On Monday night, Los Angeles got its first look at one of the last unseen awards movies of the season when Babylon had its first screening at the Samuel Goldwyn Theater. I’m Rebecca Ford, and I can tell you that the energy was electric as voters and press made their way into the theater for the screening for Damien Chazelle’s epic about Hollywood in the late 1920s starring Margot Robbie and Brad Pitt.
It’s the kind of buzz you want to build for an awards-season movie—and then it just has to live up to it. At the reception after the screening, attendees were mixed on the film. Many raved about the big, showy set pieces, the music and several of the standout performances, including Jovan Adepo, Diego Calva, and Robbie. But others had some criticism for the film’s ending and its run time (it comes in at three hours and eight minutes).
It’s a line I’ve heard repeated many times throughout this season: “It’s too long.” And it does seem like there’s an unusually high number of films that are near or surpassing the stamina-testing three-hour mark. Now, there are movies that indeed need to be three hours long, with ambitious tales that seem to fly by, even with those longer run times. But several films—including Babylon, Bardo (originally 174 minutes, but cut down to 152 minutes), Blonde (166 minutes), Wakanda Forever (161 minutes), and Tár (158 minutes)—are grappling with some harsh criticism about their run times. Even if the movies have moments or scenes that really soar, a viewer checking his watch too many times may still leave unimpressed.
In the case of Babylon, Chazelle’s desire to tell a story of this scope means he had a lot of ground to cover. (During the Q&A he revealed that the first cut of the film was actually fourhours!) And I heard even more about the “chaos” of making of Babylon when I toured the Paramount lot with Robbie for our December cover story. So the question becomes if these auteurs’ ambitious projects can prove the run time is worth it. We’ve seen long films earn nominations in recent years (let’s not forget The Irishman, clocking in at three and a half hours, earned 10 nominations) and plenty of best-picture winners have been over three hours including Titanic (195 minutes), Schindler’s List (195 minutes), The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (201 minutes) and, of course, Gone With the Wind (233 minutes). Which is all good news for the last—and longest—big awards contender of this year: James Cameron’s Avatar: The Way of Water, with a run time of around three hours and 10 minutes.
There will be plenty of time to debate all this and more at the many, many awards events in the coming weeks—kicking off with Saturday’s Governors Awards. This year’s fête, which will bestow honorary Oscars to Michael J. Fox, Euzhan Palcy,Peter Weir, and Diane Warren, will also see many of this year’s actors and filmmakers hoping for Oscar attention in attendance. And I’ll be there to report back on the long and the short of it.
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