EDDINGTON DESERVED BETTER

An Academy Awards Autopsy

by Staci Layne Wilson

There are some films you want to see, and some films you feel you should see. Then there’s Eddington. It was a cinematic root canal I was dreading, but couldn’t stop watching once it started drilling. Writer-director Ari Aster did it again: he turned modern American despair into a work of art so queasy, compelling, and darkly funny that you can’t look away, even as your sanity starts to unravel like a loose sweater thread.

I’ve been thinking about Eddington since I saw it last November. Not occasionally, in the passive background-hum way you think about a film you enjoyed—I mean thinking about it. It colonized a corner of my brain and set up camp there. So when the 98th Academy Award nominations dropped earlier this year and Eddington wasn’t on the list anywhere (not a single category, not even a crumb thrown in the direction of Joaquin Phoenix’s genuinely unnerving performance), I made a sound I typically reserve for stepping on a Lego barefoot in the dark.