The much-hyped 2024 Oscars are over. It was the best Oscars in recent memory and most watched in four years, with nearly 20 million people tuning in to the four-hour broadcast and I am still thinking about what it told me about the importance of our stories and visualizing them. We say all the time, colloquially, “I feel so seen.”
Movies make us feel seen even as they show us ourselves or our experiences or our yearnings.
I love cinema and I never miss the Oscars, which are a myriad of things: fashion, comedy, music, politics and of course, movies. I had many favorites going in — local, queer and stories I loved. The first Black gay Civil Rights hero in Bayard Rustin’s biopic, the first telling of the Osage massacre in “Killers of the Flower Moon,” the first telling of the doll that shaped millions of girls’ visions of who they were supposed to be in “Barbie.”
It was a moving ceremony with some beautiful and uplifting speeches, like that of Mount Airy’s Da’Vine Joy Randolph, who won Best Supporting Actress for “The Holdovers.” She spoke about race and belonging and self-acceptance.
When Cord Jefferson won for Best Adapted Screenplay for the brilliant “American Fiction,” he was ecstatic. He talked about race and opening doors and risk and telling stories that don’t get told.
British director Jonathan Glazer won for Best International Film for the powerful Holocaust film, “The Zone of Interest.” Glazer used his speech to call out the ongoing horrors in Gaza and has been criticized ever since for saying he didn’t want his Jewishness or the Holocaust used to perpetrate genocide.
Ukrainian director Mstyslav Chernov, who won for his gut-wrenching documentary “20 Days in Mariupol,” said, “This is the first Oscar in Ukrainian history, and I’m honored. But probably I will be the first director on this stage who will say: ‘I wish I’d never made this film.’ I wish to be able to exchange this [for] Russia never attacking Ukraine, never occupying our cities.”
Chernov continued, “But I cannot change the history. I cannot change the past….But cinema forms memories, and memories form history.”
I haven’t stopped thinking about that.
There were other moving speeches and I’m tearing up recalling them all and how the winners presented their own stories as they spoke. It was, most of all, a night of genuine feeling. There was so much realness. It was both cathartic in this political and social minefield we now live in and exhausting in its own way. We have, in so many respects, distanced ourselves from the constant pain of wars and suffering, hate and fear mongering. How else would we get through the days?
Movies help a lot of people remember how to feel. That was on display at the Oscars and it resonated so deeply for me, as I am navigating widowhood, bereft of my wife of 23 years, who I first was lovers with in high school.
As teenagers, my wife and I would frequent a local repertory cinema, The Bandbox, in Germantown. We’d watch foreign films, holding hands in the dark. A decade ago, I wrote about how powerful cinema was for me as a young lesbian and how much the movies taught me about loving and cherishing women. I also wrote about coming to terms with movie tropes of suicidal lesbians. The Bandbox played such a pivotal role in my queer adolescence and upbringing.
Remembering those years when I lived at the movies is part of why that line of Chernov’s haunts both past and present me: it is so true and so real: “Cinema forms memories, and memories form history.” Movies are such a part of my past and keep me grounded in my present. But it’s how those stories are told — the identities we see on screen — that seep into our consciousness and teach us about belonging, about being part of, about our common and divergent histories.
When I was a Catholic schoolgirl, there was a weekly posting in our classrooms of books and films banned by the Catholic Standard of Decency. Our house, I discovered, was filled with banned books. What’s more, my young socialist civil rights worker parents, poor and averse to babysitters, would take us to the movies to see many films we were too young to see or understand and which I would discover, much to my childhood confusion over morality, were often on that banned list.
As more books are banned by right-wing extremists, films are still a demilitarized zone. We can watch a movie about a banned history — be it the dailiness of racism as depicted in “American Fiction” or a hidden history of the erasure and killing of Native Americans as told in “Killers of the Flower Moon” or the hidden messages of anti-feminist oppression as America Ferrara details in her extraordinary speech in “Barbie.” We can watch the birth of nuclear war in “Oppenheimer” or question the complicity of personal and global silence in “The Zone of Interest” and “20 Days in Mariupol.”
These stories — our stories — are so critical to our culture. I remember seeing “Fahrenheit 451” as a child with my parents at The Bandbox and trying to imagine a world in which books are banned and people risked their lives to save them. And yet, we are on the cusp of that world now.
That film is about subversion and how we resist and what we are willing to risk to quite literally tell and become our stories. I have been thinking about that since the Oscars last weekend. Thinking about Jonathan Glazer taking a risk to talk about genocide as a Jewish man after making a film about the genocide of the Holocaust. Yet that is his story: a Jew telling us not to perpetrate genocide ever again.
I never got to hear the speech I most wanted to hear: Lily Gladstone as the first Native American woman to win an Oscar. I didn’t hear it because she didn’t win — a failing, I think, on the part of the academy which still isn’t getting race right, though they are better.
Emma Stone, who won best actress for her magnificent performance in “Poor Things” thought Gladstone would win. Stone was obviously shocked that she won and Gladstone was on her feet clapping for Stone before Stone was on hers. Stone spoke directly to Gladstone during her tearful speech, acknowledging her in a way the Academy did not.
And so I ponder that line of Chernov’s “cinema forms memories, and memories form history.” Our memories are vivid and visual. “My mind’s eye” is a phrase we use, and often. Our memories are cinematic, our stories are told in pictures, in a flip-book of scenes from our lives. That pastiche is something we should all contemplate as so many of our stories have never been told and so many of the people our stories honor have never been heard from — silenced, their voices and stories suppressed.
And so the message is: Do not neglect to tell your stories. Remember that those memories are the foundation of our collective history — yours, mine and ultimately ours.