I watched the Oscars last month and I was upset that Nomadland won so many awards. I thought Frances McDormand sleep-walked her way through that whole movie. She barely spoke. They gave her “best actress” for doing hardly anything at all. Overall, the movie was awfully depressing, and for all the talk about great cinematography, I wasn’t impressed. I prefer forest and ocean scenes to dusty deserts. The entire movie was a downer, and it plodded on and on, as if saying to the audience: This will be you someday. Prepare for disappointment and slow-moving devastation.
But the reviews of the movie were sometimes interesting and this one in particular contained probably the best thing to extract from the movie: We could all get by with a lot less stuff.
It refers to one scene where Ms. McDormand is poking around her storage shed. Here is what the Atlantic review reveals:
See the green highlighted part? Everything we are attached to right now and can’t bear to part with is just the junk of the future. It means nothing, ultimately. There are exceptions, like art and your own writing and photos. I need my laptop, so that will never be junk, until I replace it. But most stuff? Junk. It makes you re-prioritize a lot of things when you think about it.
