch the movie from about 5 feet away! This helps particularly when you don't have to agree with a partner on what movie you want to see. There are no irritating tall people sitting in the row ahead of you at the last minute, or anyone lighting up the aisle with cell phones, not to mention sounding off notifications or actual ringtones like the telephones I grew up with. You are safe and sound in your own bubble with a large screen and a ramped up soundbar!

I am so behind this year. Yesterday I watched Anora, not really knowing what it was about and all I can say is, thank god, I was not seated in a movie theater with my 87-year-old dad watching it. I loved the story, though. Not exactly slapstick, but the scenes in the large SUV with the mob-like handlers were hysterical but yet sad. I liked Anora, "Annie" for her spunk although her life choices were morally ambigious to say the least! Her Russian boyfriend, later husband, was the pinnacle of spoiled rich kid but hundred times worse with his laissez-faire attitude towards his parents and about his life which was dominated by sex, alcohol, drugs and gaming! His incredibly wealthy, too busy, accidentally permissive, Russian parents use handlers to clean up his mess. This time, however, the son's bender was so bad they had to come in person on their private jet from Russia to Brooklyn to finish the mopping up! What a wild ride!!!

I loved The Brutalist!! Adrien Brody is such an exceptional actor! This immigrant experience was at first depressing, then hopeful, shifting back to despondency, with a lengthy career honored at the end, for his talent but for all the underpinning trials and tribulations that he endured. At first I thought it was a true immigrant experience movie, that Hungarian Laszlo Toth was a real person, but this architect with a love for concrete construction (the Brutalist style) was either fictional or loosely based on a real architect. There is an office building in Boston, rather several buildings there, that have this Brutalist style. The HUD building in Washington D.C. is also an example.

This was the first of three immigrant stories I watched, the other being Anora and the final being A Real Pain. Anora, as described above, told this terrible story about an unscrupulous Russian family and a son who decides on a whim to marry for a green card; it was not celebratory in the least, but the story was emotional and sad for how it impacted the protaganist, Anora, "Annie." Igor, one of the handlers, was the only one of them who had any redeeming qualities. He helped to offset the other unconscionable behavior done to Anora. An interesting movie to say the least! A Real Pain was a beautiful, nostalgic and deeply emotional yet humorous story about immigrant family members who had survived or died in the Holocaust and their family members seeking to honor them and how all the members became family on the trip.

A Real Pain had all the usual trappings of a tour trip: the multitude of hotel rooms (some chic and modern, others old-school); planes, trains, and automobiles; group dinners with large goblets of wine and kitschy music, which attempt to capture the cultural experience; monuments, ancient cemeteries, and of course, irrevocably, there was the tour of the concentration camp. I loved Kieran Culkin's Benjamin Kaplan character in A Real Pain. I always love movies with Jesse Eisenberg (who acted in it, directed it, and wrote the screenplay). Eisenberg reminds me of a more likeable Woody Allen, usually playing a character with some kind of phobia or fear, or suffering from some unsurmountable low self-esteem. The two cousins in this movie (who couldn't be more different) were on a tour to discover their grandmother's place of origin, Poland, before she emigrated to America. They were on a Heritage Tour where other travelers were mostly Jewish or had converted to Judiasm. All of the supporting characters were great in this movie, particularly the tour guide and Marcia; you'll recognize Marcia as Jennifer Gray (post Dirty Dancing and her rhinoplasty, which I feel bad about mentioning as her plastic surgery was said to be a kind of albatross around her neck and her career). She was great. While watching it, I couldn't help but think about Ukraine - Slava Ukraine!! Most Americans are with you! :( I couldn't also help thinking about the impacts of profound loneliness, isolation (Benji), divorce (Marcia), joblessness or homelessness, antipathy or not (Benji), conscientious work ethic (tour guide), mental illness (Benji) and sadness (all had some component of sadness), and family squabbles (some, but particularly the Kaplans). How compassion and kindness are necessary human attributes (Benji and most all on the tour had these qualities). The fact that Benji (Culkin) shifts between each is an interesting character study in this movie. I highly recommend it.

I haven't got a chance to watch I'm Still Here (it is not streaming). I did watch Conclave which is a wonderful movie if not for the stunning reveal at the end. I am a huge fan of Ralph Fiennes and Stanley Tucci (Stanley for his movies and his cooking). What will I watch today? Substance? A Complete Unknown? Hmmmm. Maybe both. :) I will also be thinking of Gene Hackman today (as I have all week), one of my favorite actors.