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Michael Cieply: With A BAFTA Win, ‘American Fiction’ Gets Points For Facing What Frets Us
A winner at the BAFTA awards, Cord Jefferson's 'American Fiction' script faces real issues without fear or wild fantasy.
Pete has a point when he notes that American Fiction, based on Percival Everett’s novel Erasure, about a black novelist who hits it big when his send-up of African-American cultural clichés is taken at face value, probably got traction as the only currently Oscar-nominated adaptation that is all about writing. The rest, even that wild pink feminist fly-by Barbie, which does get tangled in reality, are in a sense doing what the phrase-coining trendspotter Faith Popcorn used to call “cocooning.” That is, they are curled up in a safe space, side-stepping or at most playing with events and issues—the broken border, political prosecutions, scary inflation, a meandering president, mass shootings, brutality abroad, sexual confusion, reparations, DEI—that have society very much on edge. For this, I’m sure, it has gotten a lot of points with screenwriters (their guild nominations are due tomorrow), who historically have recognized scripts that have dared to touch the real world and live wires.
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