The 95th Academy Awards ceremony was held this past Sunday night, and perhaps many of you watched at least some of it. I saw hardly any of it, but early Monday morning I was eager to see what/who received the Oscars.
Of the ten
movies nominated for an Oscar, I have seen only The Banshees of Inisherin, Everything Everywhere All at Once, Tár,
and Women Talking. It is interesting to consider what matters, or
matters most, to the characters in each of these movies.
Lydia Tár thought primarily that power matters.
Brilliantly played by Australian actress Cate Blanchett, the talented but rather
unlikeable Tár is a brilliant classical music conductor. Her focus,
though, is on gaining, maintaining, and exerting power. Is having power what matters
most?
The
Mennonite women in Women Talking conclude that the combination of safety,
faith, and thinking is what matters most. This is a powerful movie about strong
women who had been betrayed by the deplorably deviant men of their community
who apparently thought that sex matters most.
What
matters is a major part of the quirky film Everything Everywhere All at Once
(EEAAO), which won the best picture Oscar as well as six others, including the
best actress award for Michelle Yeoh, the impressive Malaysian Chinese actress.
EEAAO pits the idea that everything
matters against the
claim that nothing matters. Evelyn, the mother played by Yeoh, realizes everything
matters, especially reconciliation with her daughter. The daughter Joy, though,
mutters near the end of the lengthy movie, Nothing matters.
Even though chosen as the best picture of the year, I found EEAAO
hard to watch. Based on the view that there are multiple universes which exist simultaneously,
it moved too fast from one universe to another. It was also filled with
silliness, much of which I found unenjoyable.
Nevertheless, EEAAO was filled
with thought-provoking content as well, including consideration of what
matters. In the second article linked to below is this assertion:
In a split-second decision at the end of the movie, Evelyn beckons Joy to stay with her instead of pushing the world toward destruction. Evelyn tells us … that even if this world will eventually end with failure and nothingness, it is worthwhile to spend every fleeting moment doing laundry, filing taxes and working toward small steps of reconciliation.
In the third link below, posted in March 2022, the author
explains that EEAAO "doesn't reject nihilism as a philosophy. Rather, it
promotes a more optimistic, humanist nihilism. Instead of ‘nothing matters, so why
bother?’ it says ‘Nothing matters, unless you decide that it does.’"
We can, in fact, decide that the life we have now is precious
and it is something that truly matters.
In The Shack (remember that bestselling 2007 book?) Wm. Paul Young wrote, “If anything matters then everything matters.” In commenting later on that statement, he wrote,
Either nothing matters and we’re all caught in this bind of despair, or everything matters and life has value and meaning, and what we do with our lives is important.
But, if all (or most) life will possibly be annihilated, maybe
even in this century, does anything really matter? Perhaps that “nihilistic”
idea was lurking in Joy’s mind in EEAAO, and it seems to be common among many present-day
twentysomethings and older teens.
Regardless of how long we or the world as we know it may
last, however, if we live now in a relationship of harmony with God, with other
people, and with the world of nature, that is something splendid and it does indeed
matter, and matters immensely.
_____
Here are links to some thoughtful articles about EEAAO:
** In
'Everything Everywhere All at Once,' a multiverse of absurdity meets
intergenerational healing (3/11)
** ‘Everything
Everywhere All at Once’ and the Paradox of Achieving ‘Nothing’ (3/12)
** The
Ending Of Everything Everywhere All At Once Explained (3/2022)
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