



Run for your life! The world, according to the Oscars
Subscribe to enjoy similar stories. A man on the run in a society turned upside down: that is the image of the world projected in this year’s Oscar nominees. Their heroes dodge injustice and prejudice, flights from danger and towards salvation that are frenzied and exhausting (even for audiences).
At a time when some showbiz bigwigs fear offending the powerful, these films pack politics into rollercoaster stories. During the Renaissance, some artists embraced a principle known as copia, or abundance. Depicting the wealth of creation, they thought, required richness, intricacy and variety.
Today’s top directors seem to agree. Many of the titles are whoppers. “Sinners" (pictured) earned an all-time record 16 nominations; “One Battle After Another" has 13; “Marty Supreme" has nine: all are well over two hours long.
One response to cinema’s box-office woes is evidently to offer more bangs for your buck. Yet there are no longueurs here. “Sinners" is a fantasia about twin gangsters, both played by Michael B.
Jordan, who open a juke joint in Mississippi in 1932; it is part musical and part horror flick, incorporating the Ku Klux Klan, shoot-outs, vampires and the blues. In “One Battle" Leonardo DiCaprio is chased relentlessly across cities, rooftops and deserts. “Marty Supreme" is a madcap caper about a table-tennis hustler (Timothée Chalamet) in the early 1950s, which features two competing love stories and a gunfight over a stolen dog.
These are overstuffed movies, careening through moods and genres—sports flick to bildungsroman, or thriller to Western. Together they convey a sense that, from today’s perspective, life is too mercurial and overwhelming to fit into neat formats or plots. It is also unfair.
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