Need a Recommendation, or a Piece of Advice?

Or a review of Nickel Boys? We're here on all counts, and the comments are OPEN.

Greetings from Los Angeles, where we are — as you have surely heard — in quite a mess. The destruction from the wildfires is absolutely beyond anything I’ve ever seen. Someone told the LA Times that the Pacific Palisades looked like an atomic bomb hit, and it’s not hyperbole; both that neighborhood and my beloved nearby Altadena have been largely flattened. Literally nothing is left on several streets. I know three people whose homes were miraculously spared, but they are the only ones left on the entire street. The rest are just… burned out shells. I also know several folks who’ve lost their homes and everything in them; my Instagram is a parade of GoFundMe links. It’s awful and it breaks my heart. The good news is that the community — and, indeed, the world — has shown up to help in a major way over the past few days. People want to pitch in, and they truly are. (You know that something has really gone left when World Central Kitchen has set up shop walking distance from your house, and god bless José Andrés and all the folks who have pitched in to keep everyone fed.)

But I also keep thinking that this rebuilding project (if people can even bear to rebuild; some of what we’ve lost is truly irreplaceable) will take months, if not years. It’s a marathon, not a sprint; we have to pace ourselves. There are ample ways and places to donate, such as this helpful list from NBC that also gives advice for avoiding scams (ugh), but if you feel overwhelmed right now — I do! — your assistance and donations will still be needed in three weeks, a month, six months. It’s okay to wait, to take your time vetting the organizations that seem to be doing the most good, and to step in when the news cycle moves on (as it always does) but the need still remains.

If you or your loved ones have lost anything in these fires, we are so inexpressibly sorry; if you need anything please do not hesitate to reach out — you can just hit “reply” to this email and one of us will see it.

Hang in there,

— Jessica (and Heather)

---

Speaking of Help!

Over at Go Fug Yourself, we occasionally run a chat wherein people can ask for recommendations for something they need — be it a tangible item or something more like advice — and the community can respond with its collective, hard-earned wisdom. This works exactly the way it sounds: Do you need to know, or know about, something specific? The best way to support your friends if they’ve gone through a natural disaster feels like an obvious ask right now, as do questions having to do with home or renter’s insurance, or FEMA, or smoke mitigation companies. But please feel throw out your less serious questions to the group as well — people will also want to help you figure out, for example, a good gift for a friend’s milestone birthday if that person is also downsizing their home. Or the best tomatoes to plant if you’re really bad at growing tomatoes. Or the best place in Austin to take seven people for an anniversary dinner if four of them are vegans and two of them hate vegetables. Or the best face cream if you are extremely really very dry right now but also don’t want to spend $120 on Augustinus Bader, or the world’s greatest nail file. You get the gist. Ask away in the comments, and if anyone has an answer, please share!

As a treat, and to facilitate this, we’re going to open comments for everyone — usually, commenting is only open to paid subscribers, but given the current circumstances we didn’t want to prevent people from getting help or giving advice.

— Jessica

---

Oscar Watch: Nickel Boys

Colson Whitehead’s The Nickel Boys won the Pulitzer in 2020, and now it’s the debut feature film of documentarian RaMell Ross. The sad truth is, this might not even quite be on Oscar Watch anymore; in fact, when it first came out, I thought it — like The Underground Railroad before it — had been made into a TV series. Nickel Boys was then nominated for a Golden Globe and a slew of Critics’ Choice Awards, but the SAGs froze it out, and I can’t get a sense of whether there’s a strong enough PR push behind it to do more than get it on that final list of ten Oscar flicks. Which is a real damn shame.

The story centers two young Black men at a “reform school” in Florida — quotes because surely at this point we all know that was some bullshit — whose trajectory will be familiar to anyone who also followed the uncovering of mass graves at so-called residential schools in Canada that targeted First Nations children. They were abusive, discriminatory power plays dressed up as institutions, and in Nickel Boys, our first protagonist, Elwood, arrives there because he was hitchhiking to college and happened to get picked up by someone driving a stolen car. The narrative interweaves the boys’ experiences at Nickel Academy (based on Florida’s Dozier School for Boys¹) and Elwood’s grandmother’s misguided faith in justice, with a contemporary Elwood’s grappling with whether to testify in a government investigation of Nickel. It’s heartbreaking and horrifying.

The movie’s novel approach puts you in the first-person space. You are the camera. You see the entire beginning as Elwood, until he’s at Nickel and we jump out of his skin and into that of his new friend Turner, reliving a scene through Turner’s eyes that gives us an understanding of how Elwood carries himself. From there, we jump back and forth between the men, usually at a gentle pace but at times more quickly when it needs a frantic effect. It’s a fascinating and brave technique, especially for a rookie director. I am not always sure it worked as intended, though? It’s unsettling and jarring, which much of the time is the point, but when “your” voice is speaking there is a definite disconnect: You’re simultaneously one with the narrative but it’s also distant from you, as if someone is talking over your shoulder, which flattens the emotions a bit. The performance of each actor is understandably richer when you are the one looking at him, rather than the one from whose disembodied mouth the words are supposed to be coming. But there are moments when it’s eerily effective. Hamish Linklater’s menace makes your spine tingle when you realize torture is imminent; when “you” look at Aunjanue Ellis-Taylor — the grandmother who refuses to give up on her grandson — and she delivers her lines right at you with the full weight of her talent, and you shatter.

The film leaves this perspective for adult Elwood, played by Daveed Diggs, whose face we never see; in those scenes, the camera is always over his shoulder, behind him, never taking us within. There are one or two other moments in the narrative where this happens, too, which makes me wonder if it’s an attempt to imply that the character himself is having a moment of living outside his own skin. Regardless of whether it works perfectly, the approach is so inventive; beyond the story itself deserving the spotlight, you’d love to see creativity like this get its due. Ross did earn a Directors Guild nod for first-timers, but it’d be so lovely to see him break into the tighter Oscar category. The DGA’s main nominees are Conclave’s Edward Berger, The Brutalist’s Brady Corbet, Anora’s Sean Baker, Emilia Perez’s Jacques Audiard, and A Complete Unknown’s James Mangold. If those are the five to beat for the big prize, I’d put easily boot Audiard in favor of Ross, or perhaps Corbet. Please know that this is a deeply uninformed statement, as so far I’ve only seen Conclave and Emilia Perez, but I got a delightful earful about The Brutalist from Kevin and now have to figure out when I can block out like twelve non-consecutive hours to try and pick my way through a movie whose second half is reportedly very bad. (I also realize Jon M. Chu has his supporters, and while I did not particularly enjoy his work on Wicked, I enjoy the idea of him snagging one of these spots too — but, Ross first.)

Anyway, I believe the movie is in theaters now, and it’s listed as “coming soon” on Apple TV+. I hope you’ll give it a whirl in either format.

— Heather

---

Waffle Party Time!

We’ll be reminding everyone what happened in the first season of Severance in a special catch-up post tomorrow, for paid subscribers. Yes, of course this is also where we can all unload our season two theories — conspiracy or otherwise — in advance of the show’s premiere on Friday. If you want to get in on the fun….

---

Last Call

— Supposedly, Jack and Lazaro of Proenza Schouler are about to take over Loewe from its landmark creative director Jonathan Anderson, which Puck News reports virtually guarantees that Anderson is headed to Dior. What a pivot THAT would be for Dior. It puts new context on all the more restrained custom work (and gentler runway collections) he’s done for Loewe in the last year… almost as if he were intentionally auditioning for a job at a stately couture house. — H

— Carrie Underwood is performing at the inauguration. I remember vague notions that she was anti-vax and/or anti-mask back in the heat of Covid, but she also once did a parody of her own song with Brad Paisley that made fun of Trump (“And it’s fun to watch, yeah, that’s for sure / ’Til little Rocket Man starts a nuclear war // Maybe next time, he’ll think before he tweets”). So that’s… a pivot, to say the least. Carrie Underwhelm, AM I RIGHT. (Ugh, sorry, that’s really abysmal wordplay. It’s been a long 7 days.) — H

— New York magazine published a long and extremely disturbing piece about sexual assault allegations against Neil Gaiman (if you hit the paywall, Variety posted a summary that will give you the upsetting gist). His ex Amanda Palmer does not come off AT ALL well in this, either. You read and read and think it won’t get worse and then… it does. And it’s all too familiar to see how people shrugged off rumors over the years because he “seemed harmless.” Bravo to the women for being willing to come forward. — H

— There’s a fun thread on the Fauxmoi Reddit: “Which are the least talked about relationships between high-profile celebs?” The first comment shares a truly outstanding photo of ScarJo and Jared Leto that I had NEVER seen before and which is… really something. — H

1. If you Google, there are a number of documentaries — Hulu, PBS, etc — on Dozier. — H