At Oscars evening, March 2, 2025, Sean Baker was understandably elated. He had won a screenplay Oscar for Anora, then Best Director, and then after Mikey Madison had taken Best Actress, Anora was declared Best Picture. As Baker received Best Director, he gave a strong speech, appealing and understandable, yet as giddy as many things said at the Oscars.
He urged upon us all the experience of seeing films in theaters, big theaters with big screens. He admitted that the number of those screens in America was declining. Still, he said, that was the necessary place to be. He did not refer to the numberless comments on the internet from those who had given up on going to theaters (rather in the way they once forsook silence) because those places were chilly and close to empty. Many had noticed what is still a heresy for purists: that the image on our home screens is brighter and more transporting. If you are inclined to dispute that, look very closely.
This has never been a medium where the best practitioners or the worst can stand in the way of the technology’s progress. The theaters are over. For [contemporary youth], the only screen is the pulsing wound in their hand.
For a couple of years, a commercial has been playing at AMC theaters — I must have seen it more times at the AMC Kabuki than any Nicole Kidman picture I’ve ever watched.
It is night. She takes off the hood of her coat, outside a theater. “We come to this place for magic,” she tells us, and she goes into the dark. She looks tall and terrific, so young still — she has often been childlike — in a lamé striped suit, silver and black. She is in an empty theater, not the largest we have ever known but glowing and well-ordered. She strides up the stairs like a hurdler. She finds an ideal row and takes a seat. The music is thrilled. We see her eager face with the projector beam behind her giving her a halo. This may remind us of Norma Desmond in Sunset Boulevard.
Nicole settles as the lights go down.
She tells us about the rapture in being there.
And does not notice she is alone.
It’s an odd promotion. AMC might have done better if — to illustrate magic — they had cut away to Nicole from 20 years ago, crop-haired, in Birth, in a packed theater hearing great music but so hauntingly alone and an intense child. As if her own movie had consumed her.
Excerpted with permission from A Sudden Flicker of Light: A Revisionist History of Movies (Simon & Schuster) by David Thomson, now available.
David Thomson is the author of more than 20 books, including biographies of David O. Selznick and Orson Welles, and The New Biographical Dictionary of Film. His writing and his books have been featured in The New York Times, The Guardian, the Los Angeles Times, The Atlantic, Esquire, Slate, and many more. He lives in San Francisco.
