(March 6, 2023 / JNS) The Academy Awards is soon upon us. One film that will not be walking away with a large Oscar haul is Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon.” (It is nominated for three awards, none in major categories.) That came as a surprise, given the box office and critical success of his last film, “La La Land,” the size of “Babylon’s” budget, and the appeal of its cast, which includes Brad Pitt and Margot Robbie.
The film is a valentine to the early days of Hollywood, circa 1928, right before the Golden Age of movies, when silent films won over the general public and talking pictures would become America’s most dominant cultural export. Movies, in fact, projected what America represented to most people around the world.
Shouldn’t a movie about the wonder of moving pictures, and the pioneers who built Hollywood, be a box office draw? It is a sweeping film, lush in its cinematic landscape—deserts, hills, movie sets and mansions—daring if not wholly debauched in its sexuality, and frenzied given that nearly all the characters are inebriated, or drug and gambling addicted.
It also has a bloated running time. Chazelle’s green light from the studio was more like a yahrzeit. Perhaps its ambitions in scope were undermined by its misadventures in woke.
Actually, there’s an object lesson in “Babylon” worth pondering.
Not unlike the recent opening of the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures in Los Angeles, which somehow neglected to mention that five of the original seven studio heads were Jewish immigrants, “Babylon” went out of its way to foster inclusion for every category of identity except for the one responsible for moving the nascent industry to Los Angeles, erecting studios, sound stages and an entire city to support it—in what had been a barren wasteland.
Both the Jews of Israel and those of Hollywood made deserts bloom.
“Babylon” is…
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