It may not be a hallmark of cinema, but it’s a film that moves a great many people a great deal. There’s a place for that.
Sometimes, it comes down to one very simple thing — and by it, I don’t just mean the best picture race. I mean that thing we call movies. At the movies, people want to be moved. They also want to be thrilled, staggered, transfixed, seduced, immersed, mystified, mesmerized, drawn outside of themselves. There are movies that can rewire your way of seeing. And the cinema is an endlessly evolving form that has given us some of the greatest works of art of the last century. There are years when the movies that win the Academy Award for best picture are timeless hallmarks of cinema. “The Godfather.” “All About Eve.” “Lawrence of Arabia.” “Midnight Cowboy.” “The Silence of the Lambs.” “On the Waterfront.” “Schindler’s List.” “Gone With the Wind.” “Titanic.” But not always. Sometimes, the film that wins the Academy Award for best picture is not an indelible piece of cinema, yet it’s a rapt and heartrending movie. And the key to that is how moving it is. Sian Heder’s “CODA” is a film that moves a great many of the people who see it a great deal (including me), yet you’d hardly know that from all the backbiting about it in recent weeks on Twitter. I raise the issue because just as “CODA’s” Oscar triumph signifies that we’re in a whole new ballgame of an era, where streaming is the paradigmatic new normal (which potentially scrambles the very metaphysic of “movies,” since that word no longer means a thing you watch on a screen big enough to be larger than life), an accompanying shift is that the conversation about movies, to the extent that one still exists, is now driven by social media. And “CODA,” in that arena, has been treated as a “Hallmark movie,” a tearjerker of maximum anti-cachet. It may, in its square way, be the uncoolest Oscar winner in many decades. But that doesn’t mean it’s unworthy. Why is the heart-on-the-sleeve emotionalism of “CODA” an affront to so many who experienced the old-fashioned sentimentality of Spielberg’s “West Side Story” as a high-end act of art? Few would be squawking if Spielberg’s film had won best picture.
