The Brody Awards, and Louis Menand on “The Free World”

The New Yorker Radio Hour

WNYC Studios and The New Yorker

Politics, Arts, News, Wnyc, Books, David, Storytelling, Society & Culture, Yorker, New, Remnick

4.2 • 6.2K Ratings

🗓️ 9 April 2021

⏱️ 28 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Oscars, schmoscars! Richard Brody is a critic of wide tastes and eccentric enthusiasms. His list of the best films of the year rarely lines up with the Academy’s. Each year, he joins David Remnick and the staff writer Alexandra Schwartz to talk about the year’s cinematic highlights. Plus, the staff writer Louis Menand talks with Remnick about his new work of cultural history, “The Free World.” Menand writes about the postwar flowering of American culture, when the United States evolved from an economic and military giant into a global creative force. Modern jazz and rock and roll were exported and celebrated around the world. Painters got out from under the long shadow of Europe and led the way into new forms of abstraction and social commentary. Writers like James Baldwin turned a spotlight back on America’s fundamental, unexamined flaws. It was a time, Menand writes, when “ideas mattered. Painting mattered. Movies mattered. Poetry mattered.”

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker.
0:09.5	Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. For more than a year, very few people have been to a movie theater.
0:16.9	But that doesn't stop awards season. The Golden Globes and the various Guild Awards have all been doled out,
0:23.4	and now it's time for the prizes that really matter the most.
0:27.5	I'm talking, of course, about the Brody Awards.
0:30.3	Music See, the Golden Globes are decided by movie journalists, a whole lot of them.
0:46.8	And the Oscars are voted on by members of the Academy, more than 9,000 of them.
0:52.1	But the Brody Awards, they honor the best and brightest of the year,
0:55.2	according to just one person, one voice, one critic, someone who sees more films from around the
1:01.4	world than anyone I know, Richard Brody. Richard is the film critic for New Yorker.com,
1:08.1	and joining me, as always, for the Brody Awards, is staff writer Alexandra
1:12.6	Schwartz. Alex, hi. Hi, David. So, Richard, it has been about 13 or so months where we haven't
1:20.0	been able to enter a movie theater, or I haven't entered one, that's for sure. What's it been
1:24.7	like for you as the most constant moviegoer I know?
1:29.2	Well, in a certain way, it hasn't been radically different because even before lockdown, 90% of the movies I was seeing, I was seeing at home.
1:37.9	The number of press screenings that are held in theaters has decreased because it's expensive to hold them and very cheap
1:45.6	to send out a screening link.
1:47.5	So in the most immediate practical sense, other than the fact that I never go out, it hasn't
1:54.4	been radically different for the watching of movies.
1:58.1	For the world of movies, it has been completely different. How so?
2:03.1	Well, partly because there have been more or less no blockbusters. The kinds of movies that were
2:09.6	expected to make tons of money in theaters have simply been held over, and therefore the year was
	...

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