C4 Y THE NEW YORK TIMES, THURSDAY, OCTOBER 15, 2020
nominated for best picture since “Toy Story
3” in 2011.
- More diversity is possible.
The academy recently introduced new di-
versity guidelines meant to encourage
more equitable representation behind and
in front of the camera. Though the guide-
lines aren’t set to take effect until 2024, this
year’s nominees could already make good
on those goals.
The best director category, regularly crit-
icized for its lack of female nominees, has a
wealth of strong options this year. Contend-
ers like Chloé Zhao, who directed the
Frances McDormand road drama “Nomad-
land” (due in December), and Regina King,
a recent supporting-actress winner who
stepped behind the camera to adapt the
play “One Night in Miami... ” (also Decem-
ber), could even become the first women of
color to ever be nominated for the best di-
rector Oscar.
And a repeat of #OscarsSoWhite in the
four acting races ought to be avoided
thanks to a strong slate of Black-led ensem-
ble dramas. In addition to “One Night in Mi-
ami... ” and Spike Lee’s Vietnam drama
“Da 5 Bloods,” both of which could produce
multiple nominees in the male categories,
there are three splashy films coming that
are focused on Black female singers and
may all factor into the best actress race:
“Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom,” starring Viola
Davis; “The United States vs. Billie Holi-
day,” with Andra Day as the jazz singer; and
“Respect,” with Jennifer Hudson playing
Aretha Franklin. - Netflix will gain more ground.
Don’t expect a full slate of titles from hot dis-
tributors like A24, Neon and Searchlight:
With moviegoing still a dicey proposition
during the pandemic and production calen-
dars largely stalled, smaller studios have
mostly elected to keep their powder dry.
Among titles still to be released, A24 will
mount a push for the moving immigrant
drama “Minari,” which won pre-pandemic
plaudits at the Sundance Film Festival in
January, but the studio’s Joaquin Phoenix
vehicle “C’mon C’mon,” once eyed for a
late-2020 debut, won’t be seen until next
year. Similarly, Searchlight’s “Nomadland”
and Neon’s Kate Winslet-Saoirse Ronan ro-
mance “Ammonite” will serve as their dis-
tributors’ main hope to score multiple nomi-
nations, even as other enticing options may
be kept in reserve for 2021.
Meanwhile, the theatrically unfettered
Netflix will try to gobble up even more best
picture nominations than the three it man-
aged last year. In addition to “Da 5 Bloods”
and “Ma Rainey’s Black Bottom” (featuring
an Oscar-worthy Chadwick Boseman per-
formance), Netflix will push David Finch-
er’s forthcoming black-and-white Holly-
wood tale “Mank” and Aaron Sorkin’s his-
torical drama “The Trial of the Chicago 7,”
which Paramount sold off to the streamer.
Netflix will also have “The Prom” (a Ryan
Murphy musical starring Meryl Streep),
“Pieces of a Woman” (with a wrenching per-
formance by Vanessa Kirby of “The
Crown”) and “Hillbilly Elegy” (an adapta-
tion of the J. D. Vance book starring Amy
Adams and Glenn Close) in play for acting
nominations.
In other words, it’s a streamer’s market.
Old-school Oscar voters who have tried to
mount a bulwark against the incursion may
finally have to wave the white flag. Along
with Netflix’s many awards-season possi-
bilities, the streamers Amazon (“One Night
in Miami... ”), Apple TV+ (“Cherry,” “On
the Rocks,” “Boys State”) and Hulu (“Palm
Springs") will all try to take advantage of a
landscape that has radically tilted in their
favor this year.- Nothing will look the same.
Oscar season is usually a wild and woolly
adventure made up of riotous standing ova-
tions, glitzy parties fueled by champagne,
and face-to-face emotional connections that
make the whole damn thing worthwhile.
Suffice it to say, you won’t get any of that
over Zoom.
The awards circuit will eventually adapt
to voters’ stay-at-home reality, but the ba-
rometer of buzz will be harder to track when
applause and box office can no longer be
conclusively measured. I remember the en-
tire theater gasping at Sundance when the
plot took a turn in the Anthony Hopkins de-
mentia drama “The Father” (set for Decem-
ber), but will it play the same way when a
voter is watching the film by himself, with
his dog in his lap and sunlight streaming in
from the living-room window?
Sure, Oscar voters have long made use of
at-home screeners, but they were usually
counterbalanced by in-person screening
plans so robust that many Oscar campaigns
were won on them: “The Shape of Water”
never would have proved victorious with-
out Guillermo del Toro’s contagious passion
for the film, as evidenced at post-screening
Q. and A.s.
Without any of the usual benchmarks, no
contender can truly be counted out until the
bitter end: Not upcoming films like “Am-
monite” and “French Exit,” which earned
polarized festival reviews but still boast at-
tention-getting performances from Winslet
and Michelle Pfeiffer; not even “Tenet,”
which was more witheringly received than
Christopher Nolan’s last best picture nomi-
nee, “Dunkirk,” but was, for a stretch, the
only movie anyone was talking about.
The ceremony will almost certainly look
different, too. It’s anyone’s guess how this
pandemic-stricken country will be faring in
late April, but sardine-packed red carpets
and crowded awards-show ballrooms will
probably have to be modified to allow a
smaller, more distanced cohort to assemble.
Will the Oscar telecast take cues from the
Emmys, where presenters showed up on-
stage but couture-clad nominees stuck it
out in their living rooms? And would a dis-
jointed ceremony like that benefit from a
strong M.C., even though the Oscars have
recently gone without a host?
We’ll find out, eventually. From this far-
off vantage point, only one thing is certain:
If the Oscars always reflect the year they
were voted on — for better and for worse —
this one’s still got a few more wallops left to
come.Yes, There Will Be an Oscar Season
CONTINUED FROM PAGE C1
Above, a scene from
Disney/Pixar’s “Soul,” which
could sneak in and become the
first animated film nominated
for best picture since “Toy
Story 3” in 2011. “Soul” is
scheduled to make its debut on
Disney+ in December. Right,
Frances McDormand in the
road drama “Nomadland,”
directed by Chloé Zhao, who
could be a contender for best
director. The movie is due in
December.DISNEY/PIXARSEARCHLIGHT PICTURESABOUT HALFWAY THROUGH“Culture War-
lords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of
White Supremacy,” Talia Lavin introduces
Tommy O’Hara, who at 21 has never been
kissed, much less had sex. Tommy is shy
and socially awkward; a junior in college,
he considers himself a smart guy, yet he’s
surrounded by young women who are ut-
terly mysterious to him, “all hips, breasts
and unknowable minds.” His confusion
pushes him to seek knowledge and commis-
eration online, where he learns the reason
for his plight: Tommy is “involuntarily celi-
bate” because women are shallow, foolish
creatures who have been brainwashed by a
malevolent feminist movement to deprive
him of the sex and affection that he right-
fully deserves.
Tommy O’Hara is an incel. He also does-
n’t exist, though others like him do. Tommy
is Talia, Lavin’s creation, an identity that al-
lowed her to infiltrate the online chat rooms
where lonely men find succor in misogyny
and white supremacy. Lavin wanted to
learn how these men became radicalized.
She says she could relate to the “social isola-
tion and erotic frustration” that seemed to
drive them, before their vulnerability got
twisted and deformed. As Tommy, Lavin
immersed herself in message boards and
chat rooms, where the rage she encoun-
tered was so violent and self-pitying that it
eroded — “word by word, post by post” —
whatever stirrings of empathy she had felt.
“Culture Warlords” isn’t one of those
books in which an intrepid author journeys
behind enemy lines in order to write plain-
tively of our shared humanity. Yes, Lavin
says, the people she encountered were hu-
man — ordinary individuals who eat, drink,
sleep, and feel sadness and joy like anyone
else. But it’s precisely their humanity that
angers her; their hatred is “the culmination
of dozens or hundreds of small human
choices.” Studying the far right made her
more knowledgeable about and less patient
with those who tolerate it. Her research, she
says, “taught me how to hate.”
But she doesn’t leave it at that, and one of
the marvels of this furious book is how inso-
lent and funny Lavin is; she refuses to soft-
pedal the monstrous views she encounters,
and she clearly takes pleasure in cutting
them down to size. She is aided in her mis-
sion by the fact that the language of extre-
mists tends to occupy the space between
risible and profoundly dumb. Contempo-
rary white supremacy is a mishmash of old
anti-Semitic tropes, racist pseudoscienceand bizarre fantasia — what Lavin calls a
“bigot’s pastiche.” The people who promul-
gate it often toggle between cruel, inane
jokes and a fastidious humorlessness. “Any-
thing,” Lavin writes, “an errant wind, a
dumb tweet, a conspiracy theory invented
from whole cloth — can drum up the forces
of white grievance.”
So Lavin went undercover, not just as
Tommy but as Ashlynn, too — a blond, gun-
toting Iowan looking for love on a dating site
for white supremacists. Lavin got to know
the subculture to the point where she be-
came fluent in its language, with its self-
important feints at Norse mythology and a
rudimentary numerology. (Neo-Nazis fa-
mously love to use “88,” because the eighth
letter in the alphabet is H, and 88 signifies
“Heil Hitler”; I learned from Lavin’s book
that some enterprising Christian neo-Nazis
have also started using “83,” for an oxy-
moronic “Heil Christ.”)
Radicalization often happens online now-
adays — something that Lavin used to her
advantage. She describes herself as a“schlubby, bisexual Jew” who grew up Mod-
ern Orthodox in Teaneck, N.J., and whose
politics are now “considerably to the left of
Medicare for all.” Her maternal grandpar-
ents escaped the Nazi death camps by hid-
ing in the Galician woods. Online she could
be anyone else — Tommy, Ashlynn or “Ary-
an Queen,” entering a chat room of Ameri-
can and European “accelerationists” who
are trying to incite a race war.
In order to connect with accelerationists
on the other side of the world, she used her
foreign-language skills, recording mes-
sages in Russian in a “sexy-baby timbre
and a heavy American accent” to convince a
Ukrainian neo-Nazi that she was a milk-fed
Midwesterner trying to learn new lan-
guages for the cause. She gathered enoughinformation to reveal his identity, and then
sat back to enjoy the mistrust and chaos she
had sown in the white supremacists’ ranks.
They knew that someone had betrayed
them; what she knew was that she had
turned their own florid, anti-Semitic con-
spiracy theories against them. “I had made
their worst nightmares come true,” Lavin
writes. “Behind the beautiful Aryan they
desired was a fat, cunning Jew, biding her
time.”
Unlike Andrew Marantz’s “Antisocial,” in
which Marantz covered right-wing extre-
mists as a journalist-observer, “Culture
Warlords” expressly melds reportage with
activism. Lavin justifies her methods by ex-
plaining that “bigotry and Nazism should
have a social cost.” That social cost relies on
shame — a dwindling commodity these
days, as extremists have been delighted by
an explicitly anti-immigrant White House,
Lavin says, and a cadre of “launderers” who
repackage far-right ideas into edgy-but-
not-quite-bannable videos that get them
clicks and converts on YouTube. At a Phila-
delphia conference that was supposed to be
a celebration of “tolerance” and “free
speech” but turned out to be a safe space for
the alt-right, Lavin met an attendee who
said he was impressed with the “diversity of
opinion” there. She asked if he had actually
met anyone whose views differed substan-
tially from his own.
“Yes,” he told her. “I met an ethnonation-
alist. But I’m a civic nationalist.”
Lavin resolutely identifies as an antifas-
cist; a report last week in The Nation exam-
ined how she became a target of scrutiny by
ICE, which issued a press release accusing
her of “slandering an American hero,” after
she posted (and quickly removed) a mistak-
en tweet about an officer’s tattoo. She con-
dones “some degree of violence in pursuit of
quashing fascist organizing,” saying that
“sometimes a thrown punch in a street
brawl is a way to keep the next fight from
happening with knives,” without allowing
that a thrown punch can have the opposite
effect. It’s the only part of her book when
she starts writing from a defensive crouch
and loses some of her scathing specificity.
Fascists love violence; it escalates, turning
politics into a show of brute force that pulls
everyone into the fascists’ vortex. Will you
really crush them by giving them more of
what they love?
But Lavin suggests that drawing delicate
distinctions, an activity beloved by liberal
moderates, is ultimately powerless against
the steamrolling forces of an insurgent far
right. Having been on the receiving end of
the bile spewed by online trolls, she says
that hatred flourishes when it’s allowed to
take cover in the shadows: “Let us hold it to
the light — this wet, rotting, malodorous
thing — and let it dry up and crumble into
dust and be gone.”JENNIFER SZALAI BOOKS OF THE TIMESUndercover in a World of Rage
Talia Lavin employed false
identities to infiltrate far-right
communities online.YONIT LAVINCulture Warlords:
My Journey Into the Dark
Web of White Supremacy
By Talia Lavin
273 pages. Hachette Books.
$27.A writer refuses to
soft-pedal the monstrous
views she encounters.Follow Jennifer Szalai on Twitter: @jenszalai.CLUE OF THE DAY
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