It’s film awards season, which means movie lovers and Academy/Screen Actors Guild/Nickelodeon-watching kid voters alike have been busy sorting out the best films from last year.

Many of the most hyped-up contenders of this year’s (or any) film awards season are truly worthy of the honors they seek. Whether it’s because of their unique, high-concept plot, sublime acting performances, perfectly executed action thrills, or some other form of excellence, they deliver on their promises.

And then you have the other films up “for your consideration”—and those that really, really thought they would be. You know the ones I’m talking about. They’re tailor-made to give the appearance of depth, typically through shamelessly grandiose performances, clunky attempts to tackle Big Important Issues, or both. (And possibly a fat suit.) It’s these try-hards for whom the insult “Oscar bait” was first invented.

But in the midst of all this excellence, whether actual or ruthlessly engineered, it’s worth sparing a thought for the supposed lesser films and actors with no hope of taking home a tiny statue this year. These are the movies released on a random Friday in January—the film industry’s de facto “dump month”—or sent straight to streaming jail without even a half-hearted promotional campaign. Or better yet, made completely outside the Hollywood system by amateurs with little more than a camera and a handful of wacky ideas (and the results to show for it). Because if you’re willing to wade through the muck of these kinds of films, you may be pleasantly surprised by what they can teach us—not about badness, but instead about what passes for “good.”

For my money, there’s no better teacher than the cult film The Room, a 2003 cinematic catastrophe I find so fascinating that I edited a whole book of essays about it. Written, directed, starred in, financed, and produced by Tommy Wiseau, an untrained filmmaker of ambiguous Eastern European origins and means, The Room was supposed to be a deeply affecting story of a love triangle gone wrong. That was the intention, at least. The result, however, is a movie that is legendarily terrible: terribly shot, terribly written, and, most infamously, terribly, terribly acted.

Without even addressing the plot, or lack thereof, it’s easy to tick off the nearly infinite problems there are with The Room. Continuity is non-existent: one character announces, willy-nilly, that she has breast cancer, only for it to never be brought up again; another character disappears completely without explanation, only to be replaced by an entirely different character (also without explanation). Multiple gratuitous sex scenes (four!) go on for several minutes, in a movie that’s barely an hour and a half long. And, most memorably for fans, the dialogue ranges from utterly banal (“If a lot of people loved each other, the world would be a better place to live”) to strange (“Keep your stupid comments in your pocket!”) to downright nonsensical (“My Lisa’s great when I can get it”).

It’s easy—so, so easy—to dismiss The Room as nothing more than a perfect and hilarious example of something “so good it’s bad.” But if you let yourself dig below the (extremely rough) exterior, you’re left with a cultural artifact that reveals the deep-seated pretensions of the film industry. To wit: In its laughably transparent attempt to be taken seriously, it’s an accidental but deeply cutting parody of Oscar bait.

Take the performance of its star, Wiseau, playing the movie’s protagonist, Johnny. It isn’t merely big; it’s gigantic. “You are tearing me apart, Lisa!” Johnny wails during a mundane argument with his fiancée, gesticulating wildly for even greater melodramatic effect.

Minus the “Lisa,” this is an exact rip-off of a famous James Dean line in Rebel Without a Cause. Dean was one of Wiseau’s idols, and Wiseau’s performance can be seen as part homage to the Hollywood legend, part improvement attempt. Throughout the movie, Wiseau also channels his other idol, Marlon Brando, and his performance as the volatile Stanley Kowalski in A Streetcar Named Desire, in particular.

Thanks to Wiseau’s unforgettable performance (and, to be fair, the performances of everyone else), The Room has become the biggest cult movie since The Rocky Horror Picture Show. That’s why fans flock to monthly screenings around the country and the world to gawk, smugly, at Johnny’s impassioned but utterly unconvincing cries. And yet, with The Room, Wiseau is doing, albeit very sloppily, what so much Oscar bait is accused of: trying really, really hard to convey pathos in an attempt to manipulate the viewer into feeling something.

Lacking even the most basic ability to develop plot and character, Wiseau goes all in with a brute force display of emotion. Like most shortcuts, the approach falls utterly flat. The louder Johnny shouts, the more he contorts his face to really show his heartache, the more the audience can’t help but laugh.

Unfortunately, the performances of Dean, Brando, and many recent, talented award nominees can’t just be mimicked for effect. There’s an alchemy to a truly moving performance that goes beyond good writing and acting skill (not that The Room remotely possessed either of those). The viewer usually knows when they’re being had.

It is exactly this Grand Canyon-sized gap between Wiseau’s intention (depicting a riveting domestic drama) and his execution (creating a surreal, seemingly incoherent work of possible outsider art) that makes the movie so “bad,” and thus so compelling. In this respect, The Room is like any other film that aimed so high but landed so low. Just much more so.

There is one important difference, though. Wiseau’s utter sincerity, no matter how absurd the final result, imbues The Room with a kind of authenticity that sets it apart. “You want to be fake? Not me. I hate fake stuff,” he told his crew during filming, according to The Disaster Artist, the 2013 memoir about the making of the film by The Room co-star Greg Sestero (and the inspiration for the 2017 film, also named The Disaster Artist). Indeed, Wiseau had so much faith in the emotional honesty of his work that when The Room was first released, he rented a Laemmle theater in the San Fernando Valley to show it for two weeks—the minimum run required for a movie to be considered for an Oscar.

If recent Oscar acceptance speeches are any gauge, more than a few actors (and directors, writers, and producers) believe they are creating something that transcends the mere label of “entertainment.” Some of them are. But more often than not, their goal is ultimately the same as Wiseau’s: to signal to the viewer that the movie they’re watching is important. Maybe even worthy of a top-flight award.

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This question ties together two excellent films—King Richard and Licorice Pizza—that are nominees for best picture at this month’s Academy Awards.

The movies, while different in style, genre, and setting, are both about over-the-top ambition and relentless fame-seeking in Los Angeles County. And each film features a main character whose goals and entrepreneurial schemes are dismissed as madness, even by friends and loved ones.

Indeed, those cinematic hustlers make statements and demands and behave in ways that go beyond what we consider acceptable in today’s neo-Victorian age. They break and bend the law, they showboat, and they mold the truth to their wills. They also ultimately achieve what they want—precisely because of their outrageousness.

The title hustler in King Richard is Richard Williams, the real-life father of tennis superstars Venus and Serena Williams. Played brilliantly by Will Smith, Williams is living in 1990s Compton, the small, famously tough, working-class city south of South L.A. He works graveyard shifts as a security guard, gets jumped by young gangsters at the local park, and drives around in a beat-up Volkswagen van.

And yet, he has a plan to make his two youngest daughters Wimbledon champions. He is confident enough that he drives them through Beverly Hills and asks them which houses they’ll buy one day. And he never stops trying to convince famous coaches and agents in the very white tennis world to help him.

“We’re not here to rob you. We’re here to make you rich,” he says to one of many tennis types who dismisses his entreaties. Williams usually goes too far, and he never gives an inch. He takes “no” as an invitation to increase his demands—for better coaching, or more money, or support to make his daughters champions.

He works Venus and Serena so hard between homework, church, work (they deliver phone books), and tennis practice (even during rainstorms), that a neighbor calls social services. He shouts the caseworkers out of his home. He rarely bothers to sleep.

“Don’t nothing come to a sleeper but a dream,” he says.

All this behavior could be—and has been—framed as awfulness or even abuse. Williams still has a reputation as a crazy, overbearing father. But his ambitions weren’t dreams—they are realities, and his daughters are two of tennis’ greatest-ever champions.

The male lead in writer-director Paul Thomas Anderson’s Licorice Pizza, set in the San Fernando Valley of 1973, also crosses lines that would get you in trouble today. He is Gary Valentine, a 15-year-old child actor (played by Cooper Hoffman, son of the late actor Philip Seymour Hoffman) whose pursuit of a 25-year-old named Alana Kane (played by the musician Alana Haim) is awkward, inappropriate, and on occasion verges into what audiences today would call harassment.

But in this film, the teenager’s relentless pursuit—of everything—wins over the young woman, against her better judgment.

The film belongs to Alana, the central character, an audience stand-in, who at first is repulsed by Gary and his come-ons. But she finds she can’t resist his utter shamelessness and constant hustles. Soon they are partners in a business selling water beds—which they pitch with such fervor I almost forgot how hard it is to actually sleep in one.

Gary’s transgressions make life more interesting, and soon Alana finds herself, in disbelief, hanging out with him and his immature but inventive teenage buddies. Then, in one of those can’t-watch-can’t-stop-watching extended scenes that are the director’s forte, Alana finds herself driving a moving truck rapidly down narrow, hilly streets in what looks like Encino.

No scene, and no recent movie, so well captures the pure thrill and connection of recklessness and risk-taking. Licorice Pizza is a movie that celebrates hard falls (Sean Penn has a drunken cameo involving a motorcycle jump) and failures (including a sub-plot involving the unsuccessful 1973 L.A. mayoral bid of Joel Wachs, who, undiscouraged, went on to be a councilman and dealmaker).

The argument here isn’t hard to spot: that craziness is a requirement, if you’re a teenager who wants to open a business, win a TV role, or make that 25-year-old your girlfriend. “I’m a showman,” Gary says, by way of explaining one of his escapades. “That’s what I’m meant to do.”

Licorice Pizza and King Richard are imperfect movies. They both indulge in the same self-mythologizing, too common among Californians, that we are underdogs, just because we aren’t from the fanciest neighborhoods. While the film characters in Compton and the Valley see themselves as outsiders with their noses pressed up against the glass of better-known L.A. precincts, who are they kidding? Both the Valley and Compton have produced more than their share of stars in entertainment and sports over many years. (Witness the Super Bowl halftime show.)

But what both films get right, and what makes them entertaining, are their depictions of what it takes to achieve success in a place like California. This state demands that you cross lines and behave unreasonably. Yes, we have more than our share of rules and regulations, but those exist mostly for show, to give the truly ambitious more things to break on their way up.

Indeed, watching these movies got me thinking about one of the richest Angelenos of my lifetime, the late billionaire Eli Broad. Broad’s wife Edythe famously gave him a paperweight with a George Bernard Shaw quote: “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man.”

Broad took heart and lived up to Shaw’s words, often causing chaos and conflict in the arts, philanthropy, and the schools by changing his mind and unapologetically making outrageous demands (in service of creating various cultural, scientific, and educational institutions that survive him). And when it came time for Broad to write a book, he titled it The Art of Being Unreasonable.

You might say that that’s California’s highest art form.

The post The Outrageous California Hustlers of <i>King Richard</i> and <i>Licorice Pizza</i> appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The best California movie scene of recent vintage is the opening of the 2018 film Sorry to Bother You. A young man and his girlfriend are getting intimate in what appears to be a dark apartment when the room suddenly fills with daylight, making their union visible to the people outside on an Oakland street.

What the heck happened? In short, the Bay Area housing crisis. The apartment is really a garage and the garage door has abruptly opened, at just the wrong time.

This example of love interrupted is indicative of another unconsummated relationship—that between Oakland and the Oscars.

Over the past year, the city of Oakland has built itself up into a capital of cinematic excellence, inspiring more great films than even movie-mad nations like France and Japan. This reflects both a rising generation of filmmakers who are proud of their O-Town roots, and the city’s own ascendancy in an era that prizes authenticity. Since all the real people have left unaffordable San Francisco, and since there have never been all that many real people in L.A., those who want to set a story in a relatable California reality are drawn to Oakland.

But neither Hollywood nor the Academy have responded with the requisite level of love.

Now, of course, Oakland won’t be shut out at the ceremony on February 23. The greatest new American movie star of this cultural moment, Oakland-born (and Hayward-raised) Mahershala Ali, is favored to win his second acting Academy Award in three years, for playing the pianist Don Shirley in the film Green Book. And Black Panther, which begins and ends in Oakland, is one of the eight nominees for best picture.

But Black Panther—despite being a groundbreaking cultural document and a comic movie of, by and for black people—is unlikely to win. And the film’s maker, Oakland’s own Ryan Coogler, didn’t get nominated for best director, even though he brought to life the land of Wakanda, which fulfilled Californians’ dreams of a sustainable economy with a high-speed rail system that is finished and functional. This was the second time Coogler got overlooked. He also wasn’t nominated for his brilliant 2013 film Fruitvale Station, about the killing of a young man, Oscar Grant, by a BART police officer in Oakland.

And the Academy completely overlooked two of the past year’s very best films: Sorry to Bother You, a satire with sci-fi elements (and that great intercourse-gone-awry opening), and Blindspotting, a beautiful buddy film about two troubled young men, one black and white, who work as movers. Both movies were set in Oakland and made by Oaklanders, and thus capture the city’s mix of beauty and pathos.

And while the politics of Oakland are reliably progressive (the city’s badass mayor Libby Schaaf could star in her own movie about facing down Trump administration threats of arrests after she warned the public of an impending immigration raid), both films are conservative, in the original sense of the word. The films are about conserving traditions, neighborhoods, families, and humanity, for all its messiness, in the face of frightening change. Both films thus cast Oakland as the front line of defense for a world trying to fight off the disruptive power of technologists from the richer, smugger side of the bay.

In Blindspotting, the main character Collin—played by the film’s own screenwriter, the Oakland-born actor-singer Daveed Diggs, best known for his role as Thomas Jefferson in the musical Hamilton—is an ex-con on probation who moves richer people into his own gentrifying city. The film builds to a fight scene at a tech party and then a haunting confrontation in which Diggs aims a sad and angry rap soliloquy at a racist cop.

Sorry to Bother You, from the multi-dimensional artist Boots Riley, starts as a working-class comedy but turns into a darker film about a Silicon Valley company that proposes to solve the world’s economic problems through a business model secretly built on slavery and turning people into animals. In seeking an explanation for its Oscar shutout, I wondered if that plot line cut too close to the bone for Netflix and Amazon, which now fund so much of Hollywood.

Of course, Oakland is not without its own resources. Yes, it is losing two of its sports teams—the football Raiders to Las Vegas, and the basketball Warriors to fancy San Francisco. But Oakland is getting its due in other ways, since it’s that rare American place that is still distinctive and strange enough to convey its own message.

In politics, Oakland-born Kamala Harris, who rose to power as an establishment figure in San Francisco, tried to seize back some Oaktown cred by holding her presidential campaign kick-off at Frank Ogawa Plaza.

And in the literary world, Tommy Orange’s There There, a novel about Native Americans in Oakland, has been sweeping the top 10 books lists for its intimate portrayal of how different communities make a common home there.

“Cities form in the same way as galaxies,” Orange writes. “Urban Indians feel at home walking in the shadow of a downtown building. We ride buses, trains, and cars across, over, and under concrete plains. Being Indian has never been about returning to the land. The land is everywhere or nowhere.”

In her 1937 book Everybody’s Autobiography, Gertrude Stein lamented, “what was the use of having come from Oakland,” before making her famous (and false) observation that “there is no there there.” The truth is that Hollywood and American culture have long found things to use in Oakland.

The most honored-star of the past generation, Tom Hanks, still boasts about being from Oakland and graduating Skyline High. Oakland can claim George Stevens, the Oscar-winning director of A Place in the Sun, who grew up in an Oakland theater family, and Clint Eastwood, who was born in San Francisco but grew up in Piedmont and went to Oakland Technical High School. And serious Star Wars fans will tell you that Oakland is the real hometown of both Luke Skywalker (Mark Hamill was born and lived there until moving to San Diego at age 11) and Yoda (Frank Oz, a child immigrant from Europe, was raised in Oakland and got his start as a puppeteer at the city’s famed Children’s Fairyland).

After the Oscar snub, Boots Riley, the Sorry to Bother You director, tried to calm enraged fans by declaring he hadn’t campaigned for the Oscars, and didn’t much care about not being nominated. The Blindspotting team hasn’t protested either, since worrying about what the rest of the world thinks is not a very Oakland thing to do.

But the rest of the world would benefit from seeing more of the cinema and stories now coming out of Oakland.

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