The Big Picture – 
By Glynn Wilson –

It would be hard to imagine making it through the hellscape year of 2020 and the COVID winter and spring of 2021 without the internet — or the art of movies.

As frustrating as new computer technology can be sometimes, how could we have possibly made it through the COVID pandemic year and a half without it? Print newspapers would have been pretty useless. Maybe we could have gotten some information from a free broadcast TV signal. But there would have been almost no social interaction, no school for students, no work for millions of people who could not show up in person for their jobs.

When the coronavirus first hit hard back in March, 2020, it looked like making any movies would be nearly impossible, much less seeing them in theaters. Some people found a way, and in those darkest of nights, we found some solace in watching stories unfold on the screen, even if at times it was the size of an iPhone screen.

While watching the Academy Awards Sunday night on ABC over a broadcast antenna, the scaled down socially distanced version of the show was a stark reminder that we are not out of the woods yet. New mutations of the virus are still cropping up, trying to kill off as many humans as possible. It seems to be on a microscopic mission to save the rest of the planet from us, the apex predator that seems unable to curb its most damaging traits to get along with each other and work in harmony with nature to survive.

Now that would make a great science fiction film.

The definitive news story on the cause and origin of this coronavirus is yet to be written. I still say it emerged from the sewers of Wuhan, China, not just from the bats, as most news stories report. The outhouse where the first women believed to have contracted it by breathing it in was contaminated with RNA from humans and all manner of creatures, including pigs, chickens, ducks, monkeys and bats. The science community may one day figure this out, how this particular coronavirus jumped from animal waste to humans.

The definitive science fiction film depiction of how humans will ultimately be wiped out has also not yet been made, even though if you pay attention, there are some indicators of how this will all end. If we could find the budget, we have a short film in the works called Delta World that might take a crack at exposing this.

For now, for this time, we will take what stories we can get to survive on, most focusing on the past, not the future. None of the films made this year will go down as the best movies ever made.

But if you just take a step back and look at the performances and themes addressed in this year’s Oscars, there were important performances and themes this year.

While there were some noteworthy flaws in the making of Nomadland, which won best picture, the theme of people being thrown out of work by changes in technology and forced to live a migratory life is a trend we are going to see play out in real life more and more in the foreseeable future. The New York Times called it a film about “the damaged American dream.” But that is a bit of an understatement.

Climate change and changes in technology are already creating changes to the lifestyles of people around the world, economic migrations that are only going to increase and get worse as the planet heats up and weather patterns change, probably most notably rising sea levels. Island nations and coastal areas are going to ultimately be abandoned. Humans will have to move to higher ground, which will make the mountains more crowded.

While I applaud best director winner Chloé Zhao on her film that only employed two full time actors, the crew of Nomadland missed many opportunities to showcase the beauty of the American West in stunning cinema-photography. That was the film’s weakest point, it seems to me, although it also missed an opportunity to reveal the larger trend of the coming migratory life of millions.

Last year The Washington Post and the New American Journal carried stories saying that a million people just in the United States are already living in RVs. Due to the explosion in this lifestyle choice because of the coronavirus pandemic and economic fallout, that number could double and hit two million this summer. I fear it is going to be harder and harder to find an available campsite.

It was a touching story and best actress winner Frances McDormand did it justice. But as someone who has already been living the migratory life in an RV for seven years, it is clear that there is a larger story to tell here. I know how hard it is to catch the best times of day to capture the scenes on film in national parks and other places visited in the film. I have been there myself. It would take the budget of a Ken Burns documentary to do these scenes justice, but that footage is out there.

Should I tell my own story of living the life of basically a homeless journalist living in a media camper van? The news business has been so devastated since the Bush Great Recession that there are thousands of writers, editors and photographers out of work. The only reason I am not out of business is because I turned to the web and became a publisher.

Is that a story the American people might care enough about to support financially and watch a film about? I don’t know.

The best thing about the Oscars this year was the triumph of African American artists, who won best supporting actor and other honors for films that brought to life the inherent problem of racism in our society, of mass killings and systemic police violence. I wasn’t able to see Daniel Kaluuya’s performance as best supporting actor for playing the Black Panther leader Fred Hampton in “Judas and the Black Messiah.”

But as a lover of blues and a subscriber to Netflix, I had to see “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” and I’m still wondering why Viola Davis was not nominated for best actress. The now deceased Chadwick Boseman was the front runner for best actor for his role in that film, but lost out in the end to Anthony Hopkins for his role in “The Father.”

Andra Day was nominated for her first starring role in “The United States vs. Billie Holiday,” and the story of how the song “Strange Fruit” was suppressed is one it seems to me the American people need to see.

Actors and directors of Asian descent were also well represented at the Oscars this year, and deserve to be talked about since they have clearly suffered from discrimination in American history too. I’ve just not had a chance to see “Minari.”

The biggest disappointment was that “The Trial of the Chicago Seven” came away with no awards. Sacha Baron Cohen did an amazing job of portraying comedian and activist Abbie Hoffman, and the story of the early protest movement in America was a story well worth telling. Aaron Sorkin as usual did a masterful job of bringing to life the story of the 1969 attempted prosecution of activists arrested during the 1968 Democratic National Convention, and it is a must see story for anyone aspiring to activism in America today.

It is a bit hard to understand all the hostility on social media to the art of film and those who dedicate themselves to the craft. We can write all the news stories in the world documenting the daily truth of what happened yesterday or last week or last year. Sometimes we can make a difference telling the truth and exposing bad actors or promoting good ones.

It seems to me, however, that if the stories could be told in films and distributed widely to the masses over the internet, we could potentially reach far more people in a way that could change the big picture about life on Earth. Hey, I could be wrong, and it hasn’t been done yet. But the potential is there. If only we could find a way to make it happen.

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Check this out. In this prequel to a film called Delta World, a film crew had one week to produce an 8 minute short movie about a holiday feast for a local film scramble in Mobile, Alabama. What we came up with was Aquanox, a celebration of the anniversary of the day when sea levels rose due to global warming and covered most of dry land along the Gulf Coast. Only a few people survived on high mounds in the Mobile-Tensaw Delta. This is only the beginning of telling the story…