Oscar Seasoning: 2023 Was the Year Cinema Told True Crime to Go F--- Itself

Awards season is in full force, and a trio of major contenders examined the ethics of true crime with fascinating sharpness.

Welcome to the first issue of Oscar Seasoning, my dive into the awards cycle, what films to look out for, and how everyone is navigating the campaigning process. I’m a dyed-in-the-wool Oscar watcher, for better or worse, and have spent much of my career obsessing over this high-low-stakes contest. So, of course I have to bring some of that to this newsletter.

The Academy Awards are not the best judge of quality but they are an excellent barometer of how the American film industry sees itself and the image they wish to convey to audiences worldwide. 2023 has a fascinating slate of works for the Oscars and various awards bodies to choose from. We have the expected fare – biopics, musicals, costume dramas – and the spikier stories that we’re all convinced could never win but surpass our limited prospects. Remember, the big winner of 2022 was a multiverse sci-fi comedy family drama with an extended gag about butt plugs. But there’s a reason we don’t expect better from the Academy. For every Moonlight or Everything Everywhere All at Once, there is a Green Book.

The Oscars are about narratives, and there is always so much to talk about, most of which ends up being way more interesting than the awards themselves. To win that little gold man, you need to spin one hell of a yarn. We’re in the midst of that right now, and I thought this would be a welcome opportunity to talk about a trend that has fascinated me these past few months.

I used to be a true crime lover. When I was a kid, my parents would tape episodes of Forensic Files for my sister and I and we would watch them over and over before bedtime. When the Serial-inspired revival of the genre emerged, I was initially enthusiastic about seeing the advancement true crime could make. That potential quickly dissipated as it became evident to me that this oversaturation of the format was more interested in tawdry exploitation under the guise of glossy prestige. For every The Keepers, there were five or six Don’t F*ck With Cats and a dozen podcasts hosted by glorified ambulance chasers shilling merch and Reddit memes. I eventually gave up on true crime during lockdown, weighed down by the ways that stuff like Tiger King prioritized internet drama over restorative justice and a true concern for victims. There are always exceptions to the rule – the work of Sarah Weinman is especially notable – but the sheer glut of content became overwhelming. We needed a rebuttal to this, desperately. Mercifully, cinema in 2023 offered us not one but three films with scrutinous gazes toward the true crime industrial complex.

ANATOMY OF A FALL

We never find out if she did it. That’s not a spoiler for Anatomy of a Fall but a required piece of knowledge for prospective viewers. Sandra Voyter (played by Sandra Hüller) is not a victim or perpetrator in the eyes of Justine Triet's film. Rather, she is a cog in the machine, a woman put into an impossible situation in the name of justice.

A German crime writer living in France with her family, Sandra is put on trial for the murder of her husband, whose body was found lying on the snow below the balcony of their isolated mountain home. Nobody else was around to witness this tragedy. The couple’s son, who is partially blind, was on a walk with his dog. So, of course, Sandra is arrested and charged with murder. What follows is a dense, complicated, and gripping trial where Sandra and her hot lawyer (he’s very handsome) must find a way to exonerate her against seemingly impossible odds.

Anatomy of a Fall made me think a lot about true crime, and not just because of its courtroom setup. Triet uses the trial as a way to dissect a complicated marriage as well as the concept as a whole. What seems so typical of a long-term relationship suddenly feels highly incriminating when taken out of context and used as evidence. If we can never truly know somebody, even if we love them dearly, then how can we ever know the truth about a crime like this?

We don’t see much of the world outside of the courtroom and Sandra’s home. We can only speculate as to how feverishly anticipated a trial like this is, with a minor celebrity at its centre. The story is certainly juicy enough that I imagine it would be front page news for weeks on end. Sandra feels like the ideal victim-slash-perpetrator for the true crime complex. She’s attractive, intelligent, white, and foreign. A German national living in France, you can see her struggle to keep up with a smarmy prosecutor speaking in what is her second or third language. Society has long been fascinated by the image of the husband killer, especially if she is in any way glamorous (and Sandra Hüller is magnetic enough to be seen as such.) As we find out during the trial, she is also bisexual, and if there’s anything true crime ghouls love more than a deadly woman, it’s a sultry queer one.

It doesn’t take long for the hunt for a motive to become garden variety sexism and biphobia. Familiar narratives are spun, ones that any true crime aficionado will have seen occur repeatedly over the decades. A man’s jealousy is acceptable but a woman’s is immediately sinister. In the opening scene, we see Sandra interviewed by a student about her work, which is interrupted by her husband’s blasting of a 50 Cent song, and the meeting is later submitted as “evidence” that Sandra must have wanted to f*ck this woman.

Watching the film, I couldn’t help but think about the tatty documentaries and YouTube ghouls this case would have inspired. I could see the hastily made Discovery+ specials, the “body language experts” on YouTube, the TikToks lip-synching to Sandra’s pleas. The egalitarian promise of the legal system has never been true, and now it’s #content. The basic act of being a human, in our vast unknowability and mystery, becomes proof of guilt.

MAY DECEMBER

There’s an episode of South Park that lingers in my brain many years after I stopped regularly watching the series. In it, Kyle’s baby brother Ike falls “into a relationship” with his teacher, which quickly becomes graphic and extremely dangerous. When Kyle tries to tell the authorities about this, the cops struggle to imagine why any red-blooded boy would have a problem with their hot teacher seducing them. The idea of an attractive woman being an abuser is so out of the question that they need not look into the issue. It’s all delivered with the blunt snark of South Park, of course (as well as a subplot wherein Cartman becomes a Dog the Bounty Hunter-style hall monitor.) I think about it a lot, however, because for the longest time, I swear this was the most succinct and morally sturdy examination of the Mary Kay Letourneau case I’d ever seen.

I didn’t learn about this story until I was older, but immediately, I felt uneasy with the media narrative: the hot teacher falls in love with her student, fights against society’s rules, and gets a happy-ever-after. This falsehood continued for decades and it seldom seemed to bother the tabloids that said husband was a 12-year-old boy raped by his teacher. Vili Fualaau, the victim in question, is now 40. He was legally separated from Letourneau at the time of her death from cancer, but was by her bedside during her final days. It seemed far easier to find write-ups of an incident of child rape described as “an unlikely love story” or “sex scandal” than what it actually was. Which story was easier to sell, to make money from, to exonerate societal culpability in the sexualization of minors? Well, we know the answer there.

May December has been curiously omitted from a lot of awards bodies’ nominations, including the SAG Awards. I wonder if Todd Haynes’ scathing black comedy drama hits too close to home for some in the film industry. In it, an ambitious TV actress named Elizabeth, played by Natalie Portman, shadows a couple who “met” when she was a married mother of two and he was a teenager. Gracie Atherton-Yoo (Julianne Moore) is committed to the illusion of her life being a white picket fence dream, complete with her husband and three children, the latter of whom are all about to leave the nest. Joe Yoo (Charles Melton) is a father and husband stuck in a state of trauma and arrested development. He finds solace in his hobby of rearing butterflies while being the emotional foundation for his seemingly fragile wife. He’s in his mid-30s but seems simultaneously far older and much younger.

Elizabeth seems like she wants to help Joe free himself from this bleak lie of a life, but then it becomes clear she’s using him as research for the role she believes will make her a star. His life is a story to her, nothing more. But it’s also a story to Gracie, one built on quicksand that she is blissfully sinking into. Dressed like a Stepford wife, baking cakes for sale (which are bought by neighbours who pity her), she speaks with a childlike lisp and bops her head like a little girl. There’s a fascinating arrogance to her presence that reminds me of Orson Welles’ scathing description of Woody Allen.

In the scene that quickly went viral, Joe tries to ask Gracie about the origins of their relationship for the first time, which she immediately cannot handle. She keeps insisting that he was the boss, the one in charge who came onto her. Again, he was a child. It’s a striking moment that drives home the true abuses at the heart of this marriage. It’s also taken straight from an interview with Letourneau and Fualaau. I wrote for Pajiba about Fualaau’s own critical response to May December and the question of whose story this film’s ultimately is, so I won’t go into it here. But what this moment does so well is remind the viewer that the most salacious stories are typically rooted in someone else’s ongoing pain.

Joe and his kids are really the only people in May December who are innocent of this cycle of exploitation. Elizabeth views him as a character for her own success. Gracie’s son from her previous marriage is curiously invested in the drama. Even the owner of the pet shop where Gracie and Joe first met has a scrapbook full of news cuttings, a souvenir of his own proximity to notoriety. The ethics of turning this story into a feature film, into mining it for ever more scandal and excitement, is at the heart of May December. Elizabeth’s project is certainly not one with good intentions, but can any of this truly be ethical? Vili Fualaau has some feelings on that. May December does not exonerate itself from that process. Neither does…

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

Over the course of three hours and forty or so minutes, Martin Scorsese’s Killers of the Flower Moon breaks down one of the most abhorrent murder cases in American history. After the oil boom turned the Osage nation of Oklahoma into some of the richest people in the country, thousands of people flocked to the state in the hopes of striking it rich. They wanted what they felt was their slice of the pie, taken from the land that was never theirs. The law has required that the Osage people adhere to white legal guardians appointed by the courts to fully manage their money because the Burke Act deems them to be "incompetent Indians."

Ernest Burkhart (Leonardo DiCaprio) moves to the area to work with his uncle William King Hale (Robert De Niro), a seemingly kindly ranch owner and deputy sheriff who works closely with the Osage. He coaxes his nephew into courting Mollie Kyle (Lily Gladstone), a wealthy Osage woman whose family owns oil headrights. They marry, have three children, and soon, one person after another in her family start to die. Hale is having them killed and Ernest is assisting, including in the slow murder of Mollie.

The degradation of indigenous Americans in the film is often sly, but typically outright. White people judge Mollie’s kids based on their skin colour. Hale goes from conversing with the Osage in their own language to condescendingly describing them as simple folk in need of guidance in the space of one breath. He takes out a life insurance policy on a depressed worker, with everyone involved aside from the man himself evidently aware that an untimely death is coming. A KKK rally makes its way through town and Ernest casually waves to someone he recognizes amid the white hoods.

Murder and missing rates among indigenous people, particularly indigenous women, are shockingly high. According to the U.S. Department for the Interior, "four in five American Indian and Alaska Native women (84.3 percent) have experienced violence in their lifetime", which far above the national average. When it comes to rates of sexual assault, "one in three Indian women reports having been raped during her lifetime. 34 percent of Native women are raped in their lifetimes." The police and justice systems have routinely failed indigenous people, and white supremacy designed it this way. Mollie and the Osage plead with people in Washington D.C. to help them, and assistance eventually arrives, but it feels too little too late. So many Osage had to die for white people to even start questioning things.

Killers of the Flower Moon ends with a radio play retelling the events we’ve spent about 210 minutes watching unfold. A group of all-white actors sum up what happened once the court case was over. A white actor does a stereotypical Native American accent. An ad for cigarettes is shoehorned in. The final lines come from Martin Scorsese himself, concluding Mollie’s fate after her murderous husband went to jail. An American tragedy has become content in its purest form, something Scorsese has rightfully lambasted for years. How do you prevent recreating that problem while criticizing it? It doesn’t hurt to put yourself on the stage and let the audience interrogate your role in the system. As respectful and artistically excellent as he has made Killers of the Flower Moon, he's still a white man creating entertainment from agony. Only he can take on the culpability of that role and acknowledge that, yes, he too is complicit. Intent matters but it's not everything, after all.

Oscar season doesn’t tend to gravitate towards stories of historical truth or scrutiny. Biopics are much glossier affairs that smudge away at the trickiest details to make the darkest of lives fit for Sunday afternoon cozy teatime viewing. They love true life but generally when it offers the creators and actors a chance to be somewhat heroic. Killers of the Flower Moon rejects that, Anatomy of a Fall questions how the truth can even be determined, and May December derides the entire practice of entertainment via trauma. Of course, you could easily argue that the films even existing adds a sliver of hypocrisy to their themes. This is an issue with no easy answers, and even the best-made art about it can inadvertently exacerbate the problem. Still, I’ll take this trio of films over another tawdry Netflix docuseries any day.

Stay tuned for future Oscar Seasoning issues in the lead-up to the big night! Is there a specific contender or film you’d like to hear more about? Who are you rooting for and who do you think should get nominated but won’t? Let me know in the comments.