Hollywood Humble

Posted on by

I’m sitting there watching the Oscars, right? And all these people get up and make their speeches. And most of the speeches are full of Hollywood Humble.

And I start to think –

There is no best picture.
There is no best actor, or actress.
There is no best screenplay, or cinematography, or editing.
No best music, or design,
No best director.

There is only truth,
and beauty,
and art.

And binding it altogether –
the truth, the beauty, the art,
is
love.

We need winners, don’t we.
It makes things easier for us.
Complicit with winners, and losers, is
Judgement.
And complicit with Judgement is
Separation.

And separation is splitting us apart.
Splitting the world apart.

I might have liked some films more than others – but I can’t say one film is better than another. One director is better than another? One actor, or actress, or cinematographer or sound designer, or music composer is better than another?

They all expressed their art through truth and beauty – and love.

When looked at this way there are no winners.
There are no losers.
There is merely the work.
And if that work is art, then we are all winners.

2 thoughts on “Hollywood Humble”

  1. Well said Bill, or should that be well written. Maybe you let AI compose it for you, then it would be not written or said.

    Or would it.

    You be the judge.

    The qualities of a film or a book are always subjective as fortunately we all have different tastes otherwise life would be so boring.

    I hope your film and knees are going well.

    Cheers Gary

    Like

  2. I am quite frustrated by the contemporary movies generally, particularly in the genre of the great big spectacular like a Gone With the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, The Battle of Britain, the original Star Wars, All About Eve, Limelight, Rio Bravo, Raiders of the Lost Ark, Mary Poppins, and so many others, not excluding some recent outliers like Top Gun: Maverick and its stunningly powerful cinematography.

    These are films that are significantly better on the BIG screen.

    But personally, I have a 5K2K ultrawide 10-bit HDR monitor, and most contemporary films actually look better on this than at the cinema — yesterday, I (re-)watched Dune 1 at home ; today I went to see Dune 2 at a Dolby theatre in Nice. The home experience frankly was the better one ; admittedly because Dune 2 has some VERY heavy-handed sound engineering which IMO greatly detracts from the simplicity of Villeneuve’s elegant cinematography. IMO a case where simple stereo surpasses hi-tech forced Dolby “immersion”.

    Though the long-form TV/Streaming narrative structure is also makin the cinema proper less attractive by comparison.

    It’s such a shame — the big Studios are providing “content”, instead of stories.

    Like

Comments are closed.