Conclave Should Win an Oscar For Best Cast in a Movie Nobody Wants to See
By now, most of you have either watched the Academy Awards or read about the winners on social media. So please don’t spoil it for me. I’m permanently a day behind.
One of the Best Picture nominees this year was Conclave. And my golly does that film have a great cast: Ralph Fiennes, Jon Lithgow, Stanley Tucci, Isabella Rossellini. Are you kidding me? When I first heard about the film, my immediate reaction was:
A motion picture with all those legendary actors? I must get tickets to see it on the big screen at once!
Then I read the synopsis: “A bunch of cardinals get together to elect a new pope.” And my next reaction was:
On second thought, that sounds like the most boring fucking movie anyone could make. I’ll wait until it’s on streaming, and then I’ll play it double-speed so they all sound like chipmunks. That might be barely tolerable.
Before any Catholic readers spit their holy water, let me be clear that my aversion to the film’s subject matter has nothing to do with my hostility toward the Catholic Church. Sure, they’re a dogmatic bunch, and their motto could be “Kicking the Jews around since 312 AD”. But I’m an equal opportunity pagan. If the movie had been about a bunch of elderly Jews trying to pick a new Chief Rabbi, I’d be no less nonchalant.
The creative team behind Conclave seems not to have grasped a very fundamental concept: that certain meetings are held behind closed doors because the vast majority of human beings do not care to watch them. And the meeting to decide the next guy to get the key to the Popemobile is most definitely one of these. That’s the whole point of the white smoke telling us when it’s over. You picked the next anachronistic crowd-waving figurehead, and we don’t care how you did it. What, the intrigue? The suspense? One candidate was an accused child molester but another one admitted to aggravated bestiality? Yeah, we kind of assumed that. You don’t need to turn it into a docudrama. Just publish the AI meeting summary and we’re good.
But let’s face it: the Academy Awards long ago gave up being about popular entertainment. The whole ceremony is a bunch of elitist snobs turning up their noses at the unwashed rabble who lack the good taste to appreciate high brow cinema.
Later this year, on a slow evening, I’ll probably watch Conclave and think:
Huh. That wasn’t so bad after all. At least the acting was great.
And I’m sure it was. I’d just rather watch them in a movie about literally anything else.