Why Did a Brilliant Jewish Director’s Film Get Snubbed by the Oscars?

To all the people complaining that Greta Gerwig should have gotten an Oscar nomination for Best Director, you are correct.

In terms of snubs, however, there is another film that should not be overlooked.

Ari Aster is one of the most brilliant directors in Hollywood. Unlike two films nominated for an Oscar that use a gimmick as a crutch, Aster uses the vehicle of his films being different and unexpected in a provocative way that makes you think about the world in a more profound way.

Aster’s inventive Beau Is Afraid is a challenging film to watch, not unlike Aster’s Hereditary and Midsommar, two horror films. Beau Is Afraid stars Joaquin Phoenix as Beau Wasserman, who is filled with anxiety and has problems with his strange and overprotective Jewish mother, who does something so evil to her son, that it’s borderline implausible.

The film digs deep into the psyche of the Jewish mother-son relationship in a way that is dark but also enlightening. Aster is fearless, but not pointless. There is a big difference.

The film is about a tortured man’s journey to find validation, the pain of not having a wife and children, loneliness, and in a twist, his mother tells him his father died having sex with her, and that he may die if he has sex.

Aster has great metaphors in the film, including one that sets all the problems in motion — Beau’s keys are stolen from him and he can’t go visit his mother for fear that someone will ransack his apartment. It’s a direct comment on the mother-son relationship. Phoenix’s performance is astounding as someone who is constantly nervous, but for good reason. In a way, he may suffer from PTSD and being without his father. The film contains one of the wildest plot twists that might gross out some, but if you think about it more deeply, it is astoundingly potent.

The movie is long and frightening in many ways, though not in the way of a typical horror film. You can’t really place this film in an exact genre. There are elements of horror, drama, and comedy. The excellent Richard Kind plays a Jewish man who is angry at Beau because he tells him that by not showing up to an event, he is making it difficult to adhere to a specific law relating to burial.

This is the ultimate Jewish guilt movie, and voters should feel guilty they did not nominate Beau Is Afraid. Two other films, The Zone of Interest and Anatomy of a Fall, use gimmicks to be different that don’t work. In The Zone of Interest, you see the Nazi who runs Auschwitz in his underwear and playing with his family but you don’t see carnage of Jews being murdered, or really any Jews at all. You are supposed to use your imagination as we see the Nazi family go about its regular life with no conflict. It’s a crutch for those not able to make a powerful film without doing it, as I’ve written about here.

Beau Is Afraid is a film that is mysterious, provocative, profound, and wildly original. So why didn’t it get any Oscar love? Horror films are looked down upon, as are scenes of violence if they’re not from a war. A scene in Aster’s Midsommar was hard to watch. Aster’s films seem to be in their own world, and he does not sugar coat his films with any silver lining — and it might just be that voters don’t have a taste for that.

The author is a writer based in New York.

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