The Oscars Were About "Where"
Anora and the Oscar contenders were dripping in their depiction of "place," reminding us once again that movies affect us emotionally in part by connecting us to the idea of "where".
Anora, which swept the Oscars last night, is about a stripper who gets involved with the son of a Russian oligarch.
But it’s really about Brooklyn.
More specifically, it’s about the Russian community in Brighton Beach, the Brooklyn community right next to Coney Island, which has strong ties to Russia and to the oligarchs. And it’s a master class from Sean Baker about making a movie that’s dripping with the idea of where.
A scene from Anora featuring the famouos Cyclone roller coaster in Coney Island.
Many of the other movies up for Best Picture shared that same quality. The Substance is ultimately about what it’s like to be in the entertainment business in Los Angeles. Conclave is ultimately about what it’s like to be in the Pope business in Vatican City. And so on. It’s impossible to imagine any of these cities being set anywhere else.
Because, ultimately, all movies – even science fiction and fantasy movies – are about place. They take place in a particular location. And that place is always a character in the movie or television show even if it’s not visually present.
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You can’t think of Mary Tyler Moore—if you’re old enough to remember her—without thinking of Minneapolis. You can’t think of Seinfeld or Friends or Woody Allen movies without thinking of Manhattan. You can’t think of Chinatown without thinking of Los Angeles or Driving Miss Daisy without thinking of Atlanta. You can’t think of Big Night – one of my favorite movies, starring Stanley Tucci, Tony Shaloub, and Isabella Rossellini – without thinking of the Jersey Shore.
The famous hat-throwing scene on The Mary Tyler Moore Show was filmed on Nicollet Mall, a pedestrian-only shopping street in Downtown Minneapolis.
And I dare you to forget where Rocky was filmed.
Because one of the most compelling parts of filmed entertainment is that it is so good at fabricating place. Every Hollywood studio has a “New York street”. It’s A Wonderful Life, clearly set in Upstate New York in the winter, was filmed in the San Fernando Valley in the summer and a whole new kind of fake snow was created for it. That’s part of the reason planners are good at being Hollywood location managers; one of the leading location managers of my generation was my high-school friend Mike Fantasia, who got into the business because he studied environmental planning, went to work for the U.S. Forest Service, and served as liaison with Hollywood for movies shot on Forest Service land in Montana.
Inevitably, the location of a movie or television show becomes a part of the experience and part of the emotional appeal. Even when the place fabricated is not in Los Angeles it becomes a tourist attraction. In the 1980s, one of the most popular shows on television, the sitcom Cheers, was filmed in Los Angeles about a bar that didn’t exist in Boston. Today years later, the bar in Boston that didn’t exist where they never filmed the show is a tourist attraction. More recently, the set of 1880s New York in The Gilded Age has also become a tourist attaction – 150 miles away in Troy, N.Y., near Albany.
Of course, if you live in Los Angeles, this whole set of connections gets even more complicated. When you think of Mary Tyler Moore, you think not only of Minneapolis, but of CBS Television City in Los Angeles at Beverly and Fairfax, right near Farmers Market and The Grove, where The Mary Tyler Moore Show was filmed. (There’s currently a proposal to redevelop Television City with a Norman Foster design, which has led billionaire developer Rick Caruso, who ran for mayor and lost in 2022 but owns The Grove, to sue to try and stop it.)
And then there’s the way in which everyone in the world knows Los Angeles visually even though they’ve never been there. When I moved there at age 25—having never been on the West Coast before—I was amazed at how much of it I knew and understood just from watching TV thousands of miles away in Upstate New York as a kid. (After living in Southern California for decades, I’m now on the opposite side of that one. I can’t just watch a car chase on a typical cop show—I have to squint to see the background so I can search for familiar restaurants, familiar stores, and even familiar parking spaces.)
The real-life set of The Gilded Age in Troy, N.Y., 150 miles from Manhattan.
As an urban planner, I have always made the mistake of thinking of “Hollywood” almost exclusively as a physical place. The first scholarly article I ever wrote was actually about the development of Hollywood up until 1910—before the movies. But to think of Hollywood exclusively as a real place, of course, is to miss the point.
Many years ago, on the occasion of the seventy-fifth anniversary of Para- mount Pictures, I got an assignment to interview Frank Mancuso, who was the head of Paramount.
The famous Paramount Studios gate on Melrose Avenue in Los Angeles.
One interesting thing about Mancuso was that he had grown up on the distribution and exhibition side of the business, not the production side. The production people live in Los Angeles, but the distribution and exhibition people are scattered all over the United States. He had never lived in Los Angeles before he came in as head of Paramount. For a while, he was even stationed in Buffalo. I wanted to ask him about this, so I brought it up with the Paramount public relations person while I was waiting to see him.
I made the mistake of phrasing my question like this: “Do you think Mr. Mancuso’s view of the industry is different because he has not worked in Hollywood for most of his career?”
She simply didn’t understand the question. In her mind, Mancuso had worked in Hollywood his whole career. Because he had spent his whole career working in the movie business—and wher- ever the movie business exists, that’s Hollywood. I had made the mistake of confusing the real Hollywood with the imaginary one, and even people who work for the studios don’t do that.
As with so many things these days about the “future of where,” it’s hard to predict where this is going to wind up. Computer-generated images – CGI, in Hollywood parlance – are becoming more and more common, which is to some extent severing moviemaking from actual filming locations. Actors frequently perform these days in front of green screens so that backgrounds can be filled in later.
But it all likelihood, movie images – no matter how they are created – will always depict place. Because where movies are set is one of the most important ways that we can relate to them.