Corrollary-ing Abe here: The “I Got a Name”/“Forbidden Road” flap points to the need for an Oscar category honoring filmmakers’ creative use of non-original music. It’s been 70 years since Richard Brooks put Bill Haley’s “Rock Around the Clock” in The Blackboard Jungle, turning a then-obscure pop song into a radio hit and arguably paving the way for 2001, American Graffiti, Pulp Fiction, and approximately ten million other great films rendered indelible by their makers’ use of previously-released songs as score. But there’s still no Oscar for Best Soundtrack or Best Music Supervision, and therefore there’s no way for the Academy to reward the myriad brilliant ways contemporary filmmakers use popular music in their art. I’m in favor of sweeping reforms in this area, but we can start small, with a Best Needle Drop award honoring the creative use of a single song. My nominees this year would include Blur’s “The Universal” (1995, as heard in Andrea Arnold’s Bird) and Sinead O’Connor’s “All Apologies” (1994, featured in Queer), and La Bionda’s “One For You, One For Me,” the 1978 Italo-disco nugget that hammers home the whole point of The Brutalist. But this year the imaginary Oscar goes to Halina Reijn’s use, in Babygirl, of the INXS power ballad “Never Tear Us Apart,” a 37-year-old song I’ve heard a thousand times that now feels, ironically enough, like it’s always been telling this movie’s story, line by line. —Alex Pappademas
Best Oscar Nominee Hollywood is Too Afraid to Touch: No Other Land
Everett Collection
The indie-film-distribution landscape is not, shall we say, in a healthy place these days. Generally speaking, though, you can expect that a movie nominated for an Oscar will find a distributor. No Other Land, nominated this year for Best Documentary Feature, does not. Since the film premiered at the Berlin International Film Festival last year, directors Basel Adra, Hamdan Ballal, Yuval Abraham and Rachel Szor, have searched in vain for a company willing to give their film a proper release. Finally, in the weeks before Hollywood’s biggest night, they opted to self-distribute, four-walling screenings and theatrical runs in various cities, wherever interested exhibitors have been willing. That they’ve had to resort to this at all is a stain on Hollywood. No Other Land is a damning document of Israel’s ongoing ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank. Adra, the film’s central character, is an activist who has been trying for years to stop the displacement of his family and people from their homes in Masafer Yatta, an area spuriously deemed an IDF training site. Year after year they are attacked by the military, their homes razed to the ground, and year after year they stand against the encroachment, rebuilding what they can as their world slowly slips away. Amid this, Adra forms a fraught friendship with Abraham, a Jewish-Israeli journalist, and the film watches as they contend with the difficulties of maintaining solidarity against oppression. No Other Land is anger-inducing, and important. Perhaps that’s why, despite enough people in Hollywood voting to nominate it, the industry would prefer you not see it at all. —C.A.
