Peter Rainer on Films & Directors

Peter Rainer has a long career has a film critic, but the inspiration to get into the film industry goes back even further. Listen here as he talks about the works and directors that inspired him, such as American classics like The Godfather and international innovators like Japanese director Akria Kurosawa.

Peter Rainer: Hi, I’m Peter Rainer. I’m with the faculty of the New York Film Academy. I’m the film critic for the Christian Science Monitor and NPR’s Film Week in Southern California. I have a book called “Rainer on Film; 30 Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era.” It’s a collection of my essays and I’ve been at the critic biz for a very long time. What I’m going to talk about today is the films and filmmakers that have really inspired me as a critic and as just a regular moviegoer. Films that have really stayed with me and become a part of my life and have really opened my eyes to what movies can be.

Peter Rainer: I grew up in New York, mostly in the suburbs, but the city was where many of the great revival houses existed. They had a great old revival house in the village called the Bleecker Street Cinema, which was an amazing place. And I often would see as many great films as I could see. Also on television, there was a show called Million Dollar Movie and every night you would watch a film that they would show repeatedly throughout the week. So if you wanted to, you could see a film many, many times. In a weird way that sort of schooled me in how to look at film because when you’re obsessive enough, like I was, to keep seeing the same film over and over again, you begin to pick up on on what it’s like to put a film together, what the acting is like, the performances, you know, all of that kind of combines in a way to let you know that this film didn’t just happen. There were people who made the film, but when I was coming up, I’d sort of gave myself an education and in the process, I was also reading, you know, critics as I went along who wrote on movies. And when I was in college in the early 70s, that was a particularly fervid time for a film, I think, especially American film. It was a real breakthrough in what you could do as a filmmaker. You know, all of these films that I reviewed as a critic for my college newspaper, you know, week after week, you’d see Cabaret, Sounder, The Godfather, Mean Streets, The Sorrow and the Pity, The Story of Adele H., you know, all these great Altman movies, films by Peckinpah, Clockwork Orange, etc. I mean, there was just a ton of great stuff all the time. And I think what I discovered without really realizing it, although some readers pointed it out, was that I guess I sort of favor films that have a sort of humanistic angle. Which is not to say that I don’t love really all kinds of movies if they’re good. You know, people often say to me, well, are there any types of films that you particularly like or any genres that you really like or don’t like? And my answer is usually, not really. It sort of depends on the film, not on the genre. But I do sort of favor films that have a sort of humanistic angle, as opposed to the great big scale epic directors. There are certain directors who who have really stood out for me over the years, such as Vittorio de Sica, the early neorealist pictures that he made. John Renoir an all time great director. His focus was always on the human element. The Indian director, Satyajit Ray, is for me perhaps the greatest of all film artists. And his Apu Trilogy is for me, probably the greatest single entity and film. That and the first two Godfather movies.

Clip: I want you to rest well and in a month from now this Hollywood bigshot’s gonna give you what you want.

Clip: It’s too late. They start shooting in a week.

Clip: I’m gonna make him an offer he can’t refuse.

Peter Rainer: And then also, Yasujiru Ozu, whose film Tokyo Story especially, is this is for me one of the three or four greatest films ever made.

Clip: [Clip from Tokyo Story in Japanese]

Peter Rainer: And Ozu was was a director who worked in an extremely rigorous style. You’d be hard pressed to find any camera movement whatsoever in his films. But what he was able to accomplish as a director was was to really, again, bring out the human element in these people and focus on what’s important. And I think that that’s really something that people have to be reminded of, particularly in this day and age when people are making movies and they often feel that if they’re not showing off with the camera, that somehow, you know, something is, is amiss. That they’re not really utilizing the medium, that they’re, they’re just being, you know, stage people and not movie people. And my feeling is, if you get a powerful experience from watching something on screen, then to argue if it’s, you know, not movie-ish enough, it has no real value. Some of the best films ever made have been movies that could probably have worked on stage. What you’re looking for is the experience that you take away from seeing something. And I think that that can work with a director as spare and rigorous as Ozu, stylistically, or as flamboyant as DePalma or a Japanese director like Mizuguchi or Kurosawa, who are always considered, particularly Kurosawa, the, quote, most western of directors. And that was because he filled with such dynamism in films like Seven Samurai, one of my favorite films, or Yojimbo or Rashomon or any number of other of his films, that he, in a sense out-Hollywood-ed Hollywood. But that’s a very different approach to film than Ozu and they’re equally great if the results are.

Peter Rainer: Ingmar Bergman, I know, has a sort of mixed reputation these days because there was a time when Bergman was thought of as the, the film director that the people who didn’t really like movies liked. Because he was sort of highbrow. He talked about the big issues, you know, religion. And I think a lot of people thought, well, OK, that’s what it really means to be a movie artist. But I think an early film of his like Summer Interlude was quite wonderful and it’s very simple and beautiful. It’s like a Renoir movie in some ways. De Sica is another one who was very important to me in terms of of the sort of humanistic angle. When he teamed up with Zavattini, the two of them made some of the most groundbreaking neorealist pictures ever made. And I don’t know that any director has made more great movies within a shorter span of time than De Sica did, from the late 40s through the mid 50s. In something like eight years, he made, you know, like six masterpieces. Bam, bam, bam, bam. What de Sica often did was he use non-actors. The Father and Bicycle Thief.

Clip: [Clip from Bicycle Thieves in Italian]

Peter Rainer: Or the old man in Umberto D. who was, I believe, a professor and had never acted before. The notion that they had, he and Zavattini, was that you don’t want people to be acting, quote unquote. You just want them to be. And when this approach works, you really do feel like you’re watching the unvarnished truth. But when it doesn’t work, and it didn’t always work with De Sica, you feel like, well, gee, I wish the great actor had been in that role. It all depends. Another great French director who was a big inspiration to me, who had a similar idea was Robert Bresson. Bresson disdained actors and didn’t want anybody to be really performing in any big way in the films. He just wanted to kind of read the lines and have a certain blank affect. And that, in this way, the true spirituality and the power of the story would come through. And again, when this works, it works incredibly well. And when it doesn’t, it doesn’t. But there are tons of Hollywood movies that have inspired me of all types, The Godfather movies, as I mentioned the first two and portions of the third, but mostly the first two, are really so novelistic, so, so rich in characterization.

Clip: A crooked cops who got mixed up in the rackets and got what was coming to him. That’s a terrific story. And we have newspaper people on the payroll, don’t we Tom. They might like a story like that.

Clip: They might. They just might.

Clip: It’s not personal, Sonny. It’s strictly business.

Peter Rainer: I remember when I saw them in college, it just seemed like, you know, where did this come from? You weren’t really prepared for, for the power of what he did in that movie. I’m not sure he was either and he’s talked so much about it ever since in interviews and he’s, I think, become tired of all the adulation on those films. And he’s gone back and forth about even whether he thinks they’re great or whether he should have made Godfather Part 2, which is maybe the greatest film ever made. But those films were were just so revelatory because he could have done it an entirely different way. He could have just done some slam bang gangster movie like so many others that were being done at the time, or had been done. And instead, he made, of all things, this deeply personal film about this family and really movie about the dark side of the American dream.

Peter Rainer: I’ve always had a problem with movies that depict violence without showing the consequences of violence. That show people getting blown away and, you know, and then you go out and have a smoke or you go out to dinner and it doesn’t really seem to affect the characters very much. Bonnie and Clyde, this was a movie that really put the violence right in front of you.

Clip: This here’s Miss Bonnie Parker.

Clip: Glad to meet you.

Clip: I’m Clyde Barrow.

Clip: Clyde.

Clip: We rob banks.

Peter Rainer: And because it started out in a kind of rompy way, the film kind of faked you out in order to make that point. It was a very powerful film, as was The Wild Bunch, if we’re talking about movie violence, several years later. Peckinpah should be more recognized, I think, than he is now. But he was a great inspiration for me as a director. The Wild Bunch is, I think, the equivalent of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai as a piece of epic action, a movie about the nature of violence. Peckinpah had such a phenomenal sense of how to make a movie, how to frame and shoot and cut. Everything that he did was just so instinctively right.

Peter Rainer: Robert Altman has always been a very special director for me, despite his extreme unevenness. And he’s a director who really, in a sense, came out of nowhere. I mean, he was doing episodic TV and Sugarfoot and a lot of, Whirlybirds, a lot of these TV shows. He was really kind of a journeyman director, you know, well into his 40s until he started directing features. And even then, the first couple of features that he made that were nothing extraordinary. Then he made M*A*S*H, which is wonderful, tremendously entertaining movie.

Clip: [Clip from M*A*S*H]

Peter Rainer: But you wouldn’t really look at that either and say, well, this is the work of a great director. It was just sort of this really highly entertaining, smart movie, but not the work of a great artist. When he made McCabe & Mrs. Miller… Where did this come from? How could anybody make a movie, this Renoir-esque within the studio system? It was a period Western with Lauren Beatty and Julie Christie.

Clip: You’re John McCabe?

Clip: Yeah.

Clip: Mrs. Miller. Looking very forward to see you.

Peter Rainer: The music was from Leonard Cohen and it was a film of such deep poetic resonance that it stayed with me. And you know how sometimes when you see a film and you worry, gee, it meant so much to me when I was growing up,, but I wonder if I see it, you know, 10-15 years later, whether it’s going to still mean the same thing to me. Cause sometimes that happens, right? You see a film and it meant a lot to you, then you see it again and it doesn’t look so great? It’s a cruddy feeling, right? Because you feel like you’ve been mugged. But that didn’t happen with McCabe & Mrs. Miller or quite a few of the other films that that really meant a great deal to me. If anything, when you return to these films, they reveal more to you. Although I have to say that, especially with movies, I don’t find that if I go back and look at a film repeatedly that it does a whole lot for me if the viewings are, you know, close together. If I see a film and then I see it again two weeks later, I don’t bring that much more to the party than I did when I saw it the first time. For me, it sort of has to marinate for a while. And also you have to do a little bit of growing up. When I was a kid, I would see films like L’Avventura or Jules and Jim, and I’d say, well, yeah this is a great movie. But really, what did I know? You know, I was 15, 14. What did I really know about life that I could say that L’Avventura was a great movie? It really, kind of, doesn’t work that way. You know, you have to live a life in order to be able to appreciate some of these great films. And that’s a very important thing, not only for people who write about films, but for all you filmmakers and actors, that you have to have built up a certain amount of experience in your own life in order to be able to connect up emotionally to the material that you’re working on. And it’s not enough to simply put a story on the screen and fix it up with a lot of camera pyrotechnics. You have to have a knowledge of life that will bring something to life on the screen. And a lot of the directors that I mentioned, Renoir, Ray, de Sica, Ozu, Kurosawa, Coppola, these are directors who understood that completely.

Peter Rainer: I could go on. There are so many movies that inspired me and I will go on in subsequent podcasts, I’m sure, but this is just a taste of some of the movies and directors who really inspired me to do the kind of work that I do.

Peter Rainer: The show is edited and mixed by Kristian Heydon. The creative director is David Andrew Nelson. Executive produced by Jean Sherlock and Dan Mackler. Great talking to you.

Peter Rainer Reviews The 2020 Academy Awards

Film Critic Peter Rainer looks back at the 2020 Academy Awards, including Parasite's historic night, his takes on the acting categories, and more. Listen to his review here.

Clip: Live from the Dolby Theatre at Hollywood and Highland, it’s the 92nd Academy Awards.

Peter Rainer: Hello, this is The Backlot podcast for the New York Film Academy. This is Peter Rainer, author of Rainer on Film 30 Years of Film Writing in a Turbulent and Transformative Era, and critic for The Christian Science Monitor and NPR. Today, I’m going to talk about the Academy Awards that recently wrapped up. The purpose of the Academy Awards, of course, is, is to promote the film industry. That’s why it was created in 1927. Bunch of studio heads got together and decided that this would be a good way to monetize the Hollywood film industry and it worked. The ratings have gone down significantly over the years. Last year, the ratings were up a bit because they had no host. This year it was also a hostless show and the ratings were down something like 20 percent. This is due, I’m sure, primarily because of social media. A lot of people now just look at excerpts and clips and highlights, as opposed to actually sitting through the entire show, which tends to grind on anyway. But unless there’s some gaffe like there was a number of years ago when La La Land was mistakenly voted to Best Picture over Moonlight.

Clip: La La Land.

I’m sorry. No, there’s a mistake. Moonlight, you guys won Best Picture.

Moonlight won.

Peter Rainer: It’s usually those kinds of moments that you remember and not all the other stuff. The range of movies this year is criticized for not being diverse enough. There was the whole Oscars So White campaign that started a number of years ago when none of the actors in any of the categories were anything but white. And also this year there was a lot of controversy because there were no women who directed among the five nominees. And there was only one actor of color, Cynthia Erivo for Harriet, who was nominated in the acting categories, you know a total of 20 slots. My attitude towards all of these controversies is that I would like to see Hollywood be far more diverse than it is in terms of who’s represented, who’s stories are represented, who gets to direct. But I’m a critic and not a sociologist and so I, and presumably the academy of voters who were voting for excellence, quote unquote. You know, I can only endorse and vote for those films and performances that I think are truly deserving and first rate. The fact that there aren’t more of those kinds of films by women directors and actors and filmmakers of color is due to the fact that the industry has not been nearly as welcoming to those filmmakers, those artists and those stories as they should be. That’s a separate issue from saying that you’re going to vote for a more diverse roster of winners. I think you have to vote for what’s out there. And the fact that there aren’t more films of that type that are represented at the Oscars connects up to the problem of why these filmmakers and actors don’t have greater opportunities. As opposed to these are the films that are out there and you have to vote for what’s out there.

Peter Rainer: In terms of what was out there this year, there were certainly a number of performances and pieces of direction that I thought were overlooked in this realm that could have been cited. I’m not the biggest fan of little women, but I do think that the best aspect of it was the directing and the performances.

Clip: You’re a great deal too good for me, and I’m so grateful to you and I’m so proud of you. And I just I don’t see why I can’t love you as you want me to. I don’t know why.

You can’t.

No. I can’t, I can’t change how I feel. And it would be a lie to say I do when I don’t. I’m so sorry Teddy.

Peter Rainer: And Octavia Spencer was marvelous this year. You know, a lot of actors were neglected. So the larger question here is just how relevant, how accurate are the Oscars as any kind of indices of excellence? I think we can probably all agree that the Oscars are a lot of fun. They’re a lot of fun to watch. But as any kind of true indicator of what was the best in a given year, it falls pretty short. I think the last time I thought the best picture of the year was actually the best picture of the year was maybe like The Godfather, Part 2. So there are a lot of good movies that don’t get recognized. You have to look at the Oscars as inextricably linked with the members of the Academy who vote the Oscars, who are until fairly recently overwhelmingly white and domestic and older, all of which leads to certain kinds of films and certain kind of nominations. This year, there was a concerted attempt to broaden the membership internationally, which may explain the success of the South Korean movie Parasite, which won, you know, Picture, Director, and Screenplay, among others. But there still remains a certain amount of controversy as to whether the Foreign Language movie, which is now called I think Best International Film, you know, whether films that are not in English should be cited by the academy as the best film of the year, for example. Now, Parasite won arguably the two major awards of the night, Best Picture and then also Best Director.

Clip: And the Oscar goes to Parasite.

Peter Rainer: The question is, you know, did Bong Joon Ho who directed Parasite, you know, he’s he’s had a tour of duty in Hollywood. He did Snowpiercer.

Clip: What are you saying?

We take the engine and we control the world.

When is the time?

Soon.

Peter Rainer: And Okja was Netflix and had a lot of English speaking actors in it.

Clip: 10 years in planning. On the cusp of a product that will feed millions, and what happens? That farmer girl is gonna destroy us.

 

Peter Rainer: So he already was kind of in the club, in that sense. He wasn’t a total outsider. But nevertheless it was a very homegrown film, very South Korean. But it did strike a large nerve with the larger voting body because it’s a film that is a kind of deranged upstairs, downstairs. It’s a film about income inequality in a sense. And I think that’s one of the things that really helped put it over.

This is the first time that a Foreign Language film has ever won the Best Picture Oscar in 90-some years, but to argue that of all the foreign films that have been made, that this was the best and the only one that deserved to win the Best Picture Oscar, that’s certainly not true. The fact that the Best Picture Oscar has never gone to any movie by Kurosawa, to Antonioni, to Fellini, to Jean Renoir, to Ingmar Bergman, to Francois Truffaut, to Jean Luc Godard. You know, I could go on and on and on. Some of those directors have won the Foreign Language film, but not the Best Picture.

Now, there’s no law in the Academy that says that if you are a documentary, you can’t also be nominated for Best Picture. In the case of Animated, I believe Beauty and the Beast was nominated for Best Picture. So again, I mean, there’s no law that says that a film by, say, Miyazaki, the great Japanese animator who won Animated Oscars, could not also have qualified and won for Best Picture. The idea that a Best Picture is only English language is kind of silly, but if you’re going to create categories, then the question is, well, why are you doing that? If it’s just a wide open for Best Picture and any movie can qualify, then why do you have these separate categories? Because what happens is, like for instance Roma last year was nominated for both Foreign Language Film and Best Picture. And the prevailing wisdom was that it would not win Best Picture despite rapturous reception because it had already won best foreign film and, you know you split your vote and et cetera. And that’s probably what happened. In this case with Parasite, I think it just sort of overrode all those considerations.

Does this set a precedent for this happening again in the future? I doubt it. I think it’s somewhat of an anomaly, given, I think, the lack of any really strong competition. But I think that it’s important to recognize films for the cultures in which they are made and not to assume that everything that gets the nod in Hollywood is going to lead to bigger and better and more expensive and more, quote, commercial product. So the Oscars have a lot to answer for. But I think that the outpouring of affection for Parasite this year was deserved because I thought it was a good movie. If it hadn’t been a good movie, you know, forget it. You know, I didn’t think Crazy Rich Asians was a very good movie and I said at the time, I think this isn’t really going to lead to very much in Hollywood in the way of relevant strong movies by and about Asian actors, directors, writers, stories. It’s just going to lead to Crazy Rich Asians, Part Two. I wasn’t crazy this year about the movie The Farewell, but, you know, you could argue that that was also shafted by the academy. It was a much lower profile film with an Asian cast than Parasite was.

Peter Rainer: The acting categories, I thought they were pretty much a lock. The Supporting Actor, Actress and so forth were pretty predictable as to who would win. In most cases, I thought that they chose well among the five that were nominated.

Clip: Here are the nominees for performance by an actress in a leading role. Cynthia Erivo, Harriet. Scarlett Johannson, Marriage Story. Saoirse Ronan, Little Women. Charlize Theron, Bombshell. Renee Zellweger, Judy. And the Oscar goes to Renee Zellweger.

Peter Rainer: Renee Zellweger winning for Judy, the fact that she was playing Judy Garland, you know, when actors play famous actors in movies and biopics, that often tilts the Academy, narcissists that they are, into voting for them. I thought she was terrific in a not very good movie.

Clip: I’m working harder than you would ever believe.

Are you?

And right now, my husband is making a deal for me that means I can start over.

You’re not listening.

I have someone I can rely on, someone who’s helping me make money instead of losing it at the track.

Can we not?

I’m going to get a place and they’re going to live with me.

Peter Rainer: And Scarlett Johansson, I thought, was the lesser of the two leads in Marriage Story. I thought her performance wasn’t quite up to what Adam Driver was doing and her role wasn’t quite as well written.

Clip: I can’t believe I have to know you forever.

Oh you’re f**kin’ insane. And you’re f**king winning.

Are you kidding me? I wanted to be married. I already lost. You didn’t love me as much as I loved you.

Peter Rainer: So it made the film a little top heavy in terms of what the story was about. Saoirse Ronan is just an incredible actress in Little Women. She’s only 25 and, you know, already been nominated several times. She’s really, you know, incredibly versatile. Movies like Brooklyn. She’s done Chekhov on film. She’s, she’s done, you know, just about everything there is that she can do and there’s obviously a great deal more to come. Cynthia Erivo for Harriet, I thought it was a very strong performance again in a movie that I thought was pretty staid and, given the subject matter, a rather uninspiring piece of filmmaking.

Clip: Here are the nominees for performance by an actor in a leading role. Antonio Banderas, Pain and Glory. Leonardo DiCaprio, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. Adam Driver, Marriage Story. Joaquin Phoenix, Joker. Jonathan Pryce, The Two Popes. And the Oscar goes to Joaquin Phoenix, Joker.

Peter Rainer: In the Best Actor category, Joaquin Phoenix was the clear favorite and he did win. It’s a movie that I found to be sort of powerful, but in a way powerfully pointless. But his performance is one of a series of really strong performances that he’s given in his career.

Clip: I don’t need you to tell me lies. I know it seems strange. I don’t mean to make you uncomfortable. I don’t know why everyone is so rude. I don’t know why you are. I don’t want anything from you. Maybe a little bit of warmth, maybe a hug, dad. How ’bout just a little bit of f**king decency. What is it with you people? You say that stuff of my mother.

Peter Rainer:Antonio Banderas in Pain and Glory was marvelous. And it was a very uncharacteristic performance, so I’m glad it was recognized. Banderas is an actor who’s typically very emotionally out there. His energy is all outward-directed. And in this film where he’s playing a sort of stand in for the director, Pedro Almodóvar. His energy is all sort of inward-directed and every bit as powerful and strong as, as what he’s done in the past. So I think it was a real change for him as a performing style and it was eminently successful. And Adam Driver in Marriage Story I thought was extraordinary. And Jonathan Price in the year’s most unlikely buddy movie, the bromance The Two Popes was strong playing opposite Anthony Hopkins.

Clip: I cannot do this without knowing that there is a decent possibility that you might be chosen.

No. It could never be me.

All right. We’re at an impasse. You cannot retire from the church unless I agree to your going. And I cannot resign until you agree to stay.

Clip: Here are the nominees for achievement in directing. Sam Mendez, 1917.

Peter Rainer: As far as the directing categories go, well, I thought 1917 was sort of a stunt. The idea that it was all shot in one take, it wasn’t of course, but it was made to look that way, was justifiable. But, but I think that if the movie had been shot in the normal way, you know, broken up into, to scenes and camera shots and so forth, that it would be seen for being the conventional war movie that in many ways, it is.

Clip: Martin Scorsese, The Irishman.

Peter Rainer: The Irishman was a movie I was not totally on board for. It’s a well-crafted, well-acted piece of work. The problem I had with The Irishman is that I think that the De Niro character, the hitman is they go a little soft on him. That, as is true of a lot of gangster movies, even much greater ones like The Godfather, that there’s a tendency to soft play the psychopathology of these characters. After all, in The Irishman, DeNiro’s hitman is really unrepentant and uncaring about any of the people that he’s offed, except for Jimmy Hoffa. And I wish the film had explored that a bit more instead of, you know, somewhat sentimentalizing him.

Clip: Quentin Tarantino, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Peter Rainer: Quentin Tarantino and Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, you know, he writes killer dialogue. He makes you want to watch anything that he shoots. And the period recreation of that time in Hollywood was quite extraordinary and I found parts of it very moving. And Brad Pitt, I thought, was was terrific and deserved to win the Best Supporting Actor award.

Clip: My hands are registered as a lethal weapons. That means we get into a fight. I accident kill you. I go to jail.

Anybody accidentally kills anybody in a fight, they go to jail. It’s called manslaughter. And I think all that lethal weapon horses**t is just an excuse so you dancers never have to get in a real fight.

Peter Rainer: But I did have a problem with the way the film wraps up, which is similar to what he did in Inglorious Basterds, where he takes a horrific event and sort of redoes it so it turns out to be the way we all wanted it to turn out. And I think that using these horrific real life events as jumping off points for kind of, you know, pulp fantasias, I find sort of problematic.

Clip: Here are the nominees for performance by an actress in a supporting role. Kathy Bates, Richard Jewel. Laura Dern, Marriage Story. Scarlett Johansson, Jojo Rabbit. Florence Pugh, Little Women. Margot Robbie, Bombshell. And the Oscar goes to Laura Dern, Marriage Story.

Peter Rainer: Laura Dern is beloved in Hollywood and also is quite terrific, aside from Marriage Story, where she won, in Little Women.

Clip: I’m angry nearly every day of my life.

You are?

I’m not patient by nature. But with nearly 40 years of effort, I’m learning to not let it get the better of me.

Peter Rainer: Florence Pugh was also terrific in Little Women.

Clip: And if I had my own money, which I don’t, that money would belong to my husband the moment we got married. And if we had children, they would be his, not mine. They would be his property. So don’t sit there and tell me that marriage isn’t an economic proposition because it is.

Peter Rainer: I don’t understand the Jojo Rabbit push, Scarlett Johansson, or much of anything about that movie. It’s not that I objected to the fact that this is a film about a little boy whose fantasy friend is Hitler in war time and that. It just, I didn’t find it funny. You know, I think that you can do that sort of thing, that kind of black satire if you’re a lot sharper. It didn’t really think out what it was trying to do. Both as satire and as serious film. But then again, I didn’t like Life is Beautiful either for similar reasons.

Clip: Here are the nominees for Best Documentary Feature. American Factory, Steven Bognar, Julia Reichert, and Jeff Reichert. The Cave, Feras Fayyad, Kirstine Barfad, and Sigrid Dyekjær. The Edge of Democracy, Petra Costa, Joanna Natasegara, Shane Boris, and Tiago Pavan. For Sama, Waad al-Kateab and Edward Watts. Honeyland, Ljubo Stefanov, Tamara Kotevska, and Atanas Georgiev. And the Oscar goes to American Factory.

Peter Rainer: It was a marvelous year for documentaries and I know that a lot of you students are interested in making documentaries and that’s really important. Documentaries are a marvelous way to explore a culture, explore a subject, really get into it. And also, you really have to tell a story when you’re doing a documentary and you have to choose the right subject. You can’t just film, you know, a movie about the checkout line at the supermarket. I mean, it has to be something that really uncovers something or in some way really plugs into the human condition. And I know you all have a lot of stories out there, personal stories, stories of your origins and where you come from and where you’re going, that, that would make, you know, marvelous documentaries. So you should take a lot of comfort from the opening up of such avenues as Netflix to show these films. In the Documentary Feature category, you know, there was American Factory, which won. I particularly liked Honeyland and For Sama and The Cave. The Cave and For Sama were both very hard films to watch. They’re about, you know, death and destruction in Syria. But they were very good movies, too. It wasn’t just that they were showing you a lot of horrific stuff and, you know, gee, I’m glad the cameraman got out OK. But they were powerful testaments to the survival instincts and the human tragedy and the human spirit that comes from, you know, surviving and persevering in these terrible conditions. And Honeyland was about a Macedonian beekeeper who takes care of her aged mother and has some issues with her neighbors and what comes of all of that. And like a lot of movies that start small, it expands to take in quite a bit more than its ostensible subject. And it really is about the human condition and about surviving and the ancient beekeeping traditions that this woman has lived by or torn asunder by commercial interests. I think the film far transcends the basic description of it as a kind of, you know, movie about how capitalism destroys ecology. But thankfully the filmmakers don’t underline it. You discovered for yourself, and that’s always the best way to experience movies anyway, I think, is when you are brought into the movie as opposed to being hit over the head.

Clip: Here are the nominees for Best Original Screenplay.

Okay I’m going to open this for you.

No, not yet…

Peter Rainer: The Best Original Screenplay, again, was a Bong Joon Ho for Parasite.

Clip: Bong Joon Ho.

Peter Rainer: And I think in many ways it was the most inventive and interesting screenplay. Knives Out was a funny whodunnit. Marriage Story, I think, had its moments, certainly. 1917, less so. Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, uneven but strong. But I think it was justifiably given to Parasite because that was a movie that, again, sort of was about something that on the surface was a small scale domestic drama, and yet expanded into a much larger indictment, really, of income inequality and the grasping on both sides of that inequality to survive.

Clip: Here are this year’s nominees for Best Adapted Screenplay. The Irishman, screenplay by Stephen Zaillian. Little Women, written for the screen by Greta Gerwig. Joker, written by Todd Phillips and Scott Silver. Jojo Rabbit, screenplay by Taika Waititi. The Two Popes, written by Anthony McCarten and the Oscar goes to Taika Waititi, Jojo Rabbit.

Peter Rainer: In the adapted screenplay category, Jojo Rabbit won. Little Women, you know as I mentioned, I thought had, had issues with the screenplay. I had more issues with the screenplay than I did with with any other aspect of the film, because Greta Gerwig, who also directed, of course, shuffles the time scheme so that you’re going, you know, flash forwards, flashback and so forth. And I found myself looking at the length of the hair of the characters in the various scenes to determine, you know, which time zone I was in. And I don’t know why that had to be.

Clip: Here are the nominees for performance by an actor in a supporting role. Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Peter Rainer: In the Best Supporting Actor category, I mentioned Brad Pitt I think was was highly deserving. It’s a testament, again, to the fact that you can be a big movie star and also be a really good actor. They don’t always go together. You know, you can be a big star and not necessarily have the chops to be a really good actor or vise versa. There are a lot of wonderful actors who don’t have that charisma or the or didn’t get the right role and so they’re not stars. But the fact that Pitt is both is extraordinary and rather rare.

Clip: Al Pacino, The Irishman.

Peter Rainer: There are others like that. Al Pacino, for instance, who was also nominated in The Irishman. I thought he was quite good in that movie. Some people said he’s doing Shouty Al again, but I thought it was justified that he shouts a lot in that movie. He’s playing Jimmy Hoffa.

Clip: You know the operative word I’m talking about here. Solidarity. And it works. It works for all of us and it works for our friend here Frank Fitzsimmons. Frank Fitzsimmons here. My executive vise president. If there’s anyone that can do this job, it’s this man here and with him at my back, where are we going to go but up?

Clip: Joe Pesci, The Irishman.

Peter Rainer: Joe Pesci came out of a kind of retirement for The Irishman and again, as I mentioned with Antonio Banderas, an actor who’s known for very explosive, outward directed energy, directed all his energy in this performance inward and I thought it was equally powerful.

Clip: Tom Hanks, A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood.

Peter Rainer: Tom Hanks in A Beautiful Day in the Neighborhood playing Fred Rogers. It could have been just some adept impersonation, a sort of soft sneakers and cardigan performance, but it was much more than that. I think he really inhabited the soul of Fred Rogers and was, even though it was a supporting performance, it was the kind of emotional center of that film.

Clip: Bill was right. You love people like me.

What are people like you? I’ve never met anyone like you in my entire life.

Broken people.

I don’t think you are broken.

Clip: And the Oscar goes to Brad Pitt, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.

Peter Rainer: So the bottom line with the Academy Awards is that we have to recognize that they are not a true mark of excellence in most cases. It’s kind of a circus. It’s kind of a political show, but it does on occasion promote certain films and filmmakers, countries that deserve to be recognized. And my feeling about the win this year for Parasite for Best Picture is, I’m basically all for it because I think it was a very good movie and it also had the added benefit of being a kind of political statement in the best way. Hollywood movies have been mostly rather conventional and not terribly good for the most part. The interesting work is coming out of the indie realm, much more so than the studios, which tend to recycle franchises. And anytime you move out of that box, I think is a good thing, whether it’s in awards or anywhere else. So I’ll just leave it at that. I think that hopefully next year will build on this year rather than this turning out to be some sort of one-off anomaly. So thanks everybody for listening and go out and make the best movies, best performances, best editing, best cinematography, best sound mixing, best everything, OK? Because you’re in a good place to really learn all of that, and one day maybe you’ll be in the Student Academy Awards category or the regular Academy Award category. The important thing is don’t make movies to win awards. Make movies because you really care about them. Bong Joon Ho said in his acceptance speech that one is most creative when one is most personal and I think that’s also true for you all, that you have to make movies that really mean something to you and not necessarily just, you know, resumes for studio work. You should experiment and do things that you really care about. And a lot of student filmmakers who have gone on to big things in Hollywood, I’ve seen their student movies and they were not traditional cookie cutter films. The student films of Spike Lee, Terry Malick, Scorsese, De Palma, David Lynch, many others were all very different from what you normally see. So go thou and do likewise.

Perter Rainer: This is Peter Rainer, I’m a teacher at the New York Film Academy. This is The Backlot podcast talking about the Oscars. The show is edited and mixed by Kristian Heydon. The creative director is David Andrew Nelson. Executive produced by Jean Sherlock and Dan Mackler. Great talking to you.