A love letter to Paul - Shawn's Sense with Shawn Loughlin
While I know that the vast majority of the population doesn’t really care about the Academy Awards, nor do they care about the movies that are often nominated for said awards - as they often differ greatly from the movies that tend to do well at the theatres and become home video and streaming staples with the average family - if you’ll indulge me, I have something to say.
On Sunday night, my beloved One Battle After Another won more awards than any other film, taking home six trophies (Best Picture, Best Director, Best Adapted Screenplay, Best Editing, Best Supporting Actor for Sean Penn and Best Casting, the newly-added Oscar that was handed out for the very first time on Sunday night). After being nominated over a dozen times, Paul Thomas Anderson finally won an Oscar - three, actually - for Best Adapted Screenplay for writing the movie, for Best Director for directing the movie and then for Best Picture as a producer of the movie.
Watching the awards very late into Sunday night (I apologize to those whose stories I wrote early on Monday morning, because they’re bound to not exactly be my best work) I felt very much like a proud father as Anderson was finally being recognized for his work. Not only was he finally winning the top prizes in Hollywood, but he was doing it for a movie that many have hailed as his masterpiece and a film that will continue to be hailed as one of the greats 10, 20, 50 years from now.
As a creative teenager unsure of where to put all that creativity, in the late 1990s I poured my energy into passions that remain passions of mine to this day: movies, music and books. I worked at a Rogers Video location at the time, earning some pocket money while hanging out and talking about movies all day and mopping the occasional floor. Around that time there was a whole class of young, independent filmmakers coming up through the ranks and making their first, second and third features in an entirely new vein than those who came before them. The sprawling, bring-a-sandwich historical epics like Gandhi, Amadeus, Chariots of Fire and Dances with Wolves had been winning Best Picture Oscars and then, right as I began watching movies in the late 1990s and early 2000s, these young people started making movies. Reservoir Dogs and Pulp Fiction (Quentin Tarantino), Memento (Christopher Nolan), Do The Right Thing (Spike Lee), Fargo and The Big Lebowski (the Coen brothers), Seven and Fight Club (David Fincher), Rushmore and The Royal Tenenbaums (Wes Anderson), Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola), Being John Malkovich and Adaptation (Spike Jonze), Sideways (Alexander Payne) and Boogie Nights and Magnolia (Paul Thomas Anderson) were breaking all of the rules I knew to exist in the films of my mother’s day and I couldn’t get enough and always wanted to watch more.
Paul Thomas Anderson was the one who really stuck with me. I was obsessed with Boogie Nights and Magnolia to the point that I considered going to film school so I could be just like him. I came back down to earth and decided that I didn’t have the necessary talent, but that love for his films, as they ebbed and flowed, remained. Now, as a creative person I admire, beside whom I’ve essentially grown up, it’s so great to see him recognized for what he is, which is one of the most important and talented artists of the last 30 years.
I was proud of him on Sunday night and I’m happy that everyone else now sees in him what I’ve seen across four decades.