Oscar 2021: Nomadland
5/9/21 this year, my papers are all published at the wonderful locations: Madrid, Vienna and Amsterdam, but I can go none of them, yikes
As a downgrade, I am going to the badland national park instead, lol. Then I remembered the movie Nomadland that I watched the day before the Oscar ceremony. One day, I was randomly glancing IMDB and came across a review something like “deep, meaningful, joy to watch”, so I watched it. It has a feeling of an independent movie, peaceful and gentle. There are no dramas, conflicts, shouts or fights, but you can sense the heaviness of the life behind the unspoken. Visually, it lays out the small human beings moving across the vast landscape of the planet (the picture is tearing). Those people on the road are not friends and family, and they share their life and death between causal conversations.
It is not a typical Hollywood movie and even made by a Chinese-American director, but it is very real compared to what I have seen about American culture and people. They eat burgers and wear Walmart clothes, but they are happy and kind ordinary people. These ordinary people always touch me. Every 2/14, when I go to store to get the balloons for my son, I see this kind of ordinary people, quietly waiting in line to buy the flowers for their loved ones. I always send them the best wishes quietly.
2020 
2019
I like the award speech given by the director. She mentioned a Chinese poem “people at birth are inherently good (人之初性本善 )”, and she said “I always have found goodness in the people I met, everywhere I went in the world. So this is for anyone who has the faith and coverage to hold on to the goodness in themselves and hold on to the goodness in each other no matter how difficult is to do that.” Ting (the director) and her boyfriend did not take any friend/family to the Oscar ceremony. Instead, they took Swankie and Linda May, whose stories their move is based on, and the ordinary people who struggle their life on the road. American people are sassy about what they want to do, even those who live at the bottom of the social escalator and even what they want to do is very weird to other people. For example, in the movie, Swankie devoted her last trip to rocks and Linda May wants to build an earthship.
After this movie, many people may remember “see you down the road”. My favorite line is “if I left, it would be like he never existed.” In this movie, there is this Shakespeare’s Sonnet 18. Flowers come and go, and hopefully there is still something eternal.
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date;
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance or nature’s changing course untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st:
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.