Arts & Entertainment
The predictable predictability of the Oscars
Favoring middle-of-the-road prestige over edgier fare
It’s hard to write a reaction piece about the Oscars when you recognize that the Oscars, by their very nature, are essentially a poll – or perhaps, more aptly, a popularity contest – which reflects an aggregate of personal opinions, and therefore have as much to do with internal Hollywood politics as with rewarding artistic excellence.
I’m not saying that the movies and people being celebrated on the stage at the Dolby Theater in Hollywood Sunday night – all of them, winners and nominees alike – didn’t deserve to be there; on the contrary, 2023 was an outstanding year for cinema, and every one of the contenders could be considered worthy of taking the prize. If that’s the case, however, how can any of these outcomes be determined without the influence of personal taste? Making movies is not like playing sports, where a win results from the highest number of points scored and goals blocked; there is no such handily objective criteria to rely on in picking an actor, a screenwriter, or an entire film to proclaim as the “best” in its respective category, and it’s inevitable that Academy voters will be influenced by personal bias when they make their choices on that final ballot.
While Sunday’s 96th annual Oscar ceremony, which offered the usual snubs and oversights and no real surprises, might have disappointed me or even occasionally sparked a glimmer of outrage, I cannot fairly say that any of the final results were “mistakes.” And though it may be oversimplifying things to say that being offended by the Academy’s final choices is akin to being angry that someone else’s favorite flavor of ice cream is chocolate when yours is salted caramel praline, it’s still enough to convince me that my “reaction” piece to the Academy Awards can really only ever be an “opinion” piece,
With that in mind, here we go.
The presentation itself was the usual blend of witty repartee (mostly provided with success by veteran Oscar host Jimmy Kimmel, though attempts at it from the various presenters ran the gamut from delightful to disastrous), musical performances (Billie Eilish and brother Finneas O’Connell’s rendition of “What Was I Made For?”, which went on to win the evening’s only award for “Barbie”, was a particular highlight, alongside the more lavish and deliciously amusing dance production number headed by Supporting Actor nominee Ryan Gosling for “I’m Just Ken” from the same film), uplifting moments (a regal Rita Moreno’s benedictory introduction of “Barbie” Supporting Actress nominee America Ferrera brought tears to my eyes, and I suspect I wasn’t alone), and show-stopping surprises (John Cena’s teasingly faux nudity presenting the Best Costume Design award was a memorable stunt, to put it mildly, as was the combination of Arnold Schwarzenegger and Danny DeVito to do the honors in the Visual Effects and Film Editing categories) – yet it also had more than its fair share of embarrassing gaffes, such as upstaging the “In Memoriam” segment with an overblown production number accompanied by father-and-son operatic crooners Andrea and Matteo Bocelli’s duet of “Con tu partirò”, a move that has fueled perhaps more post-Oscars outrage than anything else from this year’s ceremony.
As for the politics, there were the expected barbs making fun of easy conservative targets, but most of the speeches avoided invoking too much progressive fury. The one overtly political moment came with the win of UK director Jonathan Glazer’s “The Zone of Interest” for Best International Feature, when he read, in prayerlike monotone, a pre-prepared statement warning against the dehumanizing hate depicted in his slice-of-Nazi-life historical drama and calling for empathy for the targets of such hate on both sides of the current crisis in Gaza. It was met with backlash, of course, especially after a partial quote in Variety omitted key elements of the speech and led many to believe the Jewish filmmaker was refuting his own religion.
As for the winners of the awards themselves (you can find the full list on the Oscar website) the evening’s choices fell more or less in line with my predictions – though not necessarily my preferences.
The domination of “Oppenheimer” in most of the major categories in which it competed was, for anyone following the pre-ceremony buzz, a foregone conclusion. Few doubted that Cillian Murphy would handily claim the Best Actor prize – thwarting nominee Colman Domingo (“Rustin”) from becoming the first queer actor to win for playing a queer character in the process – or that Christopher Nolan would take the Best Director category, and from there the win for Best Picture felt as inevitable as anything can be at the Oscars.
Equally inevitable was the evening’s most easily predicted “Oppenheimer” win, as veteran Hollywood player Robert Downey, Jr. ebulliently swaggered onstage amid the enthusiastic familial cheers of his peers to claim the Best Supporting Actor prize; his acceptance speech, in which he self-deprecatingly recalled the legal and professional obstacles arising from the substance abuse that nearly derailed his early career, became a testament to overcoming personal setbacks to achieve an even higher success, something that resonated in the words of several other of the evening’s winners.
In the categories where “Oppenheimer” didn’t win, the odds were already in favor of the eventual victors, such as first-time filmmaker Cord Jefferson, whose “American Fiction” earned him the Best Adapted Screenplay Award over fellow front runners like “Barbie” and “Poor Things,” and Da’Vine Joy Randolph, whose winning Supporting Actress turn in “The Holdovers” had been a juggernaut throughout the award season.
Many Oscar fans, though most accepted the predestination of “Oppenheimer” as the year’s big winner, might rather have seen a different candidate come out on top (my own choice, for what it’s worth, would have been “Barbie,” with “Poor Things” and “Zone of Interest” coming up close behind); but even if Nolan’s weighty and technically dazzling biopic was unquestionably a fine film, exploring a deeply disturbing slice of not-too-distant history that still casts a long existential shadow over our world today, it’s impossible for me not to see in its multiple wins an all-too-familiar pattern of “safe” choices.
While “Oppenheimer” might pique ethical discussions over its title character’s choice to build the atomic bomb, few would find controversy in the idea that the destruction unleashed on the world by that choice is a reason for concern. Its most viable competitors, “Barbie” and “Poor Things” – both of which touched on many of the same existential themes, albeit from a markedly different direction and in a more absurdist style – each stirred divisive opinions around (among other things) a perceived feminist agenda; other highly-acclaimed titles in the running, like the non-English language entries “Zone”, “Past Lives”, and “Anatomy of a Fall”, fell outside the comfortable domestic audience mainstream where Oscar’s favorite picks are usually a little too deeply-rooted to allow much opportunity for a dark horse upset. While not many expected Bradley Cooper’s ambitious Bernstein biopic “Maestro” to take home any awards, it was considerably more noteworthy that Martin Scorsese’s “Killers of the Flower Moon,” nominated for 10 Awards and widely lauded as one of the year’s most essential films, failed to score a single one of them – though I can’t help also noting that it deals with one of most shameful threads in our American past, inevitably making it a controversial movie for an era marked by deeply divided ideologies around that subject.
It’s perhaps for that reason that “Flower Moon” was not considered a front runner in most of its categories, but there was one in which it was seen as a heavy favorite. With Lily Gladstone poised to become the first Indigenous performer to win the Best Actress trophy, the odds leading up to Sunday’s presentation seemed to position them as the front runner; in the end, however, it was Emma Stone’s tour-de-force in “Poor Things” – in which she appeared in virtually every scene, in contrast to Gladstone’s relatively limited screen – that took it instead. Though it wasn’t quite a surprise, given the number of wins Stone has garnered already for the film, which also took home the prizes for Best Makeup and Hairstyling and Best Production Design, it nevertheless felt – to me, at least – like another example of Oscar’s predictable reluctance to court controversy with its choices.
Ironically, but not surprisingly, this conservative approach often just ends up causing a controversy of its own, and this case is no exception. Though I had championed Stone’s brilliant performance as the obvious winner, when her name was announced I found myself feeling disappointment over Goldstone’s loss, even as I was thrilled for Stone’s well-earned victory. After all, in a contest where the outcome is entirely subjective, Academy voters could have chosen to amplify the excellence of someone from within a marginalized community. Stone, who seemed as surprised at her win as anyone else, did remarkable work, but so did Gladstone; though it truly is “an honor just to be nominated,” it was an opportunity for Oscar to take a step toward correcting a long-ignored injustice at a time when doing so could make a demonstrably constructive impact on our culture and our society at a time when doing so would have a tremendous cultural impact, and it didn’t happen. It was a moment that struck me with an odd sense of disappointment even as I cheered for Stone; a bit of the sour within the sweet.
That, aside from a sense of missed opportunity over the evening’s consistent pattern of favoring the middle-of-the-road prestige represented by “Oppenheimer” over the edgier, more confrontational material presented by some of the other titles on the slate, was my biggest takeaway from the Academy Awards. Though I can’t say that any of the winners were unworthy, I can’t help thinking that their victories were somewhat tainted by the virtual shutout of “Barbie”, (which still feels to me like a message for female filmmakers to “stay in their lane”) and relatively low showing for “Poor Things” (which took only 3 of the 11 awards for which it was nominated), and that their underappreciation for such films was for me proof that many of the professionals working within the industry are afraid of material that pushes the medium too far outside its traditional boundaries, that dares to imagine stories and ideas which give voice to “outsider” concerns beyond the level of lip service, or that stretches the accepted limits of narrative entertainment.
More concerning, perhaps, is the minimal change that has come in the wake of the Academy’s much-publicized retooling to promote greater diversity and inclusion among the nominees. While it’s heartening to see people of color and queer people being brought into the mix more consistently than ever before, it’s also all the more painful when we see them passed over or relegated to the status of “also ran” most of the time. As a queer writer working for a queer publication, it’s impossible for me not to be impatient when films with strong LGBTQ content are lauded alongside mainstream titles only to consistently be passed over when it comes to the final victory. While queer subject matter, in varying degrees, was part of movies like “Rustin”, “Nyad”, and even “Barbie,” only two wins in the “major” categories went to films that included significant queer themes – “American Fiction” and “Anatomy of a Fall”, both of which won for their screenplays.
And while it’s now old news, the Academy’s complete omission of Andrew Haigh’s melancholy gay ghost story “All of Us Strangers,” a queer UK film overwhelmingly embraced by other major awards bodies across the world and in America itself and considered a major contender before failing to earn a single Oscar nomination, and female filmmaker Emerald Fennell’s “Saltburn,” which hinged – at least ostensibly – on a queer attraction between stars Barry Keoghan and Jacob Elordi, speaks volumes about the comfort level surrounding queer content within mainstream Hollywood. Even “May December,” a high-profile film directed by queer indie pioneer Todd Haynes but featuring only presumably heterosexual characters, received only a single nod (for Best Original Screenplay) for “May December,” despite being widely considered a front-runner for several acting awards. While inclusivity doesn’t mean considering every queer-relevant movie a shoo-in for the competition, it’s telling when the Academy all but ignores queer titles that have been contenders and even winners at all the other major film award ceremonies, and frankly, it’s extremely annoying. While I can’t speak for women, those in the Black community, or other groups with a history of being dismissed by Oscar, I can only assume that their sentiments must resemble my own.
Yet as I reach the end of my observations about the latest installment of the Academy Awards, I find myself falling short of blaming the Academy itself, at least as an organization. While it has had a problematic history of dragging its feet when it comes to evolving toward a more all-embracing approach to bestowing honors, undeniable progress has been made. That this progress is infuriatingly slow is less a reflection on the awards than it is on Hollywood as a whole; after all, despite Academy efforts to ensure greater diversity among its nominees, it’s the individual choices of its voters that determines the final results – and if those results fail to accomplish more than the occasional token victory for the non-white-heterosexual contenders, it’s a symptom of the fact that those voices are underrepresented within the industry at large.
If we want to see an Academy Awards ceremony that truly accomplishes the kind of all-inclusive spirit for which it has so palpable a potential, we must continue to pressure the Hollywood industry at large to build a more diverse and inclusive creative environment. Otherwise, no matter how much they promise to do better, they will always fall short.
Friday, April 3
Center Aging Monthly Luncheon With Yoga will be at 12 p.m. at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. Email Mac at [email protected] if you require ASL interpreter assistance, have any dietary restrictions, or questions about this event.
Go Gay DC will host “First Friday LGBTQ+ Community Social” at 7 p.m. at Silver Diner Ballston. This is a chance to relax, make new friends, and enjoy happy hour specials at this classic retro venue. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Saturday, April 4
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Brunch” at 11 a.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar & Restaurant. This fun weekly event brings the DMV area LGBTQ+ community, including allies, together for delicious food and conversation. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Nellies Sports Bar will host “Nellies DC Drag Brunch” at 12 p.m. Come get served like a queen, by a queen at the top rated Drag Brunch in DC! Join Sapphire Blue, Deja Diamond and their team of amazing drag performers, for the most fun you’ll have all weekend. Tickets start at $58.51 and are available on Eventbrite.
Monday, April 6
Center Aging: Monday Coffee Klatch will be at 10 a.m. on Zoom. This is a social hour for older LGBTQ+ adults. Guests are encouraged to bring a beverage of choice. For more information, contact Adam ([email protected]).
Go Gay DC will host “LGBTQ+ Community Happy Hour Meetup” at 5:30 p.m. at Freddie’s Beach Bar and restaurant. This event is ideal for making new friends. It’s free to attend. The group will gather inside at the purple booth to the left. Attendance is free and more details are available on Eventbrite.
Tuesday, April 7
Universal Pride Meeting will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This group seeks to support, educate, empower, and create change for people with disabilities. For more details, email [email protected].
Wednesday, April 8
Job Club will be at 6 p.m. on Zoom upon request. This is a weekly job support program to help job entrants and seekers, including the long-term unemployed, improve self-confidence, motivation, resilience and productivity for effective job searches and networking — allowing participants to move away from being merely “applicants” toward being “candidates.” For more information, email [email protected] or visit www.thedccenter.org/careers.
Thursday, April 9
The DC Center’s Fresh Produce Program will be held all day at the DC Center for the LGBT Community. To be more fair with who is receiving boxes, the program is moving to a lottery system. People will be informed on Wednesday at 5:00 pm if they are picked to receive a produce box. No proof of residency or income is required. For more information, email [email protected] or call 202-682-2245.
Virtual Yoga Class will be at 7 p.m. on Zoom. This free weekly class is a combination of yoga, breathwork and meditation that allows LGBTQ+ community members to continue their healing journey with somatic and mindfulness practices. For more details, visit the DC Center’s website.
a&e features
Award-winning D.C. chef reaching new culinary heights
Anthony Jones of Marcus DC competing on ‘Top Chef’
In Anthony Jones’s kitchen, all sorts of flags fly, including his own. Executive chef at award-winning restaurant Marcus DC, Jones has reached culinary heights (James Beard Award semifinalist for Emerging Chef, anyone?), yet he’s just getting started.
Briefly stepping away from his award-winning station, Jones took a moment under a different set of lights. Recently, he temporarily gave up his post at the restaurant for a starring small-screen slot on the latest season of “Top Chef,” which debuted in March. (The show airs weekly on Bravo and Peacock).
Before his strategic slice-and-dice competition, however, Jones, who identifies as gay, draws from his deep DMV roots. In the years before “Top Chef” and the top chef spot at Marcus, he was born and raised in Sunderland, Md., in southern Maryland, near the Chesapeake.
Early memories were steeped in afternoons on boats with his dad bonding over fishing, and wandering the garden of his great-grandparents spread with fresh vegetables and a few hogs. “It was Southern, old-school ethics and upbringing,” he said. “Family and food went hand in hand.” Weekends meant grabbing bushels of crabs, dad and grandma would cook and crack them. Family members would host fish fries for extra cash. In this seafood-heavy youth, Jones managed time to sneak in episodes of the “OG” Japanese “Iron Chef” show, which helped inspire him to pursue a career in the kitchen.
Jones moved to D.C. after graduating from college, ending up at lauded Restaurant Eve, and met famed chef Marcus Samuelson, who brought him to Miami to be part of the opening team for Red Rooster Overtown. After three years, Jones moved back to D.C., where he ran Dirty Habit, reinventing and reimagining the menu, integrating West African flavors and ingredients.
Samuelson, however, wouldn’t let a talent like Jones stay away for too long. Pulling Jones back into his orbit, Samuelson elevated Jones to help him open his namesake restaurant Marcus DC, which has been named a top-five restaurant by the Washington Post. Since then, Jones has been nominated as a semifinalist for the RAMMYs Rising Culinary Star in 2026 and won the Eater DC’s Rising Chef award in 2025.
Samuelson’s Marcus is a tour de force interpreting the Black Diaspora on the plate, from the American South to West Africa, along with his signature “Swedopian” touches. Yet it’s Jones who has deeply informed the plate, elevating his own story to date. Marcus DC is primarily a seafood restaurant, which serves Jones well.
“Where I’m from is seafood heavy, and as I’ve progressed in my career, I’ve moved away from meat.” Veggies and fish are hero dishes. His own dish, Mel’s Crab Rice, was not only lauded by the Washington Post, but is framed by his youth carrying home the crustaceans from Mel’s crab truck. It’s a bowl of Carolina rice, layered with pickled okra, uni béarnaise, and crab. Jones also points to a dish on the opening menu, rockfish and brassica, paying respect to a landmark D.C. institution, Ben’s Chili Bowl. Jones reverse engineered a favorite bowl of chili that’s seafood instead of meat forward, leveraging octopus and rockfish along with different riffs of cauliflower: showing his intellectual, creative, and cultural sides.
While “Top Chef” is showing Jones’s spotlight side, he also lets his identity show at work. “In the kitchen, I make sure we’re inclusive. We don’t tolerate discrimination. Everyone that’s here should feel confident to express themselves. There are so many different flags in the kitchen.”
Jones says that he didn’t fully express his gay identity until fairly recently. He felt reluctant coming out to certain family members, “you’re scared to tell them about being different,” he says, and while that anxiety ate at him, “I’m lucky and fortunate to have unconditional love and that weight off my shoulders.”
Today, “I’m me all the time, Monday to Sunday. I’m honest with people, and my staff is honest with me.”
“Being a chef is hard,” he says, “and being a chef of color is even more difficult.”
Yet his LGBTQ identity is a juggling act, he says. “I need to keep that balance, because once someone finds out something about you, their opinion can change, whether you want it or not.”
Being on a whole season of TV cooking competition, however, might mean millions more might have an opinion of him (Jones has appeared on TV already, on an episode of “Chopped”). To prepare, he says, “I’ve just kept a level head. It’s just an honor to be on top chef with amazing people happy to be there.”
Plus, this season is set in the Carolinas, and Jones attended Johnson & Wales University in Charlotte, N.C. “It’s a full story of my life, now a monumental moment for me.”
Jones also recently was nominated for a James Beard Foundation Award. “JBF has been a north star, a dream for so long. I always had this goal on my wall.”
Being at the top spot at Marcus DC, making waves through his accolades, and cooking on Bravo means that Jones is highly visible. “I think that if someone has a similar background to me, and can see our story, trajectory, and success, they can have more ability to be themselves. This is my goal.”
Back at Marcus, Jones has plenty up his chef’s white’s sleeves. A new spring menu is in the works. He’ll be launching a new tasting menu “dining experience,” he says, and has plans to work on more events and collaborations with chefs and friends to bring in new talent and share the culinary wealth.
Movies
Trans-driven ‘Serpent’s Skin’ delivers campy sapphic horror
Embracing classic tropes with a candid exploration of queer experience
It’s probably no surprise that the last decade or so has seen a “renaissance” in horror cinema. Long underestimated and dismissed by critics and ignored by all the awards bodies as genre films, horror movies were deemed for generations as unworthy of serious consideration; relegated into the realm of “fandom,” where generations of young movie fanatics were left to find deeper significance on their own, they have inspired countless future film artists whose creative vision would be shaped by their influence. Add to that the increasing state of existential anxiety that has us living like frogs in a slow-boiling pot, and it seems as if the evolution of horror into what might be our culture’s most resonant form of pop art expression was more or less inevitable all along.
Queer audiences, of course, have always understood that horror provides an ideal vehicle to express the “coded” themes that spring from existence as a stigmatized outsider, and while the rise of the genre as an art form has been fueled by filmmakers from every community, the transgressive influence of queerness – particularly when armed with “camp,” its most surefire means of subversion – has played an undeniable role in building a world where movies like “Sinners” and “Weapons” can finally be lauded at the Oscars for their artistic qualities as well as celebrated for their success at providing paying audiences with a healthy jolt of adrenaline.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, the boldest and most biting entries are coming from trans filmmakers like Jane Schoenbrun (“I Saw the TV Glow”) – and like Australian director Alice Maio Mackay, whose new film “The Serpent’s Skin” opened in New York last weekend and expands to Los Angeles this week.
Described in a review from RogerEbert.com as “a kind of ‘Scanners’ for the dolls,” it’s a movie that embraces classic horror tropes within a sensibility that blends candid exploration of trans experience with an obvious love for camp. It centers on twenty-something trans girl Anna (Alexandra McVicker), who escapes the toxic environment of both her dysfunctional household and her conservative hometown by running away to the “Big City” and moving in with her big sister (Charlotte Chimes). On her first night in town, she connects with Danny (Jordan Dulieu), a neighbor (the only “hottie” in the building, according to her sister) who plays guitar in a band and ticks off all her “edgy” boxes, and has a one-night stand.
The very next day, she starts a new job at a record store, where she connects – through an intense and unexpected incident – with local tattoo artist Gen (Avalon Faust), a young woman she has seen in psychic visions, and who has been likewise drawn to her. The reason? They are both “witches,” born with abilities that give them a potentially deadly power over ordinary humans, and bound together in an ancient supernatural legacy.
It goes without saying that they fall in love; together, they teach and learn from each other as they try to master the mysterious magical gifts they both possess; but when Danny coincidentally books Gen for a tattoo inspired by his earlier “fling” with Anna, an ancient evil is unleashed, leading to a string of horrific incidents and forcing them to confront the dark influences within their own traumatic histories which may have conjured this malevolent spirit in the first place, before it wreaks its soul-stealing havoc upon the entire community.
Confronting the theme of imposed trans “guilt” head on, “Serpent’s Skin” emanates from a softer, gentler place than most horror films, focusing less on scares than on the sense of responsibility which seems naturally to arise just from being “different.”. Both McVicker and Faust bring a palpable feeling of weight to their roles, as if their characters are carrying not only their own fate upon their shoulders, but that of the world at large; blessed (or cursed) with a layer of awareness that both elevates and isolates them, their characters evoke a haunting sense of responsibility, which permeates their relationship and supersedes their personal desires. At the same time, they bring a mix of respect and eroticism to the sapphic romance at the center of the film, evoking a connection to the transgressive and iconic “lesbian noir” genre but replacing its sense of amoral cynicism with an imperative toward empathy and social responsibility.
All of this helps to make the film’s heroines relatable, and raises the stakes by investing us not just in the defeat of supernatural evil, but the triumph of love. Yet we can’t help but feel that there’s something lost – a certain edge, perhaps – that might have turned up the heat and given the horror a more palpable bite. Though there are moments of genuine fright, most of the “scary” stuff is campy enough to keep us from taking things too seriously – despite the best efforts of the charismatic Dulieu, who literally sinks his teeth into his portrayal of the possessed version of Danny.
More genuinely disturbing are the movie’s scenes of self-harm, which both underscore and indict the trope of trans “victimhood” while reminding us of the very real fear at the center of many trans lives, especially when lived under the oppression of a mindset that deplores their very existence.
Still, though Mackay’s film may touch on themes of queer and trans existence and build its premise on a kind of magical bond that makes us all “sisters under the skin,” it is mostly constructed as a stylish tribute to the classic thrillers of an earlier age, evoking the psychological edge of directors like Hitchcock and DePalma while embracing the lurid “shock value” of the B-movie horror that shaped the vision of a modern generation of filmmakers who grew up watching it – and even if it never quite delivers the kind of scares that linger in our minds as we try to go to sleep at night, it makes up for the shortfall with a smart, sensitive, and savvy script and a rare depiction of trans/lesbian love that wins us over with chemistry, emotional intelligence, and enviable solidarity.
What makes “The Serpent’s Skin” feel particularly remarkable is that it comes from a 21-year-old filmmaker. Mackey, who built the foundation of her career behind the camera with a series of low-budget horror shorts in her teens, has already made an impact with movies ranging from the vampire horror comedy “So Vam” (released when she was 16) to the horror musical “Satanic Panic” and the queer holiday shockfest “Carnage for Christmas”. With her latest effort, she deploys a confidence and a style that encompasses both the deep psychological nuance of the horror genre and its guilty-pleasure thrills, rendered in an aesthetic that is grounded in intimate queer and trans authenticity and yet remains daring enough to take detours into the surreal and psychedelic without apology.
It’s the kind of movie that feels like a breakthrough, especially in an era when it feels especially urgent for trans stories to be told.
Women’s FEST returns to Rehoboth Beach next week
Belarusian lawmakers approve bill to crackdown on LGBTQ rights
Calendar: April 3-9
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Kenyan advocacy groups launch LGBTQ voter mobilization campaign
‘Out for McDuffie’ event held at D.C. gay bar
‘Jonah’ an undeniably compelling but unusual memory play
The Oscar-losing performance that’s too good to miss
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