Sizemore, Spielberg, and Sally: A Sideways Manner of Looking at the Academy Awards by Craig Hammill

My son keeps asking me about the differences between a hurricane, a tornado, and a whirlpool. And he seems to think they’re basically the same thing.

So in the nature of this week-long interrogation, I’m offering a (mild? benign?) hurricane, tornado, and/or whirlpool of thoughts about movies with special lights from the catwalks on their relationship to the Academy Awards.

That’s right, the 95th Academy Awards ceremony happens this Sunday, March 12, 2023 starting at 5pm PST.  A sideways glance at the Vegas odds has Everything Everywhere All At Once looking like a lock on many of the top awards.

And it’s interesting in 2023 to note as well that bit by bit, step by step, the ceremony is returning to the glitz and glam of pre-Covid years of yore.

Which is a good thing from this programmer’s point of view.

But what I want to throw into this impulsive jumbalaya first are some scattered thoughts about actor Tom Sizemore (Heat, Saving Private Ryan, Devil in a Blue Dress, Twin Peaks: The Return) who just died March 3rd of a brain aneurysm.

I got to meet Mr. Sizemore way back when I was twenty seven in the mid 2000’s. It looked like I was going to get to direct a high school movie I’d written Four Corners and Mr. Sizemore came into a Sunset Boulevard diner (with his sponsor or helper who stayed polite and quiet the entirety of our meeting) to talk about a role.

He would have been perfect for the role-a gruff hard living boyfriend of a main character’s mother who ultimately still has a tremendous heart- if the movie had gone through (instead it fell apart which is a whole other story).

What I remember vividly was that, for all of Mr. Sizemore’s clear troubles with drugs, alcohol, life, he was a very funny, very clear eyed, very talented actor. He told me a bunch of stories about working with Martin Scorsese, Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott. 

At one point, he asked my age.

“Twenty seven,” I mumbled.

“Twenty seven,” he said with a wry smile. “F*@k you.”

Now here I am in 2023, forty five years old, about the age Mr. Sizemore was when we met. Mr. Sizemore never got an Academy Award. But he was one of those dynamic electric performers who automatically made your movie crackle with life.

That breakfast I had with him was like getting to be in a scene with Tom Sizemore for a morning. 

After I read about his death, I thought a lot about that breakfast. How actors like Sizemore really do put it all on the screen for us the audience. And then of course their private lives also get splattered across the headlines like animals caught in roadkill cross hairs.

Mr. Sizemore was no saint. And I don’t know enough truly about his personal life to say anything of value there. I’m sure he reckoned with that his whole life. 

But I do know even later in his career, he was capable of a fascinating and perceptive performance in something like David Lynch’s Twin Peaks: The Return. And I felt he had a perceptiveness and understanding of life that gave his performances great soulfulness.

A lot of times the flashy performances get the awards. But the salt of the earth character performances so essential to good movies get overlooked.  Rest in peace Mr. Sizemore. And God bless you.

And bouncing from this I bobble and wobble to Steven Spielberg and The Fabelmans which, at least by bookie odds,  looks to go relatively ignored in the shadow of Everything Everywhere All At Once.

Not to take anything away from EEAAO which is a wildly imaginative energetic truthful and of the moment piece of work full of heart, soul, and everyone giving 100%.

Any of us moviemakers would be lucky to make something 5% as good as any scene or performance in Everything…

But The Fabelmans may just be one of Mr. Spielberg’s most intelligent, honest, and perceptive works. 

I have struggled with The Fabelmans, like many people possibly, wanting it to be great but ultimately feeling it is a very good movie with truly GREAT moments and scenes.

Still, I keep coming back to it because it feels like a Rosetta Stone for any moviemaker on how one turns one’s own traumas, obsessions, phobias into creative work. 

By stringing along his series of anecdotes into a feature, Mr. Spielberg has created a kind of cinematic rosary one can pray on bead by bead. 

He also has yet again found himself making a movie of the moment in how his movie deals with a kind of latent anti-semitism that too many folks feel is permissible in gentile America. As if racism against the Jews, if not great, is understandable.

It isn’t. And it shouldn’t be. Just as any prejudice against any group of people shouldn’t be tolerated in a society that claims to value freedom for all and the rights of any individual to their full humanity.

And finally, I have found myself this week catching up with the 1979 Martin Ritt directed, Sally Field starring union organizer movie Norma Rae.

Ms. Field won the Best Actress Academy Award for her performance as Norma Rae, a Southern single mother who, despite making a series of all too human questionable life choices, has the fire and grit to organize a union in her textile factory against heavy opposition.

Norma Rae is such a joy to watch it almost paradoxically feels like a movie made on another planet from another time by a completely different sensibility. 

It’s crazy to watch a near two hour character driven movie on union organizing shot on 35mm that focuses on really well crafted idiosyncratic and jagged scenes that never go quite where you think they will. 

That’s not to say solid filmmaking and acting like the kind seen in Norma Rae is absent from our screens and monitors. Certainly we see her lineage in great television like Breaking Bad and certainly filmmakers around the world continue to swing for the fences to tell stories that are important to them.

But Norma Rae does act as a kind of effulgent beacon for a time and a kind of moviemaking that is all too rare now.

America used to thrive on this kind of storytelling. It was this kind of storytelling that made the United States a key player in the history and journey of cinema.

We all could stand to benefit by thinking how we can contribute to cinema to extend and expand its development to the next generations of Sally Fields, Tom Sizemores, and Steven Spielbergs.

Craig Hammill is the founder.programmer of Secret Movie Club.