Article

Culture

Film & TV

3 March 2025

5 min read

The Oscars celebrate a basic human trait - telling stories

A ‘seemingly absurd ritual’ reveals a little of who we are.

Belle Tindall

Belle is the staff writer at Seen & Unseen and co-host of its Re-enchanting podcast.

Mikey Madison, wearing a ball gown, clutches a golden Oscar statue.

Mikey Madison, star of Anora.

ABC.

I’m becoming more and more resolute in my belief that nothing is ever trivial.

Not really.

Not when you look at it for long enough, not when you offer it the gift of your curiosity, not when you’re convinced that culture is made up of a myriad of restless hearts.

This resolute belief is the reason I tend to give the Oscars my attention. My full, non-judgmental, attention.

The Academy Awards may seem trivial, especially this year. Especially this week, even. I mean, are we really going to talk about Timothée Chalamet’s yellow suit or Demi Moore’s gracious-loser-face when pockets of our world are being torn to shreds? I get it. Even the people in the eye of the showbiz-storm (mostly) get it. In his opening monologue, this year’s host, Conan O’Brien, called the ceremony a ‘seemingly absurd ritual’.

And it is.

But we are story-telling creatures. We are, to quote Charles Taylor, ‘Storied Selves’. Story is how we wrestle with what has been, what is, and what we think/fear/hope may be. And so, I want to know what stories we’re telling: what stories have we deemed worthy of excavation? What stories are drawing us in and sending us out again with slightly tweaked perspectives? What are we celebrating? What are we lamenting? What are we trying to change? What are we trying to hold on to?

Plus, I’m religious – who am I to assume there’s no meaning behind ‘seemingly absurd ritual’, aye?

The Oscars is an event dedicated to just a handful of the stories that have been told over the past year – the ones that are being told the loudest, I guess. That makes it a sample pool of our collective heart-cries, the tip of our meaning-making iceberg, the headline that sits atop our cultural moment.

Is it somewhat superficial? In part.

Is it a little sanctimonious? Oh, heck yes.

Is it opulent to the point of discomfort? Most definitely.

Is it meaningless? Absolutely not. Storytelling never is.

So, in that vein – what are the stories that were celebrated at last night’s 97th Academy Awards? And what do they teach us about... well… us? I noticed a couple of interesting themes.

In so many ways, movies are humans telling humans what it means to be human.

Firstly, the ceremony opened with a tribute to The City of Angels, herself. The most sparkly city there is, the home of Hollywood – Los Angeles. Terrifyingly large swathes of which were, of course, razed to the ground by historic wildfires earlier this year. Borrowing a line from The Wizard of Oz, ‘there’s no place like home’ was spoken over a montage of the city acting as a backdrop for so many iconic movie scenes.

It made me think of the role that ‘home’ plays in many of the movies that were platformed last night – and I realised, it plays a leading role. ‘Home’, in itself, is a character. There’s the omnipresence of Brighton Beach, New York, in Anora (by far, the big winner of the night), Mexico in Emilia Perez and, of course, ‘Oz’ in Wicked. These films aren’t just set in these locations, they’re utterly dependant on them.

Then there’s the more complicated stories of ‘home’ – stories of home being both here and there. The Brutalist, for example (for which Adrien Brody won the ‘best actor in a leading role’ award), tells the story of a Hungarian-Jewish Holocaust survivor trying to make a new home for himself in the United States. Or A Real Pain, in which Jesse Eisenberg (who also wrote and directed the film) and Kieran Culkin (winner of ‘best supporting actor’) travel to Poland to honour their late grandmother, and therefore, their own lineage. In both movies, ‘home’ is a stranger that the characters must introduce themselves to and befriend.

It's fascinating.

In art, as in life, home provides identity. It’s the geography that we’re made of, the history that runs through our blood, the place where our circumstances become our meaning. At least, that’s what these movies tell us.

Another, more obvious, theme I noticed was that so many of the movies on display were telling notably complex stories of a female experience.

The Substance, one of the most interesting films of this year, tackles the theme of aging. Age-a-phobia, you could say. The experience that countless women have of becoming less valuable as they move through life – the feeling that you’re vanishing from society’s sight with every change of your body. Or there’s the afore-mentioned Anora. I’ll be honest, this one took me by surprise, racking up the most awards of the night, including ‘best picture’. Its story centres upon ‘Ani’, a young Russian American sex worker who weaves in and out of powerful ranks. Wicked, the story of a drastically misunderstood, commonly marginalised and terribly manipulated woman (who just so happens to be a witch). And winner of ‘best international picture’, I’m Still Here, tells the true story of Eunice Paiva. Her husband, Rubens Paiva, is abducted by military operatives in 1971 and never returned. Eunice is left to care for their five children as she seeks justice for her husband as well as indigenous people in the Amazon.

Female experiences – in all their complexity, nuance, grit, strength, and truth – truly took centre stage.

Movies are humans telling humans what it means to be human. And I just love that we do that. I’m never not fascinated by how much we all share – how the particular can tap into the universal. We have so much to learn about each other, and movies are a way we seek to do that, but one of the things that we constantly have to learn, re-learn, and learn again is how much we have in common.

And I know that a sentence like that sounds face-palmingly glib. But if it weren’t true, if we weren’t – at some deep and true level – made by the same stuff and for the same stuff, I’m not sure movies would exist. I’m not sure that they could exist.

And so, all of this to say that there’s more to the Oscars than meets the eye – even when what meets the eye makes it roll. Give it the gift of your curiosity, it’s worthy of it. I promise.

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Article

Culture

War & peace

21 March 2024

4 min read

Letter from the Balkans

An audience with a crown prince tells the story of troubled lands and resilient inhabitants.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An orthodox cathedral, with prominent roof domes.

St Sava Cathedral, Belgrade.

Ben Asyö on Unsplash.

It’s only halfway through our supper by Stone Gate, the most ancient entrance to the old citadel of Zagreb, Croatia’s capital, that we realise votive candles are burning in the archway outside. Closer inspection reveals three or four simple pews before a niche shrine to Our Lady and the stone walls covered with inscriptions to the local deceased.

Families, young and old but mostly young, gather in the gloaming for their dear departed. This is a profoundly Catholic site and the little restaurant, brightly lit and jolly, nevertheless feels reverential and on holy ground. Some 80 per cent of the population of Croatia is Roman Catholic, while just 3.3 per cent are Serbian Orthodox.

A five-and-a-half-hour bus ride east and we’re in Belgrade, capital of Serbia. Here, the proportions of the faithful are almost exactly reversed – 81 per cent are Orthodox and a little under four per cent Catholic.

These statistics serve as a grim reminder of the phrase that entered our political lexicon in the first half of the 1990s: Ethnic cleansing. In that civil war, as the former Yugoslavia broke up into its constituent republics, Croatian Serbs and Serbian Catholics – those who survived, that is – were displaced.

So we’re less likely to see the kind of Marian devotion that we witnessed in Zagreb being honoured in Belgrade. This is essentially a technical, creedal difference between Catholicism and Eastern Orthodoxy, in how the incarnation of the Son proceeds from the Holy Spirit. It’s no big deal theologically and shouldn’t detain us. But it quietly points to the fragility of peace, not to say democracy, in the Balkans.

A fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated.

A mural depicts an icon of Christ with a bullet hole in his forehead.

HRH Crown Prince Alexander, head of the Royal family Karadjorjdevic, which ruled the kingdoms of Serbia and (later) Yugoslavia until the Second World War, carefully refers to it as “democracy at midnight” over coffee in the Blue Room of Belgrade’s Royal Palace. He returned to his ancestral home when Slobodan Milosevic was deposed at the millennium.

The Crown Prince helped his country return to democracy by uniting the opposition which defeated Milosevic in the elections of 2000. Even today, he calmly states that western democratic leaders often fail to understand how the mindset of eastern autocracy works and agrees that it is “work in progress”. Eternal vigilance is key.

In this context, the Serbian Orthodox Church is doing well, but it’s also still work in progress. Under communism, a substantial number of Serbian bishops were appointed by the Soviet regime, for purposes of control and information gathering. That culture wasn’t cleansed overnight, nor has the communist legacy been entirely expunged from the Church.

“You’ll see what I mean when you visit our family chapel in a moment,” the Crown Prince tells me. Sure enough, a fresco of the Christ in its dome has a bullet hole through the forehead, not so much crucified as assassinated. Prince Alexander will not restore it, so its serves as a constant reminder of what can be. His guiding principle is that “only dictators alter history.”

Elsewhere, our guide points to desecrated icons and the ghostly shadows of Soviet insignia on marble pillars. Alexander is an unassuming and modest man, referring to the 18 Serbian parties he convened at a conference in 2000 as “the democracy by email”.

When we’re joined by his wife, Crown Princess Katherine, she corrects this, proudly stating that her husband returned democracy to the region. There is probably some truth in both their versions of events. The consequence of that could be a restoration of a constitutional parliamentary monarchy in Serbia – we’ll see, or perhaps our successors will.

From the Palace, we visit St Sava, called a temple but really the Serbian Orthodox cathedral consecrated to the memory of the founder of the national Church. This, again, is work in progress. Started in 1935 and only now approaching completion, it’s a paradigm of the troubled contemporary history of Serbia. Communists have razed it and Nazis have parked their trucks and tanks in it.

It is unashamedly modern, though it honours ancient Byzantine mural and fresco methodologies. Its biblical stories in gold leaf use the traditional crafts, linking Belgrade to its ancient past, whatever despots may have done to interrupt its devotional history. We’re linked to the palace we’ve just left by enormous doors, inscribed with multi-lingual prayers of welcome, donated by the royal family.

Perhaps the allegory it offers is best illustrated by the image of Christ – no bullet hole now – in the dome, which was built and raised, centimetre by centimetre, from the ground. All 4,000 tonnes of it. The metaphor of rising from the ashes of war writes itself.

And that’s the takeaway from Belgrade. Serbia – and the wider Balkans – suffered a 20th-century of unfathomable bleakness. Its people have endured and their spirit isn’t broken, a moral exemplar for western Europe. Belgrade resonates to its folk music and young laughter over broken bread and wine outpoured (gosh, do they eat and drink – for who knows what tomorrow holds?).

The phoenix, which naturally shares Greek roots with Serbian royalty, would be the go-to cliché for the cyclical regeneration of Belgrade. But as this city approaches Easter, there is of course something else more fundamental going on.

Belgrade has faith in itself, as well as the God who has delivered it. It’s a resurrection story really.