Deadgirl and Male Hopelessness

The 2008 horror movie Deadgirl is one of those films that stuck with me. The current vibe in the United States has helped with that, although we'll get to that in a moment. 

Two alienated high school seniors named JT (Noah Segan) and Ricky (Shiloh Fernandez) skip school one day and wander around an abandoned asylum. To their great surprise, they find a mute, undead woman (Jenny Spain) chained naked to a table in the basement (not easy to find pictures that I felt comfortable posting, that's for sure). JT is a genuine sociopath and immediately comes up with a perverted idea of what to do in this odd situation. Ricky is more sensitive and doesn't want to partake, despite becoming increasingly despondent over his unrequited love for JoAnn (Candice King). Throughout most of the movie, Ricky struggles to find the courage to defy his best friend and free the captive.

It's an unpleasant concept, it's an unpleasant movie, and the reviews definitely reflected that. For the most part, critics dismissed it as exploitative and juvenile, even borderline misogynistic. You can see where they're coming from, but given everything that's happened since 2008, Deadgirl is also arguably one of the most prescient movies of this still young century. I haven't seen anything else (not even Netflix's Adolescence, as good as it was) that so accurately depicts the psychology of young men descending into hateful madness by rejection from women.

"Think about it," JT says at one point.  "Folks like us are just cannon fodder for the rest of the world. But down here... you see, we're in control. Now we call the shots down here, man. Feels good, doesn't it? It's all right to say. You don't have to be the nice guy down here, Ricky."

The logic goes like this - they feel like losers in high school, particularly in regard to romance. Therefore they will be losers for the rest of their lives. Therefore the best they can hope for is an undead slave in the basement of an old building. It might sound ridiculous, but it felt real to me back when I first saw it and it still does. For decades, popular culture has drilled into the heads of young boys that to be a real man, you have to be promiscuous. If they haven't managed to get with the same amount of women as James Bond by the time they're adults, they have failed. It's totally absurd, but the damage it does is terrifyingly real. The intense shame and humiliation forced onto young men who have not met this impossible standard can (quite literally, in many cases) drive them insane. 

I got picked on a lot growing up. Girls had no interest in me. For whatever reason, I didn't go down this path but I always feel like I could have. Because of that, whenever I read about some young man committing some appalling crime out of romantic frustration, I end up thinking of the pain underneath that behavior. And I end up thinking of Deadgirl.

Now we're going to get into spoiler territory, just FYI. After getting roughed up by JoAnn's meathead jock boyfriend Johnny (Andrew DiPalma), Ricky and JT spill the beans about Deadgirl but loosen her restraints before introducing them, leading to her taking a bite out of Johnny. About a day later, Johnny gets violently ill and enters a similar undead state. This gives JT the idea to create a new Deadgirl, since the original is beginning to rot. He and a dumb stoner named Wheeler (Eric Podnar) try to kidnap a random woman at a gas station and this is the only moment the movie becomes funny as she ends up beating the shit out of both of them and escaping.

JT isn't about to give up and now thinks he's going to do Ricky a favor and turn JoAnn into the next Deadgirl, since that will get around that pesky issue of consent. This finally pushes Ricky to act and he frees Deadgirl. After the ensuing chaos, JT has been bitten and JoAnn is mortally wounded, but Deadgirl has spared Ricky and escaped. JT urges Ricky to let him bite JoAnn and turn her undead, but instead Ricky breaks down and tearfully tells JoAnn he loves her and will save her. She spits blood in his face and tells him to "fucking grow up." This final rejection causes Ricky to lose whatever decency he has left. Sure enough, the final reveal is an undead JoAnn chained to the table as the new Deadgirl.

Seventeen years after the movie first came out, social media has created a huge industry of insufferable "alpha males" pushing the same old destructive ideas onto a whole generation of young boys and convincing them to blame the resulting feelings of inadequacy on women, even though this whole cycle is maintained by other men. Women are not interested in perpetuating this dynamic, after all it's not doing them any favors either. The "manosphere" urges them to use their frustration as an excuse to act out in all sorts of ways, from voting for fascists in elections to sending death threats to video game developers if the women in their games aren't sufficiently beautiful. 

On that note, I hope you'll indulge me in a bit of a tangent, as the noxious culture around modern video games reminds me a lot of Deadgirl as well. In recent years, some game studios have started designing their female characters to look less like supermodels and more like women you might meet in the real world. This has proven to be intolerable for a lot of really annoying fanboys who treat every design choice as an attack on Western civilization. The example I've included is not a parody but an actual reaction to Bethesda Studios making a tree monster a little less sultry looking in the new remaster of Elder Scrolls: Oblivion. This attitude baffles a lot of people who stumble on it. Why do they even care this much? Well, I might be able to explain.

Have a look at this old commercial for Playstation 2. It's a clever ad, but it also sums up what I'm getting at. For a lot of lonely and frustrated young men, advancing technology like AI, VR, or even just better video game consoles means the promise of a reality that can replace the one we live in. Did you catch that one shot of the gamer being embraced by the hot mermaid underwater? She seems to have actually been some kind of octopus monster, but it still seems like a very purposeful inclusion. If the games get realistic enough, men can finally have access to women that are programmed never to reject them. What they want is a virtual Deadgirl, and that's why challenging beauty standards in games is such a threat. More powerful video games won't be useful to them if the women in there don't cater to their specific fantasies. 

What might it take to end this era of young men being radicalized by their loneliness? It won't be possible without some pretty major changes that I'm not sure society is currently capable of. You have to convince them that they are not failures and can still get a lot out of life even if adolescence is painful, because adolescence will likely always be painful but it makes up not even a quarter of your entire life. It does not need to decide anything about the subsequent 60 years or so and telling kids that it does is deeply cruel and irresponsible. Still, it's a hard case to make when capitalism thrives on subjecting people to low quality of life in the name of financial gain for the ruling class. That gives credence to some of our worst anxieties about adulthood and life in the "real world." This is all a symptom of much larger issues that I hope are solved someday although it's hard to be optimistic about that.

Until that happens, Deadgirl will remain painfully relevant. 

Oscars 2025 Educated Guesses

If the Academy Awards are meant to be a summation of a year in film, the current lineup of Best Picture nominees does the job. We've got a 3.5 hour epic dissecting the American Dream, a compelling dramedy from a rising auteur, a gripping chamber drama set in the Vatican, a biopic of a legendary musician, a swing for the fences body horror/satire, a polished science-fiction adventure, a Brazilian historical drama, a haunting art film composed entirely of shots in the first person, a hugely popular musical, and a, um...less popular musical. It's that last one that took up all the oxygen in the room during the most acrimonious Oscar season I can remember. It's a shame, because the movies deserve better...most of them, anyway.

Harvey Weinstein may be disgraced and in prison where he belongs, but his awards campaign philosophy lives on in all the social media users who gleefully provide opposition research for free. In the case of Emilia Perez, there was plenty to work with, but I can't help but feel like if it wasn't around, this would have happened with some other movie. We've gotten so used to these patterns - developing an all-consuming grudge, scouring the internet for any weakness to exploit, turning everything into an exhausting culture war all the time, even if it comes at the expense of our actual culture. Maybe I'm just old and tired, but I hope that we can get back to talking about awards in terms of which movies deserve it the most, not which movies are an affront to all that is good. 

We have an outstanding lineup of movies in our first category, so that's nice.

Best Animated Feature
Flow
Inside Out 2
Memoir of a Snail
Wallace and Gromit: Vengeance Most Fowl
The Wild Robot

Who Will Win: The highly acclaimed The Wild Robot has been dominating the animation-specific industry awards and the director, Chris Sanders, seems to be a popular figure in their community. It helps that the movie continues down the trail blazed by Puss in Boots: The Last Wish with a striking visual style that differentiates it from a "typical" CG-animated film.

You might think that Inside Out 2, which was the highest grossing film of the last year (animated or not), could upset. However, the possible dark horse winner is actually Flow, the dreamlike Latvian fable that made surprising inroads with American audiences. It even cracked the Best International Feature category - good thing that one is no longer called "Foreign Language Film" since Flow has no spoken dialogue at all and it would have made for a weird eligibility issue. 

My Choice: Any of these movies would be a deserving winner, but I have to go with (the) Flow. 

Best Documentary Feature
Black Box Diaries
No Other Land
Porcelain War
Soundtrack to a Coup d'Etat
Sugarcane

Who Will Win: The drama in this category is a lot less salacious, but arguably more important. No Other Land is a collaboration between two journalists, the Israeli Yuval Abraham and the Palestinian Basel Adra, that chronicles the cruel displacement of Palestinians on the West Bank. Despite being acclaimed all over the world and nominated for an Oscar, it still has yet to find a distributor in the United States, meaning that it can only be seen at special events in big cities or (presumably) the streaming platform used by Academy members. 

None of these distributors seemed interested in taking advantage of the movie's worldwide acclaim and topical nature, despite knowing that it would almost certainly turn a minor profit. Make no mistake, this is how you ban a movie under capitalism. This subject matter isn't a slam dunk at the Oscars, either. It would be much easier to go with another movie about the ongoing war in Ukraine like Porcelain War. However, I'm cautiously optimistic that the circumstances are just right for it to win and I'll outline some reasons.

First, the Academy's membership is growing more and more international. Movies in other languages getting into Best Picture, which was once very rare, is now a regular occurrence. That means many voters are from countries that aren't as invested in Israel's violence as the United States. Second, the bravery of Yuval Abraham standing up to his own country to do what's right must be inspiring to some of the Jewish members of the Academy. Third, the distributor issue must be chilling for all the creative types in Hollywood. No one wants their movie suppressed because the ruling class doesn't want the public exposed to a certain point of view. 

Nobody in the Academy reads this, but just in case...please don't screw this up.

My Choice: You didn't think any of that was going to stop me from seeing it, did you? A banned film is merely a challenge and it will take more than that to deter an obsessive movie guy. I was happy to sail the high seas and watch it myself. Truthfully, I found Black Box Diaries very moving and in most other years, I'd be rooting for that one. But everything going on with No Other Land is just too important. The Academy has a chance to use its platform to defy their industry's suppression of this brilliant film. It would be an extraordinary moment and I really hope they meet it.

Best Adapted Screenplay
Jacques Audiard for Emilia Perez
Greg Kwedar and Clint Bentley for Sing Sing
James Magnold and Jay Cocks for A Complete Unknown
RaMell Ross and Joslyn Barnes for Nickel Boys
Peter Straughan for Conclave

Who Will Win: The Writer's Guild went with Nickel Boys, which was a surprise. It does make sense - the original novel is considered a difficult one to adapt and Ross and Barnes took a very outside the box approach. But once the other members of the Academy get involved, I think the result will be different. Conclave is one of the strongest Best Picture nominees and it will almost certainly walk away with at least one major win. Given how competitive the acting categories are, this is its best chance.

My Choice: Sing Sing. Nothing else here felt so effortless and natural, to the point where you might wonder if there was a screenplay at all.

Best Original Screenplay
Sean Baker for Anora
Brady Corbet and Mona Fastvold for The Brutalist
Jesse Eisenberg for A Real Pain
Coralie Fargeat for The Substance
Tim Fehlbaum, Moritz Bender, and Alex David for September 5

Who Will Win: The voters in this category often go against the grain, but in this case Anora is right up their alley and it's the strongest film in the group when it comes to overall nominations. Sean Baker already has the Writer's Guild award, so we know they're into it. Some folks are predicting a win by A Real Pain and I'm not sure where that's coming from. I liked the movie, but it hasn't generated the kind of acclaim that you typically need to pull it off.

My Choice: The Substance doesn't have enough actual dialogue to be a real contender for this (a lot of its best scenes are almost if not completely silent), but nothing in the movie feels wasted and the escalating mayhem unfolds at a thrilling pace.

Best Supporting Actress
Monica Barbaro in A Complete Unknown
Ariana Grande in Wicked
Felicity Jones in The Brutalist
Isabella Rossellini in Conclave
Zoe Saldana in Emilia Perez

Who Will Win: Zoe Saldana is the only one who has emerged unscathed from all the Emilia Perez drama and is now the only real shot it has in one of the major categories. It doesn't hurt that she is at the center of the movie's most popular song. It's been accused of category fraud but that rarely hurts the nominee even if it looks tacky to the public.

My Choice: Ariana Grande. I'm as surprised as anyone else, but she was genuinely hilarious and made the dim-witted, egotistical Glinda somehow still likeable.

Best Supporting Actor
Yura Borisov in Anora
Kieran Culkin in A Real Pain
Edward Norton in A Complete Unknown
Guy Pearce in The Brutalist
Jeremy Strong in The Apprentice

Who Will Win: Kieran Culkin has been steamrolling through this awards season for his uncomfortably realistic performance as the charismatic but obviously unstable Benji from A Real Pain. Most people know someone like this, which is what makes the empathy and cringe comedy of that movie as effective as it is. This one is definitely category fraud, he's obviously a lead and the whole movie revolves around him. But like I said before, these complaints never really go anywhere.

My Choice: I would pick Guy Pearce as the loud, arrogant industrialist from The Brutalist. He was a force of nature as a uniquely American type of asshole.

Best Actress
Cynthia Erivo in Wicked
Karla Sofia Gascon in Emilia Perez
Mikey Madison in Anora
Demi Moore in The Substance
Fernanda Torres in I'm Still Here

Who Will Win: This category is by far the toughest to predict this year....and that's still after one nominee had a total meltdown and guaranteed her own loss. History is being made this year with the nomination of Karla Sofia Gascon, the first openly trans person to compete in the acting categories. Unfortunately, not long after she was nominated, Gascon had a major "milkshake duck" moment that made headlines for weeks. A win for her was already unlikely given the tough competition this year, but now it's completely out of reach.

What's left is a very tight three-way competition. Cynthia Erivo would win if the award were for singing, but that movie didn't give her a chance to do the kind of work that could compete with Moore, Madison, and Torres.

Demi Moore is the likely winner. Her towering performance as an aging actress cast aside and driven to desperation by her shallow industry carries the weight of generations of women who have struggled in Hollywood. If it were any other profession, I'm not sure the movie would have gotten this far. That's not to say that it isn't broadly applicable - her already famous insecure meltdown in front of the bathroom mirror draws from feelings that just about everyone is familiar with...and that are constantly forced upon women.

Then there's Mikey Madison, who has won a fair amount of precursor awards herself and could be propelled to the top if Anora starts sweeping the other awards. She was originally considered the front-runner until Moore surprised everyone by winning at the Golden Globes. At this point, pushing her aside for the much younger Madison would be a little distasteful. If you want to piss off Anora's die-hard fans, tell them that Madison winning completely validates the social commentary of The Substance. I've done it and their defensive reactions are pretty funny.

I'm Still Here getting into Best Picture was a surprise, and it has benefited the most from the exposure that comes with a nomination. A lot of people are just seeing the highly acclaimed Brazilian film now and Torres herself has a gentle, unassuming personality. She has yet to compete directly against Moore or Madison so it's hard to know what to expect. The fact that it was the last nominee to get "discovered" by the voters combined with some genre bias against The Substance might lead to a big surprise on Oscar night. 

If I'm being honest, my gut says Torres will win. But my gut isn't always right, so I'm following what the data suggests and keeping Moore for the "official" prediction. The Screen Actors Guild win probably sealed it. Probably.

My Choice: At the 1968 Oscars, there was a tie for Best Actress, meaning that both Katharine Hepburn and Barbra Streisand each took home a statue. It hasn't happened since, but since I can write anything I want in this section, I'd love to see both Moore and Torres win somehow. You can throw in Mikey Madison if there's another statue lying around, she was great too.

Best Actor
Adrien Brody in The Brutalist
Timothee Chalamet in A Complete Unknown
Colman Domingo in Sing Sing
Ralph Fiennes in Conclave
Sebastian Stan in The Apprentice

Who Will Win: Not as wild as Best Actress, but still pretty close. 

Some twenty years after becoming the youngest ever Best Actor winner for The Pianist, Adrien Brody finds himself likely to win again as another Holocaust survivor in a movie with "ist" at the end of its title. Never hurts to have a specialty, I guess. He anchors this massive 3.5 hour movie and gets lots of capital-A acting as his character goes through just about every emotion possible. 

Close behind is Timothee Chalamet, who managed to capture Bob Dylan's enigmatic and supercilious vibe while also singing and playing the guitar himself. He ended up winning at the SAG awards, which means he is within striking distance of pulling this off. Still, the Academy at large is reluctant to reward young actors like him, particularly if they've achieved "heartthrob" status. Leonardo DiCaprio had to lose five or six times before he finally won, so I don't imagine Chalamet winning so early in his career. 

My Choice: Colman Domingo. I wish Sing Sing had done better during this awards season, because he was great in that movie and really deserves this.

Best Director
Jacques Audiard for Emilia Perez
Sean Baker for Anora
Brady Corbet for The Brutalist
Coralie Fargeat for The Substance
James Magnold for A Complete Unknown

Who Will Win: Most of us Oscar nerds started the season thinking Brady Corbet had this in the bag. The Brutalist is a huge, visually stunning movie that somehow only cost $10 million. The guy is doing something right, that's for sure. If the Emilia Perez drama had gone differently, Jacques Audiard might be the front-runner but like his lead actress, he's said some really dumb things. Good thing foot-in-mouth disease isn't contagious or Zoe Saldana might have been in trouble.

If you've followed my predictions over the years, you know what's coming. The Director's Guild award went to Sean Baker, which means it's almost a certainty he gets the Oscar too. This is a predictor that's wrong maybe once a generation. Anora may not be as large as some of its competition but he's got a directorial vision that validates the "auteur theory." His movies are distinctly his own in a way that's instantly recognizable when you've seen a few of them.

My Choice: Sean Baker is a great director and I'll be happy to see him win. That said, I've got to go with Coralie Fargeat. The Substance is a wild experience that just wouldn't hit as hard without her unique sensibilities. I'll be first in line for whatever she does next.

Best Picture
Anora
The Brutalist
A Complete Unknown
Conclave
Dune: Part Two
Emilia Perez
I'm Still Here
Nickel Boys
The Substance
Wicked

Who Will Win: There are ten nominees here, but this awards season has been dominated by discussion of just one of them - Emilia Perez. The internet hates it and critics were lukewarm, but the film industry loves it and gave it an impressive 13 nominations. While it's already a historic movie thanks to Karla Sofia Gascon's nomination, trans commentators say it indulges in dated story tropes and stereotypes that are best left in the past (brilliant lyrics like this did little to persuade them otherwise). What's ironic is that part of the reason for its success is sympathy for trans people being targeted by Emperor Pissbaby. The Academy trying to stand up for trans people by celebrating a movie that they detest is just so on brand. I Saw the TV Glow was right there, you guys.

Best Picture is decided by a preferential ballot that asks the members to rank all the nominees. This tends to work against really polarizing films, since getting ranked as the worst by too many members dilutes its overall average. However, it doesn't always turn out that way. The obvious analogue is Green Book, a surprise winner in 2018 that the internet dragged for months. In that case, I think the backlash contributed to the win - our whole electoral process in the United States is driven by the desire to upset certain people on the internet, why would the Academy be an exception? It could very well happen again, but Green Book is not a perfect comparison.

The presumed winner that year, Roma, was a Spanish-language film acquired by Netflix, two factors that hurt it with the important old-fuddy-duddy demographic of the voters. Surprisingly enough, both of those things apply to Emilia Perez as well. Another advantage Green Book had was that, hackneyed racial commentary aside, it had genuine warmth and sentimentality that helped the voters get attached to it. Emilia Perez won the industry over with its boldness and unique directorial vision, not because of any emotional attachment. So while it's far from certain, my hesitant guess is that enough voters will see constant negative headlines about the movie's retrograde storyline and Gascon's social media shenanigans and decide that it's just not worth all the trouble. But if it doesn't win, what will?

As someone who is ride or die with the horror genre, I can tell you that our community is incredibly proud of The Substance. To see such a confrontational, blood-drenched, absolutely uncompromising horror movie get this far has been great. But as a longtime Oscars analyst, I can also tell you it's not going to win. This genre still has a steep uphill battle for awards like this. Dune: Part Two is science-fiction, which also has a tough time outside of the technical categories. Nickel Boys has to be the most experimental art film nominated for Best Picture since Terence Malick's The Tree of Life. Definitely not for everyone. A Complete Unknown was nominated seemingly out of habit, but these musician biopics almost never actually win. Wicked has a serious problem with bloat, which means it suffers when compared to the stage musical, which tells the entire story in the same amount of time the movie needs just for the first half.

If I'm Still Here was in English, it might be unbeatable. Even without that, I hesitate to underestimate it. Parasite's win means we always have to consider this possibility, but for now homemade (or British) movies still have some advantage. The Brutalist is a throwback to Old Hollywood grandiosity, but everyone involved with the movie who is not named Adrien Brody has struggled to get traction for whatever reason. For a while, I thought Conclave would be a good consensus winner. Most people like it even if it's not really anyone's favorite. It also won the SAG award for Best Ensemble, so it's definitely got a shot.

However, it looks like the true consensus winner is actually Anora. I've been surprised to see this unfold since it struck me as more of a film buff movie than an awards movie, but the Writers, Directors, and Producers Guilds have all given it their top honor. And why not? It's funny, thoughtful, moving, and just very entertaining. It's a win the Academy could feel good about, unlike a certain other movie I'm sick of talking about. 

So after all that, I predict Anora will win Best Picture, with a small chance for an upset by Conclave. This was a rough one, folks.

My Choice: The Substance > I'm Still Here > Anora > Conclave > Nickel Boys > Dune: Part Two > The Brutalist > Wicked > Emilia Perez > A Complete Unknown.