Culturedarm 19.01.20

The nominees for the 92nd Academy Awards were announced on Monday, and as usual the response was less a celebration of film than the marking of scorecards and steely lamentation for all those who missed out. The supervillain origin story Joker, starring Joaquin Phoenix and directed by Todd Phillips, grinned and grimaced at the head of the pack, the sometimes contentious picture picking up eleven nominations. Martin Scorsese’s mob drama The Irishman, Quentin Tarantino’s alternative history ode Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and Sam Mendes’s First World War epic 1917 had to settle for second place with ten nominations apiece. In total Netflix led the studios with twenty-four nominations, with Sony on twenty and Disney on seventeen.

Ford v Ferrari, which stars Matt Damon and Christian Bale at the head of the team which built the Ford GT40 racecar, Jojo Rabbit about a fanciful member of the Hitler Youth, Greta Gerwig’s take on Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, Noah Baumbach’s divorce drama Marriage Story, and the dark comedy Parasite by Bong Joon-ho joined Joker, The Irishman, Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, and 1917 as the nine films making the grade in the Best Picture category. Parasite in turn became the first ever South Korean film nominated for Best Picture, and Bong Joon-ho is also up for Best Director alongside Phillips, Scorsese, Tarantino, and Mendes, leaving the category once again without a single female nominee, with acclaimed directors including Gerwig, Lulu Wang, Joanna Hogg, Marielle Heller, and Lorene Scafaria absent. Of twenty acting nominees, Cynthia Erivo for her lead role in Harriet is the only actor of colour. On the other hand the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences boasted a record 62 women nominated across all categories, with four of the five features nominated for Best Documentary directed or co-directed by women.

Parasite also features in the rebranded Best International Feature category, along with the Polish spiritual Corpus Christi, the Macedonian beekeeping documentary Honeyland, the French contemporary crime drama Les Misérables, and a Spanish reflection on filmmaking and ageing in the form of Pedro Almodóvar’s Pain and Glory. The Safdie brothers’ crime thriller Uncut Gems and Jordan Peele’s horror film Us were among the features cut out from the Oscar nominations entirely, with Robert De Niro, Adam Sandler, Awkwafina, Eddie Murphy, Jennifer Lopez, and Lupita Nyong’o among the notable actors omitted.

In fact the acting categories may be all sewn up following the 26th Screen Actors Guild Awards, which took place on Sunday night from the Shrine Auditorium in Los Angeles. Joaquin Phoenix, Renée Zellweger, Brad Pitt, and Laura Dern reprised their successes at the Golden Globes in the best lead and supporting categories, making them hot favourites heading into the Oscars. Parasite was the surprise winner of the overall award for Outstanding Performance by a Cast in a Motion Picture, boosting the film’s Oscar hopes, while The Crown and The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel triumphed in the television categories. Robert De Niro picked up a lifetime achievement award, as the award show chatter centred on Brad Pitt and Jennifer Aniston.

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On 28 September, 1969, as the townsfolk of Murchison, Victoria milked their cows and tended their vines and orchards, out of the mid-morning sky burned a blazing fireball, which separated into three fragments and disappeared in a cloud of smoke. A tremor shook the town roughly thirty seconds later, and when rural Australia went to explore, they found the remnants of a meteorite, whose total collected mass exceeded 100 kilograms. Not content with almost squashing the town, the meteorite took its name, and as an observed fall of such hefty mass, the Murchison meteorite has been pored over by scientists and astronomers ever since.

Now researchers have undertaken new analysis of the tiny grains of stardust embedded within the rock. Fragments of the meteorite were ground into a paste which smells like a particularly pungent variety of peanut butter, then the paste was dissolved in acid, revealing minuscule grains of interstellar dust which can be measured for their exposure to cosmic rays based on isotopes of the element neon. The result is the oldest material ever found on Earth. Some of the grains have been dated at approximately 7 billions years old, predating our solar system, which formed about 4.6 billion years ago. The discovery therefore offers an insight into the the presolar chronology of our galaxy, helping us to understand the process of star formation and the course of interstellar dust as it is ejected from dying stars and attaches itself to earthbound asteroids.

The results of the research, which were published on Monday in the journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also support the sense among astronomers of a particularly lively period around 7 billions years ago of star formation. Philipp Heck, a geophysicist at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago and lead author of the paper, said:

‘We have more young grains than we expected. Our hypothesis is that the majority of those grains, which are 4.9 to 4.6 billion years old, formed in an episode of enhanced star formation. There was a time before the start of the solar system when more stars formed than normal.’

A specimen of the Murchison meteorite on display at the National Museum of Natural History, Washington, D.C. (Credit: Basilicofresco/CC BY-SA 3.0)

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On Tuesday, Spike Lee was announced as the president of the jury for the 73rd Cannes Film Festival, which will commence in May. The director will become the first black person to lead the jury in the festival’s long and prestigious history. Lee himself has a storied past as part of the festival: back in 1986, his debut feature She’s Gotta Have It won the festival’s youth award for a foreign film, prompting some French critics to dub Lee the ‘black Woody Allen’ for his fluent comedy and loving treatment of New York. In 1989, Do the Right Thing premiered at Cannes and was nominated but failed to receive the Palme d’Or, a notorious snub which left Lee feeling ‘robbed’. Relations long since restored, BlacKkKlansman premiered at Cannes in 2018 and received the festival’s second-most prestigious honour, the Grand Prix. Recounting the full scope of his career-spanning history with Cannes, Lee said in a statement:

‘In this life I have lived, my biggest blessings have been when they arrived unexpected, when they happened out of nowhere. When I got the call that I was offered the opportunity to be President of Cannes Jury for 2020, I was shocked, happy, surprised and proud all at the same time. To me the Cannes Film Festival (besides being the most important film festival in the world – no disrespect to anybody) has had a great impact on my film career. You could easily say Cannes changed the trajectory of who I became in world cinema.’

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According to three major scientific agencies, the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) in the United States and the Meteorological Office in the United Kingdom, 2019 was the second-hottest year on record, at the end of the hottest decade since records began in 1850. Analyses of temperature data showed that global average surface temperatures last year were almost 1 degree Celsius higher than in the middle of last century. The results follow recent reports by the United Nations and the World Meteorological Organisation showing that greenhouse gas emissions and the concentration of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere continue to rise, keeping the world on course for a devastating temperature rise of 3.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels.

Since the 1960s, every decade has been significantly warmer than the last. The trend has been particularly pronounced over the past five years, which have produced the five hottest years on record. While 2019 saw summer heatwaves across Europe, resulting in hundreds of deaths and record temperatures in France, Belgium, Germany, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, and the United Kingdom, the year was still slightly eclipsed by 2016, when the culmination of an El Niño warming event in the eastern equatorial Pacific Ocean impacted the world’s atmosphere, prompting drought and flooding conditions which affected more than sixty million people.

The global average surface temperature is now more than 1 degree Celsius above pre-industrial levels, with the world on course for a rise of 3.2 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels based on current patterns of warming and greenhouse gas emissions (Credit: BBC/Met Office)

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The Galleria d’arte moderna Ricci Oddi is one of the curiosities of the art scene in Italy. Founded in 1931 by the local collector Giuseppe Ricci Oddi, with its stolid brick and expressionist stonework, its niches, peristyle, colonnade, and courtyards all set within the grounds of a deconsecrated convent in the heart of Piacenza, the gallery is home to around 400 artworks from the present day stretching back to the early nineteenth century. Its focus is on Italian artists, with Ricci Oddi’s favourites including the Tuscan Macchiaioli, and its collection spreads out across nineteen spare and carefully-lit rooms, encompassing everything from the Romanticism of Francesco Hayez to the Symbolism of Giovanni Segantini, from the Futurist canvases of Umberto Boccioni to the post-Impressionist sculptures of Medardo Rosso. Yet the jewel in the collection was by the Austrian Gustav Klimt, whose expressionist Portrait of a Lady was purchased by Ricci Oddi in 1925, and held pride of place in the museum until February 1997 when it was stolen, bereft of its frame, in what investigators at the time presumed to be an inside job.

The celebrated painting had acquired new significance just one year earlier, when X-ray analysis proved the hunch of an art student, Claudia Maga, who correctly ascertained that Portrait of a Lady had been painted over a version of Portrait of a Young Woman, missing since 1917. The earlier painting is believed to have portrayed one of Klimt’s lovers, and the overpainting – undertaken in grief after the woman’s premature death – made Portrait of a Lady the only double portrait in Klimt’s catalogue. To celebrate the discovery, the Galleria d’arte moderna Ricci Oddi planned a special exhibition in Piacenza’s city hall, which apparently provided perfect cover for a heist: the painting went missing, and investigators found its gilded frame on the roof of the museum next to an open skylight, which was probably a case of misdirection. The skylight was reportedly too small for the painting, and one of the self-proclaimed thieves alleged that the theft had in fact been carried out months earlier, the original Portrait of a Lady in the meantime replaced by a forgery.

Various forgeries have been uncovered since, and the investigation at one point incorporated former Italian Prime Minister Bettino Craxi, while in 2014 the police reopened the case hoping for DNA evidence from a fingerprint found on the discarded frame. Several thieves professed their involvement in the crime, and made oblique promises regarding its return to the Ricci Oddi. Then in December, two gardeners clearing ivy from the building’s outer walls stumbled across a concealed metal panel. After prying the panel open, inside the small alcove they found what appeared to be Portrait of a Lady. This week experts confirmed that the painting is authentic, based on the presence of the museum’s stamp and X-rays showing the underpainting. While the police investigation remains ongoing, the mayor of Piacenza, Patrizia Barbieri, heralded the news as of ‘historic importance for the artistic and cultural community and for the city’, adding that film companies and book publishers are already hoping to adapt the story.

*Portrait of a Lady*, by Gustav Klimt (1916-1917). Oil on canvas. 60 cm x 55 cm. Galleria d’arte moderna Ricci Oddi, Piacenza

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20th Century Fox was formed in 1935, the product of a merger between the Fox Film Corporation and Twentieth Century Pictures. Fox Film had been founded by William Fox in 1915, and pioneered the sound-on-film process which came to fruition in F. W. Murnau’s Academy Award-winning Sunrise: A Song of Two Humans, before the Wall Street Crash wiped out Fox’s fortune, and saw him ousted from the company. Meanwhile Twentieth Century Pictures was the upstart independent created in 1933 by Joseph Schenck, the former president of United Artists, and Darryl F. Zanuck, previously head of production at Warner Bros. With backing from the likes of Nicholas Schenck, Joseph’s younger brother and the president of Loew’s theatre chain, and MGM head Louis B. Mayer, Twentieth Century Pictures pressed the merged with Fox, and 20th Century Fox became one of the Big Five majors during the Golden Age of Hollywood.

The studio enjoyed success thanks to a string of hit films including The Grapes of Wrath, The Ox-Bow Incident, Heaven Can Wait, Leave Her to Heaven, Miracle on 34th Street, Gentleman’s Agreement, and All About Eve, with contract players including Henry Fonda, Gene Tierney, and Betty Grable. However by 1956, when Darryl F. Zanuck retired as head of production, the studio found itself in financial peril despite the introduction of CinemaScope, the contract of Marilyn Monroe, and the odd winning film including The King and I as the studio turned towards musicals. Production turmoil, Monroe’s death, and the costly Cleopatra were only somewhat salvaged by the success of The Longest Day, but by the end of the 1960s the studio was on firmer footing, thanks largely to the box office bonanza of The Sound of Music. As the focus shifted again towards a new breed of sci-fi and disaster spectacles, in 1977 Star Wars surpassed even The Sound of Music to became the highest-grossing film to date. Financial stability brought interest, and in the 1980s the company swiftly changed hands, purchased by Marvin Davis then by Rupert Murdoch, who spun off into television with the Fox Broadcasting Company.